I received this dispatch from a reader.
I heard that Elia was the guest speaker at an AVID training, and she rambled on and on in a monotone boring the participants literally to tears!
I heard she was a horrible speaker.
When you are a guest speaker, you have to really move the crowd or inspire the crowd or be really exciting and dynamic. You can not drone on like a monotone. True leadership includes inspiring the poor souls in the trenches.
I bet the founding fathers were all inspiring, and they are the reason everyone got behind them and kicked the British out despite the odds.
Dr. Lennard used to drone on and on also. I guess that is what Hillsborough wants in a Superintendent.
That Elia is not a great speaker does not surprise me. My observation tells me she does not excel at anything but backstairs school-administration politics.
Elia's diction is shop worn. She says "indicate" instead of "say" or "show."She speaks stale educanto that marginally educated people have no better sense than to think shows erudition. It's as if the education bureaucracy senses it is deficient in academic depth and tries to cover up for it with shopworn sesquipedalian words instead of using plain English. This mode is tired stuff that casts a pall over the audience and makes the users of such weird language sound like pseudo-educated fools.
I infer board members think this is how superintendents should speak. They've hired two with this verbal mode in a row. Dr. Lennard came out of the bowels of the vo-tech outback, and his language reflected that baleful fact. Ms. Elia's upper-NY college where she got her bachelor's had grammar and punctuation errors on the Web page when I checked it a couple of years ago.
But we must consider that none of the board would smash into the upper limits of the Stanford Binet either. They are as convinced as the ROSSAC administrators that this kind of educanto patois is the height of intellectualism.
If a person talked like the administrators of the education ROSSAC bureaucracy talk in a good college or university, they would be considered dopes.
I know Lennard is a dull speaker. I have heard him. He could put an audience to sleep in three minutes. Had he been announcing in one of his stem-winders the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in Plant City in the next 30 minutes, he would have still put people to sleep.
If anybody can figure out how to get Elia to speak in a livelier fashion, we can then go on to working on getting rid of her mullet hairdo.
I don't know what AVID is, or I could send the group a condolence note for having no better sense than to invite Elia as guest speaker.
lee
3 comments:
AVID is a close relative to Springboard!!!! You know--same "family".
Elia parked illegally at a restaurant this week. She couldn't be bothered to park in a parking spot. She just parked at the end of a row where people are not supposed to park. She wants students and teachers to follow rules, but she is above them. What a big phoney she is!
Candy Olson told a teacher recently that she would not get a raise this year and turned away arrogantly. How unprofessional! Why couldn't she have simply said, "I wish we could give you all a raise, but there are budget cuts...." instead she sniffs that the teacher won't get a raise and turns away. I'm surprised you can't look up "arrogance" in the dictionary and find Candy Olson's name as a synonym.
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