I’m back at work (already!) and my week is filled with too many meetings and not enough time to put back together the classroom that I had to totally strip in May. With next Tuesday’s First Day of Students looming, I am not the only teacher feeling the panic of figuring out when we can hang posters, arrange seats, and do All the Things that need to happen before students walk in the building.

Today’s afternoon meeting was dedicated to the super-pop-corporate-feeling Emergenetics (not eugenics, I have to keep reminding my brain).

Last spring every faculty member had to complete a survey. You know the type – a list of 100 personality questions a la Meyers-Briggs. We didn’t get our results (our “profiles”) until yesterday.

Here are my results:

• 

The top pie chart and the top 4 bars represent ways of thinking. The bottom 3 bars (in purple) are ways of behaving.

Of note:

• I am “tri-modal” since I rank above 23% in three of the four areas. My school apparently has an unusually high number of tri-modal people.

• As will come as no surprise, Social was my smallest area. By far
• More surprising was my Flexibility score. See that up there at the bottom of the profile?
• To make it even better, they told us today that the lowest you can score on those bars is a 5.
• Then they had the staff all line up by our score orders, whereupon I (and everyone else) discovered that I am the least Flexible staff member at our school.
• They did clarify that it’s not that “we” (I) CAN’T change our minds. It’s that it costs a lot of energy to change.
• (And why should we change when we reached a perfectly reasonable decision in the first place?)

• They also had us group by our top Thinking Modes (the pie chart). My group, the Analyticals, was the smallest of the staff.
• The largest? Social. By far. Like, 45% of the staff had Social as their top way of thinking.
• Likewise, the vast majority of the staff ranked low on Assertiveness. Which probably explains why, even though everyone is complaining about something, I’m the one who actually speaks up about it to the decision-makers.

• Also funny was the fact that as we sorted through how we ranked in all seven areas, Becca (the person I work with the most) and I NEVER matched up. Her highest was Social (of course) and her smallest was Analytical. By far.
• She declared that this is exactly why we work so well together. I (after careful analysis) agree.
• And there’s no need to discuss that decision anymore.