Perspective

You might remember this post where I talked about this fight (except I just looked and the news station has taken the actual video of the fight down).  Well, the week after that post and fight, the Superintendent of my school system was fired.  The school board has since over-turned the "firing" and let the man "resign with a settlement".  No one has ever heard exactly what lead to the firing that I know of, nor do I really care as long as I don't get fired, but I believe that there were just some mounting issues and the fight that was ok'd for TV/news was the straw.  That videoed fight, in my opinion, should have NEVER been ok'd to be put on the news.  But it did and we all see what happened next.

Anyway, as of right now, the board is looking for a new superintendent, but in the meantime have named the special education director as interim superintendent.  I have no idea of the man wants the job for real, but today, we got the following in our email inboxes:

From the Superintendent’s Perspective:







Good afternoon all,


This afternoon, I found myself thinking about the students that will be taking the tenth grade writing assessment tomorrow. After a few minutes I found myself praying for the students and that they will use all of the tools in their tool chests that were provided by their teachers while taking the test. I’m sure that our teachers have done all they can to prepare our students. But often, even when we are prepared for a task, we convince ourselves or allow others to convince us that we don’t have it in us to succeed. This phenomenon reminds me of a lesson in a book by Zig Zigglar.


In Zig’s book, Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World, he talks about a golf outing in which he walks up to the tee box, hits a drive, and slices into the trees, making a terrible shot. He backs away and says to himself, “I knew I was going to do that!” That raises the question, ‘Why did you hit the ball then?’ What we have to do is back away from the ball, reprogram the brain, ‘DOWN THE MIDDLE’, and hit the ball onto the fairway. We have to visualize our self succeeding. We must believe we can.


Often we are our own worst enemies. Not only do we listen and engage in negative talk about our community, our schools, and our students, sometimes we even listen to our own negative self-talk about our own capabilities.


I wonder what Zig would think of our potential if we would take accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative from lip service to practice. We would start to believe in ourselves and so would our students. There is no limit to what the Wildcats can accomplish. Good luck to our tenth grade students Wednesday.






Have a great week!


Terry


What I would like to say is WOW!  Do you know that in all my years of teaching I have never had anyone in any type of administration posistion speak so normally nor so pep-talky in a real way than this that you  have just read.  For a system who has sure seen some negative times the past year or so, I say kuddos to Dr. Larabee for stepping up and not only just doing the job, but doing it to the point where we might actually see some change. 

And what I'd really like to say even more than that is, what if we applied this to our own daily living and not just those of us teaching children in today's times?  What kind of difference would we have in our attitudes if we did so?  Try it!  I am!  And I might be surprised!!!

On a different note, it's been difficult to get back to work after that week off.  The week was not near long enough and although sleep was not on the agenda, it's just hard to get back at it.