One of the greatest aspects of retirement is that, for the most part, I don’t really have to do anything that I don’t want to do. I don’t have to go to work. I don’t have to write these blog posts. No one is telling me how to spend my days. I can wake up […]
September 21, 2024
Public schools have been around for over 350 years in the United States. But over the last 25 years, since Columbine thrust school shootings into our national consciousness, school employees have had to deal with a whole new set of stresses that their predecessors never imagined. Between the too-frequent active shooter incidents in our schools […]
September 7, 2024
Diners at a large potluck dinner party where the invitation simply states, “Bring a dish to share!” attend with a lot of trust. Usually more trust than I possess. There’s no rhyme or reason. People just bring random dishes they are proud of/have time to make/purchase from a restaurant or grocery store, and that’s if […]
August 24, 2024
In the summer of 1985, I remember looking hard for my first full-time job in teaching. As eager as I was to start teaching history and social studies in the Bay Area, there just weren’t any positions available. I would hang out in school offices if I heard rumors of openings, just to leave my […]
November 11, 2023
From the time I was 6 until I was 14, we lived in a two-story house on a busy street in North Little Rock, Arkansas. I scored my own (very small) bedroom upstairs. It was directly above the baby grand piano, where my mom would spend hours in the evenings practicing and playing. She started […]
May 4, 2022
Gravity feels a little more forceful today. Back in my high school physics class, Father Fred taught us that gravity pulls us down at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared. Today feels like a double-digit day. It’s harder to do just about everything. You see, today would have been my son Sean’s 29th […]
April 16, 2022
If you started singing the theme song from Green Acres when you saw that title, you may (1) way too impacted by afternoon tv in the 1970s, and (2) also be considering this question. August 31 was my last official day at work in my job as a school superintendent. For almost eight months, I […]
Roland Merullo
2008
Read: 2023
Fiction, Reading Now, Spirtuality
OK. I love this book. It’s one of the few books I’ve read where, after I finished it, I immediately began reading it a second time. I’ve written about it in two separate blog posts, and I have many friends who have read it and loved it after I suggested it to them. It’s a […]
Read: 2022
Non-Fiction, Reading Now
Younger Next Year is a book I keep coming back to. I forget who first turned me on to it, but I read it in my mid-fifties, and it continues to inspire me. The bottom line is that at some point, sometime in our forties or fifties, our bodies want to get old and decay. […]
Stephen Covey
1989
Read: 2010 or before
Education/Leadership, Non-Fiction, Reading Now, Recommended for Young Adults
This is another one of my bedrock books. Stephen Covey has had such an influence on my personal and professional life. The seven habits: Be Proactive Begin with the End in Mind First Things First Win-Win Seek First to Understand, Then Be Understood Synergize Sharpen the Saw From “Beginning with the End in Mind” which […]
Patrick M. Lencione
2016
Read: 2024
Education/Leadership, Non-Fiction, Reading Now
One of my favorite parts of my career in public education is the teams that I have been fortunate to be a part of. I wrote a post on my love of teams back in 2020, celebrating teams that included: History classes that I taught New teachers (and eventually veteran ones too) at San Lorenzo […]
