The People Around You

Last week, my blog centered around choosing the right people to surround yourself with, so that they make the right impression on you. This week, I gained a new perspective on how the people that surround you serve as a support system and how important you can be to them as well. No sooner than I had submitted my blog last Friday, I received a call from my wife to tell me that her mom had suffered a stroke. By Sunday, I had a house full of her family including Erika's dad, his dog, Erika's sister from Alaska and her brother from New York. Needless to say, it's been a long week with many trips to and from the hospital. Despite the ups and downs of the week, I have been impressed by how much people step up to help out when a member of their circle is in need. I saw it not just with my wife's family, but also with her co-workers and with several of you here that stepped up to help me. (Special thanks to our APs that did a lot to let me leave early several days this week.) The people you surround yourself with, not only impress their values and character traits on you, but also work as a system to support you as a member of the group. There's no formality of asking for assistance or anything like that. People just help the ones that they care for.

I see the same among many of you and you may not even notice it yourself. There are countless times that you have covered classes for one another when there was an emergent need arose. I saw our English teachers team up and support Mrs. Medrano's freshmen English class while she was out on maternity leave. I see teachers that support one another when they know that a colleague is having a tough time outside of school. These efforts make the people around you better, and as a result of their improvement, you are better as well. So much about this job involves the people that you work with and how you help one another in a common goal. While our monthly "Whatever It Takes" award usually goes to just one person, there are times when I really think it should go to many of you as a team instead. Thanks to all of you that silently do so many things to help support your colleagues and our school family as a whole. You make us better every day.

Be Great

This week I had the privilege to attend the annual Boys and Girls Club's Be Great breakfast. This is an annual fundraiser for Greene County's Boys and Girls Club and one that I really enjoy. We get to hear from several of our local students and there is always an entertaining speaker. This year's speaker was David Sawyer, former meteorologist and current minister in Snow Hill. David said a lot about how organizations like this impact our community, but one part stuck out to me. He quoted something that I often say to students in my office. He told us that psychology finds that we are an average of the five people he spend the most time with. I use this line to remind students to hang out with people that will bring positivity to their lives. They should find people that push them academically and socially. His argument for this was that organizations like our Boys and Girls Club force children to be surrounded by positive influences in adults and peers.

For some reason that morning, I heard those words, not as a comment on children, but as advice for us all. My last year of teaching in the classroom was pretty miserable. The group of teachers that I usually ate lunch with had turned our few precious moments to eat into a daily gripe session and at some point, I had joined in. It was months before I recognized what I had become and how it was impacting me. Once I knew, I separated myself from everyone just to avoid it all. Surrounding yourself with positive people and people that push you in the right direction beyond your comfort zone makes you better despite age, race or socio-economic status. Being that person for others that surround you in return fulfills a need for the group.

As you finish out your PDPs and reflect on your year in our final weeks, be sure to take account of the five people that surround you professionally. Evaluate what you bring to one another as a group and think about how you all average out as a result. This is one area that we can learn a lot from what we tell children.

Feeling Special

Today is the big day that our special needs students wait for all year. At 10:00 am we kick off the 2018 Special Olympics and some of Greene County's favorite students get to have the time of their lives. While the focus is certainly on them, I am always impressed with the work of those that organize and run the event. From the district's organizers down to the student helpers, servant leadership abounds. I am also impressed with how humble each and every person that serves on this day can be. No one wants any credit or fanfare. That's tough for me as I help open the games because not one person seems to want to be acknowledged or thanked. Not one moment of the spotlight is taken from our athletes. That's what the day is about. Not being special, but feeling special.

Everyone enjoys feeling special in some way or another. We like being appreciated. It's just like having an extra birthday. There are so many people within schools, who come to work with the task of making others feel special about being here and doing their job. When I think of that task, I often think of our assistant principals. So much of what they do involves getting the best out of our students and staff. When those groups feel special, the school just runs better. And much like the volunteers that run our Special Olympics, assistant principals are humble. The spotlight doesn't belong on them as much as it belongs on the school and the people within it. In fact, if they do their job well, they get no credit for what they do.

Making people feel special keeps them working as a part of any organization. It gets the best out of them because they feel like they belong. That's true of everyone from the leaders in a school to the teachers that work for their students to succeed and for every student in every class. Feeling special helps us all. Today please remember to thank those people that make you feel special and to do your best to pass that on to someone else. We all deserve it.