Act I: From the Desert to the Storming Sea

July 26, 2013: I began my day in my hotel in downtown Sacramento, eager to resume work on the new English and ELD curricular framework for the state of California. My experience on that committee (which really deserves an entry all its own) enriched, enlightened, and energized me as an educator every single day, so I was excited to get after it. I would have to leave the day’s proceedings early, however, since I had been summoned to a second round interview. The position was Associate Principal of Educational Development, and the high school was an intriguing one that had recently undertaken some fascinating reforms in order to serve the young residents of its urban barrio. Too sweet an opportunity to pass up, and the committee sent me off with their blessing.

As I wrote to the principal in my thank-you email the next day: “I have to say, that was probably the most probing interview I have ever encountered.” They moved me on to the third round the following Friday, August 2^nd. I would travel for this one, too, hopping a flight from San Diego on the 1^st and spending the night in my house while the rest of my family continued their vacation near the beach. I met with the Superintendent and two of his Assistants, we made conversation, and I connected with a friend I hadn’t seen in years who graciously took me right back to the airport. My biggest impression: the intransigence of the Superintendent’s poker face.

Within a ten-day span, the travelogue read like this: Sacramento, interview, home, San Diego, Legoland, home, interview, San Diego, Sea World, beach. Then we headed back home. We inched through the glacial traffic on I-5. I think we were passing Encino when my phone rang. Job: offered and accepted. I was now an administrator. We had plenty of time to celebrate – we didn’t arrive home until after midnight. I was in the office of my new district the next morning, about fourteen hours after they had called me on I-5, and really only seven hours since falling asleep the night before.

This is still the introduction, folks. Indeed, it’s all foreshadowing how this new title, headquartered in an office instead of a classroom, would radically re-write my professional routines. I was fingerprinted about eight hours after coming home from vacation. I would attend my first Department Chair and Teacher Leader meeting the next day. My first work day on campus: two days later. I had lunch with my now-former English department (which I was slated to chair) the next day, assured that the transition plan was in place. The following Monday: staff meeting (I got my official school polo). Then students arrived and classes started – eighteen days after my second round interview.

The teacups haven’t stopped spinning. Labor Day and Veterans Day, the first two off-days in the autumn, are separated by a ten-week blur that somehow included two report cards and three standardized tests taken by 1,000 students. I’ve only now caught my breath long enough to marvel at this blur, this daily fast-forward. I’ve called it crazy and chaotic to my friends when they ask what admin life is like, but I think those are misnomers. In this brief, reflective moment, I see that the pace has purpose. I’m one of a hundred electrons buzzing at light speed around campus, each of us on a similar orbit, yet we never collide because we all encircle the same nucleus. Everyone at this school concentrates on quality instruction, not as a high-minded, academic concept, but as a messy, living reality.

I told the interview teams that what I observed at this school was a “strong infrastructure that now needed someone to pour in the concrete.” Professional learning communities here are well established insofar as groups of interdisciplinary teachers have been meeting regularly to collaborate. The agendas for those meetings, however, are still not consistently refined. This year, we’ve tried focusing on specific instructional practices, and each PLC  (we call them “houses”) is responsible for experimenting with a common lesson every three weeks. The students, who are enrolled in cohorts with these PLCs in mind, are watching instruction transform before their eyes, as lessons are newly fortified with collaborative exercises, literacy instruction, essays and projects for the first time. My principal, my fellow associate principal, and I have experienced these shifts alongside our students. The three of us pursue an ambitious goal to watch every single teacher in action every three weeks, and we use an online app that instantly sends our feedback to teachers’ inboxes. I’ve conducted over 100 of these visits – a few formal evaluations, but mostly informal drop-ins – in the first sixty days of the school year, and I can count the teachers that I have not seen at all on one hand. Even if we remove the student emergencies, the facility breakdowns, the district meetings, the union dust-ups, and the nightly sporting events, this school still moves rapidly and constantly. But when those ancillaries are stripped away, the focus never wavers. We are deeply rooted in a search for a higher level of instruction and learning. We’re trying to infuse the classroom with a new emphasis on the ingenuity, literacy, and fluency of our youth. The seas may churn and rock around us, and Heaven knows we wobble and list quite a bit, but the course stays true, and our eyes stay fixed on that horizon.

I welcome the dizziness and nausea that come with such a journey. It’s the first time in a while that my professional mind has been pushed to travel, pushed to explore. I’m afraid the shores I left behind were all too static; the denizens mostly content to stay on the beach. Whenever an itch would tingle, and someone wanted something new to look at, they may get a few dozen students to erect an elaborate sand castle. There were a few teachers who led an annual ritual whereby students dug raw materials out of the sand and constructed a raft. Some of these ragtag vessels really impressed the faculty with their sound designs and even a touch of imagination here and there, and watching the students disembark into the water always inspired tears of pride. We waved, yet our toes sank a bit further into the sand with each student’s voyage, taking root. Nobody brought us a ship, and just getting those little rafts to float was exhausting. Eventually, the raft ritual was forgotten. Teachers took to admiring seashells, planting themselves thirty feet away and ten feet above the students, pointing and whistling while they practiced their strokes in the water.

Now, the deck beneath my feet is never stable, and the crew furiously churns the ropes and turns the sails all around me, hoping to catch the one perfect gust. My eyes dart back and forth in all directions, desperately hunting for the passage through Scylla and Charybdis and around the rocks where the sirens beckon, scrutinizing each wave for sharks approaching to steal our catch, and listening intently for the captain, lest he see a white fin splashing in the distance.