Not the Smartest in the Room

It is an extraordinary feeling to be in a room with 1000 people and get the feeling that almost all of them know more than you about something very important. That is a rough approximation of my experience at the Building Learning Communities 08 conference I attended last week in Boston. The conference is an activity of November Learning and its namesake, Alan November, who has been a leading educator and technology advocate for as long as I can remember.

The most important lesson I relearned was that all of this technology is in service to enriching student learning. That is a mantra we will have to repeat often this year as we work with teachers to prepare them for a time when our high school students all come to class with laptops. Jon Orr, one of our schools most tech savvy teachers will be working with our faculty to provide them with the knowledge to use the tech tools we have or will be getting.

I often wonder if 19th century teachers went through all this angst when the lead pencil replaced chalk and slate and inkwells and quills. Were there pencils workshops? Could you get a Master's Degree in educational pencilship?

There is an enormously interesting world out there, a world with challenges that I know our students can tackle. In wrestling with those problems, they learn more useful material than reciting the Gettysburg Address or listing the elements of the periodic table. Technology can put the world at our fingertips, but that is only an advantage if we know how to interact with it.

I expect that students will be bemused at our efforts to use technology to learn. Some of the coolness of having a blog is dimished when every old guy (read administrator) has one. But if we do it right, the journey to using education to enhance student learning is a journey we can take together. I hope it works that way at Faith.

He's Baaaaack.....

I am back in town after a brief respite. Besides my parents and a few other relatives, our time was structured around visits with people who had crossed our path along our thirty years in Lutheran schools. In contrast to Mary and I who've moved around a bit, we enjoyed some time with Barb and Mark Korntheuer who have spent their entire careers at Walther Lutheran High School in Melrose Park, Illinois. A few days later we lunched with John and Ramona Ragland. John is at former athletic director at Faith and is now the Interim Executive Director of Rockford Lutheran High School (I am a proud alum, class of '74). Ramona teaches at Concordia Lutheran School in Machesney Park, IL (my 1st Lutheran School). The Lutheran world is really connected! We also spent time with Larry and Rhoda Baldwin, now living in Iowa (a relatively dry part). I miss Larry's excellence in teaching and our common frustration with the game of golf. Larry is serving on the Board of Valley Lutheran High School in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Those Lutheran Schools in the Midwest reflect much earlier some of the challenges we may soon face. They are facing even worse economic conditions than we currently have in Las Vegas. It reminds me that the sacrifice parents make to provide Christian education for their students must be honored by those delivering that education. We will work to expand dollars available for financial aid and work with families facing short-term financial situations that make timely tuition payments difficult. We just ask that families stay in contact with us and let us know when a problems occurs, not when tuition is so far in arrears that a student's attendance is in doubt.

I am fearful that my vacation is so attached to my work, but our lives would be much poorer without these wonderful people from who I have learned much, laughed until it hurt and shared the joy of ministry.

BHAG

In a few hours our faculty will embark on a journey that will never end, but hopefully reach it's destination fourteen months from now. Today we start the first of six hours of technology training over the next two days, the first sessions in a series designed to help our teachers use technology as an effective tool in instruction. That instruction will continue into the fall and throughout the next school year. It is a part of an overall strategy to integrate technology in an ubiquitous way. It is one leg of our BHAG.

Readers of Jim Collins's Good to Great are familiar with the term, but for those readers not familiar, BHAG stands for big, hairy audacious goal. Our BHAG is to be the leader of technology in education for the state of Nevada and for Lutheran schools throughout the world. While there are a lot of elements that make up that goal, perhaps the most impactful is our plan that every HS student at Faith will be provided a laptop at the start of the 2009-10 school year.

In order for us to make that commitment it is critical that our teachers have a good understanding of the power of technology to engage students and change instruction. The current crop of students we have is literally wired differently. There is at least some research that suggests that the multitasking, social networking digital kids of today have brains that function in different ways than those of a generation ago. We need to be aware of those changes and design classroom instruction that accounts for the differences.

I remember conversations as a young teacher about how Sesame Street was producing a generation of students with short attention spans and much less patience for the lecture and learn style of teaching pretty prevalent in the 70s. It sure seemed like kids had much less ability to focus. And today we can identify kids with attention deficit at earlier ages than ever. We make accommodations for those students in our classrooms. However, one of the lessons we should have learned from J.K. Rowling is that students are more than willing to devote time and attention to an activity if the content is engaging. Thanks Harry Potter.

Many of our students can text faster than I can type this blog. They can integrate video, audio, photography and other content in new and creative ways. They process information faster. We need to teach them to take all they information at there fingertips, judge its accuracy fairly, and think critically about what they information means and how it affects their lives and decision-making. It is an exciting time to be a teacher. But when hasn't it been?

The End of (School) Days

As we close the end of the 2007-08 school year we bring to an end some school and personal milestones. This was the tenth year our school has been located in Summerlin. That happens to coincide with the number of years I have been the head administrator here. The first is not much of the surprise; the 2nd is.

I am amazed and humbled at what God has accomplished in just ten years at this school. With the exception of the tennis courts and a dedicated soccer field, the original Master Plan is now complete and the buildings are much bigger than than what was originally envisioned. Even with that, we have had to keep and grow the portable classroom farm on the southwest side. Over the last ten years our student population and faculty have more than doubled. Faith has become a school of importance in our community.

Mary and I have been glad to ride along. After stops in Portland, OR; New York City; Cleveland, and Chicago, Las Vegas is now the longest place we have ever lived. My previous connections with the city were not remarkable. In the early 80s the school had contacted me about being a teacher but I had no interest in moving west again. In the mid-90s we took the longest of any of our family vacations, travelling from Chicago down to I-40 and across the southwest to LA and then back northeast up to I-90 and back to Chicago. One of our stops was a July day in Las Vegas. I remember it being 103 degrees at 10:00 am and declaring with great certainty that only crazy people lived in such a climate. My antipathy was lessened somewhat when Mary won $40 at a Caesar's Palace slot.

But man plans and God laughs. Not that much later I would consider and then accept the call to be Faith's principal. My 1st goal was simply to be the longest serving administrator in the school's brief history. Reached that milestone a while ago. We crossed the 1000 student plateau and kept going.

As we approach graduation it is hard not to be nostalgic. The last Moyer is graduating which ends a streak of more than a dozen years of having a student at Faith. Other families are bringing long associations with school to a close. Some will watch students cross the stage and know that it took an act of God to make it happen; others will wonder what will become of their son, daughter, niece, nephew, grandchild or friend who may have talents and abilities that surpass most of us regular folk. Is there a future Bill Gates, Mother Teresa, John McCain or Hilary Clinton among them? Are there teachers and preachers to inspire another generation?

The future for them and for us is in God's hands. My prayer for those who graduate is that they are happy and make a difference in the lives of people around them.

Take a look at the progress our building is making:

We have some sidewalks!

This is the support structure for seating below the mezzanine.

This monster pump supports the sprinkler sytem for the tallest building on campus.

This will be the drama classroom/green room. It is really big!

Traditions

Yesterday we held the annual senior auction, which serves primarily to fund the senior "class gift" to the school. Those of us who have watched these events over the years think that we broke several records: most bid at one time and total dollars collected. We will give the class officers some choices as to what they want to fund with the gift that will be between $8,ooo-9,000. I thank them now and will thank them later as well.

But as an educator, I have some problems with this event. It puts a monetary value on students. Popular and high profile students (athletes for instance) generally attract the most bidding. Quiet students who play second string trumpet (for instance) attract much less attention and consequently much less money. When four students get auctioned for $70 and later two students go for $2000, there have to be some hurt feelings.

Some of the posters advertising the event suggested it was a slave auction. This is nothing like a real slave auction and the tasks our seniors have to perform will not approach the hardships of millions of slaves held in bondage throughout history. To apply that term to the frivolity of what we do seems somehow inappropriate to me.

In their attempt to grab the attention of the audience, some of the seniors crossed the lines of propriety. Whether by what they wore or by what they did, some ran the risk of offending while others subjected the school to some unnecessary liability. This unique event falls in the cracks: student council runs the assembly, but no one tells the seniors what the lines that shouldn't be crossed are. With just two weeks left in their high school careers, seniors are more interested in busting loose than mature contemplation.. Maybe we just need better supervision.

All of this raises some questions we need to think about soon. Our Faith Faithful celebration lasted three hours. HS graduation will be at least that long. Both are special times for students and families, but increasingly, people are unwilling to devote that much time to these kinds of activities. The class of 2010 will likely have as many as 30 more graduates. Following our current pattern, graduation could stretch to four hours long.

It might be time to rethink some of our activities, born in the day when had classes that were in the 30-40 student range, and look for new ways to commemorate special events. We can still have memorable events without committing people to marathons and spectacles. As always, your ideas are appreciated.

Project Runway

It's official. Skirts and skorts will not be part of the dress code next year. I am curious to discover which change will elicit the most response: significant changes in our drug/alcohol policy or the banning of skirts. I think I have a good guess.

While the decision had already been made today was illustrative of one of the reasons this is a good idea in our setting. It was a bit breezy. I had crosswalk duty. Thirty feet away a group of middle school girls were gathered to wait for rides and this time of year, to talk about boys, when the wind kicked up and so did the back of this young lady's skirt. Suffice it to say I saw parts of her that should be reserved for moms and doctors. Fortunately for me, I don't know who the young lady is, which will spare both of us some additional embarrassment. Today's half second was enough.

I understand the need to be cool in a desert climate. I appreciate that dresses accentuate femininity and I am not one of those modernists who wish to blur any differences between males and females. But fundamentally, Faith is about education and no strong argument can be made that the wearing of skirts and skorts improve the opportunities for students to learn. And I am old-fashioned enough to believe that modesty should have a place in the lives of young people (and adults, but that is another matter), especially at a Christian school. There are plenty of opportunities outside of school for girls to wear skirts and shorts at whatever length parents will tolerate.

Like some other policy changes, we will review this after a year. I would be surprised however, if the faculty supports a return to the status quo.

Perception vs. Reality

Sometime this week I will get the final report from the survey we have been conducting over the last month. My thanks to all who took the time to respond. The hard part will be determining if the number of responses is statistically significant and then interpreting what, if anything should be done in response.

I have received interim reports each of the last few weeks. It is certainly a joy to read the comments of those defined as "promoters" which outnumbered the "detractors" by about a 20-1 margin. It is nice to know people have good feelings about our school and are willing to voice them. And while it probably is a character flaw, I have spent more time reading the comments of the groups defined as "passives" and "detractors". I want to know if there is something I can do to "fix" the problems some in our constituency identified.

Some can' t be fixed. When one parent writes we give way too much homework and another writes we are not giving enough, that gap is pretty hard to bridge. My focus is more on the quality of the homework we assign and less about it's quantity. Yet I know that is how some folks will measure us. One parent asks that we be at least one year ahead of our public school counterparts and another asks that we have a program for students not headed for college. While those two outcomes may not be mutually exclusive, the obstacles to achieve both at a school our size are significant.

One of the comments that has consistently been voiced over the years (and shows up a few times in this survey) is that the school has become obsessed with money. I am never quite sure what to make of that, but I know I don't like it. When I took the call to Faith one of the attractive things about it was that people had an ambitious vision of what the future could be. There was a master plan that included ball fields, a chapel, gym and a lot of classrooms. Board members told me they were certain that Faith could have over 1000 students, a bold claim when there were just over 400 students in the school and no Lutheran schools in the U.S. with that many students. The work that has been done over the last decade has fulfilled those dreams.

But buildings cost money and here, the cost of building has escalated fairly dramatically over the last decade. It has meant that we have been in a capital campaign almost continually and building something almost every year. It also means costs escalate. Our mortgage gets bigger. Utilities increase. We have to add staff to maintenance and landscaping to support expanded facilities. As the student body has grown we've added teachers, pretty consistently matching a 17-1 ratio. Those teachers work at below "market" rates in an area that has a higher standard of living costs than where most Lutheran schools are located. It has been a priority of our Board to be fair with them.

The perception that money buys you influence at Faith is hard to see from my perspective. I am the one turning away troubled students from prominent families who promise "support" for our latest project if we will give their students an opportunity. One longtime friend of the school has distanced himself because I wouldn't take a enroll a new student whose entrance score was substantially below the cut-off. I wonder to this day if that was a good decision. Students from well-to-do families have been expelled, drug-tested, suspended and disciplined. They also made teams, got into NHS and were leads in the play. Many families who are widely held to be "rich" don't really do much for our school as far as donations. Yet when their kids succeed, make the team or get a reward too many people snipe that their success came from money and influence. That's unfair to those students.

For most of my growing up years my dad was a barber (not a stylist!). He worked 12 hour days cutting hair for $2.00 a head and half of that went to the shop owner. My mom was a factory worker who never made more than $5.25 an hour. The respect I have for families who struggle to meet Faith's rising tuition costs is visceral. We are blessed that God has given our community people with resources. We would not be where we are today without them. But people who think that money drives decision-making about who gets cut, who gets the lead, who gets admitted or who gets disciplined are just wrong.