Professional Development - what is the point?

I am a firm believer in education - my own as well as my students. In my prior job, information was power, so I want to know everything. Not to be a know-it-all (although that is a failing of mine), but I really want to know it all.

When I started teaching, they were talking about standards-based learning. I bought books. I spent my summers attending additional classes to really understand the point behind this.

We have professional development every week. It is in part because of our status with AYP. I understand this and the importance of attending and participating.

We have three specialists who were hired with stimulus money to help us teach. They were elementary school teachers. (Remember? I teach high school)

They keep coming up with really REALLY juvenile ideas for us to use with our students. I know some will fly - with upper level kids. You have to be very careful with kids in lower level math classes.

Today's lesson? She read a book to us, one I read to my children before they could read. I'll call it the One Fish, Two Fish. Then we were to write our response to the standards based lesson in the style of the book.

I did not use the words that came to mind, although they were short words.

I feel like I am wasting my personal time investigating some of these ideas if they are going to feed it to me in a manner I would have understood by 3rd grade. Well, I can take that off the list of things I used to waste my personal time on.

{Disclaimer: there are good professional development ideas out there. We don't use them]