Teach Boldly

Time Capsule reposts blogs from years past.
In the eighth year of Teach & Serve, there are more than a few from which to choose!

One Thing at a Time, Not Everything All at Once

Originally published in August 2016

No matter what subject we teach, we think it parts, not wholes. Take US History for example: when history teachers begin the year, they know where they have to end up. They know they have to get to the election of President Obama (in truth, many US History teachers will be happy if they hit the chapters on the Reagan presidency by the end of the year, but that’s neither here nor there). They know where they are going and they begin to plan how to get there. They plan units, they plan chunks, they plan blocks, they plan lessons.

We hope our students do things the same way. We preach at them to do so. Start the lab. Put on your goggles, then look for the chemicals. Learn the vocabulary in Mandarin before you attempt speaking the language. Understand the equation and then apply it. Begin the research paper with, you know, the research, then start to write. Look at homework assignment-by-assignment, not at the totality of what needs to be done on any given night.

Assess the big picture. Paint the small strokes and make it coalesce.

Why don’t we apply this same thinking to the challenges facing our schools?

All too often, especially at the beginnings or ends of school years, we look at what we perceive as being wrong with our schools and become paralyzed. We see problem linked to problem, issue feeding issue, hazard upon hazard and our reactions do not always help. Our reactions break down into two categories, neither of which is particularly constructive.

We either throw up our hands, stymied by the enormity of the trouble, by its complexities, fearful that pulling any thread on the quilt will rend the thing asunder or we leap to solutions that will tackle the entirety of the trouble, consequences, ramifications and collateral impact be damned.

The systems that exists in our schools are comprised of human beings each full of talents and commitments and agendas and weaknesses and strengths. Rarely do any of us set out to create complexity and tie Gordian Knots around our institutions. But it happens. It seems to always happen.

Some leaders believe the way to overcome these challenges is with the precision of hand grenades. Blow the problem up and start anew. Some leaders believe the way to overcome these challenges is to trust people to do good work and let the problem work itself out.

I understand both reactions. I’ve had them. I’ve lived them. I’ve turned away from the beast. I’ve challenged it head on. Not the best plans.

We can solve the issues we face if we do one thing at a time, address one problem at a time and, wherever possible, keep the pieces separate and the issues distinct. We actually can, with discipline and planning, take on each part and create a chain reaction that will solve the whole.

Don’t ignore.

Don’t demolish.

Work the problem. Work it piece-by-piece.

We don’t expect our teachers to teach everything at once. We don’t expect our students to learn everything at once. We cannot solve each issue our schools face all at once.

But if we don’t start with the first step, we’ll never solve anything.

And if we try to jump to the last step, we’ll likely solve even less.

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 was lucky enough to teach at Bishop McNamara High School for the first two years of my teaching career. They were formative years and, like the imprinting that a mother bird does on its children, I am sure that who I am as a teacher and administrator today was developed in the crucible of imprinting that went on during those years in Maryland. 

I can point to all manner of philosophies that I think are mine which are, more than likely, the outgrowth of my experiences at Bishop McNamara. They are the results of my respect for the people with whom I worked. They are the guiding principles of my career.

One that I know was planted at McNamara and took root in me was pranking. When you were pranked by someone at McNamara, you knew you had made it. The most frequently employed prank was the rearranging of one’s classroom. In my case, this took the form of my coming to school one Monday morning in my second year and finding every piece of furniture – every. piece. – turned upside down. My teacher desk and chair, all the student desks, everything. Even the one bookshelf I had in the room was flipped over with all the books still in order, but upside down.

No one spoke of who masterminded these pranks, though I always suspected Mr. Hunt, the music teacher, as the force behind the hijinks. 

The day I saw my room pranked was the day I felt fully initiated into the profession.

I have not forgotten.

In the years that have followed, I have taken many an opportunity to good naturedly prank someone. I have been involved in putting a teacher’s car in the school lobby, slowly adding more weight daily to a colleague’s briefcase day-by-day, taking and wrapping a teacher’s completed final exams under the school Christmas tree and, perhaps my favorite, perpetrating an ongoing annual prank on an unsuspecting new educator, telling them that they had to process in and stand with the “school flag” throughout graduation ceremonies – and that the harness they had to wear was not too heavy at all.

I still include false information in the first April edition of every newsletter I write for school.

At Bishop McNamara, I found right away that the work we do in schools can be long and it can be challenging. Laughter helps. It helped when I was a brand new teacher and it helps now.

I really do love a good prank.

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!

Beginning a school year when the year has already started is something to be avoided. Doing that in your first year of teaching is a truly terrible idea. Starting mid-year is very much like trying to board a moving train, you can do it, but it is going to hurt. 

I began my first teaching position at Bishop McNamara High School on a Monday in October replacing a teacher who, according to the students I was inheriting, had a “nervous breakdown.” 

I never found out if mental stress was actually the reason my predecessor departed and the reasons for her leaving the school were immaterial at any rate. I had a teaching job. I had students. I had my own classroom. 

I was terrified.

I have related the story of my first day as a  teacher on numerous occasions. In truth, it is not the story of my first day, it is the story of one incident that took place on my first day, an incident that shaped the totality of my first year.

I remember being in the classroom right before first period, reviewing the seating chart provided me, trying to learn names. 

The students began to arrive. They were seniors, some of them surely 18 already and only 4 years my junior. I was very conscious of that fact.

I do not know what they were thinking, but I imagined they thought they had run one teacher out, they could take care of this new one, too.

I was 22 and nervous. I was also six foot three. I have learned to never underestimate that gift.

Class started. I called the roll. I introduced myself. I moved into the lesson. Interesting and, perhaps, instructive to me that I do not recall the content from that day. I walked to the chalk board and caught some motion out of the corner of my eye.

A student had slipped out of her desk. She had fainted in her seat and crumpled to the floor.

No kidding. 

She was out. Unconscious. And I was panicked.

I double and triple clutched for what felt like an eternity and then (please remember this was 1994) I had a male student pick the young woman up and he and I walked with her to the Main Office. I did not know if we had a nurse. 

Oh the liability…

When I returned to the classroom, the students were messing around, joking and laughing with abandon because, you know, kids! I entered the classroom and lost it. I raised my voice. I yelled at them. I told them how I did not know them but how disappointed I was. Who knew at that point if their classmate was going to be okay? What were they thinking? 

The room got very quiet and still. I went on with the lesson.

Did my outburst help the students respect me? I do not know. I do know that I never raised my voice with that class again for the rest of the year. Maybe it did.

What malady affected that young lady is lost in my memory. The names of the students in that class are as well. But the incident is indelible.

Time Capsule reposts blogs from years past.
In the eighth year of Teach & Serve, there are more than a few from which to choose!

Temporal Landmarks

Originally published in August 2018

You cannot hold back the sea and you cannot hold back the beginning of the school year.

Those of us involved in education are ramping up, feeling the itch, sensing the inevitable. In the coming days or weeks, we will embark on the opening rituals of the 2018-2019 school year: meetings and planning, cleaning and decorating, organizing and implementing. While we may now be stealing the last few moments of summer vacation or time in our buildings without students, we know that those moments are, at this point, fleeting and running out on us.

Hopefully we are rested. Hopefully we are ready. Hopefully, we are excited.

Let us embrace the moment because this moment – the start of the school year, has power.

In his work When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (which was suggested to me by a wonderful friend and colleague and which  I highly recommend) sociologist and scientist Daniel H. Pink writes about when people do things, when they are most successful at doing things and when they should do things.

Particularly salient to those of us in education at this time of year are his thoughts on temporal landmarks defined as dates that have significance and that draw a line between what is past and what is to come. Building on the work of researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, and Jason Riis, Pink says of a temporal landmark: “This new period offers a chance to start again by relegating our old selves to the past. It disconnects us from the past self’s mistakes and imperfections, and leaves us confident about our new, superior selves.”

Wow. That is a very interesting way for us to consider ourselves as we start this new school year.

Last year, and the years prior to it, are in the past. We can, as appropriate, disconnect from them. It is not that we forget them, we simply leave them behind in favor of this new year. We use the temporal landmark of the beginning of the school year to set goals, to dream, to let go of our past “mistakes and imperfections” – which we all have.

This is a good thing.

Even better is embracing the confidence that comes with starting a new. Better still is envisioning ourselves as we start this new year as superior to who we were last year. 

One of my favorite things about being in education is that our time is broken up into manageable segments. I have not, until this year, however, thought about these segments as temporal landmarks. It is such a powerful way to reflect and to project.

As we start this new year, let us reflect on who we were last year and learn from those reflections. Let us take into this year all that was good in us last year. Let us be confident as we stride into 2018-2019. Let us know that we are better – we are superior – to who we were last year and let us start this year compassionately and confidently. 

The temporal landmark of these last summer days leads us to wonderful possibilities of a bright, new year. Blessings as we begin!

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!

Throughout my high school years, I wanted to be a teacher. Specifically, I wanted to teach high school English and direct high school plays. In the playbills accompanying the performances I was in during my high school stage career (and what a career I thought it was! I let anyone who read my bio what my goals were. 

I majored in English and Secondary Education at The Catholic University of America, did my student teaching my senior year, graduated with my degree, applied to local DC, Maryland and Virginia schools – primarily Catholic schools – and got 2 interviews. From those interviews, I received 1 job offer, to teach out of my discipline at a school whose reputation was not sterling. I told myself I could teach English anywhere or I could teach Theology (the job I was offered) in a perfect situation. Taking on both challenges felt like a bridge too far for my 22-year-old psyche and I passed on the position, instead taking a job at a DC Not for Profit.

That lasted just over 2 months.

In early October, I got a phone call from Bishop McNamara High School, a Catholic, Holy Cross school. They had had an English teacher who was newly hired not pan out and needed a replacement. I had applied to McNamara in the spring of my senior year at CUA and was thrilled to get the call. 

As I remember it, and many of the blogs this year will likely have that caveat because I know that I have forgotten, embellished and/or invented many details of the stories I will share, I interviewed with English Department Chair Al Odierno and Principal Matt Goyette on a Friday and was offered the job before I got home. The message was waiting for me on our answering machine. On tape. I wish I kept it. I started the following Monday.

It was an amazing situation for me, and I was too inexperienced to realize it at the time. 

Bishop McNamara had, just that fall, gone co-ed. La Reine High School, an all girls school, had closed the prior spring and McNamara invited those students and other girls to join them, integrating boys and girls at the school for the first time. If this was mentioned in my interview, I do not remember. During the 3 decades to follow, I would find myself in an all boys setting, an all girls setting, back in the DC area for years and in a co-education setting in my various positions. McNamara was the perfect start. 

And I simply loved being there. I have such wonderful memories of the two years I spent the first time I was a Mustang!