All over the internet lately, folks have been making very public mistakes and making apologies of varying degrees of effectiveness and watching all of this happen very much in public has made me think about how we deal with mistakes and pain and hurt in our schools.

We all make mistakes that end up hurting other people – and most of time the hurt we cause is unintentional. In schools, that happens all the time. Teachers are dealing with four or five classes a day with 30 kids in them. Administrators juggle the needs and wants of teachers, students, parents and districts. And students, in addition to all of the school-based content they are learning, are learning what it means to be human in a rather confusing world. All those folks in close quarters every day… it is a wonder that we get through the day at all.

So inevitably, we hurt one another.

One of the things we should learn is how to deal with it when we do that.

Randy Pausch gave us a pretty good roadmap in his last lecture when he outlined the steps for a real apology. His steps:

  1. What I did was wrong.
  2. I am sorry I hurt you.
  3. How can I make it better?

You don’t even have to say that you didn’t mean to hurt the other person. You don’t have to get defensive. You just have to simply say, “My bad.”

As educators, this can be really hard to do when students are trying to tell us that we hurt them. Kids don’t always tell us that we’ve hurt them in the best way. They get angry, they act out, they compound our mistake with their own. And as teachers (and certainly as principals), we can get hung up in their reaction rather than in our initial action or we can think that we might appear weak by saying, “I’m sorry” or we can worry so much about our over-work, our exhaustion, our sacrifices – our ego – that we lose sight of the people in front of us.

I wish I could say that I’m great at this all the time. I’m not. I’m plenty prideful, and I can think of far too many moments where my own mess got in the way of really listening to the other person and making the best apology I could make. But I try. I endeavor to be a person that the students and teachers of SLA feel comfortable coming to and saying, “Here’s how you screwed up today…” or worse, “Here is how you hurt me today,” secure in the knowledge that their concerns will get listened to openly and honestly, and that they can feel that I am willing to apologize, mean it, and work hard to do better.

All of this is to say, there is incredible power in the words, “My bad.”

We should all get more comfortable with owning our shared, flawed humanity and be willing to say them more often.