Telling Our Own Story

Convocation Message to the Litchfield Staff on Opening Day

August 28, 2015

My theme for the coming year, something you’ll very likely hear me repeat over and over, almost a mantra is:  “This is our year for Telling Our Own Story.”

A Story

And so to begin, I’m going to tell you a story of my own.  This is my granddaughter Ella.  She’s five.   “And a half!” she will tell you. “But, I’m more on the half towards six than five!” she’ll add with an emphatic series of karate chops, as if to cut off the remaining time.  She’s in a bit of hurry to grow up! 

This summer, Ella and I were returning from some errands out past Worchester, Massachusetts.  We got on the Mass Pike, (which is a toll road), at I-495 … and, since I was not driving my own car with my EZ-Pass, I had to stop and pick up a toll-ticket.   Ella asked about it… what it was for and so on… And I told her, looking at her in the rear-view mirror.   

When we got to our exit at Rt. 84, the traffic jam was ridiculous. If you’ve ever been in that area of the Mass Pike on a Sunday evening, when all the summer Cape Cod traffic is headed west, you know that if the exit for Rt. 84 is extremely backed-up, they start waving cars through the toll booths until it clears.  We had that luck.  I had the ticket in my hand, ready to turn it in, when we were waved through.
 
From her car seat in the back, Ella said, “Oh good!  Can I have it?” 

“Sure,” I said and handed the ticket back to her. 

“Thank you, Gramma!” she exclaimed, as if I had given her the deed to the Taj Mahal.  She held onto it, and when we got home, she set-up a pretend game on the kitchen floor, with all of her many horses and one two-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex crossing over the raised wooden threshold between the kitchen and living room.   When each animal crossed over, they had their names spoken aloud, and they got a little circle colored-in on the Mass Pike toll-ticket. 

Why is this story important?  Because this year Ella starts kindergarten.  This year, her family turns her over to the teachers in Southwick, Massachusetts, in a school system that’s not very different from Litchfield’s.  Over the next thirteen years, through their lenses, and of course, through her family’s as well, Ella is about to learn that this toll ticket (with its colorful crayoned dots) has absolutely no real value – and this, a crisp $20 bill, does.  How that ‘introduction to the real world’ and how that ‘education’ take place is of vital importance to all of us. 

It is, of course, important that our students learn math and can wrestle with difficult reading passages.  It’s important that our children learn money and time and the notes on a C-scale.  It’s important that they know what an anecdote is and how to use a microscope.   But, it’s also important that when they see a friend in need, they stop to help.  That even though their T-shirt reads “It’s all about me!” – it really isn’t.  That they learn to understand, and even predict, the impact of their decisions.  It’s important that they sometimes live in their imaginations. 

Teachers do ALL of THAT so very well.  For that reason, it is important we tell our own story.  
Every child, in every one of our classrooms, is an Ella.   A child loved by his or her family and entrusted into the hands of educators who hopefully understand that “in loco parentis,” which in Latin means “in the place of the parents,” in parent-language really means, “Please be kind to my child, kinder than I am when I lose my patience … And, therefore, please, be patient … And, please, please, please be better than I am at translating this crazy world we live in into something meaningful my child can use.”

Fortunately, you’re up to the challenge!  And that too is where “telling our own story” comes in!

We can’t control what happens around us in the educational setting.  We can’t control state mandates for teacher evaluation or for SBAC.  We can’t control ‘opting-out.’  We certainly can’t control what comes into our environment from the outside – our students’ broken home-lives, the prevalence of drugs and alcoholism their culture, or domestic violence. 

That is primarily why my goal for this school year is to improve communications and, through communications, to control our message that we send out into the world!  I want a better and more interactive webpage where it becomes easy to post a picture and a headline… or, a sound bite of kids at work and a sample of their accomplishment.  I want a webpage with a calendar we can trust to be up-to-the minute, menus, and a link to the CIAC, so we can use those kinds of features to draw parents and the community in.  Then, I want rss-feeds and links to Facebook and Pinterest for even more sharing.   I want a place to brag about our teachers and our programs.  I want our positive message, about all the good things we do, to be louder, with a more memorable melody and a stronger cadence, than the voices of the dissidents.

Our communications can be our fight song. 

In Our Classrooms
First and foremost, we can control to a great degree (because it is solely our domain), how we treat each other in our classrooms.   How we treat each other in our classrooms matters.   Sarcasm, (even when gentle), teasing, and insensitivity have a way of chipping away at everyone’s health – ours, the target’s, and the bystanders'.  Kindness and thoughtfulness lift people up!  Incivility holds them down.

Words, when they are not carefully and thoughtfully chosen, make people feel small.  I remember reading a study in Psychology Today which said that emotionally healthy children can receive up to 11 negative messages to every 1 positive.  A negative message could be anything from an emphatic ‘Shhhh!’ to ‘Can you do something with your hair?’ to ‘How many times do I have ask you to take out the garbage?’  ALL messages which adults have long-ago ceased to consider negative.   Imagine, 11:1 -- and that’s the emotionally healthy kids.  The damaged kids received as many as 56:1; and because of their circumstances, many of their negative messages are self-generated: “I’m such a loser!” “Why is everyone prettier than me?” “No one likes me.”

That’s an important set of statistics; but, whenever you genuinely ask a student, ‘How is your mother feeling this week?’ or ‘How many kittens did the cat have?’ or ‘What did you like best about your trip to San Antonio?’ you are showing you care about what's important to them.  When you focus your classrooms on respectful discussions and ask kids to acknowledge another student’s point before they disagree… or, when you consistently reinforce, ‘mean behavior is not tolerated here,’ you are lifting your students 12 feet off the ground!

This year, in addition to talking about math and AP scores and awards, I will try to communicate all of those fabulous activities in your classrooms and our schools which focus on building our students’ respect for others and their own personal dignity. 

In Our Faculty Rooms

No, we can’t control many of the most recent variables of our profession.  But, neither can today’s nurses … or airline attendants … or policemen… and so on.  We are all living in a dramatically changing world.  People in every profession, in every walk-of-life feel the impact of change in their lives.  No one can control the speed of change.

But, we can control how we treat our colleagues in the workplace and how we communicate with each other.  A generalized dissatisfaction with our profession and an insensitivity to the virtues of teaching and teachers chips away at everyone’s well-being.  In the spirit of our colleague-to-colleague communications, reach out to the new teachers we have hired this year.   Share your materials, your ideas, your anecdotes, your legacy, and how our late-openings and snow days work.

Be present, in mind and spirit, when your grade-level teams meet.  Bring your best self to professional development, to SIT Team and PPTs.  Support your principals in faculty meetings.   Advocate for, and be a champion of, teachers and education.  To the degree that you can on any given day, take a deep breath and smile at change because we’ve seen it before and it didn't deterred us then, nor will it now.

In Our Wider Community

I’m asking that you please be thoughtful about how you represent your school and your colleagues outside our doors, as well.   Always remember there is a text … and a subtext.   You might say to a parent, “Wow, we’re having a hard time getting the tech up and running this year,” and what someone in the community eventually passes along to their neighbor is, “That school is a mess and no one knows what they are doing…”  An off-the-cuff remark that “the early release days for PD make the day feel longer, not shorter” later gets translated in the community as, “The teachers hate the PD days, so why do we need them?”  Everyone knows how the negative flows.  Everyone understands the nature of ‘scuttlebutt.’   So, kindly be ambassadors for your schools.  Brag, celebrate, congratulate, and think about the powerful subtexts of those positive messages and stories you can send forth.

Conclusions

Teaching is a challenging job with many unique frustrations, but the rewards of teaching are innumerable.   Remember Ella?  This year someone just like you is going to teach her that while a $20 bill ‘buys her things’ that ‘Mass Pike toll ticket,’ which represents her imagination and story-telling, can take her places too.

That is a powerful… awesome! … responsibility.  And it is ours!  Relish in it!  Celebrate it! 

Do what you can to tell our story!