Looking Out for Others

While I'm not at all a fan of cold weather, I do love Christmas. I think that I have appreciated this holiday more as an adult that I ever really did as a child. Growing up, we never had a live Christmas tree, so when I had my first apartment in college, I decided that I wanted one. My wife, Erika, still laughs at me every year when we pick out a tree, in memory of the giant tree that filled up my small, one-bedroom apartment that year. With that tree in the apartment, there was only one side of the living room that could see the TV and you had to maneuver around it to get into the hallway. It was ridiculous. In true college student fashion, it was decorated with cheap ornaments and a homemade garland of beer bottle caps. While it showed my love for the holiday, looking back it was very ugly.

Fast forward almost 20 years and Erika decided that it was time for us to update our Christmas decor this year. With our kids with friends and family last weekend, we set out to buy new decorations. We had a great time, and while I'm usually not one for spending the day shopping, I had a blast getting ready for Christmas. I was so excited to post pictures on Facebook of our new things in my celebration of the holiday. And that's where it started. Several teachers saw what I posted and what I didn't post, was my actual tree. (I still have a problem buying large trees, but now I just have bigger rooms to put them in.) This week several teachers were genuinely worried that the small tree in the corner that I took a picture of, was the only one that my family would have this year. They took the time to check on me and finally broach the subject of why I didn't have a real Christmas tree.

By now, you've probably learned that I like to use daily events to tell a story or lesson, and this week is no exception. This week's Christmas tree misadventure taught me a lot about how teachers pay attention to those around them and try to look for signs that something isn't quite right. I never noticed that my Facebook post gave clues to people around me that something in my home was out of the norm. In the same way, teachers notice their students and can pick up on small signs that show that something may not be right. We have seen quite a bit of that lately as students struggle with hunger, depression and family problems outside of the school. They wear small signs that they may not even realize. But caring people in our building have paid attention and took those signs as a chance to help. That help has probably comforted more students than we may ever realize.

In the spirit of the holidays, I want to say thank you to those of you that look out for me as well as all of the other people in our building. I have always asked that we work hard to take care of ourselves as well as one another. I learned this week that you all do a great job of this.

Leadership Matters

I came to Greene County under a somewhat strange set of circumstances. I had always lived and worked in Pitt County and while I had gone back to school to be an administrator, I was somewhat disillusioned with education at the time. I was sitting in a conference room in Chapel Hill, listing to guest speakers talk to us about school leadership and the job that we were about to embark upon when I met Patrick Miller. He caught my attention with what he said to us and I remember thinking, "this is a guy I can work for." When he finished speaking, he had to leave to get to another appointment. I stepped out of the room after him, pretending to go towards the restroom, and followed him into the parking lot of the Friday Center. I introduced myself and told him I was interested in coming to see Greene County Schools. That introduction didn't immediately lead to me working in Greene County, but it did lead me back here a few years later, and I'm thankful.

Having a presence of leadership, whether you're the superintendent, the principal or the classroom teacher, is all the same thing. And let me be clear, being in charge is not the same thing as leadership. Leadership envokes people to get behind you and the mission of your group or organization. In a school district, that means working toward lofty goals that take years to come to fruition, but in a classroom, it can mean getting through a lesson or unit. Either way, the objective is met by having someone that inspires and guides the group to do their best. In both roles, you can demand certain actions and berate failure, but true leaders get the most out of others through encouragement, coaching, modeling, and patience.

Students screw up, teachers sometimes fail, and principals sometimes lose sight of the big picture. But it is leadership that puts all of us back on the right track and causes us to regain sight of why we are all here. I'm thankful to work in Greene County and for North Carolina's State Superintendent of the Year, Dr. Patrick Miller. Working here and with him literally kept me in the field of education. But I'm also thankful for the dozens of classroom leaders that I work with every day. Leadership matters at every level.

Managing Behavior

I always thought that the hallmark of a great sermon was that you left church feeling like the preacher was speaking to you directly. When a message resonates with your daily life or a struggle you are going through, the message feels personal despite that fact that it was given to a large audience. I'm going to attempt that today, so if something resonates with you, then know that I may have had you in mind, or maybe I never knew that you needed it. Either way, I hope it helps.

I've had classroom management on my mind a lot lately. Somewhat because we put it on our School Improvement Plan and somewhat because I have worked with some teachers in efforts to improve a situation. I've seen some validation in the concerns that were voiced in last year's Teacher Working Conditions Survey and it's popped up in some strange places. Places I didn't expect to be perfectly honest. At the heart of each issue was a teacher with good intentions. They were working to get a student, a group or a class in line and were not being effective. That ineffectiveness comes out in strange ways. You can see frustration, anxiety, anger, sadness and sometimes apathy on the face of a teacher when they know something isn't really working. We raise our voices, change our language, insert sarcasm or just give up. None of that works though.

Teaching is a strange job. We tell teachers to build relationships with students. Sometimes those relationships are as close a family for both parties. In that, we forget that this is a job. It's business. But in our business transactions, we take things personally. When we invest in a person and they let us down, it's hard not to feel that way. At the moment, it's difficult to separate yourself from those feelings. But we have to.

I could use this paragraph to reference professionalism or teacher leadership as the reason why we cannot show that frustration and all of that is true. But greater than that is the fact that these children rely on us as examples of how to act. Through our actions, we either entitle them to continue negative behaviors or stand as a consistent example of what good adults do. Whether you demonstrate professionalism or lose your cool, you model behavior the exact same way you model a problem on the board. The "I'm the adult and you're the student" excuse for differing rules and expectations doesn't work, especially in high school. Not all of our students come equipped with examples in their homes of how to behave or how to act in the presence of frustration in their lives. And while we never took a class on that in college, it's our job to teach it. If we are successful, it's probably much more important than anything in our curriculum.

So if today's message spoke to you in any way, then use it to reflect on your priorities as an educator. It's not an indictment and I'm not calling anyone out. Trust me, we're all in good company. If you need help, then that's what I'm here for, along with Mrs. Willis, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Simms. That's also what your colleagues are for. There is no silver bullet in managing student conduct. But there is help and support for when you feel like you need it.

A Difficult Job

The last time I had to hire a receptionist, we had 84 people apply for the job. Many of those people
had different qualifications and experiences, but I had an image in my head of what I wanted, and I didn't see that on any of the resumes that I was reading. Often when I hire for a position, I am looking for a particular personality type. I strongly believe that you can teach a person to do a job (any job), but you cannot teach them to be someone that they are not. At the time, I was working hard to build parent contacts, especially among our Hispanic student population, and I thought that having someone up front that could speak Spanish would help me a lot. I had also seen how stressful that job can be and I knew that answering phones was a small part of the position. 

While I had not formally met Liz, I knew her sister from my time at Greene Early College and I had heard several stories about how great of a person she was. She was in school part-time but didn't really know what she wanted to do. She had taken a part-time job working with ESL students at GCMS and I used my connection with her sister to call her. She was unsure about taking the job but I did my best to convince her to interview and we offered her the job quickly after. Her first day was April 1st, and in retrospect, I probably should have waited one more day. I am amazed that she came back after she had to read fake names over the intercom (she realized it with Chris P. Bacon) and was frightened with fake roaches. But she did come back and somewhere along the way, she became part of our family. 

Today we say goodbye to a young woman that has helped us all countless times. She has endured the craziness of the front office. She counsels students when they are upset or sick. She calms parents before they make it to see us. She finds substitutes when we have none and she knows who to call before a fire drill. She helped us build bridges to our Hispanic community, who, for the first time, knew that they could call the school and ask a question about their child. But more importantly, she had the right personality. She knew how to make us all feel better about the place we spend most of our daytime hours. And along the way, she figured out that she wanted to be a school counselor. While I hate to see her leave us, I am reminded that I made her promise that she would finish school when she took the job. 

Liz has a difficult job in keeping us all straight, but I think in some way, we served as her internship for counseling. Her experience has been priceless and we have all been better having her here. Thanks for everything Liz.

Eavesdropping

Sometime last week, I was waiting outside a restaurant for my name to be called so that I could be seated. My wife, Erika, was with me and she is fully aware of my propensity to watch people in public. People-watching is one of my favorite things to do and she tells me all the time that it borders on being rude. Nonetheless, I was watching a group of young adults in their early twenties and I couldn't help but overhear their conversation. They were discussing high school and while some of them were quick to hate their experiences, one young woman defended her time there as positive. Her evidence came back to one teacher in particular that made her appreciate American history. (Now you know I was hooked!) She talked about trench warfare lessons where the students built trenches from classroom furniture and threw foam and paper balls at one another in a recreation of World War I. While she was speaking about the teacher's methods and how she allowed her students to experience their content rather than listen to it, she was also recalling key pieces of information that I couldn't help but notice. She used key vocabulary and could tell why they did what they did as a part of the teaching process.

So here was a student, at least 5 years displaced from the classroom, that could recall key information from a high school lesson. While contemporary research speaks volumes about how students are simply memorizing information long enough to test in our age of assessment, this young woman was proving that wrong. Her experiences allowed her to learn things that we associate with standards and vocabulary comprehension, but she knew it only because she associated it with good teaching.

So here's my take away, and I don't think it's going to be what you are expecting. While you might think that I'm talking about active learning or project-based instruction, I'm not necessarily advocating for that. What I am advocating for is this: Do your students associate you with good teaching? If not, it doesn't matter how much planning you did or out-of-seat time they have, the connection was lost. The conversation that I overheard had much more to do with her connection to the teacher than that teacher's methods. There are many of you that have different teaching styles that work for you and may not necessarily work for a teacher down the hall, and that's ok. The question that each of us needs to consistently ask of ourselves, is "Does my style actually work for me?" If not, it's time to change it up!

Stubbornness Can Get You Far

Standing outside of a church, I was a nervous 21-year-old kid in a tuxedo that today I would know didn't fit as well as it should. To break the ice before we went inside, my soon-to-be-wife's father made a joke and told me that I was going to make a great first husband for her. I think a lot of people had that in the back of their minds that day and before. She was only 20 then and we had gotten engaged when she was just 19. We were young and dumb, but you couldn't tell us anything.

My wife, Erika, and I celebrated our 15th anniversary this week, and while that's no huge feat by any means, I do think that it's a bit farther than a lot of people expected back then. We are both very different people today than we were then, but one trait that we both have has remained. We are both very stubborn. We hate admitting defeat on anything. Just ask our kids. We are not above cheating in games with them to win. While that trait is sometimes viewed in the same realm of closed-mindedness, when it is applied positively, we often change the word to persistence.

Doing something new in your classroom is often not easy. As adults we are resistant to change and even when we know that change could be a good thing, we stop with early obstacles. At the start of the year, Mrs. Garcia issued a 30-day challenge to make your objectives at the forefront of your lessons and in your instruction. Some of you took up that challenge, and others set it aside for now. Some persisted, and others did not. The great thing about it is that you can start again today. If you do start again, try being stubborn about it. Don't think of it as a task or a change. Think of it as a challenge. I'm sure that some of you are like me and if you went into it with the mentality of a parent in a game of monopoly against an 11-year-old, you would do anything to win. Or maybe you're more sentimental. Then you could use the mentality of a 21-year-old kid, stubborn enough to marry a 20-year-old girl, and stubborn enough to make it work. Either way, put your stubbornness to work for you. Sometimes you never know just how far it could take you.

She Called My Mom

This week I had a discussion with a teacher that knew one of my former teachers from 9th grade. I had to chuckle when I heard her name because this teacher and I bumped heads often. By mid-year, the phone calls to my mom at work were becoming more regular due to my smart mouth in class. In my adolescent opinion, her comments in class were deserving of my quick reply and I was not about to lose a battle of words with anyone. In hindsight, I most definitely crossed a lot of lines that I shouldn't have. At some point, it reached a breaking point with my mother. I had been marched from class into a teacher's lounge where we interrupted my mom at work with another phone call. After the teacher spoke with her, I took the phone. My mom did not care to hear my side of the story, or really even the teacher's side. She had had enough of all of it. What she said to me was something that I couldn't forget. She was tired of the calls to work and told me that it was my job to change it. Whatever I was doing, whether it felt justified or not, was not bringing about the action that anyone wanted.  If I wanted the teacher to stop calling my mom (and I did) then I had to change what I was doing.

Some part of that did not seem fair at the time, but there was some genius in it. We do not control how people act or react to us as individuals, but we do always control how we react, even in the midst of adversity. None of what was happening to me in that class felt fair to me at that time, but if I wanted something to change, then I was just as responsible as anyone for changing it. There are many things in life and in our jobs that do not seem right or fair and while we cannot change many of those things, we do control so much of the outcome related to us. If the results you are getting are not what you want, and you can't seem to change the people or events that cause them, then think about your reaction and how that can change to create a new outcome. A new strategy can work and get you what you want in the end.