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!

Following my year as Acting Principal of Regis Jesuit High School Boys Division, I returned to my role as Assistant Principal in the Girls Division. The subsequent 2 years I spent in that position were good ones albeit challenging ones as I found myself clashing too frequently with the direction leadership was moving the school. I was in leadership, of course, but not in a principal role and I felt that the effect of my voice was significantly diminished. 

This may have been only perception, but it was my perception and it was painful.

I began to reluctantly search out a new job.

That came in the form of a vice president position at the Jesuit Secondary Schools Association. Over my 20 years at Regis Jesuit, I had been blessed to take part in numerous personal and professional development opportunities staged by the JSEA. I had been to every Colloquium the network had offered. I was a graduate and an adjunct instructor in their Seminars in Ignatian Leadership. I had presented at many gatherings. 

I had friends on the staff of the JSEA and my mentor – a man I still rely on for direction to this day – was departing his role. 

I applied to be his successor and was so very happy to be granted the role. I was happy. I was lucky. I was blessed.

The Jesuit Secondary Schools Association was part of the Jesuit Conference of North America, providing programming and support to more than eighty secondary and pre-secondary schools. Its offices were in Washington, DC (about 4 blocks from the White House!) and I would be able to remain in Denver with the expectation that I would travel to the office regularly and would be responsible for programming and teaching all over the country. 

It was an incredibly exciting opportunity and I loved every minute of it. 

Departing Regis Jesuit was a challenge. My last day there was something of a surreal experience. Finding a home at JSEA (soon to be the Jesuit Schools Network, but that is a subject for another post) was a beautiful gift.

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!

One day I – provisionally – received the job I had been chasing for years: principal of Regis Jesuit High School. 

Less than 10 months later, the dream job ended.

Shortly after that, I departed the school I had worked at for 20 years.

This is a very simplistic, but perhaps not inaccurate, way to look at the end of my years at Regis Jesuit High School. Following serving for seven years as an administrator in the Girls Division of Regis Jesuit, I was asked to take on the role of Acting Principal for the Boys Division in late May and agreed to do so. 

My perception of the months I held that position is that they were challenging but rewarding, that I worked very hard to serve the faculty and staff and students at the school and that the results of my almost full year on the job were good.

I was thrilled to have the role but not everyone was thrilled to have me in it. I knew this and worked as diligently as I knew how to illustrate that I was the person for the role. I wanted to show through my actions that I had the best interests of the institution and the people who served our students at heart. I desired nothing more than to win over those who believed I was the wrong person for the position.

As I noted above, that quest lasted 10 months. When I applied for the ongoing position, I was not hired, though many, many signals were shared with me that I would be.

It was a very bitter pill to swallow, one of the most bitter of my entire professional career. 

Following the limited explanations offered me by the president of the school (and, to be fair to him, I was in far too much pain to ask for further details than those he offered in one of the more uncomfortable conversations I have ever had), I sat down with the people I worked with on the administration of the Boys Division and told them I was not going to have the job. 

I believe they were all surprised.

To one of them, I said: “If I could punch you in the face and be put on paid leave for the remainder of the year, I would do it.” 

I found out the news in February. There were months left with me in the position, some pretty critical months in the life cycle of the school.

My favorite professional memory of this time concerns the plans the President and I created to tell the full faculty that a different hiring determination was made. We decided that he would meet with the faculty and staff for the first 15 minutes of our weekly staff meeting, share the news with them and then I would enter and run the rest of the meeting. Writing it out now, I wonder why we thought that would be a good plan. Surely there was a better way to proceed here…

Ah, well.

As the faculty and staff met with the president in the library, I waited outside the closed doors until the appointed time. My desire was to come in quickly and quietly with a modicum of dignity and assume leadership of the meeting. 

There was tension in the room as I opened the door at the back of the library and began to walk in. Everyone’s backs were to me, but I could sense the mood. Perhaps I was projecting how I felt on the group. Regardless, I moved into the library. To enter the room, one had to pass through scanners that looked like metal detectors which tripped when something was being taken into or out of the library that was not checked out. If that happened, an alarm would sound.

You can likely guess what occurred next. While I had nothing with me that should have set off the alarm, it sounded. 

Loudly.

And 150 heads turned to see me.

All I could do was laugh. 

All any of us could do was laugh.

It was the perfect entrance to the meeting.

It feels like the last time I would laugh that year.

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!

To write that I loved the 20 years I worked at Regis Jesuit High School would be a significant understatement. 

I was 24 when I arrived, newly married and childless. I was 44 when I departed with 3 children and re-married. Those life changes, in-and-of-themselves, made those years perhaps the most influential of my entire life, certainly the 20 years of my life that were quantitatively filled with the most changes. 

I have had two other positions since I left Regis Jesuit which I will write about in future blogs and I have loved both of those as well, particularly my current position as principal of Mullen High School. Comparing all of these chapters in my professional life is somewhat silly. I cannot and will not say I loved any of my jobs more than any others.

I will say that, by the time I walked out of the doors as an employee of Regis Jesuit, I was very, very aware that I was working in my hometown. By that I mean my 20 years at the school and the actions I had taken, the roles I had played, the stories I had told and the myths that had grown were cemented parts of who I was perceived to be.

The interactions of 20 years were primarily positive. My efforts were primarily well intentioned. My philosophies of education and leadership were primarily fully baked. But I had conflicts, I made bad decisions, I upset people usually unintentionally but there were times I intentionally did so as well. My history was long and known and, in some cases, documented.

That I am proud of most of that history is true. That I am not as happy about other pieces of it is equally true.

I was very, very well known in my hometown. What I realized when I left is how others knew me was informed by their experience of me but also by their experience of what they thought about and heard about me. And I also realized that I cared very much about perceptions and narratives over which I had very little control.

As my departure date approached, I heard more-and-more about those perceptions. 

What I was forced to consider is how much I allowed my history to define me and how much that definition played into my departure from the school.

While I am thrilled that life took me in other fruitful directions, the reality is, I thought I would retire from Regis Jesuit.

How the end played out had much to do with being known in my hometown.

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 cannot remember once in my college studies as I prepared myself to be a high school teacher thinking “I am following in the family footsteps.” My parents were not teachers. My older sister was not considering becoming one. It did not feel to me like I was paying tribute to my family in my career choice.

This frame of mind did not consider my grandmother. 

Grandma was an elementary school teacher for years. She taught at Brown Elementary, one of the neighborhood elementary schools down the street from her home. I remember many summers when Grandma invited me and my older sister to decorate her classroom. I remember when she retired. I remember her talking about missing teaching. Why I did not recall any of this when I was choosing my career path is beyond me.

And it was not just Grandma. 

My mother’s brother, my uncle, was a math professor at Southern Illinois University for his entire professional career. He served as the Dean of the Math Department for many, many years. 

His daughter, my cousin, also became a university professor.

My aunt was a long-tenured English professor at a community college.

Her son, another cousin, became a social studies teacher for a second career.

Her daughter, still another cousin, is still a preschool teacher and administrator. 

My brother-in-law taught high school for years. 

Beyond all of these relatives, my son chose education as his first career path and is teaching at the school where I am principal. What a gift this is! He’s a really talented teacher, too.

And my wife has been a high school teacher for over 20 years and is one of the best educators with whom I have ever worked. That we got to team-teach a US history/US literature class together for years in our career is an absolute highlight of my life. She is teaching at my high school as well and I am so very happy to be working with her again.

Dear Lord, it’s a family business and I never realized it…