No Refs

Our Fall sports teams have done exceptionally well this year. When so many teams do well, along with the other after-school events, it's hard to attend everything that you want to see and support so the administrators usually try to divide things up. Luckily this week, Mrs. Willis was able to come and watch tennis, which is something that I usually cover alone. Throughout the match, I was having to explain the rules and how the game works to her. Her boys are mostly football and track athletes, so she hasn't watched much tennis over the years. As I explained the game to her, she was impressed by the fact that there are no referees in high school tennis. The opponents call the game themselves. If your opponent says that your ball was out, it's out. If you think theirs is in, you play it. It's an honor system that is part of the game. You can question a call, but ultimately it's up to the opponent to do the right thing. Mrs. Willis thought this should be a blog post.

There are a lot of times in life when we want a referee. There should be someone to apply justice as we see it. Someone to make the call for us or someone to blame when we don't like the call. There are a few of those in life, but let's be honest, not many. More often in our personal and professional lives, we make a call on how to treat one another. We make decisions about equity and fairness. Sometimes the judgment calls of others that we interact with are questionable, but just like in tennis, we can't always change how someone else sees things. I wrote a couple of weeks back about trust and I think this is another example. We have to trust one another to make the right call in their dealings with us and in turn, we have to honor the system to make the right call with them, even if we don't like the outcome. It forces us to think about what is right and what is wrong instead of having someone to do that for us. And thinking about how we impact others is never a bad thing.

Respect

Winning Principal of the Year comes with the daunting task of completing a portfolio with a list of your accomplishments and your thoughts on several different questions. As I started working on it, I took notes on those questions so that I could come back and turn those notes into paragraphs later. One of the questions stumped me and I moved on to the next one without any notes. The question reads: How does your school leadership foster an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect within the school? As I continued to work on the portfolio, I kept coming back to this question and it wasn't until yesterday that I could even start to articulate an answer. 

So why did I struggle with this one? It's because I don't think there is any schoolwide policy or agenda item on a Leadership Team meeting that can address it. Trust and mutual respect are a cultural phenomena, not something that can be decreed or set in policy. This is something that is much harder to define, but on Thursday afternoon, I had it. I got called over the radio because Mrs. Edwards heard two students running down the hallway using profanity loudly. I found out that they came from Ms. Best's room so I went to talk to her about it. We have tried several things to manage the two students over the past few weeks with marginal success and my patience with them was quickly running out. But despite the string of issues, Ms. Best (a first-year teacher) was calm, polite and so collected about it. She was still focused on the fact that they missed the directions for their next assignment. Her focus was teaching them. My focus was on trying to help her and the students should have been focused on doing their part. That's how you define mutual trust and respect. In a school, it means being willing to uphold your part in the agreement, even when another member may not uphold theirs. You respect the role that you play because it impacts others and the role that they play. We have boundaries, but we also give grace because students, teachers, and principals are all still learning every day. We trust and respect each other because we have a mission to grow young adults the very best that we can. Without that, it makes it harder for any of us to succeed. 

Now if they will just let me link a blog post in my application...

Why Do We Do This Job - Part 2

Kathy Dail, our school nurse, is the only current employee that has been working at Greene Central longer than Dana Hedgepeth. So technically, Ms. Hedgepeth holds the title of the most tenured teacher. The "Queen of Graduation" attended our school as a student and graduated in 1991. She went to Pitt Community College to become a nurse but quickly learned that she didn't see herself doing that. Against the advice of her family, she decided to become a teacher and came right back to Greene Central in her first year. Almost every teacher in the building had taught her and she did not have her own classroom but lived on a cart that roamed from room to room each period. She was quick to tell me that she cried every day in her first year of teaching. 

Twenty-five years later she can't imagine doing a different job. Today many of her students are the children of former students. Those generational relationships have been a key to her success. Ms. Hedgepeth firmly believes that the relationships she built years ago are still paying off for her today. Living, working and raising her two boys in the same school community where she still works has led many of her students to affectionately refer to her as "Ma" instead of Ms. Hedgepeth. As Ma, her students know that she grew up here with many of the same experiences and struggles that our students experience. And even though she is older than their parents, that relatable nature makes it easier to teach. In room 32, students learn life + math and while they get a credit, they also get someone that they can come to later. 

While Ms. Hedgepeth claims that students today are probably better than they were a generation ago, she also knows that her patience is probably a little shorter now too. Now that she can count on one hand her years to retirement, she doesn't want that to spoil her attitude in the time she has left. She works hard to leave her problems at the door each day. Her students don't deserve to deal with her issues on top of what they have going on.

So when I asked her why she does this job, her answer also had little to do with curriculum. She said, "I love the students. I love my department and the people that I work with. I love the relationships. We are a family, good and bad. It's not about the math, but they accept that later." 

I'm Not Positive

Last week was one of those times where I didn't have much good to say, so I felt like I shouldn't say anything at all. The fights, lack of substitutes, strain on teachers, COVID tracking, and several other interactions throughout the week consumed my time and energy and kept me away from the good parts of my job. It's certainly not the first time it has happened and while I usually try to see the silver lining, I just couldn't for a bit. Here I was telling all of you to take care of your mental health this year and I was a victim of it myself. I have to do better I guess. 

But the start of this week gave me a little perspective on how to do that. Like most people, I told myself that I was going to "be positive." We've all done that, right? You coach yourself with the voice in your head and motivate yourself to accept a challenge or to change your mindset. But somehow the rational part of me took over this time. Let's be honest, last week sucked! It really did. Now I can try to pretend that it didn't or that stress isn't real or I can fake it until I make it, but it certainly doesn't change the circumstances. That's when it hit me that just "being positive" may not be the answer. Bad things happen. Bad days happen. And sometimes bad weeks happen. But instead of telling myself that these bad events are really positive, I decided that I'm going to be optimistic. I think things will get better. 

So like a principal with PTSD, I came to work this week waiting for the next crisis event to happen, but throughout the week I saw things that reminded me why I still love my job. Students and teachers dressed up for spirit week and decorated hallways. The loud noises in the hallways of a fight were replaced with laughter and music as students danced to "throwback songs" between classes. I made some headway with a few kids that I've been working with and I finally got to observe a couple of teachers. 

So I've decided not to be a positive person. Instead, I'm going to be optimistic. I believe that hard work pays off and that through that work, things will get better. Thanks for a great homecoming week and for getting me back in a good frame of mind. I'm optimistic about what next week will hold.