SMS Principal Blog

“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” -Vince Lombardi This past Thursday quickly set the bar for what it will take to get onto my "Proudest Principal Moments" list. Several weeks ago, I put forth an idea to my staff that I wanted to kick off a commitment to community service by holding a Service Day at Sullivan Middle School. I believe that one of the responsibilities we have as educators is to instill in our students a sense of ownership in their community. If our small town is going to succeed in this next century, it will be because individuals took it as their personal responsibility to make it so. The extent to which our students pour themselves into making our community stronger will largely determine how successful we will be.  My vision was to have a fall day of service in which our students would break into their grade level groups and take on some smaller service pr...

"I am not a teacher, but an awakener." -Robert Frost Earlier this week, I shared a blog post  written by Dave Meister. He was my principal during my time in the classroom, and I credit him with a great deal of the learning and growing I did as an educator. In my first year, he dropped a book on my desk that challenged many of my notions about what school should look like. What has followed has been a decade long exploration into how we teach and how students best learn. What Dave and Robert Frost are getting at here is the root of great teaching and learning. A tired and unengaged mind is only capable of so much, but if we can get our kids' brains firing on all cylinders, anything is possible. With our 1:1 initiative, we have the tools to point our students in the right direction and then let them run. Don't be afraid to let go in the way Dave describes in his post. One of the greatest gifts I ever received as a classroom teacher was the ability to take risks w...

"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...