Another Scene from the Book: A Tuesday in March, 2001

I sit for a few seconds staring at my computer, watching my own personal mission statement march across the screen, hoping I can live up to it today.

Caring Profoundly, Enacting Community, Inspiring Inquiry, Illuminating Possibility.

Two summers ago, in 1999, I composed these phrases for my screensaver during a workshop on the topic of “visioning.” I don’t recall what motivated me to give up the four June days for this topic, but I knew I needed to re-focus after the Columbine killings. The workshop refreshed me for the final two years, reminding me why I had walked through the door marked Principal in the first place.

Much of the time, the stream of events, kids, and conversations just flows forward, finding its own channel. Today, riding that flow, I will make many more small choices than big decisions. Choices are the infinitesimal adjustments that come from the place where my individual disposition meets my life experiences. Fundamental to my doing of this job, these choices, these units of inclination, are the subatomic particles of daily decision making.

Decisions, the currency of school leadership, are more administrative than choices, more about the public yes/no, now/later, this/that. Choices are the corrections, amendments, right or left turns, and adjustments in vocal tone that I make in each of the thousand moments that make up a day. I wish I could say that I only make good choices. Like decisions, choices not only express ideals, knowledge, wisdom, and good intentions, but also reflect misunderstandings, blind spots, and prejudices.

Today, will I stonewall? Will I lie to anyone? Will I weasel to avoid doing something that I really don’t want to do? And today, will impatience trail off into anger, my own particular defense against the frustration that can come from never finishing anything, from encountering one more thing I am supposed to pretend is other than what it is? Maybe. 

Linda and I Eat Tamales and Talk About Why I'm Retiring

I promised excerpts, so here are a few paragraphs from the Preface:

    “Fifty-four seems too young,” Linda said.

    She and I were sitting in her living room a few days after Christmas of the year 2000, eating tamales from plates we held on our laps. I’d known Linda longer than anyone who was not part of my family, and we hadn’t had a chance yet to talk about the job—the career—I was leaving in just a few months. I had no idea how to respond.

    In the years I’d worked in schools and Linda had worked as an urban planner, I’d heard her mention that educators worked less than a full year, had all those long vacations, and spent only six hours a day working. She didn’t see how jobs in schools could be very hard.

    On that winter day, I didn’t tell her that two principals I knew had simply cleaned out their desks and walked away on days that were not even Fridays, let alone ends of semesters. I didn’t tell her that after fifteen years, my job had come to feel like a game of pinball, one where I was the ball. I’d sat silently for almost a minute when Linda asked, “Do you think it’s futile?

    Surprised at her use of this word, I put my fork down on my plate and said, “No! It’s not futile. But I can’t do it anymore.”

    Growing up in the second half of the Twentieth Century, I had regarded capital-P Progress as a sure thing. My post-war generation would, I assumed, pitch in to keep things moving. By 1967, I had decided to do my part by teaching school. I’d make sure kids could read, write, and compute, and I’d also inoculate them with peace and justice. I didn’t plan on, or even imagine, being a principal.

    Thirty years after I chose to teach, the era that raised me had run into trouble. While racial and gender equality increased in that time, peace did not last. Prosperity became a more elusive goal, less a value of community than a contest to be won by individuals. I did not foresee that in the last years of the Twentieth Century, public education would no longer be everyone’s favorite democratic institution. 

How Does Life Become a Book?

One day in January of 2001, a friend of a friend passed my name along to an editor at USA Today. This editor asked me to write a one-thousand word Day in the Life piece to go along with a story they were going to publish about the work of school principals. Eager to expose the inner workings of a job that just kept on getting harder, I agreed.

Within a few weeks, I realized that a thousand words wouldn't even come close to showing what actually happened in a typical day, or even an easy day.That short a format wouldn't have allowed me to summarize or list the hundred conversations, the hundreds of people, the sounds, smells, mishaps, surprises, small and large victories, that never stop happening in a public elementary school. 

By the time I started writing what turned into my memoir Principal: A Personal History, I had put in fifteen years as leader of first one elementary school, and then another, in Tucson, my hometown. I had grown puzzled and frustrated by how much more difficult my job had gotten over that time. You might expect that it would be a simple matter of accumulating experience and then applying the wisdom gained as each new school year came around.

I believe that school leadership is crucial to the success of our democracy, and that if we don't get this sorted out pretty soon, our troubles will grow. My book, Principal, does not provide the answers, but provides for the first time in the current era an inside look at what happens in schools from the perspective of the school leader. The answers to the questions raised, I believe, need to come from informed conversation, one that I hope to start. 

In future posts, I'll include some excerpts, some thoughts about what's not in the book, the occasional rant or thoughtful reflection about current issues, and updates on the process and progress of publication.

Since this is my first experience blogging, I hope you will bear with me as I figure it all out!

Contact me at PrincipalTheBook [at] cox.net to get on my mailing list.