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!

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.

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!

The hard calls one makes as a principal tend to deal with departures. There are times that, for the good of the school or for the good of an individual, someone must be asked to leave or be mandated to leave. Over the course of my almost five years as principal of Mullen and in my years as an assistant principal and acting principal at Regis Jesuit, I have taken part in more of these kinds of separations than I would have liked.

There have been situations which are all but obvious, when someone has done something that is so far over the line that there is really only one decision that can be reached, but those are very, very rare. 

More often, these decisions are heart wrenching and, as I write this post, I picture faces and remember names and recall – vividly – the emotions around each of these separations.

While I remind myself that, at the end of each scenario, I and those making the decisions with me did the best we could with the information we had, the sting lingers. Choices such as these change people’s lives. There is immense responsibility in them. 

All of these hard calls remain with me. The emotions still impact me. The history of each choice informs the next.

It might be better if I had the capacity to simply let them go but I do not want to be that kind of principal or that kind of leader.

In the much maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Captain Kirk is offered an opportunity to have the pain of the worst moment of life erased from his psyche. He refuses. “… pain and guilt can’t be taken away with the wave of a magic wand! They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain,” Kirk says.

While I might, sometimes, especially directly in the aftermath of these decisions, want the pain to go away, I have to agree with Kirk.

It is my sincere hope that each hard call and the reflection thereon makes me a better principal when I have to make the next one. 

I have learned the next one is always coming…

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!

The unpredictable is part of the job of a high school principal and part of what I love about it. Rare are consecutive days that are the same. Very, very rare. Rather, there always seems to be something new with which to contend and some new opportunity to handle.  

But, if you are a high school administrator and you are huddled around a table in your office with some of your colleagues after 4:30pm when there is no evening event which you are all planning to attend, something has gone wrong.

There has been plenty that has gone wrong in my years at Mullen High School but the kinds of things that keep you in the building late are about people, about students or staff or faculty, and you are there because something needs to be done.

As I write this, I have situations flashing in my memory, scenarios that were sad or infuriating or frustrating or devastating, scenes that I would never want to live through again. 

Never.

It is these moments that can define a life. I am not being hyperbolic. When one is around a table after 4:30 in a crisis, someone’s future is in the balance.

I have sat around many tables like this. Many, many colleagues have taken positions around them with me. Thinking back on these situations and the difficult decisions that have been made in these gatherings, I can say without a doubt that I have been deeply affected by the level-headed, prayerful and compassionate people who have taken up chairs with me. They have had the best interests of the individuals we have been discussing at heart. They have been clear-eyed and calm. They have been manifestations of God’s presence when situations call for God’s presence to be most needed.

Though conversations after 4:30 stand as some of the worst moments in my life as an administrator, I know that I have been blessed in them.