Out of My League

I remember December of 1988 pretty well. I was graduating from the University of North Texas with a Bachelor’s degree. The doctoral candidates were getting ready to file across the stage. Dr. Alfred Hurley was speaking to the group and and the end he said, “Welcome to the world of scholarly thinkers.” I had a thought about that then… what have I been doing? Dr. Hurley had obviously never taken Dr. Lott’s anatomy or physiology class!

Fast forward to August of 1993. I was graduating from the University of North Texas with a Master’s Degree. As the doctoral candidates were preparing to file across the stage, Dr. Alfred Hurley was speaking to them and said, “Welcome to the world of scholarly thinkers.” Again, I wondered… what have I been doing? Dr. Hurley hadn’t been in my cardiovascular exercise physiology class.

Fast forward to today. I started a residency for my doctorate. I’m starting to understand what Dr. Hurley was speaking about on both of those occasions. This program in it’s design is very rigorous. The drop out rate for most doctoral programs is around 50%. My group of five, we are committed to finishing this work in three years.

Welcome to the world of scholarly thinkers… kinda scary.

My cohort…

     Greg Bicknell (me)

     Angie Bicknell (my beautiful and extremely intelligent wife)

     Phyllis Scott

     Sharon Brodin

     Cheryl Schwaebler

Pencil in February 2011 for our commencement exercises… only about 1096 days… done before you know it.

How do you get staff members to work in cooperative groups?

How do you get staff members to work in groups outside of their grade?

How do you get staff members to try new things?

How do you get staff members to work outside of their comfort zones?

How do you get staff members to work outside of their area of specialization?

Most of all, how do you help your staff have fun?

I think you challenge them!

I think you find a way(s) to engage them!

I don’t have the answers… but what I do have gives me better questions.

This is the end of my first year as a building principal. I have worked on large campuses with many administrators and many teachers. This is my first rodeo with a small campus and no other administrators. I have struggled to find ways to engage my staff in pursuit of doing the above.

Our school district calendar changed this year due to a new state law saying all schools must start the same week. Our fall semester in past years had ended before the Christmas break. Now it ends in January. I decided to have somewhat of a modified scavenger hunt. I divided the teachers into groups of three based on a mug they chose at our last faculty meeting. No mug on each team was alike.

 I was disappointed by a couple of my staff. They really didn’t want to participate. They said all the right things. Family comes first. Students come second. I get that. I respect that. But, there is nothing wrong with having a little fun and getting to know those you work with better. Nothing wrong witha  little competition. I digress.

Once the teams were divided I gave them a task. Then added more tasks as we went along… here they are:

Subject: Let the Games Begin - Competition #1

We all need more margin in our lives… if that doesn’t make sense I can explain later…

We are having a team competition… you have been placed on one of thirteen teams. You are   competing for the fabulous award at the end… (we are working out the details… but it is worth playing for).

Each team will earn points (each competition is will have a point value assigned to it).

Competition #1

Do the impossible… the note card that was in your mug… cut a hole in it that you can crawl through… the card must not be taped in any way. This is worth 100 points… style points can be added!

Subject: Let the Games Continue - Competition #2

I am impressed by the group for your competitive play… very impressed…

If you have not completed competition #1… fear not… it is never too late… but here is #2

A – design a team logo (I am using the term logo loosely) that includes a piece of each members name (one letter is enough)

B –  a 1953 penny

Subject: Let the Games Continue - Competition #3

Pick ‘em… you can choose to do three (minimum) out of the five… choose wisely…

1 – Picture of all group members with Santa… (together with the same Santa)

2 – Create a wiki for your class… (each group member would have to do it)

3 – A picture book of your team (minimum 25 photos – digital are best)

4 – Recreation of the Beatles “Abbey Road” album cover. (Submitted digitally – if you do not know what this is you really need to listen to some good music)

5 – Picture of your team (whole group or individual members) with a firefighter in full bunker gear. (All must pose with a firefighter – you just do not have to be at the same place at the same time.

I have three boys. Two of them in school. I love the days they come home from school so excited about something they learned that they do it at home. The keep working on it. Why? That should be your question? That should be what you look for in every lesson. Why do they want to continue working on it? How do I design lessons that make that happen?

 You know… only one team can win the award… but… I think everyone who is participating is a winner.

I’m not sure if I ever believed in Santa Claus.

I’m not sure if I have stopped believing in Santa Claus.

One of my administrative interns, who uses the term ‘crack smoker’ way too much, let a cat out of the bag the other day to her 6 year old. One of my kindergarten teachers has guest readers come every Friday. One Friday Zorro came in full regalia: mask ,boots, and sword. He read a great story. I have proof he was there… see my blog about Zorro. Zorro, much like Superman, can’t make a living out of fighting crime and can’t make a living out of reading stories to little kids. He has to moonlight, or in this case, daylight, as a high school assistant principal. You see, many of the same qualities that are required of a Zorro or a Superman are required of a high school assistant principal. My intern’s daughter just happens to be in that class.

I digress. My intern saw Zorro at a high school sporting event sans the Zorro attire. She tells her sweet little angelic daughter… “see that bald guy over there… that’s the Zorro that came and read to your class!” Which makes me wonder… has she already killed off the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and Santa with her daughter?

I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in the goodness of what Santa stands for. (Truthfully, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny freak me out.) Should we encourage our children to believe in these things as well? I think we should. We should all have wonder and amazement somewhere in our lives. We should all have that secret belief that goodness exists. We should take whatever avenue is available to make the world a better place. If believing in Santa (and the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny) are the way to do that, then so be it.

Wonder and amazement are good. Two of the reasons to love elementary school.

Halloween

I have to rely on my fellow principals to keep me out of trouble. In secondary schools we don’t have party days. In elementary, I have found that we do. We get a couple a year. So, I have had to ask the questions to keep me out of trouble. Trouble lurks… waiting… I’m on the look out.

I sent an e-mail to my distinguished colleagues in my district asking them about HalloweenFall Harvest and I got many different responses. My favorite was from a principal who will remain anonymous. He/She said that he/she loves Halloween and starts singing songs  a few weeks in advance. For the life of me I can only think of one Halloween Fall Harvest Song. Come on, you know it, it’s Monster Mash.

I was delighted to find the little red light illuminated one morning about a week before Halloween Fall Harvest. (I’m lying. The little red light of doom never makes me happy, but for this story to sound good, it made me happy. Just for the record… if that light is on… there is trouble!) When I played my messages and made my way through the phone tree hierarchy of the ones from unhappy people… I found this… and I’m sharing with you…

          anonymous principal message about Halloween Fall Harvest 1

On my birthday the day before Fall Harvest I had another message.

          anonymous principal message about Halloween Fall Harvest 2

Just a question for my anonymous friend… do you know any Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus Winter Holiday Songs?

According to Wikipedia,

Zorro is an extremely agile athlete and acrobat, using his bullwhip as a gymnastic accoutrement to swing through gaps between the city’s roofs, and is very capable of landing from great heights and taking a fall. Although he is a master swordsman and marksman, he has more than once demonstrated his more than able prowess in unarmed combat, even against as many as twenty armed opponents.

He never uses brute strength, more his fox-like sly mind and well-practiced technique to outmatch an opponent.

I tell you this because Zorro visited our school today. One of our high school assistant principals (his name will not be mentioned to maintain his Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent identity) came to read to a kindergarten class. He brought his own book. A book that he has read to his daughter so many times that she can recite it word for word. He had the kids eating out of the palm of his hand. Talk about engaged learning… Phil would have been proud!

Time for an analogy… if I had only taught English…

teaching : kindergartners : : herding : cats

I have a fabulous group of kindergarten teachers. I am amazed at what they have accomplished with the students this far in the year. They work well together. They plan well together. They are truly a team. When I watch them work with those kids I am amazed. Everything is so well planned. They operate so smoothly. It’s much like cowboys/cowgirls/cow-people? working a monstrous herd of cattle. You keep the whole group moving the same general direction while simultaneously looking for the strays and bringing them back into the fold.

I get to practice this daily when I relieve the K teachers for their conference period. They dismiss their kids to the parents and I take the few kids that are left waiting for a ride. It’s never very many. I don’t have the skill that those teachers have. The look like seasoned ranchers out on the range. I look like a city boy herding cats. Have you every tried to get more than one cat to do what you want? Have you ever tried to get one cat to do what you want? Do you even like cats?

Zorro had those kids in the palm of his hand today. He was reading a book called, “Skippy jon Jones” by Judy Schachner. A wondrous book by a wonderful author read by a fantastic educator. Today was the cherry on top for the week!

And Zorro… wherever you are… thanks for reading to my kids!

Thirteen years of public education in Texas culminates in graduation. An event that, for many people, is one of the top five lifetime events.

One of my favorite things about graduation is the regalness of it all. Yes, I know, regalness refers to royalty or the king, but I argue the day of graduation you are the king or the queen. Everyone dressed in regalia for the occasion. Everyone looking like royalty. Everyone there to celebrate the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. (We can argue this point… but I’m conceding to you for the sake of this post that there is an ending and a beginning… conceding just for this blog.)

I have had the pleasure of sitting through a dozen or so high school graduations as a teacher and administrator. I say pleasure and I mean that. I remember sitting in my first graduation as a teacher at Haltom High School and watching the six hundred kids walk across the stage. Many I had not seen since they were in the eighth grade. How proudly they walked across the stage. What a great event that day was for them. I also remember my last graduation at Birdville High School. I sat on the dias as the associate principal and watched the students up close process across the stage and receive their papers to be free from the clutches of the man.

I have also been quite amazed by how many people don’t show up for these events. By how little regalness they see in graduation as a life altering event. My colleague Greg Farr wrote a piece about a program in his school for the kids in danger of dropping out. The article is called, “At-Risk Students - Situational Unawareness“.

I am writing this blog to get to this. Most kids spend the greatest amount of their time in elementary school. Many of them have fond memories of that time. Learning was fun. School was fun.

Why are there not any elementary or middle school teachers at high school graduation? I’m not looking for more work or days added to my contract. I’m not asking that my teachers work another day for free.

I’m just asking the question: why don’t elementary teachers celebrate the culmination of what we do? Maybe they do. Maybe in the crowd of thousands in the graduations that I have been to there are many teachers sitting among the families. Maybe they are there to see their former students process in with regalness and walk across that stage to the cheers of family members. Maybe I just cannot see them.

I have spent the majority of my educational career working in secondary schools. For the past ten months I have been an elementary school principal. I would like to see my staff members get a different perspective of graduation. I would like to see a place for us, the elementary people, at our high school graduations. I would like for my people to process in with the faculty and students from our high school. I would like for my teachers to see how successful their (our) students have been. How they have met all of the requirements set forth by the state and succeeded. How they came into kindergarten not knowing their letters or their numbers, and how they have amassed a great wealth of knowledge. Enough knowledge that the State of Texas has deemed them fit to be high school graduates.

I think elementary teachers need to see that their work is not in vain! They need to see the culmination of their blood, sweat and tears. 

It starts here. I have a confession to make. Don’t hate me for it. It’s a confession about me. Something you may not have known…. I’m a coach.

 Let that soak in…

For twelve years of my life I was a coach.

More soaking…

I spent twelve of those years coaching football, eight coaching track and field, seven coaching basketball, four coaching cross country, two coaching baseball, and two coaching soccer.

Still more soaking…

I looked up the term coach on dictionary.com in search of a fitting definition…. didn’t see one. Not a definition that truly conveys what or who a coach is. To me, and let’s face it, it’s all about me, a coach is someone who builds capacity. A coach is someone who helps you focus your energies on improving your skills. A coach doesn’t point fingers at what you don’t know or what you haven’t learned. A coach assesses where you are (formative) and devises a plan for you to get better. To get you to be the best you can be. A coach does this for numerous players at any given moment.

The grade for my coaching ability came most often during public exhibitions. We call them games or contests.

In my opinion (see above about that), the best classroom teachers are coaches. I’m not saying that they stand on the sidelines and yell and scream. I’m saying that they stand in the classroom and help the kids improve. The give formative assessment all along the way. They find out what the kids know and don’t waste time teaching things they have already mastered. You don’t teach a kid how to throw a pass or catch a ball if they already know. There are no tricks involved. Teachers are truly about kids and truly about helping kids develop… to develop their full capacity.

In the coaching arena the kids go home more tired than the coaches do. The kids are the ones doing the work. The coaches design the work… the kids do the work. The kids work hard… the coaches coach.

More soaking…

I don’t want my teachers to go home more tired than the students are. I want my students to go home tired from all the work that the teachers created for them.

See the parallelism… the best teachers make the students do the work. The best teachers coach.

I’m reminded of this when I speak to one of my teachers. We went to high school together. We actually had a class together. I had the big desk she had one of the small ones. I’m reminded how important coaching is by her almost daily. When our conversation ends it usually ends with her calling me coach… and that makes me smile… because that means the right people are doing the work.

I had the pleasure today of interviewing the U.S. House Representative for the 26th District of Texas. The interview is on the left… under the title… Interviews…

I was watching a television show on the Discovery Network not too long ago. (I like to call myself a nerd but Hugh Henderson our Science guru says that since I am employed I’m a geek… nerds aren’t employed. Whatever. Anyway, back to the story An airport was being built. The terminal was covered by one very very long roof. This roof was called the great arc(h) or circle… can’t remember which… but the cool thing about it was it would make a circle if you continued the ends onward (downward). (I’m looking for a picture and I will insert it in the place of this sentence when I find it!)

That got me thinking about the Great Circle Route that airliners use to get from one place to another on our fabulous planet. A wiki describes the Great Circle Route as…

The great-circle distance is the shortest distance between any two points on the surface of a sphere measured along a path on the surface of the sphere (as opposed to going through the sphere’s interior). Because spherical geometry is rather different from ordinary Euclidean geometry, the equations for distance take on a different form. The distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a straight line from one point to the other. On the sphere, however, there are no straight lines. In non-Euclidean geometry, straight lines are replaced with geodesics. Geodesics on the sphere are the great circles (circles on the sphere whose centers are coincident with the center of the sphere).

Between any two points on a sphere which are not directly opposite each other, there is a unique great circle. The two points separate the great circle into two arcs. The length of the shorter arc is the great-circle distance between the points. Between two points which are directly opposite each other, called antipodal points, there are infinitely many great circles, but all great circle arcs between antipodal points have the same length, i.e. half the circumference of the circle, or πr, where r is the radius of the sphere.

Because the Earth is approximately spherical (see spherical Earth), the equations for great-circle distance are important for finding the shortest distance between points on the surface of the Earth, and so have important applications in navigation.

Blah Blah Blah… all of that to tell you it’s a zero… kind of…

In education we often look at the zero as an end to a means. I’ll show them! ZERO! I wonder how that would work with my staff if I gave a ZERO every time they were late turning something in. How about a ZERO every time I go into a classroom and the teacher has just gone across the hall… ZERO. Late for picking up the kids from lunch… ZERO! Not teaching enough social studies… ZERO. Not enough science… ZERO! Late for D-hall duty… ZERO. Late for crosswalk duty… ZERO!

I’m exaggerating… I know… I used to agree with the zero… when I first started teaching it was about getting those grades… you had to earn everything… I still agree with earning everything. However, you earn it by what you know and can do… not how many worksheets you fill in correctly.

ZERO’s… love’em or leave’em… the world is now gray to me… shades of gray… nothing is cut and dry… I don’t need the zero. Let’s move on!

I NEED THIRD GRADERS! Not many… 3 or 4 would be good… then I might get to add a teacher. How cool would that be to have small classes? Anybody know of any third graders who live in my attendance zone who haven’t enrolled yet? 

I made home visits today. Trying to find my kids who haven’t shown up for school yet. I don’t want them to miss several weeks and then show up saying they didn’t know when school started. Not the kids, the parents. I didn’t know when school started… I didn’t have a bill to prove that I live in the house I live in. Some just waiting a few more days because school starts too soon.

Hillary Clinton once said (I think it was Hillary anyway), that it takes a village to raise a child. How true this is. I know that I pontificate at great length on the importance of education. Problem is it’s usually my wife who is listening (or in the same room watching TV and not listening). I agree with Hillary… no…. you can’t quote me on that… it does take a village. But the point of me bringing up Hillary is that is does should take a village. We should all worry about the education that is provided in our schools. We should all worry that the kids next door haven’t gone to school yet. IT’S OUR VILLAGE!

I remember starting elementary school. We started with first grade because kindergarten was not in public schools. You had to pay. I have five siblings. I’m the youngest. Keep him at home or send him to kindergarten? Keep him at home and we can eat or send him to kindergarten and we eat potatoes for every meal. My parents kept me at home. I started 1^st grade when I was 6 turning 7 in October. How smart were my parents. I couldn’t read. I think I knew all my letters… but that was over 35 years ago…The point I’m making is my parents didn’t know anymore than anyone else about school. They just knew it was a good thing. School was not about childcare… school was about making life better. Making my life and my siblings lives better… and guess what… IT WORKED!I think we take that for granted today. Schools really do a good job of educating, and everyone is required to go to school. But, I don’t think people really look at school making life better.

I saw tears on many faces this morning, both kids and parents, in the kindergarten area when parents where dropping off the kids. I don’t think I saw any teachers crying… at least not in front of me.  I saw fear on parents’ faces. I saw apprehension. I saw joy. I saw many confronting the unknown. Not knowing this person they were turning their kids over to. When school was out today I saw relief. I saw hope. I saw smiles and happiness.

And tomorrow… I hope to see 3 or 4 more third graders!