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.

Change Your Mind

On Tuesday evening, I got to witness something so well connected to the things I have been reading and writing about, that it was almost too good. At the varsity boys basketball game at North Lenoir, I watched a quick play under the basket that led to a layup from BJ Corbitt. It wasn't showy or set up. Just a short pass and a basket without any cheer. But I noticed that the points never went on the scoreboard. I glanced at the scorer's table to see if there was an issue with the board and noticed our bookkeeper, Andrew Fraboni, visibly upset. He also saw the layup from BJ, but the home scorekeeper hadn't and despite his pleading and the acknowledgment of some people behind them, she refused to change her mind and add the two points. She stood her ground on the belief that she was right.

A few weeks ago I wrote about truth and then about lies. We like to look at those things as two very distinct things. But in the case of the layup, the scorekeeper for North Lenoir did not believe that she was telling a lie at all. But if you saw the play, you knew that she couldn't be telling the truth. Science says that what we saw is actually pretty normal. It is very hard for us to change our minds. It's very simple and rational to think that we should just be able to look at evidence or information and determine if we are right or wrong in our thinking. But humans just don't do that and if you've ever had a political conversation at a family gathering, you know what I'm talking about. Our brains can look at information and pick out what supports our ideas and literally ignore any information that opposes it. Evolution has programmed us to not change our minds because it impacts our confidence and ego and overall makes us weaker psychologically. Being wrong makes you a loser. Our opinions create social circles that have developed a consensus and disrupting that can be very bad for us.

We are not always this way. Apparently, you become more rigid in your thinking as you age. By your thirties, you have developed a taste for foods and music and all sorts of things that you believe are "good" or "bad." After that age, not much changes. Younger minds are still developing and are much more open to information. Also as we age, we adopt a false sense of knowledge based on the people that we know and trust. For example, we don't need to know how our car engine really works if we know a mechanic. But I'll bet most people have an opinion on the dependability of a major car brand that we think is right. We do the same things with our opinions on all sorts of things from politics and climate change to consumer goods.

So here is what we know about truth, lies and changing our minds:

• Truths can collide and two people can be right and against one another.
• We all lie (usually daily) to promote our interests and teenagers lie more than anyone.
• Changing your mind about a truth can be really difficult, even if you have a mountain of evidence in front of you.

Undoubtedly, this semester, we have all encountered a situation where our truth conflicted with someone else's truth. (I know my child vs I know what I saw) We've probably also told a few lies to promote our advantage over a situation in our classroom or program. (Yes, I looked for your assignment and I didn't find it) Science says that we can't stop either of those. But what we can do is focus on changing our minds. Being rigid in your thoughts is known as a fixed mindset in the educational world. This is something that we do our best to teach students not to do, but we should practice this one as well. At the end of the semester, you have an opportunity to sit back and be objective about your teaching, your content, your expectations and all sorts of other things. But when you do, you can either look for only evidence that supports what you want to see or you can consider your class from all points of view. It's harder to do, but it also keeps your brain young. Before we start a new semester in January, try making a list of your practices. Consider those from the point of view of colleagues, students, parents, administrators or counselors. Do they still make sense? If not, try to change your mind. I promise we won't call you a loser, but we just might call you a better teacher.

Dare

Dare Johnson was a student in my American History class during my third year teaching. Dare was a friendly girl and one that I knew outside of school. As her youth pastor, I had gotten to know her well. Dare was not athletic and not a top academic student, but was one that everyone seemed to like because she liked everybody. Born to hippie parents, her first name was Sunny. And while she went by Dare, I always thought that Sunny fit her personality better. Her first car even had two sunroofs so that "she could see more of the sun." 

One week, I had been on her to complete some makeup work that was hurting her grade pretty bad. Dare was that kind of student. I was out of work for some reason one day and received a call that  Dare had passed away in a car accident that afternoon. That evening I called several members of our class and of the youth group. I remember sitting up that evening writing out what I thought I should say to our first-period class the next morning. I got to school extra early to talk with our counselor and went over what I was going to tell the class. When I entered the room, the very first thing I saw was a stack of papers and a workbook laying on my back table with a note from Dare. She had left me all of her makeup work. 

When class started that morning, my notes were quickly forgotten. I stood in front of the class and cried. I laughed and cried as I told them all about a ski trip that we had taken that winter with our youth group and how miserably bad Dare had been as a skier. Her fluorescent coat could be seen rolling down the slopes all day. All I knew to do was to celebrate what we loved about her and to show my students that it was ok to be upset about our loss. 

Since that year, I have unfortunately lost several students and it never gets any easier to deal with. As an educator, you sometimes invest more time into some students than you do your own families. Those that usually get the most time are the ones with the biggest needs. They have academic or social behaviors that require special attention. When those students are lost, you often feel it on a personal level. 

The loss of TyMear Dodd rang true on all of these feelings. TyMear was not a student that we will remember for his academic or athletic contributions, but he is someone that his teachers knew for his ability to make things right when he had done wrong and how he checked in on those that he cared for often. He was one of the students that needed extra time and attention, but in giving that, you somehow understood him better. And if there is anything that we all should learn from him, it's that we do care for one another. None of us is a perfect member of our school community, but our attachments to one another are not based on our shortcomings. Instead, we are linked by what we give to each other. 

Lie to Me

I like to joke to people that I feel like I am the most lied to person on Earth. Between working with teenagers that are in trouble or seeking to convince me to give them something, parents seeking to get their way and employees seeking to gain advantage or get out of something, I know that not everyone tells me the truth on a day-to-day basis. Last week's blog about truth, led me to dig a little deeper into why we lie. (For more on this, read here.)

It turns out that everyone lies and most of us tell some kind of lie on a daily basis. Most lies are harmless. We lie to gain an advantage or make ourselves seem better than we are. Sometimes we even lie to protect someone's feelings. On the other hand, social scientists believe that most people tell at least one major lie in their lifetime. They use falsifying a college application or an affair as examples. As it turns out, humans learned to lie about as soon as we learned to talk. Telling a lie to gain food or a mate was just easier than hitting a competitor over the head with a rock.


How, when and why most of us lie depends on our age and our intelligence. Adolescents tend to lie much more than younger or older adults. As we get older, our ability to lie evolves and we get much better at it. There are even studies that show dramatic increases in neural fibers in the brain among good liars as compared to those that do not lie as much. Other studies strongly tie advanced abilities to lie to advanced cognitive function and intelligence. On the other hand, tests on children with autism show a very low ability to lie.

So if we know that everyone lies to us and that they do it to deceive us to gain an advantage, why do we believe it? You would think that as humans we would have evolved to detect a lie. Instead, we have done the exact opposite. Because we are creatures that greatly depend on a social group, our need to believe and trust those in our group outweighs the harm done by most lies. Therefore, humans have continued to be gullible. The onset of social media has only multiplied our lies and our acceptance of them. As we use social media to spread lies about ourselves we have also begun to intentionally believe lies that confirm our opinions of the world around us. 

So what does all of this mean for us as educators? As we spend our days with the "Keep It 100%" generation, we probably need to keep in mind that they are doing everything but that. We need to know that even when we present them with evidence against a lie, they will likely dismiss that evidence. Teenagers lie to us and each other daily to improve their self-image, make excuses for their shortcomings or just to get what they want. If they are successful in fooling us, it's not our fault and may even show signs of intelligence. But also remember that all of us believe that we are good at lying and that when we do perceive that someone is not being truthful, we should trust that instinct because it is strong enough to defy our genetics. 

So as the guy that is lied to more than anyone in the world, I say "Lie to me!" I may or may not believe you, but I do have a pretty good formative assessment on how smart you are.