Looking Out for Others

While I'm not at all a fan of cold weather, I do love Christmas. I think that I have appreciated this holiday more as an adult that I ever really did as a child. Growing up, we never had a live Christmas tree, so when I had my first apartment in college, I decided that I wanted one. My wife, Erika, still laughs at me every year when we pick out a tree, in memory of the giant tree that filled up my small, one-bedroom apartment that year. With that tree in the apartment, there was only one side of the living room that could see the TV and you had to maneuver around it to get into the hallway. It was ridiculous. In true college student fashion, it was decorated with cheap ornaments and a homemade garland of beer bottle caps. While it showed my love for the holiday, looking back it was very ugly.

Fast forward almost 20 years and Erika decided that it was time for us to update our Christmas decor this year. With our kids with friends and family last weekend, we set out to buy new decorations. We had a great time, and while I'm usually not one for spending the day shopping, I had a blast getting ready for Christmas. I was so excited to post pictures on Facebook of our new things in my celebration of the holiday. And that's where it started. Several teachers saw what I posted and what I didn't post, was my actual tree. (I still have a problem buying large trees, but now I just have bigger rooms to put them in.) This week several teachers were genuinely worried that the small tree in the corner that I took a picture of, was the only one that my family would have this year. They took the time to check on me and finally broach the subject of why I didn't have a real Christmas tree.

By now, you've probably learned that I like to use daily events to tell a story or lesson, and this week is no exception. This week's Christmas tree misadventure taught me a lot about how teachers pay attention to those around them and try to look for signs that something isn't quite right. I never noticed that my Facebook post gave clues to people around me that something in my home was out of the norm. In the same way, teachers notice their students and can pick up on small signs that show that something may not be right. We have seen quite a bit of that lately as students struggle with hunger, depression and family problems outside of the school. They wear small signs that they may not even realize. But caring people in our building have paid attention and took those signs as a chance to help. That help has probably comforted more students than we may ever realize.

In the spirit of the holidays, I want to say thank you to those of you that look out for me as well as all of the other people in our building. I have always asked that we work hard to take care of ourselves as well as one another. I learned this week that you all do a great job of this.

Leadership Matters

I came to Greene County under a somewhat strange set of circumstances. I had always lived and worked in Pitt County and while I had gone back to school to be an administrator, I was somewhat disillusioned with education at the time. I was sitting in a conference room in Chapel Hill, listing to guest speakers talk to us about school leadership and the job that we were about to embark upon when I met Patrick Miller. He caught my attention with what he said to us and I remember thinking, "this is a guy I can work for." When he finished speaking, he had to leave to get to another appointment. I stepped out of the room after him, pretending to go towards the restroom, and followed him into the parking lot of the Friday Center. I introduced myself and told him I was interested in coming to see Greene County Schools. That introduction didn't immediately lead to me working in Greene County, but it did lead me back here a few years later, and I'm thankful.

Having a presence of leadership, whether you're the superintendent, the principal or the classroom teacher, is all the same thing. And let me be clear, being in charge is not the same thing as leadership. Leadership envokes people to get behind you and the mission of your group or organization. In a school district, that means working toward lofty goals that take years to come to fruition, but in a classroom, it can mean getting through a lesson or unit. Either way, the objective is met by having someone that inspires and guides the group to do their best. In both roles, you can demand certain actions and berate failure, but true leaders get the most out of others through encouragement, coaching, modeling, and patience.

Students screw up, teachers sometimes fail, and principals sometimes lose sight of the big picture. But it is leadership that puts all of us back on the right track and causes us to regain sight of why we are all here. I'm thankful to work in Greene County and for North Carolina's State Superintendent of the Year, Dr. Patrick Miller. Working here and with him literally kept me in the field of education. But I'm also thankful for the dozens of classroom leaders that I work with every day. Leadership matters at every level.

Managing Behavior

I always thought that the hallmark of a great sermon was that you left church feeling like the preacher was speaking to you directly. When a message resonates with your daily life or a struggle you are going through, the message feels personal despite that fact that it was given to a large audience. I'm going to attempt that today, so if something resonates with you, then know that I may have had you in mind, or maybe I never knew that you needed it. Either way, I hope it helps.

I've had classroom management on my mind a lot lately. Somewhat because we put it on our School Improvement Plan and somewhat because I have worked with some teachers in efforts to improve a situation. I've seen some validation in the concerns that were voiced in last year's Teacher Working Conditions Survey and it's popped up in some strange places. Places I didn't expect to be perfectly honest. At the heart of each issue was a teacher with good intentions. They were working to get a student, a group or a class in line and were not being effective. That ineffectiveness comes out in strange ways. You can see frustration, anxiety, anger, sadness and sometimes apathy on the face of a teacher when they know something isn't really working. We raise our voices, change our language, insert sarcasm or just give up. None of that works though.

Teaching is a strange job. We tell teachers to build relationships with students. Sometimes those relationships are as close a family for both parties. In that, we forget that this is a job. It's business. But in our business transactions, we take things personally. When we invest in a person and they let us down, it's hard not to feel that way. At the moment, it's difficult to separate yourself from those feelings. But we have to.

I could use this paragraph to reference professionalism or teacher leadership as the reason why we cannot show that frustration and all of that is true. But greater than that is the fact that these children rely on us as examples of how to act. Through our actions, we either entitle them to continue negative behaviors or stand as a consistent example of what good adults do. Whether you demonstrate professionalism or lose your cool, you model behavior the exact same way you model a problem on the board. The "I'm the adult and you're the student" excuse for differing rules and expectations doesn't work, especially in high school. Not all of our students come equipped with examples in their homes of how to behave or how to act in the presence of frustration in their lives. And while we never took a class on that in college, it's our job to teach it. If we are successful, it's probably much more important than anything in our curriculum.

So if today's message spoke to you in any way, then use it to reflect on your priorities as an educator. It's not an indictment and I'm not calling anyone out. Trust me, we're all in good company. If you need help, then that's what I'm here for, along with Mrs. Willis, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Simms. That's also what your colleagues are for. There is no silver bullet in managing student conduct. But there is help and support for when you feel like you need it.

A Difficult Job

The last time I had to hire a receptionist, we had 84 people apply for the job. Many of those people
had different qualifications and experiences, but I had an image in my head of what I wanted, and I didn't see that on any of the resumes that I was reading. Often when I hire for a position, I am looking for a particular personality type. I strongly believe that you can teach a person to do a job (any job), but you cannot teach them to be someone that they are not. At the time, I was working hard to build parent contacts, especially among our Hispanic student population, and I thought that having someone up front that could speak Spanish would help me a lot. I had also seen how stressful that job can be and I knew that answering phones was a small part of the position. 

While I had not formally met Liz, I knew her sister from my time at Greene Early College and I had heard several stories about how great of a person she was. She was in school part-time but didn't really know what she wanted to do. She had taken a part-time job working with ESL students at GCMS and I used my connection with her sister to call her. She was unsure about taking the job but I did my best to convince her to interview and we offered her the job quickly after. Her first day was April 1st, and in retrospect, I probably should have waited one more day. I am amazed that she came back after she had to read fake names over the intercom (she realized it with Chris P. Bacon) and was frightened with fake roaches. But she did come back and somewhere along the way, she became part of our family. 

Today we say goodbye to a young woman that has helped us all countless times. She has endured the craziness of the front office. She counsels students when they are upset or sick. She calms parents before they make it to see us. She finds substitutes when we have none and she knows who to call before a fire drill. She helped us build bridges to our Hispanic community, who, for the first time, knew that they could call the school and ask a question about their child. But more importantly, she had the right personality. She knew how to make us all feel better about the place we spend most of our daytime hours. And along the way, she figured out that she wanted to be a school counselor. While I hate to see her leave us, I am reminded that I made her promise that she would finish school when she took the job. 

Liz has a difficult job in keeping us all straight, but I think in some way, we served as her internship for counseling. Her experience has been priceless and we have all been better having her here. Thanks for everything Liz.