The Fervor and The Peace

“Darling, remember when you come to me
I'm the pretender and I, what I'm supposed to be
But who could know if I'm a traitor
Time's the Revelator”


Gillian Welch


I was a blur at work today. I wouldn’t have recognized myself, even if I had two minutes to look in a mirror. I was running from the second I arrived on campus. I don’t share these list of events to brag. I am not sure why I share them. I am not saying that everyone in the world is not just as busy. I am not promoting busyness as some sort of point of pride. It just helps me unwind to name the things that had me thinking and working and energised all day. I want to know what is responsible for this state of near collapse, as I sit with the wine and the soft guitar music soothing my soul.


It is through our work, our labor, physical or intellectual that we grow. The events of my day are not meant to be complaints or boasts, but simple acknowledgements for how I spend the seconds, minutes and hours of my life. I arrived a bit early at 7:25:

• Student of concern meeting. 
• Covered half a mentor class
• Ran to the Parent Coffee Morning I was facilitating. 
• Caught up on email
• Planned and re-planned the times and dates for the grade 6 trip to Tioman
• Met with one of the members of the grade 6 team for a check in
• Grabbed a salad to go for lunch
• Ran Daraja meeting (getting closer to assigning role and moving toward goal setting) 
• Taught two eighty minute classes
• Ran Off Tangent our literary magazine (One of the most student driven things I have ever done. They are simply amazing) 
• Came home read with Skyelar
• Listened to Kaia’s Math homeshare
• Had dinner. 
• Got over guilt of not running. 
• Got kids ready for bed and sat with them to fall asleep
• Sent off a few emails
• Started to organize some Movember stuff

• and now…the music is quiet. Not much left to so but stare at some entertainment. Something from Netflix or youtube. 
• Read a few pages and sleep. 

Tomorrow is Friday and we have a great dinner planned. The weekend is upon us, and as we march into November, I am reminded of the Redwoods from the summer. The hours on the road. The streets of Bend, Oregon. The cabin. The calm. The rest. The ease.


I am grateful to have both- The fervor and the peace.

Unwilling

Some nights I want to sit at this machine, stare at the blank page and create magic. I hope that it will just come pouring out, some kind of inspirational BS that people relate to. Or maybe I just need the space and time to stir myself around with words, so I can settle in for the night and watch the particles settle back down in the still water.


But on some nights, the words demand too much care. Too much attention. There is a level of effort that comes from making sense. Of creating meaning. Of carving out….see? Sometimes the words just don’t come. They are entrenched into the bedrock, unwilling to shine.


Tonight, is one of those nights- the ideas are like swirling dust in a storm. I want to gather them. To capture them and wrap them with syntax, but the conflicting metaphors becoming confusing. The very act of slowing down and writing becomes too tedious a chore and on nights like this, the work is not for anyone to read. Words that are forced seldom become relatable or even readable. But when you make a promise to give it a go every night, then some of them will be duds.


I would love to breath and relax and slow down and do the work, but honestly I just need to watch some Seth Meyers, reconnect with the absurdity of the world, maybe read and get to sleep. I am not jet lagged, but the switching of my million hats has me spinning, to the point where I am not sure where I will land.


…


We had our first Off Tangent Lit magazine meeting today and we had 20+ students show up. We did some introductory exercises and I saw one girl smiling from ear-to-ear and actually pump her fists as we spoke about the purpose of the magazine- to inspire and empower young readers and writers who love words and stories. I am so proud of the community we created last year and this new group feels just as inspirational. The young leaders we trained were back this year and looking focused and learned and determined. There is nothing like student empowerment and passion. We do more teaching in this activity than most of our classes. So glad to be working on something I love with Paula again this year.


…


Been messing with Ghost in You by The Psychedelic Furs, and even though I am basically talking through the song, it feels nice to get my fingers around it.


…


Friday of a three day weekend up ahead and looking forward to some downtime that doesn’t involve killing time in an airport or an airplane.

School Are Amazing Places

“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.”
Jack Kerouac


School are amazing places. You wanna know why? Because they are filled with kids. And people who love kids and want to give them awe-inspiring experiences. Schools are places where teachers create rock shows and magazine launches. Schools are places where kids can be athletes and scientists. Schools can be places where kids are challenged to question and research and explore and wonder. Schools are places where kids dance and plant trees and hike and run meetings. Schools are places where kids build friendships, identies and 3-D printed design projects.


It’s where they write poetry, solve equations and fall in love for the first time. School is where kids find themselves one year, only to lose themselves a year later. School is where kids find confidence and take risks. It is where they test out their jokes and command a stage for the first time. A school is a place where they can leave the orbit of their parents for a few hours a day and see which other galaxies they might find themselves in. Schools are places where kids skin their knees, break their bones and learn to get back up. It’s the place where kids have to learn to fight back or to resolve conflicts between friends. Schools are where kids learn how to socialise around a meal or to eat alone. Schools are places where kids shred a guitar solo or forget the lyrics of the third verse. Schools are places where kids roam the halls looking for friends. It’s where they stand up to bullies, learn to talk to adults to demand their rights. Schools teach kids how to be activists, citizens and free-thinkers.


Schools are the most beautiful and important places in our societies. I am here tonight to challenge the narrative that schools are broken.


I am tired of constantly starting every conversation about how schools are places in need of drastic change, disruption or re-imagining.


(Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that I realise that I am blessed to work in a well-resourced school. I work at a top internationals school, where we are wanting for little. I want to be sensitive to people who might be reading this post who work in schools that are structurally damaged and morale vacant buildings. I have worked in such schools and I know it is hard to do your job in such environments.)


But even in such places, I refuse to continue to start every conversation about school that highlights the conceptual idea of school as a place of deficit. I’ve heard all the complaints. Hell, I have lobbed many of them myself: The curriculum is too intense, too much content, too many skills, too many tests, not student-driven enough, not enough tech, too much tech.


When we spread the narrative that schools are inherently broken we discredit and disrespect the two most important things that make-up schools: Kids and teachers.


I have spent the majority of my life in schools. And for all their faults, I still think they are amazing places. I still remember the rainy day afternoons in Mozambique waiting for the rain to stop so we could carry on because the floor had flooded for lack of windows. The fact that kids didn’t have shoes or books or pencils didn’t bother us none. The fact that I barely knew what I was doing didn’t seem to matter either. We were looking at the lyrics of Africa Unite by Bob Marley as a way to learn English. We laughed and smiled and built something unnameable. It was fueled by wonder and love.


All you need to run a school are kids and teachers who love kids and want to create awe-inspiring experiences for everyone on campus.


Tonight I was at Sound Asylum which is or annual MS rock show run by the music department ( Lee, Lindsey and Evind) in a constant state of goose-pimpled skin. I watched two hours of talented kids be rock stars. The team created an opportunity for these kids to stand on stage behind the lights and the smoke and in front of their peers and live out a dream. This is what a school is all about. Everything else is administration and bureaucracy.


It is not fair to kids if their teachers are constantly focused on looking at the problems of their school. We owe them more. Take a look at your school and ask yourself how you can create opportunities born from your love and passion- opportunities for your students to be inspired. If your curriculum has you down, or if you are buried under mandates of which you have no control, find other ways to build a culture of wonder in your school. A poetry reading, a basket ball league, a hands on science club, a coding team, a rock show, a magazine launch, a place to knit, plant a garden.


We don’t always need to focus on how to re-build our schools. Let’s change the conversations and focus on the fact that schools are by default great places because they are filled with kids. Everything else must grow from that understanding.

The Tricky Part

The tricky part about writing everyday, is that on the days where you do a lot, the ones that are chalk full of activities and blazing thoughts, you are the most exhausted and not really in a mood to tackle your thoughts and pin them to the page.


Take today for example- I had two classes of read-alouds that went pretty well, and between my three classes I must have conferenced with at least fifteen kids. Lunch time was a high pressure Daraja meeting hell-bent on being productive. All fourteen members showed up, on time, and were busy at work. This is no small feat.


My afternoon included a forty-five minute chat with an independent leadership consultant we work with at school. She is meant to play the role of critical-friend for the admin and mid-level leaders at school. She gave me some good advice and things to think about as I transition into the head of grade role. I am equal parts excited and terrified.


Then Daraja was asked to help run a wine and cheese night for grade eight parents. After some initial miscommunication, the team pulled together and it was a success. The three student volunteers were simply spectacular. I am so happy that after four years of work, our GC is sustainable and effective enough where I can ask for volunteers for two events in one week, and not only do they volunteer their free time at night, but they do it with grace and enthusiasm. Tomorrow night another set of volunteers will help launch our Lit Mag at a launch party the students have planned.


There is a lot to say about the leadership conversation and the beauty of student centered learning, but on a night like this- after I inhaled a vegan pizza from Alt and an entire box of Pizza cinnamon Dough-balls, finding the energy to clearly articulate any of it, feels difficult to muster.


There many thoughts hatched today, many things learned, a few moments of awe and the overcoming of panic, keeping it cool, there was complaining and negotiating, waiting and doing. And now the only thing left to do is sleeping.

Get Me In The Game

I woke up from an intense dream this morning. I was on some kind of outdoor-ed trip. It was not clear if I was a teacher or a student, but there were lots of exciting adventurous activities happening: rafting, zip-lines, intense games of paint-ball etc…


But as teams were selected for each event, I was completely ignored. Nobody wanted me to participate or to be on their team. They kept telling me to just chill and stay behind in the room. Catch up on reading. Don’t worry about it they would say. I was furious. All I wanted to do was participate, but I was invisible and when I finally started to make a stink and demand to be included, they became angry and told me to just get out of the way.


I was in the middle of a tantrum, when I woke up.


I seldom get angry in life. I am a pretty chilled and go-with-the-flow kind of guy, but I swear I was short of breath and slightly shaking when I woke up. I am no dream interpreter, but I think it meant that I want to get in it. I want to do it. Get me in the game. I am ready.

…

I’m at the airport now. I just inhaled a Sushi Burrito. If you don’t know what that is, take a minute and imagine what it could look like and I bet you are right. I board a plane to Manila in about thirty minutes and I have Spotlight downloaded for the flight. I spent the last few minutes emailing the chair of my Daraja GC with plans about what needs to be done for our meeting n Thursday. And earlier today I participated in a very productive meeting of our Lit Mag. The magazine is in our hands and we printed a massive beautiful banner to advertise it. We are planning a launch party next week. The reason I am bringing this up is because I am so proud of the student initiative of both these projects.


At the start of the year, I made a conscious decision to find ways to create more student-driven experiences for my students. The thinking went that although our academic curriculum might not always allow such freedoms as passion led projects and/or inquiry-based learning in our daily classes, it is vital that we find other ares of the curriculum to make them happen. And our Lit Mag is a great example of this. Paula and I have been very hands-off as a small group of dedicated grade 6-8 boys and girls have created this magazine. They have learned so much from the process. I want to do a more formal write up or even short film about the process, but the whole things reminds me that we can carve places and times to give students ownership of their learning.


I am proud of them. It is a beautiful product and I cannot wait for them to send it out into the world next week.

…

Next time you’ll hear from me, I will be in my hotel in Manila tomorrow night. I am excited to share thoughts and photos of what I can only assume is going to be a tremendous city. The gate beckons.