One of the dangers of both the teaching life and even more the administrative life is the getting caught up in the day to day world of crisis management, paperwork pushing and just getting through. For me, the past few weeks have bordered on that. We had to spend out our budget of all supplies, equipment and furniture by yesterday, which meant lots of meeting with vendors, going over purchase orders, figuring out what rooms would be needed next year… in short, important stuff, but all tangential to teaching and learning. And that’s important to remember — because it is tangential to the learning.

There will always be another central office memo, there will always be another report to file and it’s easy to mistake those things for our jobs as administrators, especially in the "Era of Accountability."

They aren’t.

Yes, we have to do them. Yes, we should do them on time if we want to keep our jobs. And yes, there is merit in many of these tasks, but if we allow them to become our lives, we will get stagnant.

The blogs can re-energize us, our colleagues can re-energize us, but in the end, we have to take responsibility for walking into our building every day and not just seeing what is in front of us but seeing what could be.

Some weeks, I do that better than others. But it’s my goal, every day.