Districts are cutting budgets.

Schools are cutting budgets.

Workplaces are asking workers to do more with less.

People are being asked to do more for less.

It sure does seem like the operative formula for saving money in schools and districts is: resources (R) – money ($) – staff (P) + more work for those that remain 🙁 – FURLOUGHS = A BALANCED BUDGET 🙂 !

So what is the solution? Maybe we should rethink the societal opposition to human cloning. Why do you ask? Maybe that way we can be in 100 places at the same time and be effective and not kill ourselves in the process.

Don’t believe me? Well let’s see. We get to work in the morning and parents are already there to talk to us about some issue. Meanwhile, we have a staff meeting to conduct first thing in the morning. If not a staff meeting, the district office is calling about something a parent called about or some paperwork they need submitted, or something they need completed that they need someone from the school to come take care of. ALSO, the students need morning tutoring but the teacher is absent and we have to fill in until someone can be found. BUT several other teachers called in sick and you need to find subs for them AND the orders for books, technology, or the like didn’t arrive and have to be checked to see what happened yet SUDDENLY someone from the district office shows up to do an audit of something and you have to sit with them while they go through it. HOWEVER it’s almost 9 a.m. and the remainder of the student body is arriving and instruction begins on time every day and every classroom has to be monitored. Did I miss anything?

Now I know this is a partial list and none of you have ANY of these issues first thing in the morning. Schools always run smooth and everyone is there every morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to teach the children.

But for those of us who have no arms from being pulled in more than two directions every second (we only have two arms), cloning ourselves seems like the only solution. That way, no matter what is going on, no matter the time, no matter the meeting, no matter where someone wants us to be, we will always be there. Though we need to find a way to link the clones to communicate the information given to them. That way, we will always be “in the know” even though we are not there, yet we are there.

Come to think of it, bad discipline issues by the students would take a nosedive because they couldn’t get away with anything anymore. Every time they turned around, “we” would be right there, watching.

One more benefit added to the list of having a clone.

We also have to find a way to clone our experiences so that we don’t have 100 people looking like ourselves but behave and act differently due to varying levels of experience. We also don’t want them to wise up and leave either. The whole point is to have “me” everywhere, all the time, getting things done. That wouldn’t work if “I” (the clone, or clones that is) decided to quit.

Now that, the nature versus nurture, product of our environment discussion, will have to wait for another day.