Investments

This past week I had my annual meeting with my investment guy. He handles my retirement savings and the college savings for my girls. Our conversation is always about the same. We look at what's happened over the past year and we talk about what he projects retirement and college will look like in future dollars if we stay the course. He always reminds me that we shouldn't think about growth as good times or bad, but how it looks averaged out over decades. When the stock market is doing great, we are always happy but when it starts to turn, you can't help but wonder if you're doing the right thing. Either way, he says it always works out to an "expected growth" over the long term. 

He used the word "growth" enough to trigger my thoughts about student growth. We generally look at student growth from year to year as they matriculate through different levels of math, science, and English. We talk about Expected Growth and High Growth for EOC courses and those teachers use lots of specific strategies to try to get the most out of growth. But once the student leaves their class, they are most likely forgotten as the new group comes in. Unlike the advice that my financial advisor gives me, we think of growth in the short term, instead of the long term and I think we might be missing the point. I won't say that we are not concerned with growth this year at all, but it's easy to see that our focus is not the same as it would be under normal circumstances.

If you take a step back and see students over time, we can start to see that "expected growth." Their elementary teachers made the initial investments. Middle and high school teachers built from there and tried to compound it. After us, they will continue to learn professional and life skills that further enhance their growth. And just like stocks, some have bad years and some have tremendous years. Overall, we hope that the growth averages out and a well-rounded, educated person emerges. Not all investments make us rich, but if they slowly grow over time, they do pay off. If a student leaves us and has a career, supports a family, and contributes to a community, we have to regard that as expected growth. Every now and again, we get one that exceeds expected growth, and those are the great stories that we love. But what we have to remember, is that we have no way of knowing the final outcome in the short time that they are with us. We are simply the installments. We are payments made to a long-term growth plan. And even if this might be a year that doesn't fully yield what we want, it doesn't mean that our investment is lost. If we stay the course and we all give a little, we can still expect a return, and sometimes that return can still be huge. You just never know which ones it might be.