Many principals in the School District of Philadelphia worked at least some of this week. (I took Monday and Tuesday off.) One of my colleagues talked about how, after catching up on paperwork, cleaning her office and getting a lot of the immediate stuff off of her plate, she wasn’t sure what to do next. I threw out some ideas… write up a wish-list of where you want your school to be… revisit a process in the school that you don’t think works well… or even just catch up on the Ed Leadership magazines that gather dust in the office. Of course, I was making those suggestions while still feeling the weight of my "must-do" list.

And as I’ve been reflecting on that interaction for two reasons. The first thing I was thinking about was how, after what has been a very stressful last year or so in the School District, it is harder than it should be to actually step back, reflect and plan. So many principals – myself included too often – have been struggling to deal with the changes, the cuts, the mandates, such that when we find ourselves without an imminent deadline, we don’t always know what to do. I try to keep a list of stuff to do when I find myself not knowing what to work on next, but when you are always living in crisis, it can be really hard to get to that list. And all over this country, principals (and teachers) are living in the grind too much. And for me, I needed this week at work – as crazy as that sounds – just to feel good about entering 2012 ready and not in the middle of a crisis, even if I didn’t clear everything off of my to-do list – let alone my wish list.

But then, I started thinking about our students who struggle the most in our schools. Most teachers who don’t assign homework over Winter Break tell those students who are behind, "Use this time to catch up." I know I did that all the time. And a lot of kids do use Winter Break to catch up, but then they haven’t really gotten out of that crisis mode. It is easy to say, as a teacher, "Why didn’t you use the rest of the time to plan? To get ahead?" But when you have felt behind for so long, it can be hard to look forward and plan… and so patterns get repeated.

If we want schools to be healthier places, we have to look at the unhealthy patterns that exist and try to figure out how to undo them. I don’t like living in crisis-mode, so on a personal / administrative mode, I am going to make more of a concerted effort to figure out how not to. But I think I have to remember to be one school here. I want all of adults at SLA to think about that feeling of "Oh no, what’s next?" that we have all felt from time to time… and I want us to remember the paralysis we felt when we fell behind on narratives and then had to catch up… or when the grading load nearly broke us… and then I want us to think about how we can not just learn to mitigate those moments for ourselves, but for our kids as well.