New Educator Institute FRUSTRATION

Part of being new to DPS is the requirement to attend some New Educator sessions. I spent three hours in one yesterday about ELA- English Language Acquisition (in my previous district this stood for English Language Arts). There wasn't any detailed info about what this required session was about so I had no idea what to expect. We initially met in the auditorium of North High School. The director of ELA came out and told some stories and told us how our three hours would be broken into smaller groups and sessions. We all ventured like cattle to our first sessions. My first session was about the DPS ELA Position Paper. We were given about seven minutes to to read, digest and discuss with a person next to us this seven page paper. Frustration immediately set in as this was the first time I'd heard of or seen this position paper. I would home that if I'm supposed to process such a document I'd be given more than 7 minutes. FRUSTRATION started to boil. We then were shuffled to our next session about Content/Language Objectives. This session REALLY made me feel inadequate.  I began thinking I'd missed some required training about these objectives and how they work. We again were supposed to quickly do an activity, process and discuss. FRUSTRATION. Finally our last session was in the most beautiful high school library I've ever seen. It was about Denver Context. We learned about historical cases that are guiding the work DPS is doing in the ELA areas. We again had an activity that we were to do with someone that was FRUSTRATING. Finally in about the last five minutes the presenter said that the day was about getting and introduction to ELA in DPS.  WHAT!??!! She then asked for feedback about our time. I couldn't resist politely saying how I'd felt inadequate, behind, and stressed for the the three sessions only to find out this was just an intro. I suggested as they continued their trainings of this ELA intro they tell people up front. Whew.