Teach Boldly

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!

It seems to me that there are not enough adjectives in the English language (the language I know, but I venture to include all languages in this statement) to describe the feelings of bewilderment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Inconceivable comes close for me. What the world went through was inconceivable and what many, many endured (and continue to endure) was more than anyone should have to bear.

I spent a year writing about COVID and I do not really wish to write much more. The reality is that, no matter what I say and what words I choose, I cannot begin to adequately express the suffering and pain shared by so many.

Rather, what I present here is what some of what we did at Mullen High School in response to the pressures, counter pressures, internal pressures and external pressures brought on by the pandemic. 

We shut down to in person learning. We were not alone. At a faculty meeting prior to Spring Break 2020, I explained to the faculty and staff that we were going to take a few extra weeks off around break and “deep clean the school” and that we anticipated being back together after that short time. We informed the community. We took the weeks. We deep cleaned. We were not back after that short time. 

We went asynchronous. We really did not know what else to do. About four of us had heard of Zoom at that point and schools were moving towards this model. We moved, too. Following a series of phone conversations and FaceTime chats, we developed expectations and plans and rolled them out to our faculty and students. I was so proud of our teachers and so deeply gratified by what they did in these last weeks of the 2019-2020 school year at Mullen (my second year there). They were heroes. Remember when society said that teachers were heroes? That was a wonderful 15 minutes…

We went online and synchronous. As the 2020-2021 school year dawned, numbers were looking good in Colorado and we felt we could open in person. Then, in very, very late July, those numbers tanked. More meetings, these facilitated by Zoom, more conversations, more plans. We created an online model of instruction that we hoped we would not use for more than a few weeks. It was more than a few weeks.

We dealt with anger – from all sides. Mullen is a private, Catholic school. Our families work very hard to pay tuition to entrust their children to us. Many understood we could not be together due to the legal restrictions placed upon us. Many did not. We were faced with petitions and rage. We confronted anger and resentment. I dealt with personal attacks and vitriol. Mullen was not unique. These challenges continued when we moved to a hybrid model and, finally, back to school as a full community, albeit masked. We could not please everyone. We had vocal detractors. We were not alone and I understood the frustration. I shared it. I lost sleep, I lost confidence, I lost some of the authority and credibility I had gained. 

We employed way too many different approaches. I considered going back through my files and emails to catalog the many, many things we did to try to keep school going. As the landscape shifted, we shifted in response. We had hybrid schedules and one-way hallways and masks and quarantines and teachers cleaning desktops and students being sent home and vaccination clinics and more. My heart beats a bit too quickly for my tastes when I put myself mentally back in these spaces. I choose not to do so often.

We survived. We are still here. Mullen High School is still here. It is bigger than any administrator, teacher, student, parent, family or, it turns out, the pandemic. Mullen still stands, perhaps changed, but still here after 90 years. And I am still so very, very proud to serve the school.

Pandemic, I learned a ton from you and I do not mean about infectious diseases and contact tracing, I learned about commitment and teamwork and fortitude. I learned about desire and passion. I learned about rationality and irrationality. 

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!

“I just thought we were on the same page,” she told me when I sat with her and the Human Resources Director and let her know that this was her last day at the school.

“I am going to take my daughter somewhere where people actually care about her,” her mother all but yelled at me after I let the family know that the school was separating from her daughter.

“This decision will be very bad for the school. And for you.” He said when he heard about my decision to make a significant change in direction and policy. “You’ll never get another dime from my family.” 

“You’re firing me? Me?” I have heard a variation of this sentiment each time I have had to dismiss an employee. These comments are often followed by tears.

“I did everything you asked me to do.” He said when he stopped in my office door on his last day in the building.

“This is not what you promised me.” She looked me in the eye and would not leave my table until I provided an explanation for why she did not get the position she felt she was owed. That was a long conversation.

“Please, where’s your compassion? I thought this was a Catholic school.” When students are dismissed, this is the question that each and every appeal asks. It is typically asked by heartbroken parents. 

“Way to hide behind the rules,” he said when I spoke with him about a teacher remediation plan highlighting a number of policies he had broken and illustrating what he would have to do to remain at the school.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” This is a very good question I have been asked more than a few times in person, on the phone and via email.

Despite last week’s post in My (True) Life in Education Thus Far which may suggest the contrary, I do know what I am doing, particularly in scenarios such as the ones quoted above: challenging scenarios that are charged with emotion and energy. Not only did I know what I was doing in each of these circumstances, I own each one as well.

I have to. 

If I do not own these kinds of situations, no one does. I embrace this variation of the Harry S. Truman “the buck stops here,” bon mot. I have discovered that my ability to own my choices in these circumstances fully and completely helps me learn from them, apply those lessons and improve as a leader.

In 30 years, perhaps the best lesson I have learned is that there is so much I can do to improve. 

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!

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!

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!

My life has been forever changed by the people I have worked with in the three schools I have served in my career. 

As a young teacher at Bishop McNamara High School, I hoped I would be in education for my entire life, but I did not know that I would. Signing my first contract at the school, I had no idea how long I would stay there. I certainly did not know it would be only two years. Those two years set my foundation as a professional educator and provided me friendships that have endured to this day. The friendship and mentorship of these people put me towards the career that would define my entire life. 

Someone with a better statistical mind than I possess (I did take stats in my teacher preparation course work) could calculate the number of different people with whom I worked during 20 years at Regis Jesuit. It is a big number to be sure. What the statisticians could not tell us is that I met my wife there, I made the best friend I will ever have there – the godfather of two of my children – I formed connections that influenced who I am. I had mentors and competitors, compatriots and allies. These people I journeyed with at Regis Jesuit were my life, we were in every part of it and remain so to this day. 

In these (God, I must admit) later years of my career at Mullen, I have again been blessed with meeting and befriending incredible people whose presence in my life has made me a far better teacher, administrator and person. I acknowledge and embrace that I am now humbled to be a mentor. I have found at Mullen a friend who I know will be in my life forever. I have laughed and loved and smiled with these newer friends and I know that these relationships are as important to me as any I have ever had.

The joy of working with friends cannot be underestimated. I have been working with friends for 30 plus years.