Why Do I Goof Off in Training Meetings?

Don't let her make you feel like a crappy teacher!

Every time I go to a training meeting put on by the state or the district, I have a massive urge to blog about what I wish we did and complain about what we really did. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: teachers make the worst students, and today I was the worst of all: I was a class clown. So I started to wonder why, and maybe I can apply it to my own classes.

1. I don't know if anyone has noticed besides my wife and maybe the afternoon custodian, but I work my butt off for this job. And yet, whenever I go to trainings and find out all these strategies that good teachers use that I'm not using, I feel like I'm still not that good at my job. So I goof off to shake off that feeling. Makes me wonder about the kids that goof off in my classes. Could it be that my class makes them feel incompetent?
2. Too much fluff, not enough stuff. (I just like phrases that rhyme, even if they don't make much sense.) I don't need feelgoodery. I don't need some teary-eyed district lady telling me how much my work (and by 'my work' I mean she's saying it to a room of over 80 teachers) means to my students. I want actual resources, actual practices. And that doesn't come from some district lady, it comes from other teachers. Maybe they've occasionally attempted to foster actual collaboration between teachers, but I have yet to see such a thing.
3. Along the same note, I want a lot less of the general practices, and a lot more specific practices and activities for my subject. Very few things can be applied to every subject, yet we spend so much time all together. I feel particularly victimized because I teach classes that very few people out there teach, at least to my age group. They'll cluster me with somewhat similar teachers, or at least they're project-based like me: Foods/Home Ec, Shop, IT. Even so, it's tough to find common practices. I want to be put with a whole group of teachers like me so we can really talk about teaching strategies.
4. My butt hurts. It's so cruel that my students have to sit on those hard chairs all day, every day!