Lots of people reach out to me. Between my books, my blog and my big mouth I guess sorta invite it. And I gotta say, I like when people rant because venting allows people to blow off steam that – left unblown – often proves to be like lurking toxins in the engine of our careers and lives.

I got just such a rant the other. A smart person who had been pushed a bit over the brink the the inanity and tomfoolery of this world. (And who hasn’t been in that category, right?) This person got to me at just the right time, too, because I was a good emotional place. So instead of throwing logs on the fire of their raging soul I instead typed up a short, somewhat level-headed response.

I am gonna share a version of it right now. But before I do, please don’t expect me to always live it. I swear I’ll try, but, what’s that old religious saw? Oh yeah, the flesh is weak.

Illigitimus non carborundum. (i.e. Don’t let the bastards get you down.) I think that’s the moral of the story you just told me. There are so many things one can’t control in the life of being a teacher that we often forget to focus on that which we can.

Your own quality. Your own sense of professionalism. Your own work ethic and diligence and joie de vivre… spend you energy in those arenas and you will have spent it well. Real kids matter. The shenanigans of colleagues and admins… not as much.

BTW, I wish someone would have told me this stuff years ago… wouldda saved a lot of heavy days in my heart and gray hairs on my head. If I wouldda listened that is. But me, I spent many days seeing my educational problems as if they were nails while I was a teacher holding a hammer.

That outlook leads to lots of pounding. Length in the teeth has taught me there are other tools, too.

Teachers are demoralized these days. If today you can hoist the spirit of a peer you will have done the world of schooling good.

So since I am in the mood to offer up so many thoughts as of late about how to re-shape K-12 education (heck, who isn’t doing it these days) I thought I’d chime in on the silliness of the manner by which we choose to pink slip 194 teachers in a district with about 900 educators.

We did it by seniority. Merit played no role. (Don’t worry, this is not a post about the budget cuts… though they will certainly see some action, I am sure, going forward.)

I repeat, quality of service played absolutely no factor in the decision making process of who got to keep their job and who got to canned. It all came down to one simple question: when were you hired.

And these are the deepest staff cuts I’ve ever seen.

No one asked, how well did you work? No one asked, to what degree did you serve the needs of the students? No one took into consideration things like work ethic, degree of content knowledge, extra-curricular duties, ability to differentiate for various learning styles, and on and on and on.

Chronology slapped down worthiness.

Add it all up and it means that this past week I had a chat with an ELA teacher I greatly admire, one who is but a few years into her career – and is a real dynamo with a bright future – and told her I’d be happy to write her a smoking letter of rec if ever she wanted one.

Best I could really do.

I mean this is a teacher we should be fighting to hold on to. I know it. The principal knows it. Heck, even the folks in the district offices might know it.

But rules are rules and length of service in public education trumps quality of service.

It’s folly. Plain and simple. No one lets a better employee go so that they can keep an older employee.

BTW, this is not ageism at play. Some of the best educators I know have multiple decades under their belt. Matter of fact, the leading ELA teacher on our campus (in my opinion) is a lady right across the hall from me and she’s at year 32 in our district.

Do you know what I was doing 32 years ago? Lemme tell, ya, it wouldn’t make momma proud.

Just think about what would happen to an institution’s degree of impact if they sustained such a silly policy over the long haul. I tell ya what would happen, it would inevitably crumble over the course of time due to erosion as a result of such poor decision making. (Anyone ever hear of a small industry once based in Detroit?)

Essentially, okay, I get that we are going through a fiscal crisis that is pretty much unprecedented in our lifetimes. But at least make the most intelligent moves you can make. We are compounding the impact of the budget cuts by not better adapting our policies to meet the needs of the current times. Truly, these types of decisions are handcuffing us from being able to do the best job we can possibly do at one of the most important jobs that there is to do in our country.

Society is counting on us to do it well.

And these are the rules by which we determine who gets laid off?

If merit plays no role in determining who stays and who goes, at some point the institution of public education will crumble.

This week, a few stones in the edifice fell. And it’s a sad thing to watch.

I just witnessed a group of teens and young adults who said, with a straight face and all the seriousness in their heart that they could muster, that if they did not figure out a way to improve over their performance of last year, they’d be toast. They knew they needed to grow, adapt, change, evolve and break new ground… for if they didn’t, they knew someone else, with more hunger in the belly, would come along and take from them their, well… everything. Their future, their ability to earn a prosperous living , and so on.

Work ethic, creativity, self-determination, guts, a willingness to learn and grow and experiment and push the envelope, they showed it all.

I LOVE young people such as this. And I then I realized that if public education, and all the people who were involved in it, had this same attitude, we might literally move mountains.

Yep, I am saying it: if public education were more like the X games, I think we might all be happily surprised.

Look, I am a HUGE fan of the X games. If you ain’t seen some of their highlights, you have no idea what you are missing. Check it out…

See, the thing is, the reason I believe we, in education, have much we can learn from these X gamers is because 1) They care. I mean they really care. Passion drives this sport and nobody shows up to work at the X games without bringing their A game.

Imagine if our students showed up to class with this same hunger to learn. Or if our nation’s teacher’s showed up with this same fire to teach? It’d almost be a different world. I mean how many people who work at our schools actually show up at the start of a new school year and feel, “If I don’t have the best year as a teacher that I have ever had, if I don’t give my best, reinvent parts of myself, give 110% this year, I’ll be toast?

X-gamers do.

2) They bounce back from adversity. There’s not an X-gamer out there who does not know what it means to fall flat on their face. It’s a world where falling and failing is part of the process but woven into the fabric of being a participant is the notion that YOU GET UP.

You get up. Getting knocked down is inevitable. When adversity strikes, you don’t fold your tent, you don’t weep, “Poor me”, you don’t give up.

You plan to keep going.

3) They celebrate one another’s achievements in a way that is characterized by authentic camaraderie. They are rooting for one another’s success. It’s not a back-biting, undercutting, talk trash about your kids and your colleagues in the lunchroom type of world. They are each working to be their best but they are also each a part of a bigger whole and they love to sit back and admire the excellent efforts of the people in the same game.

They know how to tip their hat.

X games: it’s more than just apparently suicidal tricks. It’s an outlook on life.

I have a love/hate relationship with Open House. I initially hate it because I will have left my house about 6:00 am and not returned home til about 9:00 pm. Trust me, that gets old quick. On the other hand, seeing my kids without their “student” masks on is always insightful and heartwarming. I forget just how adult so many of my students must be. They care for younger siblings, interpret English for their non-English speaking parents and carry the dreams of their family’s deepest aspirations for success in America with them as they try to navigate me assigning them “Dissect the theme of ________ in a well-written essay” for homework many, many times a year.

Sometimes, it’s gotta be tough.

However, I just had a student — male, Hispanic, 15 years old — come into my room with 2 parents and they wanted to know everything. His grades, attitude, attendance, work ethic… goodness were they on me about him. And he was looking at the floor, somewhat ashamed/embarassed. But our conference ended with me telling this student that he was lucky, that there are scores of kids at this school that have no parents coming to see me, no parents asking thoughtful questions, no parents making deep inquiries and really working hard to know what’s going on in their teenage son’s life.

And this student is a good kid. Well behaved, polite, smart, does his homework, not hanging with the wrong crowd (as far as I know but with teens today, does one really ever know?), on his way to college one day.

Yep, lucky. Though he might not really feel it so much now, this kind of involvement, their active engagement is going to have shaped — for the better — his future life.

Really, how many times on this ning have we discussed the importance of parents? And if Open House proves anything, it proves that. I mean the kids who are failing, is it a coincidence that their parents haven’t come to see me tonight? Virtually all the folks who came in this evening are parents of kids who are earning a B+ or higher.

It’s not rocket science. Parents matter!! And meeting the parents of my students is always a joy for me. Goodness, I love Open House.

But I can’t wait for it to end so I can finally get out of here as well. Another long day almost in the books.

Parents, parents, parents. When they are on my side I feel like I can move mountains with my kids. And when they are not, the hills to climb becoming so much more steep.