Pointless meetings

I am fairly certain I have mentioned this before but the amount of time that is wasted on meetings in this place is simply astronomical. Clearly, being new to the type of workplace where meetings occur, I am not the best person to critique such behaviour, but it strikes me that most of these meetings could be bypassed without it resulting in the collapse of the school. Yesterday there was a surprise meeting called at 3:30 for the grade 5 teacher, Kishinou-sensei, to read out what she had written on the handout she had put on everyone's desk that morning. Obviously I am not the only person here who it is thought cannot read kanji, (I can't see any other reason for the habit they have here of reading aloud everything that is written down. I thought the point of written communication was to reduce the need for assembling physically in order to announce events thereby increasing the time each teacher has to complete their own work on their own schedule). At regular intervals Kishinou-sensei was interrupted to clarify a point, by which it was made clear to me that my poor Japanese was not in fact responsible for my misunderstanding of her proposal, it was just the way it was written. I already knew what she was on about because she had asked me to make the materials for the new June module fo rthe Englihs class she is proposing. Turns out that even though she has already had me make all the materials she is yet to get approval from everyone to change the module anyway! Why the grade 5 English module has any bearing on the rest of the teachers I have no idea, but they all had to sit and listen to her explain herself and be questioned to the enth degree by Yamamura-sensei (who was clearly against changing anything). It was quite amusing in some ways I guess, and a good insight into how to oppose and support arguments while maintaining respect in Japanese.

After an hour and a half the meeting closed with absolutely nothing decided except that Kishinou sensei should re-write her proposal so that at least the native speakers could understand it. Tough crowd. I still don't know why all the teachers need to have an opinion, or even know about this change to only the grade 5 curriculum though. Surely this would have been better nutted out between only those who actually have an interest in the outcome? I guess it's just another way to force everyone to sit at their desks and pretend to listen for an extra 90 minutes each week, because we clearly need more practice at that.