By the way...I do drink too much coffee

I am going to admit it. Someone hurt my feelings last week. Bad.  Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I have car duty.  On Tuesday and Thursdays, I am inside in the café monitoring breakfast. This is very strategic. It is important that I am outside. I cannot tell you how much I learn at carpool. Yet, I learn so much about students from being at breakfast as well and also build relationships with students during this time.  While maybe my answer is a little different in January and February, I really enjoy car duty more than being inside during breakfast. I want to be outside greeting students every morning.

During arrival, I sing, I dance, I high five, I smile, I fist bump, I call each student by name, I speak to parents, I make jokes with kids, I actually have a great time. I am a little loud. I am a little excited. Let me be very, very clear. I don’t love car duty. I want to do car duty, but I don’t love car duty. I usually arrive at school between 6-6:30 every morning. I have a list of routine things that I must do prior to 7am each morning, but then I also organize for the day. I get ready for any meetings, I restock my mobile office, I make a list of the rooms to visit for the day or the paper work that must be handled that day, and address any emails that I didn’t get to the day prior.  I’ve worked with principals who didn’t go outside. They were enslaved to that office and left the morning duty to teachers. I never understood that. I love being with the kids.

I find it important to be excited in the morning. By nature….that is not me. I don’t, by instinct, dance, sing, jump, clap, high five, joke around. So, if I don’t like being outside, I have things to do in my office, and I don’t enjoy “acting a fool” why in the world would I do this three times a week?  I do it because our parents give us their most prized possession every single day. And don’t this kids deserve to be welcomed into THEIR school with a smile, being greeted by name, and ensuring that they have a smile on their face?  Students deserve to come into THEIR school each day knowing that we could not wait for them to come back and we are excited about what we will do together that day. 

This is where my feelings got hurt. As I was welcoming kids the other morning, a student asked me what day it was as they had just heard it on the radio on the way to school. The student told me it was “talk like a pirate day” and I started telling some cheesy pirate jokes with the kid (obviously in my best pirate impersonation). You know the jokes….what kind of socks to pirates wear? Arrrgyle.  Why do pirates go on vacation?....they need some arrrrr and arrrr?  This student, who two years ago, had to be pulled from his mom’s minivan some mornings in tears, went into school laughing and almost running to class to share my cheesy jokes with his classmates. At about this same time, an employee was walking into school and looked at me and just said, “Someone’s had some extra caffeine this morning?”

I’m not going to lie to you. This hurt my feelings. Bad. It didn’t hurt my feelings that she thinks I’m a bit too much. I get that. Sometimes many people think I am a bit too much. I really don’t care about that. Seriously. I don’t care. I find it far worse to have students disengaged in school, unhappy to arrive each day, and unsure they’re wanted. So this is why I am excited to see students each day. This is why I tell stupid jokes in a pirate voice. This is why I bother to get to know all 501 JBE students by name. This is why I dance when I clearly shouldn’t. This is why I high five, fist bump, and sing (usually off key). It didn’t hurt my feelings that someone was making fun of me. It hurt my feelings that someone on our staff didn’t understand what I’ve known since about my first year teaching. Our students deserve for us to be excited to see them each morning.

I was talking to my principal friend about it the next night and she gave me so much insight. She stated “she had to make fun of you, Meredith. She needs you to be wrong because if you’re right then she’s wrong.” Now I don’t expect anyone on this staff to sing, dance, or tell pirate jokes as they welcome their students each day. I do expect a sincere, warm welcome for each student, each morning into class each morning.  Our kids deserve that very minimal standard. 

Excellence is our standard. Those who don’t believe that, should always be silenced by those of us who do.

Bad News.......

Six months ago, my sister-in-law called me and told me my Dad had been in a wreck. That’s all she knew. Within 10 minutes I had my overnight bag in the car and was heading towards I-26. On my way to my hometown, my brother called to say that my Dad had been hit head on by a drunk driver. He was hurt bad but my brother had talked with him and I felt better. Our small-town hospital was ill-equipped to handle his injuries and they were flying him to a trauma center in Columbia. I waited when I arrived in Columbia for my brother to call and tell me which hospital to make camp. He called to tell me that the weather was too bad and the helicopter would have to go to Charleston instead of Columbia. I got back on the road and headed down I-26 towards Charleston. About 5 miles before the hospital exit, my brother texted and asked how much longer I would be. That was my first clue. About 2 minutes later, my sister texted me and asked if my husband was with me. That was my second clue. When I arrived at the ER, I told the registration desk who I was and who my father was and the attendant looked at me with such sad tenderness. That was my third clue. A lady dressed in an all-black suit asked me to join my family in a little room off the ER. This was no clue. This was reality. There in that room, the room I had been escorted into by this chaplain, I found my brother and sister-in-law and my uncle. They were waiting on me to tell me that my father had succumb to the injuries from the car accident upon his arrival in Charleston.    There are so many things from that night I remember, but one thing that I remember the most was the chaplain.

Her demeanor was amazing. She was there but she wasn’t pushy. She answered questions but she put no demands on my family. She explained kindly. She used words we understood rather than the “big” words of the medical staff. She had caring eyes. She wasn’t judging our grief. She helped my brother and me as we were led into the room with our father’s lifeless body. She quietly handed me tissue. She kindly suggested that I take my Dad’s Clemson ring and his wedding band... She reassured me it was okay to take them off as if she knew he never took them off. In fact, in 45 years, I’d never seen him not wearing those rings. She helped me wordlessly when I couldn’t do it alone. She was strength when we were weak.  I think about her often. I wonder how many times a week- maybe even a day- that she must sit with other families. How many boxes of tissue does she go through in a week in that magic black bag of hers. How many families has she prayed with and for? Delivering news like that every day must be hard for her, I would think?

Just the other day, she crossed my mind again. She gives terrible news to families. She is there when they hurt. She is there when they don’t understand. She is there when they are angry. She is there when they’re heartbroken. I thought of this chaplain because I was in a meeting with a parent. We were having to tell this parent that his son was behind where he should be. We were having to tell him that his son had not gotten the foundational skills necessary to be successful YET!  This parent was sad. This parent was upset at what had happened in the years before this year (or what had not happened). This parent felt like a failure. While we, as the practicing educators, had to give the bad news, we also had to support that parent through it also. This parent had many of the same emotions that that chaplain sees every day.

The difference between us and that chaplain is a decision to share.  That chaplain is forced to have difficult conversations with families. We have a choice. Well, sort of. It would be safe to say, as a practicing educator, that if we do not have difficult conversations with parents that we are committing educational malpractice. No one enjoys difficult conversations. No one wakes up in the morning and ask themselves, “Who can I disappoint, dishearten, upset, anger, sadden today?” Seriously none of us do, but it must happen. We must be honest with parents. They deserve to know the truth. They deserve to know where their student is and how they can help.

As I think about that chaplain, I often wonder how long she trained for her job. I wonder if she practiced. I wonder if she shadowed others. I wonder if she worked alongside a mentor before she did it alone. I wonder if she read books. I wonder if she was led to this work because of her own experiences. I wonder if she worries about how she will behave in these situations and I wonder if she reflects afterwards. While death and academic difficulties are not anywhere near the same thing. I would think the delivery of the news is very similar. We are honest. We are sincere. We are kind. We don’t judge, we understand. We aren’t pushy. We reassure. We are strong. But most of all-we share the truth and we don’t hide from it. It is what our students deserve. 

Effort=Results

I’ve made it no secret that I struggle with my weight. It’s part DNA, part my lifestyle- I literally need a 12 step program for pasta addiction.  Yet, I continue to exercise and continue to try to eat better. And with a hope and a prayer maybe, just maybe, one day, I’ll be the size and health I want to be.  Because I go to the gym before the chickens wake up, I am pretty much on my own at the gym. My gym has a large selection of cardio machines. Each morning, I spend ½ hour either walk/running or on the elliptical and then spend another bit of time in a weight circuit. This weight circuit is designed by the gym to be done in ½ hour with work on legs, arms, and abs.  I was a little frustrated with the fact that I do this circuit at least 3 times (if not 4) a week and see little results. I was lamenting this to my husband the other morning, when he asked me about the weights that I use. I started explaining to him what I use and he seemed impressed with the heaviness of the weights. He then asked me how long I had been using the same weight on the machines and I told him that I was using the same weight since I started the ½ hour circuit about a year ago.  He then laughed and explained that my lack of increasing my weights was my problem. I was using the same old weight every day and didn’t challenge my body by going further every couple of weeks by increasing the weights.  He then made me really mad by stating, “Mediocre efforts produces mediocre results.” Uggg…..Know it all!   

When he gave me this great advice, I started thinking about a conversation I had just had with one of our teachers. She came to see me last week. She was a little downtrodden. She was discussing a situation with a student that honestly seemed minor-but I listened anyway. Call it mother’s intuition or maybe that I’ve been doing this too long, but I finally asked, “So what’s really bothering you?”  That’s when she started to share some real failures in her classroom that day. We’ve all had those days. Heck, sometimes I have those weeks.

As I do with many of these types of meetings, I started asking questions. You see, I may be “principal” but that doesn’t mean that I know more than our teachers-it just means I get more emails. Many times teachers know the answers to their own questions. Teachers are experts.  I asked one question that she answered with some delay. I asked her how it had gone last year when she had done her groups in the way that had failed on this day. After not answering the question, she answered by stating that she was trying something new and it hadn’t gone well. I asked her why she had changed the way she did it last year. She then started discussing her data from last year, what she had learned from a new teacher last year, and about a book she had read this summer. All of those things made her realize that she needed to try things a little bit differently. We talked some more and discussed some things that could make it better the next day. I checked up on her at the end of the next day and just as I thought, she had a much better day-actually a great day!

Unlike the teacher I just mentioned, I was playing it safe. At the gym, I wasn’t pushing myself. I wasn’t working harder every day. I started and continued the same thing day after day after day after day. And eventually the results stopped. So for the last week, I started upping the weights. The first day was a complete failure. I upped them too much, couldn’t do what I needed to do, ran out of time and didn’t finish. I really left feeling worse than I had in a long time. Sunday morning, I could hardly walk from the car to the church. I was so sore.  But then this morning came, and I felt great. I kept working through the pain and almost skipped to my car because I felt so accomplished.

You see, if you haven’t failed in your class lately, you probably aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. You are probably playing it safe and doing what you’ve always done-maybe it seems easy. Maybe it seems safe. Maybe it seems less hard.  But I can assure you that “safe” lessons are a recipe for mediocrity- AT BEST.  And as my husband so lovingly pointed out…“Mediocre efforts produces mediocre results.” And our kids don’t deserve mediocrity.