High Fives for Days

"Give people high fives just for getting out of bed. Being a person is hard sometimes."
-Kid President

I don't know what it is about short weeks, but they sure can seem long sometimes. Last week was a struggle for me because I wasn't physically able to do everything I wanted to do. I was relying heavily on pain killers and muscle relaxers just to get dressed and get myself to work. The entire week was a struggle for me. When Friday afternoon rolled around, I could sense that for different reasons, many of you were on the struggle bus with me. It was a short week. It should've been easy, but there we were, grinding through the last few minutes of the work week like shell shocked survivors of a natural disaster, so I decided to go around and give everyone a high five. 

I don't know why, but it just seemed like everyone could use a high five. I get lots of them throughout the day. For some reason, middle school kids like to give the principal a high five, and once that hand is up, every kid within 200 yards has to join in. I like it. No matter how stressed I am, 37 high fives cheer me up, so I thought I'd go give all of you one.

As I walked into classrooms, almost every teacher looked at me like, "Oh crap. What is he going to ask me to do now? I was almost out the door!" When I walked up and put my hand up and just said "Good week! You deserve a high five. Have a great weekend," every single teacher smiled and relaxed a little bit. It was a simple gesture, but I walked out of the building feeling pretty good having connected with (almost) all of you in a positive way. 

One student who witnessed this said she didn't know teachers high-fived each other. She had never seen anything like it. We are #OneTribe. That means we all support each other. I promise that I do my best to make your lives at work as good as they can be, but the simple fact of the matter is that ours is a stressful and demanding job when done well, and you all do it tremendously well. I can't make it stressfree and easy without watering down what we deliver to students, but I can encourage you and cheer you on as you do it. I can assure you that your efforts are appreciated, but even in that, I am only one man. Pick each other up. We are a team. Give each other high fives. Get a few of you together and get a little breakdown before class starts: "Teach on Three. 1, 2, 3 TEACH!" We are a team. The more we act like a team, the more fun we will have hashtag winning.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 15, 2018 at 6:05 AM

    Kudos to our staff because I feel like we do an AWESOME job of encouraging each other and helping each other out! We've done this for years and it makes a huge difference when you come to work with people you enjoy working with and who become friends.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mr. OgleOctober 19, 2018 at 12:02 PM

      I agree, but I think that it often happens out of sight of students. Feel free to celebrate each other right out in the hallway. Let them see that we have fun working together.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Full of It

Image
"Teaching should be full of ideas instead of stuffed with facts." -Unknown I remember having to memorize all sorts of things in school. At one point, I could recite the first 30-some elements of the periodic table, all of the state capitals, the presidents in order, and the states in alphabetical order. I can still do the state thing, which blows my wife away because they did not sing that particular song at her Catholic elementary school. My kids probably can't do any of those things, but I see them doing things that I couldn't have even begun to attempt at their age. The age of information is transforming our relationship with information, with facts. There was a time when memorizing the periodic table may have been helpful because it saved you the time of pulling out a book to find it. The investment of time to memorize it presented a positive return in the time you would save constantly having to find it. Now that we are all carrying the sum total of the co
Read more

Oxygen Masks

"When you take care of yourself, you're a better person for others. When you feel good about yourself, you treat others better. " -Solange Knowles I was reminded this morning, as I almost slid through a stop sign, that in spite of some mild weather last week, we are likely several weeks away from the end of winter. This realization kind of bummed me out, to be honest. I had already let my mind turn toward thoughts of spring activities and getting back out into the fresh air, but this morning I'm reminded that it is still January. These thoughts let me to other thoughts about how quickly January has gone. Really, as we look ahead to parent teacher conferences and then PARCC followed by Spring Break, this whole semester is likely to fly by, and we will be enjoying those warm spring days before we know it, but his week is all about heart health, and I know winter is a time where it is easy to fall into some bad habits, so much like flight attendents remind us
Read more

#OneTribe

"I realized if you can change a classroom, you can change a community, and if you change enough communities you can change the world." -Erin Gruwell For anyone who attended last night's varsity girls Sectional Championship game, I hope you felt the same sense of pride and community when our (significantly larger) crowd erupted when our girls took the court to begin their warmups and then over and over again throughout the game, especially in that very exciting first half. For about 90 minutes, any differences some individuals in attendance may have with one another, we were united in a common purpose-- to support our Lady Redskins up until the final buzzer sounded, at which point they earned a well deserved standing ovation for giving us all something to get excited about this week. I love moments like that. Championship runs are a prime example of the sense of community that can be built when a group of people all share a common goal or sense of purpose, when
Read more