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…
I need to embrace relentless optimism. That is the way through this particular genesis
There is something frightfully wonderful about the start of any school year and, while we are a few weeks beyond the actual opening days of the 2020-2021 campaign, the reverberations of the ramping into an academic year continue to be felt well into late September.
While this year has its own obvious and particular challenges, the beginning of any school year is filled with stress in the best of circumstances. Seems to me it has been all too easy to forget that this fall.
I know that I have too often forgotten that simple fact, and I’ve been doing this for longer than a hot minute.
This fall marked my 28th first day of school as a secondary educator. 28 of these have preceded this one. You’d think I wouldn’t forget this lesson. You might also think that, given the spring and summer that we’ve just shared with reinventions and reimaginings of school we’ve just undertaken, that I would be deeply aware of not only the stresses the start of a school year places upon students and parents and faculty and staff but of the new pressures of this particular year.
But, somehow, I seem to be forgetting them all too frequently.
This particular start is unlike any other any of us have ever seen and it calls continual reframing. It is all too easy to forget that the typical stresses of the beginning of the school year are coupled with the new stresses of opening the year in the midst of this pandemic, of these crises facing our country, of the questions we are asking about our shared structures, our identity and our faith. It is all too easy to ignore that all of us – each and every one of us – is feeling some of these stresses in deep and different ways. It is all too easy to react rather than reflect, to snap rather than soothe, to rage rather than relax.
I have to do better, not only for the school I serve, but for myself.
I have to do better remembering all that what we are all experiencing is out of the ordinary and that it calls for out of the ordinary compassion and uncommon patience. If I used to metaphorically count to 100, this year I need to count to 1000.
And I need to embrace relentless optimism. That is the way through this particular genesis.
We had no new cases this week… But we are back in our buidlings at half capacity. SO GOOD to be together, even in this format.