Teachers and administrators are first responders too.
23 years ago, the term first responders became an unfortunate part of the cultural vernacular.
As the pandemic played out, “first responders” entered the zeitgeist once again.
People venerate first responders – those who rush into action, into danger, into the fire. Society, rightly it seems to me, praises those who look after others first and consider themselves second. We elevate those who reflexively place the needs of others before their own needs and we are grateful for their work and sacrifice.
We typically think of law enforcement officials and health care workers as first responders. We often widen the definition to include mental health professionals. While those in these professions absolutely deserve much praise, we can look to education and see the same type of response in these professionals each-and-every-day.
Teachers and administrators are first responders too.
Good educators look to the needs of their students and staff first, they put themselves on the line for them, they protect them. Good educators pay attention to the tenor of their classrooms or or the temperature in meetings, they perceive who is in crisis and try to assist them as they can. They react with kindness and compassion and love.
So very much of the work we do calls us to recognize challenges before us. It calls us to analyze situations and to understand people. It calls us, sometimes in split seconds, to act for the good of the student, the teacher, the department, the class. Excellent educational professionals have the reflexes and insights to make spur-of-the-moment decisions that improve situations for individuals and for groups. They have the ability to diagnose and respond quickly for the good of others.
This is a critical part of our shared work.
Good educational professionals are absolutely first responders, making split-second decisions that affect, change, and, yes, save lives, every moment of every day.
On September 8, 1966, the fabric of American fiction changed when a television series called Star Trek premiered. From the relatively humble beginnings of a tv show that was canceled not once, but twice, a major American entertainment franchise was spawned – a franchise that continues to this very day as new iterations of Star Trek hit bookshelves and screens each-and-every-year.
So very much has been written about Star Trek. It seems that the phenomenon has been scrutinized from every conceivable angle. I should know. I have been trying to develop a book idea about Star Trek for years and each time I think I have found a clever way in, I discover that someone has already gone out into that particular final frontier. Someday I will crack it.
That coming project may have something to do with the fact that education is so critical to Star Trek.
The very heart of Star Trek is education. The mission of Starfleet itself is to explore, to seek out, to go. The various crews of the various starships that populate the universe are often “sciencing” themselves out of difficulties or relying on knowledge to understand another culture or are employing diplomacy to extricate themselves from a challenging situation. These are educated people at the tops of their fields, seeking to learn and to grow.
From its earliest episode, and I mean the first (well, not really the first*) one, the intrepid man of action, Captain Kirk himself, is revealed to have been a teacher before he took command of a starship. Of Kirk, his best friend Gary Mitchell notes that he was told: “Be careful of Lieutenant Kirk. In his class, you either think or sink.”
It is something of a throwaway line, but I just love the fact that one of my all time favorite characters was a teacher before he was anything else. He was a good one. A demanding one. A memorable one.
That the original crew of the Starship Enterprise were my fictional role models growing up may well have led me to my vocation in teaching. That Captain Kirk himself was a teacher may have been an inspiration that altered the course of my life.
Fascinating.
* The actual first episode of Star Trek was the unused pilot The Cage, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike. It was in the second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, that Mitchell uttered these lines about Captain Kirk and, even then, Where No Man Has Gone Before was not the first episode of the series to air. That honor goes to The Man Trap, an “creature of the week” adventure that NBC executives thought represented the show better than Where No Man Has Gone Before. And all of this I know off the top of my head. Maybe I need to get cracking on that Star Trek project!
Teaching is noble work. Teaching is praiseworthy work. Teaching is God’s work.
Some things I have learned in 32 years in education:
The work that teachers do can be very rewarding.
The work that teachers do can be very fun.
The work that teachers do can be very exciting.
The work that teachers do can be very fulfilling.
True.
The work that teachers do can be very taxing.
The work that teachers do can be very tiring.
The work that teachers do can be very boring.
The work that teachers do can be very demoralizing.
Also true.
The “can be” operative in the above conclusions and the opposing truths indicate the duality of the work of educators. In one moment, we can be on the highest of highs. In the next, we might find ourselves in the lowest of lows.
This is challenging work and it impacts teachers in ways that are hard to explain.
Simon Sinek gained much notoriety asking leaders in the business world to articulate their “why,” as in why do you do what you do? Teachers are very, very good at articulating what they do. They are asked to often – by administrators, by students, by parents. They are asked to justify what they do more frequently than they should be.
Rarely, I think, are we asked why.
Having done the work for over 30 years, I know that there is one, single throughline as to the “why” committed teachers do this work. It is simple. It is elegant. It is commendable.
Teachers want to improve people’s lives.
I am convinced this fact gets lost in the work we do. It gets lost in conversations about classes we teach and curricula we adopt and duties we do and compensation we lament. It gets lost when students carry on, when parents complain, when colleagues critique. It gets lost when grades are due, when meetings are upcoming, when time runs out.
This fact gets lost.
We ought to hold on to it like treasure. We ought to shout it from the rooftops. We ought to print it on t-shirts.
Teachers want to improve people’s lives.
Teaching is noble work. Teaching is praiseworthy work. Teaching is God’s work.
I wish the rest could always simply be noise.
Why do we do it? To improve people’s lives.
Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph. End of chapter. End of book.
“What is your goal for us?” or “what is your goal for the school?” or a variation of those interrogatives are fair questions to be asked of a principal new to her or his position.
I have been a new principal three times.
In each stop, at Regis Jesuit High School, Mullen High School, and Xavier College Preparatory High School, I have been asked this question. It has seemed that the person asking the question truly wanted an answer and expected me to have one. I thought the unstated implication was that if I did not have one, the institution would have made a mistake in hiring me.
Typically, my response to this question has been something along the lines of “oh, I have a plan, don’t worry about that.” Sometimes I would say “I don’t want to scare you with my plan” and smile.
The reality, however, is that, were I truly pressed, I would have had a hard time clearly articulating what my plan actually was.
My philosophy as an educational leader which I have embraced over the years is to allow the community to develop plans, to suggest directions, and to map the future together. I have rarely – if ever – wanted to lay out my own, fully articulated blueprint. I have never, to the best of my recollection, decided the direction of a school I have served and expected or demanded that the staff and teachers simply fall in line.
I believe that is not my style. After all the years, I hope it is not.
However, in the lastest stop at Xavier College Prep, I had a unique onboarding. The school was able to add me to the staff in March and I got to meet with each member of the community one-on-one as their year wrapped up simultaneously to my tenure beginning.
That was a real gift.
In those conversations, more often than not, I was asked “what is your plan for the school?”
It began to be unseemly that I did not have an answer.
Surely a principal has a plan. Surely the person in That Office has expectations. Surely the educational leader has an idea where the school should go.
As end of the year meetings approached, knowing I had 45 minutes to speak with the faculty to send them off into their summers, I reflected on and prayed about this question, the answer to which was found in the most unlikely of places.
In the late spring, comedian John Mulaney was interviewed on David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs no Introduction program. A fan of both men, I was eager to watch the show.
Mulaney is Jesuit educated. He is a graduate of Georgetown University. He went to high school at St. Ignatius Preparatory in Chicago, IL. Part of the Letterman interview was filmed at St. Ignatius in December of 2023.
The entire show is worth watching as Mulaney opens up with Letterman about his life, drug addiction and recovery, and fatherhood. It is a powerful show.
But, during the interview when Mulaney was asked about his experiences at St. Ignatius, he made two comments that resonated with me so much that I immediately rewound the show to watch them again.
Of his time at the school, Mulaney said: “When I was a student I thought ‘Oh my God, they are on our case 24/7. Luckily we have this theater to goof off in and do things.’ And I’m here now and I’m like ‘well, they built it, you know? It wasn’t like a clubhouse we found in a sewer, you know?”
Letterman follows up this comment with the question: “Did you like high school better than college or college better than high school?”
Mulaney immediately replies: “I liked college better than high school but the education in high school was better than college. Yeah.”
Letterman is suprised. “Wow!”
Mulaney: “Oh yeah. This was the best education I ever got.”
And thus was articulated my goal by a man far smarter than I.
At our faculty meetings, I set up this clip with something about Mulaney’s background as a St. Ignatius and Georgetown grad and andI said: “Okay, many have wanted to know what my goals for us are. I can’t articulate them better than this.”
There were a few audible gasps.
Truly.
Whether Mulaney knows it or not – and I believe he does, he is a very smart guy – the “education” he is talking about is not simply academic. It is about the whole person. It is about how good teachers, counselors, and coaches work together to allow a student to grow in every way imaginable.
So, this is my goal. It is two pronged. Be a school where students can find themselves, their passion, and their relationship with God within our guardrails and guidelines and be a school that provides our graduates with the best education they ever got.
Please join me in this post for an annual tradition: the beginning of school playlist!
Readers of the blog may remember that, years ago, my good friend and educational leader Sean Gaillard (author of The Pepper Effect – great reading for any and all Beatles fans and a must read for educators!) introduced me to the idea of #OneSong which developed into the idea of a mixtape which morphed into the exercise of developing an annual playlist. For the last few years, I have put together a playlist to lead me with energy, optimism and enthusiasm into the upcoming school year.
My specific criterion for songs to make my list:
songs whose lyrics of the song resonate with me,
songs that move me,
songs that inspire me,
songs that send me.
The goal here is to play the list and rocket into a new year on the most positive of notes… pun intended.
Generating positive energy is the goal. Generating it through music is a gift.
