G-Town Talks

At the conference I attended on Friday, I was very pleased to hear Chancellor Bennett’s response to my inquiry about cohort outcomes after four years of school and cohort outcomes after five years of school. Chancellor Bennett’s response to my question was extremely positive and in favor of the idea that it’s okay to take five years for students to get to graduation.

Currently, under NCLB, the four year path is the only one that counts favorably toward our graduation measure. This is a crucial measure for high schools and in one like ours, is a significant difference. I have argued here before and have written to the Commissioner about the fact that we’re keeping kids in school, we’re getting them back for the fifth year, and that should be a positive outcome.

On our most recent school report card, for the 2001 cohort, we jump from 68% graduating in four years to 76% in five years. For our male students that same figure jumps from 60% to 72%. Our students with disabilities jumps 21% in five years versus four years. Yet we continue to be held to the four year path as our standard of success.

No goal, no win at the federal level. Not fair and too narrow minded in its view of success.

Any time I change this presentation, like I have recently with the Tarski presentation, I experience problems. James Farmer at Edublogs is working on this theme, but G-Town Readers’ comments have shown up on the wrong posts. So here I am, back with my original theme. The other presentation afforded me some features I don’t get here, but readers’ comments are the most important part of blogging so we’ll just stick with this one until it’s worked out.  Sorry for the confusion.

I absolutely cannot believe that a kid in my class would have been able to use an MP3 player during a test to cheat. Maybe in the schools where cheating is happening with electronic devices they have much larger classes than I ever did.

So here we go again. Instead of doing our due diligence, teaching our kids appropriate uses and giving consequences for those who are ill intended, we ban electronic devices.

Does anyone remember that prohibition didn’t work?

The last thing I wanted to do this morning was attend a conference sixty miles away in Niagara Falls.

I was pre-registered and my Title VII friends had paid for my registration fee so I felt obligated to attend. I called my colleague in the middle school who assured me he would handle any “emergencies” and off I went to the conference.

This was the very best thing I could have done today. It was an excellent conference on Indian Education with sessions that really got me thinking about the “big issues” and about good instructional strategies. I’m so glad that by attending I got to see Dr. Lloyd Elm receive an award. I hold Dr. Elm in extremely high regard, as he’s one of the finest educators I’ve ever known.

Attending this conference reminded me of the big picture, of the real reason I’m here. Allowing myself to get away from the day to day operations, the sometimes difficult “trouble shooting, plug your finger in one hole as another one pops open” kind of day, reminded me of why I do this job.

I concentrated on my own learning and it was invigorating. I wish I had unlimited professional development dollars so that I could send every teacher in my employ to a two-three day state or national conference from which they could return refreshed and ready to roll with new ideas.

I hope every teacher out there who is fortunate enough to work in a district with those kinds of funds truly appreciates it and takes advantage of every session.

It’s nearing the end of a long day in the midst of a longer week. Thank goodness my mother in law is preparing dinner for us at 7:00. I can look forward to a nice meal with my family. I have no explanation for those weeks when we walk around saying, “when it rains, it pours” or for the repeat lyrics in my head of, “Mama said there’d be days like this. . . ” I’m pretty sure much of it has to do with the pressure of the end of the year coming and graduation and grade advancement.

I’m sure every administrator has experienced the days when your spouse looks at you and says “how was your day?” and you can’t even remember/articulate everything that happened. It’s literally going from one phone call to another impromptu meeting to yet one more kid melting down.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that every person who comes to see me or calls deserves a “refreshed screen” without me dumping whatever just walked out of my door onto them. I like to think I managed that well today but can also say how much I appreciate those people like Sue R., my secretary, who can see through it and give me some support. On this Administrative Professionals’ Day, I appreciate a gazillion things about our office staff, but nothing more than when I can close the door and say to Sue, Lori, or Carol, “HOLY CATS, what was that?!”

Once again today, I realize that remaining calm, despite how upset the parent or student may be, is the only way for me to effectively listen to the problem and then attempt to solve it. And when we consider that 98% of the time parents only become upset because they are advocating for their children, the people most important in the world to them, it makes it a whole lot easier to be quiet, to listen, to respond effectively. To understand. That’s when we need to remember, this isn’t about me and my response to your behavior, it’s about truly listening and solving the problem.  

He who yells loudest doesn’t win.

Thank you to the 46 53  67 (and counting, think we’ll let this experiment ride a while) readers who responded to the referers/readers survey! I’ll give it a couple of days to be sure everyone has responded who wanted to, and then post a summary of who YOU are–and James said you wouldn’t comment if asked.

Here’s the thing about working with kids. It’s not like managing employees where we can talk about separating one’s personal life from one’s professional life. It’s all mixed in together and sometimes it’s messy.

Take today for example. It’s only Monday and I spent a good portion of the day talking to students and parents about everything but academics. We have relationship issues, kids who were living at home when they left for the weekend and now are not, ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend disasters, Prom ticket sales, and kids expressing their individuality a bit too much. I swear I don’t solicit it and sometimes I wish I weren’t so approachable.

It seems there’s so much “stuff” coming through the door that I wonder how we teach kids anything. Better said, I wonder how they retain anything we teach. How do they even notice us?

I honestly would like to just stop everything and say “I don’t want to hear one more word about what he said/she said or what color your hair is today—let’s talk about your social studies class or what you’re learning in Science!”

But then I know it’s about connecting with every kid. Helping them as a whole child to deal with growing up. I know that kids are sometimes self-centered and that how they express themselves is the most important thing to them, now.

I just want to maintain focus. I want to remind every kid who’s hung up on whatever of our purpose, our mission, our academic goals. It’s my job to maintain this focus for everyone, to keep our eyes on the prize. I just don’t have it figured out yet, how to be supportive and at the same time, say “okay, enough support, let’s get focused on learning now!” Maybe I say just that more often?

G-Town students, someone, anyone, please have a meaningful conversation with me tomorrow about something that you’re learning. . . any subject will do.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Jeff Archer, who’s doing an article about this blog for Education Week. One of the things that Jeff and I talked about was the number of “referers” to the blog each day. This is the way stats are shown on edublogs.

Jeff’s colleague, Jeanne, contacted James Farmer at edublogs.org and asked about the referers statistics. Apparently, most blogs follow page views rather than hits or referers. James Farmer responded as follows,

“I think it’s fair to say that hits, in the manner of her site (given theme choice), would correlate roughly to be divisible by 2-3 to page views”

I suppose this means that on April 15, when I had 3019 referers, I can estimate that there were 1000-2000 page views. I also wonder if this means that there were 1000-2000 readers?

More important, it makes me wonder who the readers of G-Town are. I know who some readers are through their comments or through the address listed as the referring URL. But I wonder who’s reading, from where.

So I thought we’d try a little experiment. If you’ve stuck with my post this far, please post a comment to this blog. Right here, right now. Even if you’ve never commented before, it’s really very easy. If you are reading this, post a comment that just tells your name or initials, where you’re reading from, and if possible, what you do. That’s all. For example, I would post a comment that says “ksm from Gowanda, high school principal and parent”. Nothing more is needed, but will tell an interesting picture of who our G-Town readers really are. Audience is important for any writer and I’d love a better view of who you are–your comments will be more valuable than any other stats.

Thank you for participating!

So about fifteen minutes after my arrival today, a colleague saw me about an issue on which he was clearly unhappy. Normally, I may have reacted to him differently, but today I just looked at him and thought “how unfortunate that he’s this upset.” I didn’t take in any of his negative energy, didn’t react, just calmly answered his questions.

I really wish I could manage from that perspective 100% of the time. My “business” is working with people who come with as many different attitudes, issues, and emotions as there are minutes in the day. It felt really great to maintain my own energy and attitude without taking in any of his.  I found that I was refreshingly calm, cool, and collected.

This was a great reminder that everyone needs a little time away to gain perspective. Coming back from a ten day student tour, I know it was a success because I feel ready to handle anything that comes my way. I’m reminded that this is the perfect job for me, and most important, that spending real time with our students (as I got to on this trip) is the secret to my own happiness and success.

I’ve been putting things away, doing laundry, and cleaning up all day long. Well, not all day, I just woke up from a brief nap, which was much needed. Our flight from Philadelphia to Buffalo was cancelled, but we did get on a later flight. I hit my bed at 12:45 this morning, after about 29 hours of travel.

As I read through the entries over the past ten days, I realize that this G-Town Talks blog took on a different focus and served another purpose for parents and readers. Unfortunately, I also realize that my writing is better when I take the time to edit and rethink at the end of drafting a post. This was time I just didn’t have on the trip.

As I reconnected with my family today, it was actually easier because of the blog. I didn’t have to recall as many details to fill them in on our adventure. It saved some time. With 8 loads of laundry and a dining room table filled with mail, that was time I was glad to have. Some might argue that it’s more worthwhile to talk it all through. But really, who wants to listen to every detail anyway? It’s like the relative who wants to show all of her vacation videos or photos. This blog gave a snapshot every day, sort of the way it’s better when your colleague brings only 5-10 of his favorite vacation photos to share instead of asking you to look through 950 of them.

I’ve been writing about G-Town on this blog for ten months and it’s consistently been about our students and school management. This trip travelogue allowed a glimpse into just one more aspect of student and in this case, principal, life.

Thanks for joining us for our journey. It was a privilege and a pleasure to bring you along.