Put up the Boots!

I am going to confess. I hate snow days. One day of pretty, pretty snow is about all I can take. I love watching it snow for a few hours, and love the way my family gathers around the fire and peaks outside. I love the way the Rosebros run to me every time my phone “dings” to see if it is the superintendent cancelling school and then staying up late playing board games in the middle of the week when we get that call. That one day of sledding with the boys is fun and exciting. Having crockpot chili and freshly made cornbread in warm comfy clothes does my soul good. Then it hits me….I’m stuck in my house. Panic, for whatever reason, begins to set in day 2. I start looking for anything to bake, cook, eat, well, consume. I literally can’t eat enough and I want out of my house.

 During our last snow, a major snow ball fight happened between the Rosebros and me. My duck boots, which some girls wear fashionably, are only brought out during snow in my house and they were soaked after our snowball fight. I took them off in the garage and left them by the door. And there they have stayed since January 18^th. I am not usually one to leave things laying around, but on January 20^th, I picked up clothes, scarfs, hats, snow boots, snow jackets, etc and hung them all back up in their proper place along with my weekly cleaning of bathrooms, kitchens, dusting, laundry, etc.(you get the point). I decided to just see how long my duck boots would last by the door. Would anyone else in my home feel the need to help out or feel the same sense of urgency that I do about keeping our home tidy-I mean you never know when someone important may just drop by.  I even made some mention a couple times as the family was heading into the house about my boots needing to go inside. Nothing. They sit there.

After a particularly frustrating day last week, I pulled into the carport and saw, again, my boots. My family works as a team. We all 4 work really hard at what we do, and we depend on each other to make it all work. This “boot failure” made me wonder if we somehow had stopped working on the same team and were working on our individual selves. It made me think about school. How many times do we walk past a bulletin board that needs some new staples in it because the staples have come out-and we just walk on by? How many times do you walk in the hallway and see a piece of paper on the ground and we just walk on by without picking it up? When we take walkers out in the afternoon or when we do car duty, do we pick up trash that we may see so that our campus looks nice or do we leave it for someone else or do we even care at all?  While those things are important and shows a sense of pride in our school, it seems much bigger than those minor cosmetic details.

What I realized in my carport looking at my boots was that the thing that was missing is a sense of urgency. Getting better requires focused, persistent work by EVERYONE-not just one of us. I am compelled every single day by this overwhelming intolerance of failure. I do not want one single student or one single teacher to fail. I want to eliminate ineffective practices and processes that slow us down and impede student achievement. I want to connect with more students and more families. I want to connect with more educators to develop this greater sense of purpose as well as find ways to fix all that is wrong in our schools. But it starts with doing something……….Sometimes it starts small. But nothing can move forward if we are stuck doing what we’ve always done. Those boots will remain in my carport not because my family is irresponsible, but because I always pick up everything and put it in its place. Those boots will move when I stop giving subtle hints and I specifically tell one of my “boys” to put my boots in the box in the closet along with the rest of the snow stuff. Doing what we’ve always done because we’ve always done it will results in nothing new……..but persistently perusing excellence means that something will have to change-not everything, but something.