The Journal presents my weekly reflections on being a private, Catholic school principal during what promised to be a year filled with energy, excitement, challenges and possibilities…
… if there was ever a situation and a year in which to give myself – to give ourselves grace, this is surely it.
Our school is opening online.
This week we are welcoming all of our students back to campus, class-by-class at approximately 100 students a clip, to complete their orientation days. Next week, we have four “Syllabus Days” – one for each class – during which our students meet their teachers, hear about expectations for classes, for social distancing, for what we are calling our “Phases” of schooling this year.
Then we go into two weeks of distance learning. We will determine if we stay in Phase 3 (Distance Learning) shift to Phase 2 (Hybrid) or move directly to Phase 1 (Full Capacity) at the midpoint of those two weeks. Given our current health trends in Colorado, I am hopeful for a shift to in person learning.
We will see.
What this means, though, is that many are disappointed that we are not already going to be in-person and, though we spent weeks in Emergency Remote Learning last spring, many are nervous about what Distance Learning will be. The “many” are students and families and teachers alike.
I am doing what I can through reflection, through prayer, through self-talk to keep nervousness at bay and to replace it with something else: I am trying to replace it with grace.
As principal, I have the privilege of speaking with our faculty and staff at our meetings and, last week, as we completed that ever present ritual of coming back to school, fall faculty meetings, I had the opportunity to speak about grace.
On our best days as humans, I like to think that we give grace to one another, that we consider other’s backgrounds and feelings, that we presume that people around us operate from a place of goodwill. I like to think that grace is our default. I like to think that we live in grace.
I choose to think that.
When I have received push back on the plans I noted above – push back I wrote about last week in this blog – I have tried to remind myself to give the other person grace and let them speak their feelings about the decision. While this has not always been easy, asking myself to give the other person grace has been so important and so helpful. It also has been fairly easy.
What is not and never has been as easy is to give myself that very same grace. Giving myself the space to fail or to not know an answer or to make mistakes is a challenge for me. I don’t want to appear that I don’t know what I am doing, that I don’t have all the answers, that I don’t have my stuff together.
But, if there was ever a situation and a year in which to give myself – to give ourselves grace, this is surely it.
I need to make that a daily practice.
By the way, no positive diagnoses this week…