We All Need a Coach

Some of you may know about my recent attempt to regain my youth by tackling a running challenge that I completed ten years ago. It's called a streak run and basically, it means that you run every day of the year. I did this my first year at Greene Central and a decade later, I'm trying to do it again. It's more of a form of self-help this time around. I'm certainly not as fast as I once was and the longer runs leave me sore much longer than they did then. But this time around I'm focused on mental therapy rather than winning any races. Because of where I live and some previous close encounters with cars early in the morning, I've done a lot of these runs via a treadmill. I've never really liked treadmills though. They make me feel like a hampster in a wheel. But nonetheless, I carried on with my very inexpensive treadmill until the week we got out for Spring Break. The motor was dying and I needed to quit being cheap and make an investment. 

I chose a new treadmill with a feature that I thought I might never use. There's a screen with a video of a coach that runs with you in different places throughout the world. But why do I need a coach? I ran competitively for years and coached some very successful runners. I know what I'm doing so why do I need to pay a monthly fee to be told what I already know? My wife wanted to try it and so in the spirit of having a growth mindset, I gave it a try. I'm so hooked. Over the past two weeks, I've been doing interval training on the beaches and mountains of South Africa with a coach that guides me and encourages me along the way. I can't begin to tell you how much of a difference it makes. Having a voice of encouragement keeps you accountable to something other than the voice in your head. I run farther and faster every time I do it. (But I'm still not fast.)

Having a partner for challenges in life makes them easier. Someone to support you and give you feedback makes you better, even when things are tough. These last few weeks of school are always the toughest part of the race. We are tired when they need us the most. But look around and remember that this is not a race that any of us runs alone. We are all right there together, we just need to look up and encourage each other to finish the race. Each of us has the ability to be that coach for each other and to receive that when we need it. Now is not the time for any of us to put our heads down and attempt to run alone. Let's do this together!

An Unusual Gift

I'm not too proud to admit that this whole Principal of the Year thing has started to weigh on me a bit. Maybe it's the added responsibilities and expectations, the nights away from home, or the guilt I feel being away from my real job and knowing that others are having to pick up the slack. Maybe it's all of that combined that's kept me running full speed and feeling like I'm always behind. Last Sunday morning I woke up at 5:00 am, made breakfast, did a few things around the house, and packed a bag to go to Washington, DC for a conference. I didn't want to go. I even tried to cancel the plane ticket the night before, but it was too late. Halfway to Raleigh, I debated turning around and just losing the cost of the ticket. At the time $450 seemed like a fair trade for some sanity. Perhaps I should explain why I didn't want to go. This was a national advocacy conference and when I agreed to go and meet with our state's legislators in DC, I didn't know that I was the only one from North Carolina attending. Every other state had teams of people and I just wasn't feeling like taking on another thing. 

Nonetheless, I got on the plane and landed in DC. It was lunch and breakfast was a long time ago, so PF Chang's in the airport sounded great at the time. The fortune cookie at the end of the meal read, "You will soon receive an unusual gift that you will greatly appreciate." It made me laugh and so I took a picture of it just in case something strange came my way. I made it to the hotel, checked in, and decided that I wasn't going to waste the day so I got an Uber to take me to the Smithsonian American History Museum. It should have been a 19-minute ride, but apparently, all traffic in DC locked up the exact moment I entered the car, and my driver, Mohamed, and I were stuck together for 1 hour and 20 minutes before arriving. I literally jumped out of the car in the middle of the street versus making him fight for a place to park. The moment my feet hit the street I heard someone yell my name. It was Susan Harrison. So much for not knowing anyone on this trip I thought to myself. After a quick chat, I made my way through the American History Museum and the Natural History Museum. I've been to both several times, but I see something new each time. 

So now, how to get back to the hotel? The streets were just as packed as before and the previous $16 Uber

ride was now $55 and an extensive wait to get to you. My thought was to start walking toward the hotel and when I got to a less crowded place, reassess the Uber. 4.6 miles to the hotel and Google Maps said it would take 90 minutes. I passed the Washington Monument and through the cherry blossoms in full bloom at the Jefferson Memorial. I've never seen them in person this time of year and it was incredible. There was also a kite festival and hundreds of kites could be seen throughout the National Mall. With the streets still packed I made it to the Potomac River and crossed it with 2.5 miles to go. Might as well keep going since the Uber can't get me on a bridge. The walkway led me to the airport and along a park trail that I had run with a college friend over a decade ago. In jeans and a hoodie, I wasn't quite prepared for a run, but it was a great memory. When I reached a less crowded street in Arlington, Virginia there was only a mile and a half left. Why not just finish it. I arrived at the hotel in exactly 1 hour and 20 minutes. The same time that the Uber ride there had taken. 

I'm not sure if that fortune cookie had spiritual powers or if I was looking for some type of modern transcendental moment (my English teacher would love that I remember that) but I got that unusual gift that the cookie told me I would get. I got an afternoon where I was absolutely forced to slow down. It was great. So great that I highly recommend it to you. We talked a lot about wellness during COVID due to stress in education, but stress happens all of the time to everyone. So with Spring Break on the horizon, I urge you to please, take a moment and appreciate it. In the words of Ferris Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it."

What Will the New Greene Central Look Like?

This week started the first real design discussions for the planning of the new Greene Central High School. On Wednesday, our Leadership Team and a couple of students met along with board members, commissioners, and other community officials to talk about the vision that the architects will use to create the site plan and the initial design. I had no idea what to expect from this process and when we got into it, I was completely hooked. The whole thing didn't begin with pictures or layouts as you would expect. It began with a brainstorming session. We threw out words and phrases to capture what was important to us. Safe was the overwhelming winner. Everyone wanted a modern facility that honored our past while being prepared for the future. They wanted spaces for advanced learning and spaces that were welcoming to the community. They wanted a secure facility that didn't look or feel like a prison. They wanted outdoor community spaces that doubled as learning spaces. With all of that information, the job now is to capture what those needs look like. But really they are capturing what they feel like. It's easy to get caught up in needs and wants, but the work this week reminded me that places like schools also have to capture how they make you feel. Our current school has done that for many generations in the past. You'd be surprised how often I hear references about it from parents and graduates that haven't been here in a while. I'll admit that I've been nervous that we can't meet everyone's desires and stay within a budget for building a new school. I don't want anyone to feel left out or forgotten. So while not everyone will get everything they want, my hope is that we still capture that feeling that is uniquely ours. So what will the new Greene Central look like, I don't know yet. But this week taught me that it's more important to ask how it will make us feel. 

An Anecdote for Dr. Willis

I often use stories as metaphors in my writings. With the announcement this week that Dr. Willis would be taking on the role of principal at Greene County Intermediate School, I thought back to the many stories that I had about her over the years. I hired Uvonda Willis 13 years ago as an English teacher in Pitt County. At the time, the graduation project was still a state requirement and I gave her all of the Seniors that had not been successful in Engish 4 or on the project specifically. She worked with some tough kids and had a daunting task, but she did a great job reaching them. She could often be found teaching without shoes on and used her planning periods to run around and find mentors and other resources to support her kids. After I came to Greene County, she had been hired on as an assistant principal in that school. When I had an opportunity to hire an assistant principal here, she was the only person I really wanted to interview. I called her and paced around in my yard as I tried to sell her on my vision of what the school could be and how she could help us get there. Since then, she's been my right hand. She has pushed me to think and grow, protected me when I needed to focus on myself, and been a sounding board when I needed to figure out difficult problems. Through all of the things that we have been through, conversations we have had, and wild plans that we have made (we probably should revisit some of those), there are a ton of stories that I could tell. So how do you choose? What metaphor do you want to tell about someone that has contributed so much to you personally and professionally? What does that story need to convey?

The answer is that this isn't a good story, it's an anecdote. There's a difference between a story and an anecdote. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In a good story, you don't see the end coming at the beginning. But an anecdote is predictable. You know how it will end right from the start. That's why I think the story of my sister Uvonda is an anecdote. From the start, I knew that the day would come when she would get the opportunity to develop her own vision and lead her own school. Fortunately, I was able to be there to see the beginning of this predictable tale and of those of you that have been here since she arrived, you've seen that beginning as well. So rather than tell a story, I'll celebrate this anecdote. We all knew that this day would come and I couldn't be more proud of her. We will miss her leadership, her creativity, and her ability to find resources outside of our building to make things work. In the end, I think it will be better becasue she can pour those skills into the students that come to us, and for that, I am grateful. So in the time left, I'll keep the stories that we have shared as great memories and I'll celebrate the anecdote that I always saw coming. 

Supporting the Whole School

One of the state committees that I found myself on this year is the Whole Child Committee. It is a group built of mental and physical health professionals, school support coordinators, policy leaders and K-12 educators. The goal is to guide policy related to all of the non-instructional needs that students face today. If you're thinking that encompasses a lot of things, you'd be right. I had an opportunity to speak yesterday to the group about issues that I currently see related to this need. In Greene County we are more fortunate than most in this area despite our economic status and rural designation. Having access to physical and mental health providers on campus is a huge deal. But even with the access that we have, it somehow never seems like enough. So after bragging about all that we have, I reminded the panel that this is a tough time of year for several reasons. Students needing access to our health providers, specifically mental health providers, often don't have the same level of access due to all of the other students that are currently being treated. There simply are not enough resources to match the needs. So when students need to talk to someone, they often turn to teachers instead. They trust us as people that care about them, are willing to listen to them, and as someone that can provide advice for them. And while that is an amazing relationship to have, it also has it's limits. When students regularly disclose their mental health needs to teachers, the impact comes in the form of secondary trauma. We mentally and emotionally carry the burdens of children that disclose them to us. And because we would never turn a student away, those pile up on us on top of the regular stresses that come with the job. Too often in the time of negotiating policy and budgets, education people can only see direct impacts on themselves. But right now, I think that one of the best things that we can do to support teachers is to provide students with the mental and physical wellbeing that they need. Supposrting the whole child really means supporting the whole school, you and I included.

How Do I Know You're Good?

I'm literally neck-deep in projects right now. Between the various committees and advisory groups that I've been invited to join, all of them seem to be demanding some of my time at once. Oh and I'm supposed to be running a school. One of those projects involves developing a proposal for a new principal compensation plan. Principals are paid on performance and I am advocating that we need something more than test scores to tell that story. The problem is that isn't easy to determine what we should use. In my discussions this week, someone asked me a short, but difficult question. "How do I know that you're a good principal?" It's not very easy at all to sum that up and it becomes even harder to begin to apply it to all principals. A lot of what we do as educators can't be summed up into a test score. It isn't always easily quantified and the timelines of our effectiveness don't always fit into the school calendar year. Test scores aren't what students remember about us and if you ask the public, it's probably not the first thing they will mention. But it is still important. 

This is exactly why I did the exercise at the recent faculty meeting. The word cloud our staff created of what our next Teacher of the Year should be is just as complicated as the answer to my question. Take a look at the words below. How do I know if you are passionate? How about fun, adaptive, or reliable? In fact, I think I could argue that not a single one of the words that our staff list can be accurately determined in a test. Instead, you see them in day-to-day actions and their consistency is the key to success. So how do you know if a teacher displays there? You have to watch and you have to pay attention a lot. Unfortunately, our roles don't always give us the privilege of doing that as much as we should. So in the spirit of choosing the right person, I ask that we all take a little more time to watch over the next few weeks. Test scores and student performance can only tell us a piece of the story, but you have to look for the people that are caring, positive and adaptive.  

What Gives You Hope?

I'll be the first to admit that having the POY title has opened a few doors for me and given me the opportunity to meet some fascinating people. With the State Board meeting taking place this week in Raleigh, I had the chance to attend a book talk on Meredith College's campus that was sold out. Ibram X. Kendi and Nic Stone collaborated to release a book entitled, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist. It's a follow-up to Kendi's book with the help of Stone, who is more well-known for her young adult fiction. The talk involved both authors and quickly leveraged the importance of talking to young people today about past and current social justice issues. The authors reached way back into our history but also talked about current events, more specifically, the death of Tyre Nichols. I was reminded of the incident involving Rodney King when I was a student and how a teacher took the time to help us understand the social implications of the event and the trial that followed. (Teaching social justice isn't really a new thing.) It was hard to understand back then and I know that it's at least as hard for kids to grapple with today given their increased access to opinions on the topic. 

My connection to the book talk came through NC's Beginning Teacher of the Year, Xavier Adams. One of his high school students was invited to ask a few questions as a guest moderator. Aside from her, everyone else on stage was in their late thirties or older. She followed deep discussions on the history of racism, the intersection of politics, and the terrifying examples of our past. The table set before her was not easy, but she handled it with such grace that I started to consider how differently students today might think of things than I did at her age. Then came her final question. And despite the wealth of information given in that two hours, the most powerful thing that I left with was the last question that she posed to both authors, "What gives you hope, despite everything you have discussed tonight, that things are getting better?" The nearly two-hour event had discussed dark events and topics that solicited feelings of anger, contempt, or disagreement, but in that one sentence, the mood instantly changed. This is why we have to talk to young adults differently. She saw progress, whereas we saw the problem. 

It's a powerful lesson that we can learn a lot from to grapple with any ongoing problem. We have plenty of those in education or just in working with each other. We organize whole committees with the goal of finding and trying to solve problems. Maybe we should also take a minute to consider what gives us hope that things are getting better, even if they aren't what we envision just yet.