What You Focus On

My kids say some crazy stuff at times. One of the benefits of my job is that I get to take them to and from school every day and I get to talk to them during that time. That's not a luxury that I had when I worked in another district and I saw very little of them then. On a trip to school this week, my girls were talking about how bad 2020 has been so far. They highlighted recent bad events such as the impeachment trial, the coronavirus, the earthquake in Cuba and the recent death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter. Being the optimist that I am, I asked them if anything good had happened. They quickly said no, but then started listing out things that were good for them personally along with good things that they were looking forward to later this year. They then concluded that the year wasn't that bad, but it was just the bad things that they were focusing on. Similarly, I was working on a different message for my blog post this week and the more and more I thought through it, the more negative it got. I was also guilty of focusing on the bad things.

I recently sent some data from the first semester to our School Improvement and Leadership Teams. It covers teacher growth data from EVAAS, first-semester course grades and student discipline. It's the first time I have tried doing a "status report" of this type for anyone other than myself and it's the first time I've taken a multi-year look at some of these things. What I found was something good to focus on. Here's some of the good news:

• Our percent of College Ready students measured by the Pre-ACT has steadily increased from 9.18% in 2016-2017 to 22.64% this year.
• Our courses where teachers made or exceeded growth (according to EVAAS) has increased from 38 in 2017 to 61 in 2019
• Only 9% of courses were failed in the first semester this year
• Only 3% of courses were failed by a Senior
• Only 9 community college courses were failed this Fall while over 120 courses finished with an A or B

It's human nature to focus on problems and to think about the one student that drives you crazy, one lesson that bombs, one policy that needs to be fixed or whatever else that drives you crazy. But when those things become your focus, you create an image that the world around you is bad. For me, it literally makes me feel bad. Changing that focus and deciding to see the wealth of good that is around you can be life-changing, and some studies even think it can make you live longer. The next couple of months ahead of us are traditionally difficult for schools. This semester, let's focus on the good by sharing good news. If something has gone well or you have something from your classes or your professional learning to celebrate, send it out to all of us. That change in focus can be the difference in seeing 2020 as a good year, or a bad one.

Why Do I Do This Job?

Since my last blog post on Sacrifice and getting to make choices about how we handle our jobs as educators, I've had quite a whirlwind of emotions related to my professional life. Last Friday was a bit of a crazy day that ended with a lot of students receiving suspensions from school for various events. Everything from disruptions to fights and drugs. Those days are rare but tough to manage. One of the things that I always try to get students and their parents to understand is that suspending children is the part of my job that I like the least. I have never come to school, eagerly awaiting a situation that requires me to remove a student from the classroom where they learn. Suspensions are sometimes necessary to give time for the student to reflect on what went wrong and hopefully learn from their mistake so that the same behaviors do not cause them to lose a job or gain a spot in the criminal justice system later. I was suspended for fighting in school and I was also sent to ISS for having a smart mouth at inappropriate times. I learned from those mistakes, and I quit making them. I grew up.

In the midst of those suspensions, Mrs. Duncan had me visit her classes and talk to them about my culinary experiences on my trip to Peru in October. This week, I also got to teach a statistics lesson to Ms. Jesse's AP Psychology class. Getting back in the classroom reminds me why I got into education and it allows an admin to forget about the parts of your job that you really don't like. It's fun to teach when you haven't had a chance to stand in front of teenagers in a while and attempt to hold their attention. I did have a kid or two check out on me at a couple of points and it was an instant reminder of how hard a teacher's job can be.

So between the ups and downs of my job in the past week, I got a reminder of why I do this job. In school, we teach kids a lot of things. If we are being completely honest, they will never use much of the curriculum that we test them on. Most will not need to know the parts of a cell or the area under the curve of a polynomial. They probably won't have to identify the theme of a passage, run a mile for time or many of the other things that we make them do. If we are lucky, one of those pieces sticks with them and ignites a genuine interest that leads to a career. Those sacrifices that I wrote about last week are done so that we help make good people. Sometimes it is easy to focus on the students that drive us crazy and lose all hope in humanity. I'm pretty sure that there were some teachers that thought the same about plenty of us at times. But just like us, our students eventually quit making mistakes and they grow up. From there, they can be whatever they want to be and they can learn whatever they want to learn. And we are just like the people that educated us. We all do this job because we want to make things better. We believe that kids can be better, and we are willing to do that work. It has good days and bad days. Some days you teach them a hard lesson and some days you bore them with statistics. But either way, these young people grow up into adults. Some of them might even be crazy enough to become educators.

Sacrifice

The new year brings about resolutions for change for many of us. If you are normal, you've either let those go or they are slipping now that we are two weeks into the year. Many resolutions involve some sort of sacrifice. You give up unhealthy foods, time you could be in bed so that you can exercise or some other bad habit. Making that sacrifice is tough for many of us, but we often try because we recognize that there is something to gain. It comes down to the concept of delayed gratification: I can have this now, or I can have something better later. But either way, you get to choose.

It's that choice that made me think this week. While we usually focus on the outcome of those choices, we sometimes forget that we are making those choices whether we intend on it or not. There is no middle ground. You either make a decision to sacrifice your time or effort nows now, or you pay the price for not making that sacrifice later. But either way, you're going to make a sacrifice. While we don't often like these choices, it can be very empowering to make them.

Students and teachers also have to choose their sacrifices. As a student, you have to choose to pay attention or to put the work into your classes. If you don't, a sacrifice is made in regards to grades and opportunities later. The very same is true for teachers, especially in regards to classroom management and instructional planning. You can put the effort into establishing practices now or sacrifice your sanity later. You can make the sacrifice for planning now, or your student;'s scores will sacrifice later. There is no middle ground. But still, we all get to choose our sacrifice. The other great thing about this choice is that you get to make it every day, even if yesterday was a bad day.

By today, we are 10% done with the Spring semester and while this portion has probably gone by quickly, remember that we have 90% to go. That means that you still have a lot of time to choose your sacrifices. But either way, you can pick it now, or it can get you later.

Working Together

I didn't travel much over our holiday break this year. Staying home allowed me to get some much-needed rest and even gave me some time to reconnect with some old friends that I had not spoken to in a while. Some of these old friends work in education as well and the overwhelming theme that I heard from them was about adults in their building that couldn't get along or made things difficult for one another. I joke with teachers all the time that sometimes I complain about adults the same way that they complain about students. (I'm sure teachers complain about me the same way students complain about teachers too!) Despite those complaints that we all make, I realized listening to them how blessed I am to work in a building where the adults work well together.

There has been quite a bit of study on school and organizational culture in the past few years and the resounding affirmation of those studies is this: How a staff interacts with one another is as important to student success as how teachers interact with students directly. Read that again and think about how big that is. Your interactions with the other adults in this building has just as much to do with achievement as your direct teaching in their classroom. Not even class size or curriculum materials has that large of an effect on student achievement. I've long believed that teenagers have a great ability to detect hypocrisy. They probably wake up in the morning looking for it. The fact that students are so impacted by teacher-to-teacher interactions reminded me of an old saying: "I can't hear what you're saying for seeing what you do." This seems to be all too true for school culture.

So welcome back to the start of a new semester. But more than that, thank you for what you do for our students, each other as educators and for our school culture as a whole. While only six teachers work with End-of-Course testing subjects, each of you makes an equal impact on student success through how you interact in our school. And personally, thanks for blessing me to be the guy that you sometimes complain about. Having a reference on what the other side looks like makes a world of difference.