Tomorrow ain't gonna be a fun one.

I'm the union rep for the teachers in our school -- it's a job with a lot of glory, a lot of prestige, and gives me a hefty pay hike.

(It also allows me to make a lot of shit up, such as the three things listed at the end of the above sentence.)

Tomorrow is a step in the staffing process where people board-wide, if they tentatively don't have a job for September, get to find out if they got placed into a position -- thereby bumping-out the least-senior teacher on staff with similar qualifications. This process, perhaps unsurprisingly (and unglamorously), is called "bumping." (No grinding, though.)

There are a lot of people on my staff that are feeling pretty edgy about Monday. And even though I'm extremetly likely to stay where I am, I'm feeling edgy too -- if someone gets The Letter, I have to be in on that meeting. And that's a very, very shitty room to be in.

I got bumped in my first year of teaching, but things eventually shook through and I got recalled. Which was great, of course -- I've only ever been at the one school, and frankly I don't see any reason to leave. We've got a good thing going.

I can clearly recall being bumped, and sitting in the staff room looking at another teacher who was a bit of a dingbat but who had so much seniority there's no way in hell she would've been bumped. I remember thinking, "I work my ass off, and she's kinda crazy. How come I have to search for a new job, and she doesn't? This is unfair."

It may have felt pretty unfair. But the point is that this entire system, which is based on seniority, is equally unfair to everyone. If it wasn't, you'd have situations where people, who might be doing a great job, get left out to dry because they weren't coaching the principal's favourite sport. Or maybe they spoke up about problems they had with admin a little too much, and got the boot. Perhaps the principal didn't like the way the teacher parted their hair.

But that's why you have unions: to make sure the rules are fair for everyone. And yes, that means that occasionally you'll get a bad teacher protected the same as a good one; it's a standard criticism of unions, and frankly it's one that I share to a point. The problem is, everyone thinks they're an expert in education because they were once a student... but just because you've been a patient in a hospital, that doesn't mean you're an expert on how to run one (or how to perform a liver transplant).

So yeah, Monday's not going to be one of those fun days at the ol' schoolhouse, that's for sure. There may be some tears in these meetings. It's happened before.