One step at a time

Today I walked 6,323 steps,  and/or 2.72 miles, and/or 6 floors and/or burned 1,6,29 calories.

Yesterday 9,169 steps, and/or 4.29 miles, and/or 6 floors and/or burned 1,775 calories.

Wednesday 6,808 steps and/or 2.93 miles, 7 floors and/or burned 1,774 calories.

How do I know? I wear a Fitbit every day.  Having received it as a Christmas gift, I am now obsessed with every move I make every day.

At first I couldn't remember to put it on.  Now, I am disappointed if I forget it or take it off and then go back up the stairs.

Minutia.  How can one small device make me OCD regarding the number of steps, number of calories, number of flights of stairs and number of miles per day?

I believe part of it is that it is the same attraction of Angry Birds or a number of other digital games-- instant feedback and rewards.

Rather than just work out every morning for a certain number of minutes, by wearing my FitBit all day I can now gain a much greater understanding of my steps and minutes directly after my workout and then also monitor my activity every day.

Every night I sync it to an app on my ipad mini and each day of the week review my activity level.  It rarely needs charging, fits easily and unobtrusively on my waistband or wrist, and is effortless to use.

The only drawback I have found was figuring out by trial and error how to get it to record my movements on my rower and elliptical.  Wearing it on my waistband doesn't work at all for my rower, and so I use the wristband.  On my elliptical, wearing it on my waistband works the best.  I have not yet tried it on my bike but am guessing the wristband around my ankle will work.

The Fitbit targets 10,000 steps per day and every week issues a weekly progress report by email summarizing the total number of steps,  total distance, total floors climbed, and total calories burned.  In addition, you can earn badges for high points from the week, providing additional positive reinforcement.

If you want, you can even share your daily progress with a "friend" and compete against them.

I love my new Fitbit, and especially am proud when I do actually reach 10,000 or more.  One evening I even took a couple of laps around my downstairs to bump it over to 10,000 at about 9:45 PM when I checked to sync it and found myself just a few steps short.

The great thing about the Fitbit is that you don't even have to even be an athlete to use it.  Just put it on and see how many steps you take each day.  I'll bet it is more than you think, one step at a time.

Closed buildings; but not closed hearts

Ever since The Columbus Dispatch ran a series of articles on the proposed closings of schools due to low enrollment I have been thinking about the impact of this decision.

Odd, because I am not directly impacted in any way.  I do not work in the Columbus schools nor do I have any children or relatives affected.

But as a person who has spent the greater part of her life in schools, K-12 myself, college at The Ohio State University, graduate school, 14 years as a teacher, and almost 15 years as an administrator (wow-- that really is a lot of time in school!), I have been truly touched by the photos and videos of students standing in front of the Columbus Board of Education advocating for their school not to close.

The impact of these decisions is vast.  Please understand that this blog post is apolitical.  I have, as my Dad used to say, "no dog in this fight."

As an experienced administrator, and one that has been a part of difficult personnel decisions, I can't imagine the many hours of strife and anxiety for those administrators, educators and school board members involved in these arduous decisions.  Certainly, all of them are acting in good faith with fiscal responsibility, which probably makes it even harder.

Why? Because these individuals know that closing a school of any level, elementary, middle or high school, has an enormous impact on a community.

If it didn't, wonderful young people, their parents, and alumni wouldn't show up at school board meetings holding up signs, dressed in school sweatshirts and letter jackets, shouting how much they love their high school.

As someone who has spent most of their life as a high school educator, this has moved me deeply.  I walk our halls, a building teeming with gold and forest green signs, class graduation banners with class slogans (Class of 2006-- We did it first; we did it best), and rows of athletic championship team photos.

There's the first staff composite photo from 2004-05, and the shovel from our Groundbreaking.  There's our perfect ACT and National Merit Semi-Finalists.  How about our first class mascot and our first Bagpiper.

And what about the present-- classrooms filled with teachers and students learning from each other, halls filled with giggling students, half texting and half lingering to hang out with friends.  What about lunchtime-- there is no other time when a school is so filled with life.  Voices loud and shrieking. Boys trying to shoot milk cartons into the trash cans.  Texting, laughing, giggling friends. Talking about who is going to the football game, the Prom, the Twitter and Instagram photos, teachers, homework, marching band.

And yet I cannot help but think about those administrators, teachers, students, parents, and alumni who are learning that only a few short months remain until their school closes.  For good.

What happens to all of those artifacts of generations of graduates?  What happens to all of those honor student photos?  The championship basketball? The student ceramics? The state championship banner?  The school crest? The perfect ACT photo? The cafeteria tables once filled with laughter? The flags from the classrooms? The teacher lunches in the refrigerators?  The vending machines?

Today I was able to attend one of our sister school events.  I was there for a meeting and was lucky enough to drop in on one of the school's most significant yearly events: Cafe Read-a-latte.  A celebration of diversity in word, music, food, and print.

Scioto High School was ALIVE.  Students waited in droves at the cafeteria doors watching the clock click to 3 PM so that they could enter.  They even paid $2 to attend.  Imagine that.  Hundreds of high schoolers lined up to pay to come to an after-school celebration of internationalism and acceptance.

As I walked around I couldn't help but think of Brookhaven High School closing.  Look at Scioto High School today-- the students love it and each other, as have students from 1995.  Just as the Brookhaven students have loved their school.

I feel the same way about my school.  I love being a high school principal and I love Dublin Jerome.  Every day.  I love the students scurrying in the mornings holding Tim Horton's cups of coffee and I love every sign, photo and banner we have hung.  Why?  Because of the lives they represent. The students. The teachers. The coaches. The fun. The memories we are creating.  The lives we are impacting. Schools are people, not buildings.

I can't imagine our building closing. Ever. I only hope that schools facing this challenge know that although doors may close, furniture will be moved, banners will taken down, and  photographs will be boxed, the memories and the lives changed will live on in the students, their teachers, their parents, and their alumni. Live on in their hearts.

And that can't be closed. Ever.

Readers have plans. What's yours?

I am fortunate to live and be an administrator in the Dublin (OH) City Schools, one of Ohio's best school districts.  One of the reasons is being able to attend the Dublin Literacy Conference, which has been held for the last 25 years in February.  The list of keynote speakers has been truly amazing, and has included many renown children's authors, from Mem Fox to the Collier Brothers, as well as experts in literacy.  As the lit conference has evolved, so have I, having participated as a parent (Yes-- there are sessions for parents), as a teacher, and now, as a high school principal.

Each year, several hundred educators from surrounding states, Ohio and Dublin give up a Saturday to learn more about cultivating readers and writers at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels.  The expertise of not only the keynotes, but the teacher-leaders, is truly amazing and I learn practical strategies for increasing literacy expertise every year I attend.  This year I attended with four of my staff members, including one of my assistant principals, as part of our literacy intiative that is a new cross-curricular focus area for us this year.

In particular we were excited to see and hear Penny Kittle, author of Book Love.  Penny is a high school reading teacher in New Hampshire, and we were drawn to gain ideas from a high school practitioner considered to be an expert in enhancing and cultivating readers and writers at the secondary level.

She was mesmerizing.  To see her videos of her interviews with her students speaking about the impact she has had on their reading and writing, and moving from reading zero books in their high school classes to now being prolific readers was impactful.  Penny and her students reinforced the fear and doubt that we are experiencing even in our high-performing high school, that even as we assign students to read a book, they don't ever read it.  With Spark notes, listening to class discussions, and utilizing peers, students today dramatically decrease reading in high school, and Penny presented many ideas for how important it is for us to increase the volume of reading and writing in which students engage.

One of her best insights into readers was that readers have plans.  She went on to explain that readers keep lists of books and that we should encourage students to develop "Next" reading lists.

It sounds obvious, but truly I have never heard it articulated before, and it was so apparent what an important characteristics of readers it is.  I love reading, and I have always loved reading, ever since I received a certificate for reading the most books in my second grade class.  I couldn't believe it-- I was actually good at something.

From that point on I have been hooked.  I love the feel of books, the smell of books, and yes, I have plans.

I have not fully made a transition to ebooks or audio books.  Certainly I use them, especially when I am flying somewhere, but it is not my favorite mode of reading.  And what about my plans, my lists?  My daughter utilizes Goodreads, both for herself and her students.

My plans?  Books stacked in various locales in our home.  Since I love the feel of books in my hands, so I can highlight and page-flag and sit with them in my lap, my plans as a reader is keeping books in various stacks of priorities.  And until Penny Kittle pointed it out, I never even considered I was a reader with plans.  My plans are below.  What are your plans?

Lion or gazelle-- you had better be running

Day 4. 9 pm.  It didn't take me long to hit the wall and wrestle with the idea that maybe I just wouldn't write today.

What a day.  One of those days where every hour was another meeting at another place, finally getting home about 7:30 PM followed by a Jersey Mike's club sub and falling asleep in the couch, only to awake to my dear sweet husband teasingly saying, "nice to spend the evening with you talking."

And so I decided I just couldn't go to bed without writing and then discovering I had left my laptop at school.   My husband offered his laptop up and after five minutes fighting with his PC, I declared I couldn't even search for Blogger on it.  It is like trying to type left handed and backwards.

And so on my iPad mini I am forging ahead to get Day 4 done.  And after today, exhausted but determined, one parable comes to mind.

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.  It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.  Every morning a lion wakes up.  It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death,. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion, or a gazelle, when the sun come up, you'd better be running."

And so it is with high school principals and many other educators.  Here's to all of us who had better be running, day after day.

Country Roads, Take Me Home . . .

It always fascinates me when I ride in a friend's or colleague's car to what the radio is tuned.  If it's talk radio on any subject, I can't wait to reach our mutual destination.  Hip Hop? Please let me out at the next intersection.  Heavy metal?  The ride is already too long.  Classic Rock and Roll? Now we are getting somewhere.  Country? We are kindred spirits-- take the long road there and back. 

I grew up in Marietta where there for my Dad there were only two kinds of music-- Country AND Western.  Car rides along Route 7's curvy journey following the banks of the Ohio featured Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Flatt and Scruggs, Willie Nelson, Connie Smith, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. 

I have to admit that although I am a diehard country fan today, especially of Toby Keith, Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert, Garth Brooks, George Jones and King George Strait, I was not always thrilled listening to purely country and western with my Dad, especially as a teenager.  It was the age of the Beatles and Rolling Stones and rock and roll was here to stay, much to my Dad's chagrin.  He didn't think they could sing "a lick" and he particularly didn't like the length of their hair and how they dressed.  Not surprising for a WWII Marine who went in on Day 1 of Iwo Jima.

To him, country singers were real men, not like the sissies with long hair, and he was a man's man.

And so I grew up listening to his favorites, and I have to admit, I remember his laughter when he would share with me another great country hit that had just been released, such as "I've Got the Hungries for your Love, and I'm Waitin' in your Welfare Line."  Or how about "I've Got Tears in my Ears from Lying on my Back at Night Crying over You."  I was drawn to country and western then because I loved spending time with Dad, especially on "flood" days.  I never remember having a "snow" day in Marietta, but every spring, especially before the lock systems were put on the rivers, both the Muskingum and Ohio would override their banks, closing school.  

Dad would turn up such a George Jones "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and drive me all over town so I could see all of the flooding.  Half of the downtown would be underwater and people in row boats would be cruising down Front and Green Streets, trying to get in and out of the storefronts and upstairs apartments.  We would navigate up the narrow street to Harmar Hill and Lookout Point and see miles of town underwater, both on the West Side and Downtown, out on the Pike and out towards Devola.  It happened every spring, and though the songs changed each year, the country music themes of love done wrong, drinking beer, pickup trucks, trains and Mama fit the melancholy and gray landscape.

Dad is gone, and so are the mammoth floods, but the themes of country music remain.  George Strait still sings  "It's not the Breath you Take, but the Moments that take your Breath Away," and Garth croons "Friends in Low Places."  Toby sings "Wayman's Song" in honor of his best friend who died and Carrie pledges "I Will See You Again."

I listen to country because for me the ballads are poetry, with the universal themes of love, life and death, just as the country and western of the past, and with the hayseed humor of HeeHaw and today's "Here's a Quarter, Dial Someone Who Cares."

And yes, I admit it.  I love country, I listen to country and I blare country continuously in my car, torturing my passengers just assuredly as when I am a passenger in a car with talk radio.

More importantly, I have turned into my Dad, even tormenting my family in car rides, just as my father did, even my wonderful son-in-law Ryan, who with no country knowledge or background, politely smiles when I turn to him at a traffic light and shout to the back seat, "Hey Ryan, I know you know this one . . .join in on "You don't have to call me Darlin', Darlin-- . . ." or "Country Roads, Take Me Home.

Perhaps, one day those rides will bring memories of me, just as I have of my Dad, and for me, that's what country music does, it takes me home.

You'll never find rainbows if you are looking down, or will you?

"You'll never find rainbows if you're looking down." I love this quote from Charlie Chaplin.  But today, this past week, and in the past two weeks, I have found a different meaning to these words.

Why? My husband is an automotive research engineer and I am a high school principal.  Some days we see some of each others, and others, hardly any. But at 36 years of marriage, we have fulfilling lives and careers and each exercise regularly.  We are still madly in love,  love our family,  and by all undeniably  external indicators, young for our age, in body, mind and spirit.

And then two weeks ago, without warning, in one day, the retina in my husband's right eye, detached, a large tear.  Emergency surgery was scheduled for the next day, and our difficult odyssey began.

Do you know what the recovery regimen after detached retina surgery is?  Certainly we didn't know, and really hadn't even thought about it.  That is the way life is.  One minute we are sailing with positive momentum, certainly grateful and appreciative for our love, family and life, and the other we are drawn into the medical world of unknown ailments, where surgery is performed through a microscope trying to reattach something so delicate and small that it is difficult to conceive.  Its importance-- consequential.  What is the price of sight?

After detached retina surgery, the patient must spend at least 45 minutes of every hour looking down, with only a respite sleeping at night.  Imagine.  My husband spent virtually every waking hour looking down for about 10 days.  In the surgery, the physician repairs the tear with laser surgery and inserts a gas bubble in the eye.  The patient must look down in order to have the gas bubble rise to repair the retina.  Who ever thought of that idea-- whoever it is surely owns his/her own Caribbean island, right? Torturous but certainly worth it to make this surgery successful, for a lack of success means compromised vision.

The surgery was on Valentine's Day and for 10 days he was home most of the time, looking down, not being able to drive or go to work.  We eagerly looked forward to last Monday's appointment to release him back to driving and work.  We had followed every doctor's order; surely success and freedom, a return to normalcy, was imminent.

But right when the surgeon took a look we both knew something was wrong.  Instead of experiencing elation and freedom, we were told fluid was still present, meaning either a hole had been missed in the surgery, or another tear had developed.  We were stunned.  Disappointment would be a euphemism.  After three more appointments last week and having him lie on his side to see if the liquid would cease, we received the devastating news that he must again have emergency eye surgery.  Anticipated elation to nightmare.

With every surgery comes the increased chance of compromised, damaged vision.  How can this be happening?  And so, since Thursday, my dear sweet husband has been sentenced to looking down, but this time it is even worse.  A bigger bubble and a serious second surgery now requires him to look down virtually 24/7 for another 10 days, even while sleeping at night.  Another 10 long days to see if this surgery is successful.  He is eating looking down, sleeping face down, listening to music face down, trying to read face down, with extremely swollen eyes, puffy face, eye discomfort, minute after minute, hour after hour, day in and day out.

Our new existence is tortuous for both of us.  He is sentenced to another 10 days in the house; I worry and come home to fix lunch and put eyedrops in four times a day.  No meals out, no social life, an eerily quiet existence as he often naps, still recuperating from the arduous surgery. Our previous normalcy seems distant.

 But with every storm comes the possibility of a rainbow. How can we see rainbows if we are looking down?  The rainbows are the prayers and positive thoughts of our friends and family.  The rainbows are the home-baked breakfast loaves of bread, the made-from-scratch bean dip, and the humorous and uplifting greeting cards left mysteriously on my desk and chair.

The rainbows are having my daughter Jennifer and her husband Ryan come and visit us Friday, Saturday and again tonight, just spending time as a family.  The rainbows are the gift cards for restaurants, symbols of hope for the future, one given by my entire World Language Department and another by my administrative team.  Rainbows of texts from old friends wanting updates and rainbows are prayer chairs.  Rainbows of homemade chicken noodle soup and deciding to have blueberry waffles for a Sunday lunch.  When and why did we ever get too busy for this scrumptious treat?

And so, in these difficult days of my husband looking down, I find myself longing to see his beautiful hazel eyes, unbruised and unswollen.  To me, that would be a rainbow. And just to correct Charlie Chaplain,  you really CAN find rainbows if you are looking down, thanks to love, good friends, and family.

Nothing will work unless you do

Day 1 of the Slice of Life Challenge.  Nervousness? Yes.  Trepidation? Yes. Why so worried?  After all isn't writing just taking 26 letters and forming words and ideas?  Sounds easy-- but why does it seem so hard to think of doing this every day for a month.  There's something different about that, isn't it? That's why I like the title, Slice of LIfe CHALLENGE.  A challenge is just that, kind of like a double dog dare, and I love challenges.

Another major reason I am going to try this challenge is  because of  the encouragement of my daughter, Jennifer, who is a third-year veteran of the challenge. She is a beautiful writer, teacher, daughter, and wife, who passionately and positively enjoys life.  I love reading her blogs, and it has given us many additional opportunities to connect and converse.

This summer she also encouraged me to be a blogger, and that was a major step for me.  I have always loved writing and reading, having spent half of my educational career as a middle and high school language arts teacher.  A Caulkins reading and writing disciple, I loved reading and writing with my students, especially the ones who when they entered my class room had already decided they hated reading and writing.  What a joy it was to see them find something they loved about reading and writing!

Now as a high school principal for 14 years, I have always continued to foster my love of reading, but writing has taken a back seat to 27 varsity sports, 150 staff members and 1415 students.  Although my limited career in blogging since the summer has not been as prolific as I would have liked, it has rekindled my desire and love of writing also.  And so the Challenge will really be a challenge for someone who has only produced the average of about one blog post per month, little alone one blog post per day.

I read a wonderful article in today's Columbus Dispatch about a woman who at age 64 had initiated a new tradition on her birthday every year the past few years.  However old she is, she engages in that many new things in that year.  This year her goal is to try 64 new things.

I really like this idea, and so perhaps in addition to being caught up in my daughter's enthusiasm and love for this project,  I am also intrigued to add this to my own personal goal of continuing to try as many new things as possible.

In addition, I also believe and hope that this Challenge will provide an opportunity for introspection and self-awakening.  I love learning, and I hope I will learn from the other writers, with the other writers, and also learn a great deal about myself.  Self-reflective by nature, I don't always take time or believe I have time to pause, think and write.  I am hoping that by engaging in this Challenge, it will provide the structure and motivation to engage in the metacognition that we encourage our students to do.

And so it begins.  What will I think about it at the end of March?  I don't know but I am excited to try.  What will I write? "Aye there's the rub," as Hamlet would say.  I love quotes, and I love poetry and I imagine I will include some of my favorites of those.  I love motivational books, and I would imagine those will also come to play.  And I am a high school principal, and for those of you in education, you know how varied a day in a high school can be. Oh-- we could write a book . . .

And so, just like that-- Day 1.  I've done it!  Why such trepidation?  It's only 26 letters in different combinations, isn't it? Wasn't it Maya Angelou who said, "Nothing will work unless you do."  Let the Challenge begin!