Wow! I can defintely see why there is an entire class devoted to this topic! Collective Bagaining is a very large subject with lots of meat & potatoes to cover. Because I never chose to be a part of the union during my years in education before becoming an administrator, I do not have any personal experiences from which to draw. For seven of the years before I was an administrator, I was a counselor--working very closely with the principal. Therefore, the union did not really openly invite me to be a member, even though they knew I had a right to do so--I really had no interest in it, but I liked to ask them questions that made them uneasy sometimes. I guess they never heard the saying, "keep your friends close and your enemies even closer!"
I have found both days of instruction to be very interesting--overall I have learned a great deal about the entire process as well as new vocabulary (ie. caucus, greviance, fact finding, arbitration vs mediation--which, of course, I really had no "real" understanding of before.
