16- Unibind

To conclude the third Monday of my teaching career, Principal scheduled a mandatory faculty meeting. We have regularly scheduled faculty meetings twice a month, but will sometimes have other meetings and workshops to attend. This particular meeting was a complete waste of my time and left me feeling insulted.
When the meeting first began, I assumed that we were there to learn how to use new machinery purchased for our school by The District. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Principal had made an appointment with the Unibind Guy to come to our school and give the teachers a sales pitch about his product. Unibind is a machine that creates books by hot gluing pages to a metal spine. The faculty politely sat through 50 minutes of Unibind Guy boring us with his “Presto!” demonstrations. The marvels of his invention were randomly interrupted by Principal, who in her slow southern drawl, would say, “Now, please give these teachers the price of that paper.” The she would slowly nod at us, and Unibind guy would pant like a puppy, wishing we would buy his equipment.
It is a pretty great invention, but the Unibind machine and all of its gadgets are expensive. All teachers were given $250.00 at the start of the year to buy classroom supplies. This is not a lot of money, and teachers always end up spending their own money on materials for their classroom. I can’t help but wonder if Unibind guy is secretly a salesman relative of Principal’s- one who is desperate for a sale.
I feel that requiring us to sit through a sales-pitch, for teacher-toys that we can not afford, is insensitive at best. I foresee myself plotting ways to beg out of attending the next faculty meeting.