matching tracksuits

I've been reading the first batch of journals from my sixth graders, and much of it is what you'd expect: cutely amusing from the girls; generally fairly lackluster from the boys.

And then I read Z's journal. Her family went through some tough times a couple of years back, and it caused her to be very insecure, she wrote, and she confessed that that manifested itself in a meanness that most would never expect from her. She worked her way through it, but it made her into the person she is today, she concluded. She is, in her words, someone who "give[s] grace to mean people" because one never knows what they've been through.

That's a lesson most adults don't seem to learn let alone an eleven-year-old girl.

When I began working at Hughes nearly twenty years ago, one of the first things I had to learn was a number of different procedures and protocols. What does one do on hall duty in this spot? How many grades do I have to give during a quarter? Where do I take my students during a fire drill, and what paperwork do I need to complete once the drill is over? What is the procedure for afternoon dismissal? How do I handle late work? All of these things were already in place when I began, and while the new principal (who started the same year as I did) made a few tweaks in the program, he wasn't inventing out of a void: he was merely changing existing procedures.

Yet when founding a new school, none of that is in place. Last year we had to decide on all of those things and more. Then this year, moving to a brand new building, we had to re-invent most of it. Four weeks into the new school year and we've finally got most of this settled. Class changes follow certain guidelines and procedures. Lunch and recess play by rules that we're constantly adjusting to smooth transitions between the two.

No procedure has given us more grief, though, than afternoon dismissal. We have approximately 750 students that we have to get out of the building and into cars as quickly as we can while maintaining strict safety protocols to prevent any mishaps that might result in injury. The first time we ran the carline with all students in attendance, it took well over an hour to get everyone into cars and heading home. We have in place protocols now that have reduced that time. I thought of the tweak we're now implementing that has made things go so much faster, but it was a tweak that we had to implement carefully and thoughtfully. Run carelessly, our procedure could be problematic at best, but we've worked out an entire system of checks and redundant protocols that ensure everything will run smoothly for everyone. It's a whole system involving verbal communication, non-verbal communication in the form of color-coded signs and groupings, adults in specific and strategic locations to keep a careful eye on everything. Taken altogether, the new procedure has reduced the time to just over half an hour -- an acceptable time for a magnet school, which has no buses for students.

This is just a small version of what we have done as societies and cultures for millennia. Why do we drive on the left side of the road in most of the world? Why do we stop at red lights and go on green lights? Why do we implement this particular punishment for that particular crime? Indeed, why do we decide something is a crime -- or more strikingly, is a crime in some situations but not in others? Nothing novel about these thoughts -- college freshmen taking Sociology 101 cover these ideas in the first few lectures of the semester. Yet I've never been in a situation where I'm part of the creation of procedures that, in coming years, will be something that new hires must learn and master.