With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
ALL THE OLD STORIES ARE NEW
MARCH 8, 2023
I do not remember being intimidated in the first days and weeks I served Mullen High School as its principal. I was absolutely aware of the responsibility and I was incredibly humbled to have the privilege. Through the generosity of my boss at the Jesuit Schools Network, I had been able to work a few days a week at Mullen throughout the spring of 2018 so, when the 2018-2019 school year opened, I felt I knew the school a bit better than I had when I interviewed. As the calendar moved into late July and early August, I was ready for the opportunity life had presented me.
I spent days reviewing the staff list, looking over the prior year’s yearbook and running through lists of departments to try to familiarize myself with everyone’s name. I had met many of the faculty and staff over my brief association with the school, but I wanted to know them as best I could before the year started.
I walked the campus every day. Mullen’s campus is vast and encompasses over half a dozen buildings. Some of the classroom numbers do not exactly follow logical patterns. Many of the locations are not referred to by what they are actually named, but by some colloquial understanding. I wanted to be certain I would not get lost on my way to any particular gathering or find myself in the wrong hallway in a crisis.
As I got to know more people and they got to know me, I realized that all of my old stories, the stories I had told many times at Regis Jesuit and the stories I had used as an instructor for JSN, were all new. The folks at Mullen did not have a 20 year history with me. Hell, they did not have 20 minutes experience with me.
Many of my early conversations with people at Mullen necessarily dealt with my past, with what made me want to teach, with who I was.
It was like interviewing all over again sharing my professional and not a small amount of my personal history with my new colleagues. And it was a gift.
I have found when I tell someone why I am a teacher or why I am an administrator, I am energized because the work I am blessed to do truly inspires me.
Mullen High School inspired me in those early weeks.
It still does.
