Category: leadership

Merchant of Joy, Part I: Lessons from Elementary School Teachers

Posted on by MichaelPortas

“Contrary to what we usually believe … the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times [….] the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Premise: The secret to life is joy, which allows us to reach the ultimate goal of fulfillment. Both require work. Without persistent open-minded perseverance, neither can be achieved.

After teaching high school English for fifteen years, I thought all teachers were pretty much the same. The six years that followed as an elementary school principal very quickly taught me  that I was wrong.  In short, elementary school teachers are different. A quick summary:

  1. They work incredibly hard at things like planning for six subjects, updating bulletin boards, rationalizing with the irrational, and more that I hadn’t really considered.
  2. They communicate with the 20+ families on their rolls more in a month than I ever did with the 100+ on my rosters in a year, and it isn’t even close.
  3. A team of them could figure out world peace if you gave them a few hours of dedicated work time, a 42-minute prep and several pots of coffee. You’d have to construct the team like a boy band (The Super Organized One, The Elitely Calm One, The Frenetic Tornado of Productive Energy One, and The Sharply Intuitive Who Never Hits Reply All), but they’d get it done.
  4. They have empathy beyond description.

That last point presents itself generally in positive ways, but occasionally manifests itself in their feeling deeply hurt. With my underwhelming emotional capacity, I felt limited in my ability to offer true support beyond listening. I’m typically a fixer but couldn’t fix that so usually I didn’t say much, but did make it a point to check in frequently.

Since they gently tolerated my overt nerdiness, I did, however, occasionally dip into my English teacher toolbox and talk about how the Greeks nailed the human condition in their tragedies. The often misunderstood concept of the fatal flaw was particularly relevant as it’s essentially the quality that makes us great, but when taken to an excess, can bring about our demise. The applicable traits are legion: stubbornness, pride, passion, compassion and lots more.

The tricky part of compassion and empathy is that they require us to treat our emotional front more like a screen door than a sliding glass door or the sturdier and more impenetrable option, a reinforced dungeon door. Beauty, joy, fun and more pass freely in and out though the screen door, but there’s an inevitable vulnerability that comes along with it. And I say it’s worth it.

What I often observed in elementary school classrooms was joy shared between unhindered children who know that the educators in the room care deeply for them. That’s the trick with high school kids, too: if they know you have their back, they’ll work for you and take healthy intellectual risks. But the intensity of nurturing the same group of kids for the entire day has to drain even the strongest soul, and yet I can attest to the power of kindergarten therapy (hang out in a classroom for 5 minutes and your day gets significantly better). 

So where do they find the energy to keep up? Joy. They start with the mindset that their calling is to shape learning experiences for kids. What’s next is letting the screen door approach work its magic. hey feel the elation of their students’ successes by listening to their stories, celebrating their moments and sharing in the breathless excitement of curiosity and discovery.

We’re looking at a new year in the education world (it’s mid-August as I write) and that provides a rich opportunity to resolve to be something even better than what we’ve been before. While no one really gets a completely clean slate (no tabula rasa, sorry), we do all get a fresh start each school year and we each have the opportunity to define how we want to assert ourselves in the days and months ahead.

Here’s my challenge to you: be a merchant of joy. Start the new year with a perspective that allows you to both feel and spread joy. Yes, by May we’ll likely start giving each other the stink eye when we notice who chews too loudly in the faculty room or always parks over the line next to your spot, but we can start from the best place. Easy? No. Vulnerable? Yup. Rewarding? Definitely. It starts with your mindset, demands commitment, and hopefully pays off both in the joy you receive and the fulfillment you feel.

Be a merchant of joy. Have fun and Happy New Year! 

Sand Castles & Struggle: A Leadership & Parenting Observation

Posted on by MichaelPortas

This entry, my first in a while, was inspired by a casual conversation with my wife while walking on the beach in the Outer Banks. It really did unfold as described and then just stuck in my head as I felt there was something much larger than sand castles going on. I ended up writing a lot of this in my head on the drive home a few days later, and am really excited to finally deploy the word shambolic. Enjoy!

My wife and I enjoy morning strolls on the beach, which sounds like a cheesy line but is true. We talk about a lot and, really, nothing much at all while we dodge beached jellies, scan the horizon for dolphins and observe people enjoying the sun and surf. In our conversations, my success rate in expressing opinions with which she disagrees is close to 70% and a recent warm Wednesday morning added to that. The topic? Sand castles.

I noted that we were seeing more sand castles that morning (agreed). I then added that it seemed like the builders were more parents than kids (quiet disagreement). I waited a few steps and then summoned the courage to say, “That’s really not a good thing,” which elicited outright disagreement.

She’s a teacher so she’s well versed in the “I-do, we-do, you-do” continuum and countered that the parents were just being nice and helping their kids.

But in taking over the work, are they truly helping their kids? In the long run, I don’t think so.

I contend that our children’s construction skills, no matter how shambolic they might be today, should be reflected in what they produce. Their labor might not inspire passersby to gasp in amazement and take pictures, and might even dissuade you from snapping a few shots to post on social media, but at least the sand castle will reflect their work authentically.

For perspective, I’ve long advocated for the 10-and-10 Rule by which no school project can require more than $10 spent at Michael’s or 10 minutes of parent labor. When our kids were little, I also made it a point to compliment my wife on how much her work improved on dioramas she crafted for third son. I got away with the irony, but still believe that life has taught us that we learn by doing. More importantly, we learn by experience, which tends to consist of the mistakes we learn from.

On the beach, I took a gentle swipe about how our aspiring sand castle builders are being denied opportunity by well-intentioned parents and wanted to craft an argument based on a syllogism, which is that if A=B and B=C, then A=C.

My A=B logic is that struggle builds strength. The B=C is that we want our kids to become strong. Where the equation and explanation get a little messy and drift into applying negation, is that if we don’t want our kids to struggle, then we don’t want them to build strength. That’s problematic. Not intentional, but problematic.

Instead of framing that argument, I elected instead to read the room/beach and my audience, and opted to pivot: “So the Red Sox game was really exciting last night.” The experience of 26 years of marriage has taught me to cut bait.

Truthfully, I don’t care about sand castles, but am looking at a bigger picture of mindset and agency. I submit to you that we do well by allowing our children or the people we lead to endure the messy early stages of developing their skills. Be there as the safety net and provide a helping hand, but let them grow by doing the work to their own ability and vision. As they endure, we can guide them to become more durable and confident, and, ideally, celebrate in the brilliant sand castles they can eventually create.