Practical Theory

So... for the first time in, I think, a year and a half, I played in a club tournament today. I'm playing with Drunken Masters, a NYC Masters Division team. Now, at Sectionals, you just play in the Open Division, which means that I spend my day chasing players who were upwards of 17 years younger than me (Hello, Adam!) The good news -- I survived without injury. The better news -- I played reasonably well. The best news -- I had a great time. This is a great group of guys to play with, the weather was perfect, and we were just competative enough to make it really fun. I've mourned the end of my competative Ultimate days... but today reminded me that while I don't have the time (or probably the ability) to play on a team that wants to train hard and compete in one of the other divisions to go to Nationals, but I can play Masters and have a lot of fun.

Even more fun was playing against and in front of Beacon kids. Yes, they are all faster than me now, but that's not the point. It's just fun to be out there with the kids I taught to play. And it was fun to play in front of Jakob... if I can hang around for another few years, he might even remember his dad out there.

Regionals in two weeks... more fun to be had.

I just found the first thing I hate about Serendipity. I just had a long entry based on this article from today's Times on Tenure, Turnover and the Quality of Teaching. But I timed out of the administration and lost the whole thing.

argh

I just stumbled across this essay by J. B. Schramm of College Summit. College Summit is a non-profit that looks to help lower income kids -- specifically the ones who aren't the straight A kids -- into college. Mr. Schramm seems like a pretty amazing guy... he's a Yale and Harvard Divinity grad who went to work in Washington, DC at a local ministry and then found a problem -- too many urban kids who could go to college don't. I've seen it here in NYC as well -- where middle class kids with Cs find the schools that will accept them, many of the poorer kids don't. Beacon is an exception because of the outstanding work of Stephanie Binder and the advisors who care about the kids.

I saw it acutely in the basketball world where kids who were solid players and decent students didn't go on because... well... for any number of reasons. I've tried working with college coaches to get more of them to recruit in the city, because I really think that there are so many amazing kids who could excel scholastically and athletically at Div II and Div III schools. But, and it's not hard to understand why this happens, it's easier for the college coaches -- and college admissions offices -- to find similar kids in the more affluent areas of our society where the apparatus is in place to support those kids.

And that's my small window into that world. I know at Beacon, we've sent dozens of kids off to college who were the first in their families to go to school. We've had so many kids who never thought they could leave New York City for school go off and have great success. And it sounds like we do it with a very similar approach to College Summit. It's something to replicate at SLA... and something we want to build in when those first kids are 9th graders.

But... go read the essay. It's from a chapter of a book called How to Change the World. It's a wonderful reminder of how a small effort can steamroll into something much larger. As my good friend Nate Turner has posted on the outside of his classroom door:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

-- Margaret Mead

Where do you go after Beacon?

For me... I'm going back to Philadelphia with an opportunity to do something truly amazing.

I'm going to be the founding principal of the new Science Leadership Academy. This is going to be a small magnet school built in partnership with The Franklin Institute. It really is a dream come true. For people who don't know it, the Franklin Institute is one of the most well-known, well-respected and beloved cultural institutions in Philadelphia. It is a science and technology museum / exploratorium that has been around for a couple hundred years. I can't imagine a better partner institution to work with to start a school.

As for the school itself, it will be two blocks from the institute. It's going to be small -- between 400-500 students -- and we'll start with a ninth grade in 2006.

So I get to go home, work with one of my favorite places in the world and start a school that hopefully can make a difference in my city.

Yep. I'm excited.

Well, I'm resistant to change... and I'm moving to Philadelphia, starting a new job, changing my web site and my email address -- so needless to say, I'm a little out of sorts these days. Changing my blog software could possibly have been the last straw.

But Serendipity is quite a cool piece of software. I love their plugin manager, and because I can't just install tons of software on this new server, I've actually had an excuse to try Flickr and Del.icio.us. Fun stuff!

(Now, if only I could figure out what I did wrong when I imported all the old entries so that the line breaks weren't recognized...)

As much as I usually prefer using a program like Gallery over Flickr, mostly because I just like hosting stuff myself, I admit that I really like the social nature of this software -- same with del.icio.us. It is interesting to see what friends of mine are posting on flickr... and it's fascinating to see who else has linked to sites and what sites they link to.

Anyway... I'm bought in. And as I think about designing the new school's technology program, I need to think about how these new programs might fit in.

As everyone at Beacon knows already, I'm not there anymore.

After nine amazing years, I've left Beacon to take a new position in Philadelphia as the principal of a new small school. More details about that in a later post. This is about Beacon.

Every teacher should be lucky enough to work at a place like Beacon. I haven't written this post even though I've known I was leaving for a few weeks because I really didn't know how to sum up what I feel about the place. I've listened to and read about so many teachers at other schools who feel that actual teaching and learning is the last thing they are allowed to think about, and I count myself as blessed that I've been at a place where we are encouraged to think about that all the time.

I've had the chance to work with administrators who dared us to care about our craft, our kids, our colleagues and our community. The only restriction I ever found in nine years at Beacon was the sheer number of hours in the day. If you had an idea and you were willing to make it a reality, you knew that you worked for people who would support you and wanted to see that happen.

And I've had the chance to work with some of the most brilliant teachers that I could imagine. I've talked to prospective teachers about what it's like to work at Beacon. In some schools, a good teacher becomes the MOST beloved... the MOST favored, etc... but at Beacon, that just makes you one of many. I always loved being one of many. I always loved knowing that no matter how amazing I thought a lesson plan was... how well a class went... that I could exit my classroom, walk down the hall and see something that blew it away. I have had the chance to learn from and work with the best teachers in the business. I only wish I had had more time to spend in their classrooms.

And then there are the kids... hopefully, anyone who has spent any time reading this blog knows what they mean to me. Beacon kids buy into the dream that a school can be much more than that. Beacon kids come to practice at 6:30 am and stay late for Open Houses until 9:00 at night. Beacon kids question your pedagogy if you ever try to take them out of the equation. Beacon kids ask if they can try to do a project "their way." Beacon kids eat lunch in their teachers' offices. Beacon kids write long screeds on the Beacon forums at 2:00 am. Beacon kids come back and visit. And Beacon kids graduate from Beacon knowing that it means something to say, "I went to Beacon."

The scariest thing about leaving Beacon is feeling that I won't be able to find a group of people who want to build a place like Beacon again. But that can't be the reason not to do it. This is what I said at graduation this past year, and yes, I knew there was a chance I wouldn't be back when I said it, although at the time I thought it was a small chance. So in some small way, I was challenging myself as well as the Class of 2005.

In the end, we are all lucky. We have been able to spend time in a place where these values, hard work, passion, engagement, growth, trust, perseverance, kindness and care mean something. But that doesn’t happen by accident. You all – we all – have been lucky enough to share a vision of what a school, a community can be. And in the end, those values and that vision are as important as any fact or figure you have learned in your classes. But for those ideals to truly mean something, the responsibility now falls to you to replicate it in your lives after Beacon. You must take the values that have most allowed you to thrive at Beacon and extend them to your day-to-day lives. So many of you have expressed a concern that you won’t “find a place like Beacon” after you leave. And this is my challenge to you -- create one. Live your life that way, and others will follow. Ask Ms. Lacey, ask any member of the faculty, they’ll tell you, it may not be the easiest path to take, but, in the end, it’s well worth it.

So that's my challenge now, I guess. To create a place that means as much for the people who inhabit it as Beacon has meant to all of us who have walked its halls. Needless to say, the bar has been set rather high.

There are many posts to write about what is coming next... and I hope people follow this blog over to its new home at PracticalTheory.org. I'm in my planning year now, and I plan on sharing a lot of the questions I grapple with in my planning at the new site.

Thank you to the Beacon community for being my home for the past nine years. Thanks to all those who read this blog... and here's to creating more communities that matter in our schools.

Go read.

I haven't written an entry for a few days, and as I've been watching and reading all the footage about Katrina and its aftermath. I've tried to write about what I thought and felt, and honestly, nothing I put down seemed even close. Sadness, anger, disbelief, outrage... I couldn't believe that this was my country... that we would allow this to happen. I couldn't believe that our government could fail its own people so completely.

I was saving links to stories, as if somehow, I could make sense of this. I gave a significant amount of money to the Red Cross. I donated clothing to Salvation Army for designation to Katrina relief. I wanted to be able to somehow make some sense of this for myself. There was no sense to be made.

Then, tonight, I watched Rescue Me -- the decent FDNY drama with Dennis Leary. Tonight, in the closing moments, a child dies, and we see the reaction of the parents. It really crushed me to see that. And, after spending twenty minutes watching Jakob sleep, I realized that what makes all of this harder to deal with than it used to be is that I look at the world now as the world Jakob will inherit. (And now, any time I see anything that suggests a parent losing a child, I'm a wreck.) The cruelty and injustice I see around me is even more painful because it isn't the world I want Jakob to have to deal with.

I've tried to live my life with the belief that we try to leave the world a little better off for our presence. It's been a core belief of mine for a long time... thanks to my father. Now, with my own son, that belief has become more powerful... and I realize that the sadness and injustice I see around me hits me just that much harder.

To the city of New Orleans, we failed you. It was a failure of compassion, a failure of political will, a failure to recognize our responsibility to the common man.

Sterling Newberry, over at The Blogging of the President, has written the speech we most need to hear from President Bush right now.

I'm going to quote the entire post in the extended entry, just because I think it really should be read. It's most brilliant because it isn't partisian. It is compassionate, but realistic, and it is a specific list of things that our government can and should do to help in this time of great need. It even recognizes Bush's deep religious convictions and honors them in this speech.

My politics are well-known, but I'd be the first one to cheer President Bush if he gave a speech even resembling this.