Love the Kids! Always Love the Kids!

So, my focus changed a bit during this time period of my career from being focused on making sure that teachers stayed happy to making sure that kids stayed happy! I waffled. I couldn't exactly tell who came first on most days.

There were days that the kids were frustrating the teachers so I would grab the biggest offenders and bring them into my office so the teacher could have some respite. The student and I would spend some quality time bonding and in the end we would both be pretty happy with the time spent. The surprise to me was that this seemed to upset the teacher! "Why is this student leaving your office happy? This student had made a mess of my lesson, my class and now he is happily leaving your office! What do the two of you do anyway? Eat candy and tell jokes???"

I was, undeniably surprised by this at first. I had thought that I was helping the teacher...giving the teacher a break from a student who was obviously pushing her buttons! I should have realized that the teachers really wanted a principal who would punish "bad" children! Of course, the breadbags were evidence of that!

Even the kids, sometimes wondered about me! One student spent a great deal of time in my office. I would calmly try to discuss each situation as it occurred. This kid finally said "Why don't you just face it. I come from a fighting family!" My response was "Well, I don't! So we have a problem!"

More than anything, I saw kids who would get upset about an injustice. Just as we all would. They wanted to be listened to. They wanted to be respected. It reminded me of a book that my own kid's nursery school teachers recommended to us as parents. It was called "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk". It was a book that changed my parenting forever and it was definitely the philosophy I went into administration with.

A couple of years later, after I had earned my stripes at this first school, one teacher said "Your style is completely like Jim Fey's Love and Logic." I didn't know what that was at the time. Based on her suggestion, I ordered some tapes and books and as a staff, we began the Love and Logic journey towards working respectfully with kids.

Off to My First Principal Job!

One short semester as an Assistant Principal and then my ship sailed to another elementary school where I took over in the month of February! I will never forget the feeling of nausea as I drove down the road to that school thinking that I was now to be in charge of it...a school that had had the same principal for so many years that most of the teachers had never known another principal.

I didn't want to move any of his things for fear it would upset people but it looked like he hadn't moved many of his things for years either! Dust had collected everywhere! I couldn't find the phone and someone had actually put a tin mailbox outside his office door so that current notes had a place to be seen. I decided to clean the office. Even the secretary laughed as I cleaned and sneezed! People dealt with that change quietly and watchfully.

But, within a short month, I committed the ultimate "sin". I disagreed with a long standing tradition! If students forgot their boots during the winter months, they were to wear bread bags over their shoes outside!

Nope, not on my watch!

Within seconds of hearing this, the breadbags came off and I called a staff meeting. What were they thinking? How would they like it if they had to wonder around the playground in breadbags? Not to mention the potential of slipping and falling...how would we explain to parents that their child got hurt because he slipped while wearing breadbags on his feet! Breadbags that we made him wear!

Lesson Learned - Know what you stand for! Know the lines in the sand that you simply will not cross no matter what! Humiliation is never a good way to get people to remember to do something!

Oh yeah! And don't be afraid to change around the office! It's time to let everyone know that someone new is in charge! Little changes mean a lot!

1996 - Administration, Here I Come!

My brother said, "If you are going to be in a job all your life, why wouldn't try to make the most money at it that you can?"


Good Question!


I had been working as a teacher since the 70's. I loved it but was not really going anywhere. If you know what I mean. Every beginning of every school year, some teachers actually even put up the same bulletin boards! I began to feel the need to change. I loved the kids. Loved The Kids! But each year, the months passed by and each year, my friends got more and more negative about the work. I found myself not wanting to go to work either at times. I knew that something had to change! I did not want to spend my days being negative.

It started with a sabbatical from my job...the opportunity to go back to school full time to pursue something in education as long as I committed to return to the district and stay for 3 years. Done deal! And there I was a full time college student again. This time getting certification for administration. Less then one year later, I was an intern assistant principal in an elementary school where I had taught. The following fall, I was the Assistant Principal there!

What I came in with was a desire to see the negative feelings go away from the staff. So I tried my hand at Symbolic Leadership. I told stories, had them tell stories and we wrote things down that we all believed in. We all knew that we believed in kids!

This first fall, we sailed off on the journey together, sharing things that we valued on gold paper coins and dropping them into a treasure box. We stayed focused through symbolic links to our ship and had fun...

... accept for one staff meeting right before winter break when I came in ready to finish up the work on the vision/mission statements and some of the teachers felt the meeting should have been a Christmas party instead. I had brought treats and planned the agenda to be quick and to the point but, in my mind, there still needed to be a meaningful outcome. It was the first time that I had a friend/teacher turn on me with a very clear question - "What is this shit? You should know better!"

Lesson learned - The staff meeting right before winter break is not the time to "keep pushing". Instead, it's a great opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of the year so far instead!

I learned my lesson!

1986 - Two Kids and a Masters Degree Later!

Within 10 years of teaching, so many things changed! Yes, I had two little girls now and a Masters Degree in Learning Disabilities but also the field of special education changed dramatically!

In the beginning, students just arrived in my classroom based on an IQ test given by the school psychologist. In the beginning, students labeled Mentally Retarded were not particularly welcome in the school. Classroom teachers didn't want them in their classrooms. Infact, when I started, special education programs were operated by counties not by the school districts. There was a belief that students with IQ's below 70 were unable to learn and took time away from students who could learn. Many children were sent to group live-in facilities. In Madison, there was Central Colony (now Central Wisconsin Center), in Jefferson there was St. Coletta's. There were others around the state. When the higher functioning children from these facilities started to be placed in public schools, people were afraid!

In the beginning, these children and their teacher stayed quietly in a classroom and cautiously started entering "regular" classrooms like Art class. With the passage of PI 94-142, all children with handicapping conditions were guaranteed a free and appropriate education. Special education teachers needed to learn how to administer formal testing and then had to write an IEP (Individual Education Plans) for each student. This job and the paperwork that it entailed was and has been an enormous burden for special education teachers. This group of teachers has been held accountable for student progress since that time. The passage of this bill really was the beginning of Individual Learning Plans that are just now becoming part of the "regular" classroom teacher's duty.

"Mainstreaming" students into regular classrooms was an exercise in letting go! I didn't trust that my kids would be safe out there in the rest of the school. Some teachers opened their arms to these kids but most felt that they had little or no skills to work with children who struggled to learn. So mainstreaming was still limited to classes like Art, Music, and Physical Education and sometimes Social Studies. Often, still, children with special needs were ostracized from the group learning often made to sit at separate tables.

With my Master's Degree, I added a certification to work with students with learning disabilities. At one point, I went with another teacher to talk with the superintendent to ask if we could merge my students (labeled Mentally Retarded) with students with Learning Disabilities. The superintendent was hesitant. "What will parents say?" The label was a deterent for many parents. They didn't want anyone to think that their child was "retarded"! We made it work with personality and humor and became one of the first Cross-categorical programs in our district and apparently around the state. The two of us were asked to speak to other district administrators and school board members about how it worked.

So in 10 years, my kids and I went from being self contained to included at least in part in classrooms. Over time, again with personality and humor, we became an important part of the culture of the school and the community.

1976 Was the Beginning...At Least For Me!

The first real teaching job that I got started as someone else's 1 year leave of absence. I was given a classroom in an elementary school with children labeled "Mentally Retarded". There were 9 little ones from grade Kindergarten to Grade 3.


It started out like this...

"Here's your room. Here's the key. Let me know if you need anything!

Ok, then!

I started by moving some furniture around and making my first ever bulletin board. I cut out something that looked a bit like a tree branch...I should have taken a picture! Remember that in life. You're going to wish you had pictures of everything!

I think I titled the board "Reaching Out to a New Year"! Or something like that.

After I felt like the room looked passable, I opened a file cabinet...and oh my god!

No files!

But PILES!

Piles of faded blue mimeographed sheets of paper with anything from coloring book pages to simple math problems in pica type. (There's some vocabulary to look up: mimeographed and pica)

Drawer after drawer...Stack after stack!

The kids were coming in two days! Wait! What kids? Did I have a class list? Did I have some form of information about who they were or what they needed? Oh well, I was sure someone would tell me when I needed to know!

For now, I was excited! I had a classroom. I had a bulletin board up that I had designed myself! And...I had an empty box that I could use to carry home one file drawer of paper stacks!

Life was good! Ahh...my first real teaching job!

Another Year Ready to File Away!

And there goes the 2009-10 school year!

The best part of working in the field of education is that you get to bring closure to each year! There is an orderliness to the whole thing. My files run chronologically from 1976 until now. Oh, I've left most of those files in other drawers and perhaps over time some hard copies have disappeared but they are filed neatly, none the less, in my brain.

Each year was a story; a chapter, perhaps in the greatest story ever told! For me, the novel is nearly at an end. You know how you linger over the last chapters of a really good book? It's like you want to know how it ends but you don't want it to be over. It's a dilemma! So you read just a little bit slower and you savour each closing paragraph.

For me and for my girls, I want to capture the story somewhere so that it is not just in my head. Ahh, the beauty of blogging. So as the actual novel winds to a close...let the story begin!