Miscommunication

The experience that I had where information was miscommunicated was not in an actual work setting but was in an internship. I had an internship in my senior year of high school in an Elementary school in a first grade classroom. One of the assistant teachers was talking about how the school could no longer let parents bring in baked goods from home because one parent had brought brownies that contained pot. I couldn’t believe this and I went back to the high school and asked one of the teachers who I knew had been in the community for a while if she remembered this happening, she was shocked when she heard what the teacher had said. My teacher remembered a few years ago when students had gotten food poisoning from something in the cafeteria but never had pot in the brownies brought by parents. This was a huge misunderstanding and without my knowledge, my teacher went to the principal of the Elementary school and was very upset. The assistant teacher in my classroom ended up getting in a lot of trouble and after this occurrence both the teacher I was interning with and the assistant were very rude to me and it was difficult for me to complete my internship. I ended up having to switch schools and after that, every time I saw the teachers out in the community it was extremely awkward.

The miscommunication could have been prevented if the assistant teacher in my classroom had made sure that her facts were straight before she started spreading the rumors to others, especially students from the high school. Also, the situation was made worse in the fact that this was in a very small town and the news got around fast, which made everything a much bigger deal.