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!
MAKING IT UP AS WE GO ALONG
APRIL 26, 2023
30 years of working in high school education has taught me many things, one of those is that teachers and administrators are, all too often, making things up as we go along.
I found this to be most true at 3 inflection points in my life, and none of them are particularly surprising: the year I started teaching at Bishop McNamara, the year I was part of opening the Girls Division at Regis Jesuit and my first year as principal of Mullen High School.
My first year of teaching began as the year was already underway and that is never an ideal situation for a teacher. The challenges were compounded by the fact that I was a brand new teacher and that I really had no idea what I was doing in a practical sense. I had my education degree, I had completed my student teaching but I had not lived the life. At McNamara, I was living it and no amount of theoretical preparation outweighed the minute-by-minute decision making that a teacher has to make. After all these years, I think this is something that those who do not teach do not and cannot understand about the profession: there are hundreds of real time decisions forced on a teacher in each class and over the course of each day. The exhaustion teachers report at the end of a day or a school year is real. It is very real for me. There were days at McNamara when I felt I barely had the strength to drive home.
Being part of the first staff at the Girls Division of Regis Jesuit truly did feel like making things up as we went along. Though we were basing our ways of proceeding on the over 100 year history of the Boys Division, there was no playbook for adapting structures and rules to teaching young women. In the first year of the school, I remember sitting around an administrative meeting, the principal, the assistant principal and I faced with some new choice to make and the AP looked up and said “we are really making policy right now.” It felt amazing. It felt powerful. It felt terrifying.
As the principal and, in my first year, the acting president of Mullen High School, I operated under a reality that I knew to be true before I started the job, but I experienced in actuality for the first time: what I said really went. People listened to me and, more times than not, did what I said because I was the principal. I was in charge. And I was called on to make all kinds of decisions at every minute of the day. After a particularly challenging 24 hours, I thought it would be very interesting to have someone follow me around to simply chronicle the questions and judgements and choices and decisions I had to make on any given day. Principals are asked to do a bunch and I hope most, like I, feel very lucky to be entrusted with the responsibility.
It is very hard sometimes not to think I have been making all of this up as I go along.
After 30 years, though, I hope what I make up is, more often than not, in the best interests of the school!