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.

Clinometers

Over the summer I received a gift from a family member that knew about my appreciation for nautical items. The gift was a ship's clinometer and it sits on a bookshelf on my office. I set it there as something neat to look at and thought that this would be the extent of its use. Little did I know that in the wake of hurricane Florence, this antique would become a metaphor for how our school would progress in the weeks and months after our return.

Most people do not know what a clinometer's purpose is. On a ship, it measures the incline or depression that the ship takes on the water. On rough seas, it measures the chop of the waves as the ship rises and falls and on calm seas, it can measure how balanced the load on a ship is distributed. If the ship is loaded incorrectly in the front, the ship must plow through more water while the rear of the ship rides much more smoothly, yet inefficiently.

The week and a half of school days lost due to the storm and impassable roads have placed a large weight on the front of our ship. Our fall semester has fewer days and getting material covered, grand challenges presented, certifications earned, benchmarks completed and exams prepped will be a challenge. The front of our ship will have to plow through a great deal of water and along the way, there will be waves. There will be good weeks and tough ones that tip our clinometer back and forth. But while we ride the waves on or unbalanced ship, it's important to note that the ship pushes on. It does not sink and it does not sit still.

The next three months will present us challenges, but rest assured that our crew has the expertise and experience to weather the journey. Your leadership in your classroom and beyond will be called upon to get our precious cargo to their destination. Everyone must play their role. And while the clinometer of our school may be out of balance, it is no match for the will of our school, our staff, our students and our community. Steady as she goes.

Seeing Growth

This year starts my sixth year as principal at Greene Central. During that time, I have seen the state's accountability system change quite a bit. Some of it I can agree with and other parts I personally think are ridiculous. We have seen Common Core math rise and fall along with new standards in every core subject area. Those that taught outside of the core area tested subjects saw a couple of years of portfolios, graded by fellow teachers, first outside our district then within it, only to see it disappear as quickly as it arrived. In North Carolina, we seem to continue to struggle with how to measure teacher and school success versus failure. Our current system, despite the simple letter grades, can be very deceiving. While grades for a student measure degrees of accuracy or mastery of the content, our measure for schools is not quite that simple. No matter how students do or do not perform statewide, our system will always have a group designated as high growth, meeting growth and not meeting growth. Rather than measuring student knowledge against the standards, we measure teachers against one another. If you have the most teachers at the top of that list, your school wins.

Over the past five years, Greene Central has had years of being a D school and then we grew to a C. There were years where we met growth and years where we did not. Sometimes I think I can predict it well, only to find out that I'm not that good. I'll be honest and admit that I did not see us reaching the high growth mark that was announced this week. Our Math 1 teachers were still perfecting a new way of teaching. We had almost all new teachers on the English 2 team, and Biology was experimenting with new benchmark tests and determining how much time to devote to which standards. When I learned that we not only made high growth but were among the top 10% of all schools in the state, I was blown away. When those results were made public, I can tell you that seeing it in print felt great.

While the whole school is designated with the high growth status, there are actually just a few people in our school that are directly responsible for that portion of our school's grade. The teachers that teach the EOC subjects face a greater sense of pressure in determining not only their own personal growth but also in knowing that that number will also reflect the school as a whole. That often means longer conversations with administrators, more meetings, more assessments and more visits to their classrooms. While the state and the community sees a high growth status and the accolades that we enjoy, they do not see the countless hours of work that went into out-performing almost every other group of teachers in the state. This is the case for high levels of success for almost every field. To be among the best, you have to out-work, out-last and out-think everyone else. Doing just one thing well, will not get you there.

This year I asked that we celebrate being a teacher and the millions of victories that come with our jobs every day. This week we not only have little victories to celebrate but also have a pretty big one. And while achievement can fall just as quickly as it rises, this week we need to pause to celebrate the very skills that we all work to teach our students. Perseverance, grit, determination, and dedication brought us here. A great big thanks goes out to each of you that played a role in that.

Once a Ram, Always a Ram

Near the end of the summer, I was tagged on Facebook by multiple people that had seen a post of a young woman that was looking for the owner of a Greene Central class ring from 1984. I was able to connect with her and get the story of how her grandmother had found it in a used car that was purchased many years ago. Her grandmother had always wanted to find the owner but had no idea where to begin. Armed with the resources of social media, Makayla Meeks set out to find the owner of the ring for her grandmother. Throughout the process of finding the owner, I got to meet Makayla, a former student of Coach Wooten at North Pitt. I also got to meet the ring's rightful owner, Cheryl Moye. Cheryl now lives in Connecticut, but still has many strong ties to Greene County. I also spoke with many other graduates from the mid-1980s that knew Cheryl or were helping to find the owner. This community of people was amazing in their stories and the things that they remembered about the school. I also went through the 1984 yearbook and found some familiar faces, including Coach Edwards and one of my cousins who worked at the school as an assistant principal that year.

The school hasn't really changed much since 1984, and the community hasn't either, and that's a good thing. You still find good people that value personal connections and the time and space that they spent together. I heard stories of people that had not spoken in almost 30 years and could still remember great things about one another. I hope that aspect of our community never changes.

This week, Greene Central welcomed in almost 200 freshmen and several new faculty members. Each of these people is a Ram now and are a part of this complex, interconnected web of people that make up our community. In the years to come, some of these people will remain in the area and some will move far and wide. But no matter where they go and what they do, once you are a Ram, you are always a Ram.

Class of 2018

I'll admit that I may have started out this week tired and overwhelmed. I walked in the door Tuesday morning thinking that I was really happy that it was a short week. When I got hit with Senior pranks a few minutes later, I was already over it. In last Friday's blog I asked teachers to dig deep and work hard this week despite how tired I know that you are, and I came in and did the exact opposite. In my frustration after everything was cleaned up, I made a statement that got twisted around pretty quickly. I joked that the Senior class hasn't been able to do much to organize themselves to do anything as a group, and now they decided to show us that they could. Somehow that statement got twisted into me saying that this class would never amount to anything after high school. I'm not sure how it got there, but it made me pause to consider why they would believe that.

Miscommunication often happens when we are frustrated. We either say things that we don't mean or don't say them well. There's a dose of humility that comes with setting the record straight. I had to do that with a few students that took things to heart. Talking with several of them this week made me realize that this may be some of my final conversations with them as students. I thought back about them as a class and about several of the individuals that stand out. We think about these students as the Class of 2018, but in reality, they are not considered under this title until they graduate. So in my penance for being misunderstood, I'd like to set the record straight on what will be the Greene Central Class of 2018.

This class arrived with high expectations. With an unusually large number of students identified as academically gifted, some amazing athletes, talented artists and young people with strong opinions, they gave us a run for our money pretty quickly. We watched them grow and so many of our teachers tried so hard to push them beyond their comfort zones. We did that because we didn't want them to just rely on talent. We tried to teach them grit and perseverance. We changed school schedules and created more college course opportunities to try to give them every shot we could. So many of them took advantage of these opportunities and their college and career choices will be much easier as a result. We tried hard to teach them to be leaders and to be active in their school. We saw that in how they supported one another over the past four years. They were quick to help a friend when they could because they developed a sense of community amongst themselves. In doing all of this, we created individuals. We created young adults that had an idea of what they believe in and why. 

In a few days, they will leave Greene Central and be a part of the real world. They will have bills, jobs, pressures and all of the other responsibilities that come with being an adult. But they are ready. We will miss the Class of 2018. While we hope that we made them better people to enter the world, we also know that they also made us better people and educators at the same time.