As I sit at my computer this Thanksgiving, I am thinking about all the things for which I’m grateful. It’s a long and fairly clichéd list, except for this one thing. One of things for which I am eternally grateful is the principal every educator hopes to avoid for the entirety of their career.
I love teaching and just being in a middle school. Specifically, I love sixth graders. I loved teaching sixth graders. I loved sparring with them. I loved creating spaces where they could find and be themselves. I’d like to think I was pretty good at it. I’d been teaching there for 15 years. I knew I didn’t want to teach anywhere else. I knew I’d found my people and my purpose.
He was foisted upon us, ignoring precedents that had allowed the staff and community to meet prospective principals and offer feedback. I was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt and I tried. I did. I could give you a list of reasons why it didn’t work out, but that’s not really the story I want to tell. It took me a few years, but I reached the point where I knew I couldn’t, in good conscience, work for him one more year. I devised an exit strategy.
Years earlier, there’d been talk about closing my school, pushing fifth grade back into the elementaries and pushing sixth grade into the middle school. The first thing I did was get my 6-12 history certification because I was never, ever going to work in an elementary school. Ever. I was pretty clear on that front. There was a middle school gifted position open and I set my sights there. My first interview was at an elementary school. Good practice, I thought. I’m never going to work in an elementary school. Really.
I tend to believe that things turn out the way they’re meant to turn out, but I really wanted that middle school job. I didn’t get it. I was offered a K-4 gifted position. I took it because I really couldn’t work for that principal for another year. I took it because I’d heard good things about the school, about the assistant principal in particular.
I made a kindergartner cry on the first day of school when I asked him how his day was going. That’s when I started keeping a list of things I’d learned. Never ask a kindergartner how their day is going on the first day of school. Try to avoid tying wet shoelaces at any cost. Don’t ask where that bug came from. Some days kids just want to be called by their superhero name. School is not the most important thing in a child’s life. Sometimes you have to just open the back door of your classroom and let them go for a run.
A year later the assistant principal was the principal (after a community forum, I might add). Seven years later and I know I have that terrible principal to thank for where I am now. I was a pretty good middle school teacher, but if I ever go back, I’ll be so much better than I was.
I’m in my eighth year of teaching in an elementary school. When I taught middle school, I thought I was teaching students rather than subjects and maybe I was, but now I know I’m teaching students first. I thought I was holding students to high standards, but often did so without room for grace - for them or myself. Parents were often an obstacle to overcome rather than a partner on the team. Students who misbehaved did so because they were ‘bad,’ rather than because we saw behavior as communication.
Teaching in this elementary school created a seismic shift in who I am as a teacher. It forced me to see the whole child in ways I hadn’t before. Though I’d always known it was true, I can clearly see how important a principal is to the well-being of a school.
When the principal sees her staff as people rather than simply teachers it allows teachers to see their students as children rather than simply students. When the principal allows her teachers to take risks, teachers allow students to take risks. When the principal does what she can to take care of her teachers, teachers have space to take care of their students in ways they might not otherwise. There is real magic in knowing your principal will never ask you to do something she would not be willing to do herself.
So tonight, I find myself very grateful for the principal who did none of those things. Without him, I’d be puttering along doing a pretty good job, but I’d have missed the bigger, more important picture.
Students deserve teachers and principals who see the big picture and understand what their place is and what it isn’t in that picture. Tonight, I’m thankful for the principal who helped me see the magic I’d been missing.
Thank goodness for those that create openings for us to bloom in the midst of their turmoil.
You remain one of the very best teachers my offspring had and they still talk about you with respect and admiration.