Resilience

 It's been another exhausting week... lets all be honest. We read and hear a lot about how amazing and how exhausted our teachers are in this learning environment but I assure you school administrators are also exhausted. We listen to our teachers, staff, students, parents, boards of education and listen some more, so much of what they tell us and want answers is really out of our control but we know it helps for them to tell us and feel like someone is at least hearing them and cares about them too. My mantra has become "we are all doing the very best we can right now" and I truly believe that. Everyone is struggling, everyone is looking for answers and often they are not aligned with what others want and desire and are putting us at odds with one another. To add fuel to the fire, we are all exhausted and want to just hug our loved ones, many of whom we can not even see right now because of the pandemic. 

    This month, I joined two members of my PLN who every November Tweet out daily a #gratitudesnap. I do mine first thing every morning, before I even go to the gym and it has helped to remind me in this challenging time in our lives all that I have to be thankful and grateful for. On the weekends, I am simply grateful for some time for self care and time with family and away from work (provided I don't have to contact trace which is nearly inevitable these days) but I at least get to slow down and be with family and in my own home where I feel safest. Doing this daily has really helped to frame out my day in a positive light from the outset as I think mostly about the people who have helped to shape me in so many ways and that I am so lucky to be able to spend anytime with right now. I believe 2020 has really helped some of us double down on the importance of family and values and how these things shape the way we view the world. 

    As with other posts, I will also share a recent personal story that I am still somewhat struggling with since I have thought that I have been doing so well throughout the pandemic and have really been in a positive and good place within myself. Last Thursday, I had a terrible pain in my chest that to me seemingly came out of nowhere. I was at work and really starting to panic because I needed to launch an IEP meeting for a parent that I knew would be upset if I was not ready to go early but I was really struggling to pull myself together for the meeting. One thing I can tell you I hate about Zoom is that it is so dependent on one person to launch the meeting and in our school, that is most often the school administrator and our administrative assistants love lining us up with meetings so we barely have time to get to the bathroom in between. This particular day and time, I did have about ten minutes between meetings, which you would think would be a huge relief but instead I get railroaded in between meetings by an unhappy teacher who I had spoken directly to about being an indirect exposure but she was upset because she didn't get the blanket letter the district sends and seemed to need the letter. While I know it was not this one thing, and I would NEVER blame it on just this one thing, what happened afterwards was I had the second anxiety attack I had ever had in my life. I landed in the nurses office who wanted me to go to the emergency room. I was scared because we had a new nurse who did not know me at all and I did not understand why I was feeling like this at all. The pressure of everything had finally gotten to me; it took about 10-15 minutes in her office before I was finally able to come down from it and I just sat there and cried. Two of my good friends drove me home afterwards, my colleague took the meeting for me and I once again realized all of us, including myself are doing the very best that we can right now and that perhaps I sometimes need to even forgive myself when I don't live up to something that others think I should because at the end of the day, administrators are just people too. 

    The final thought I want to share this month is that I really wish we would focus on the resilience of everyone in our school community and not on the coverage of content. Can we stop making the focus of meetings how far behind we are in content? The whole world is behind... it is a global pandemic! PK-12 education is also the culmination of 13 years of teaching and learning and none of it looks the way we think it should right now, we are inventing it all as we go. We should be grateful and thankful that our kids are getting out of bed and even getting on Zoom to attend classes. We could and will probably continue to cover content that we need to and should but I question how much any of our brains are able to retain right now because none of us are well. What I do know is that I will always remember my two friends that took care of me and drove me home that afternoon, my colleagues that text me several times because they didn't know what happened (and I still haven't really told them), and how much my brother supported me that afternoon and the days that followed. Don't you think the same is true of our students? What they are going to remember right now from this time is the relationships with their teachers; not the pythagorean theorem or reading Catcher in the Rye or studying the Civil War. We need to double down a few months into school on our relationships, not how far behind we are in a global pandemic. 

    As a school administrator, the first question I will always ask my staff and students is "how are you?" and when they start in on talking about academics... I will again reframe the question because we have to take care of our people, especially right now!! Stay well and continue to do the best you can right now because that is truly all we can do.