Sleep on it

Last night as I was watching the Alabama football team go down in defeat, I was going down to defeat at the hands of a spreadsheet I had been so proud of. It was a masterpiece in the art of taking a paperwork nightmare imposed from the State Department of Education and turning it into a simple, paperless procedure.

The fly in the ointment was a formula--one formula. I knew what I wanted to happen but didn't know of an Excel formula which would do it. A Google search revealed other people searching for exactly the same formula, but it seemed what I wanted didn't exist.

As the the 4th quarter was drawing to a close, an idea occurred to me that would work. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't pretty. But, it would work. Two to three hours was a good estimate of the time required to make the needed adjustments--major adjustments. As the ga,e proceeded into overtime, I realized I was looking at a task which would require far more time and energy than was available. As the opposing team scored the winning touchdown, I was making notes about where I would pick up in the morning. Then, I went to bed.

How many times in our lives have we been given the advice to "sleep on it"? While I slept, evidently my brain kept working--and did so at a very creative level. The next morning, I awoke with another idea to solve the "missing formula" problem. This one was elegant, very elegant. Better yet, the modifications took exactly five minutes to make. Best of all, the solution worked!

Tomorrow, I am meeting with one of my favorite people in the education world. Last spring she had described to me how she had papers scattered all over her living room floor in an attempt to tackle this one report. It was not a pretty picture! I can't wait to see her reaction when we go over how this spreadsheet works and I give her a copy of it.

I guess this story has two morals. The first is that when confronted with the paper avalanche, we must train ourselves to look to technology for a solution. So often, it's there. The second message is perhaps there is something to handing over our problems to our creative subconscious. Perhaps it is the force which can take today's insurmountable problems and turn them into tomorrow's solutions.

Smooth sailing or overwhelming frustration? School has begun!

School has begun! The beginning of this school year, like any school year, includes gathering data. How many students do we have? What classes are overloaded? Who is authorized to check Tommy out of school? What's my locker combination?

Technology is our friend in these areas, just to name a few. For those who have figured this out, the beginning of school tends to go smoothly. For those who don't, the works "overwhelmed," "disorganized," and "frantic" typify those first days and weeks as random pieces of paper fly between the classroom and school office, generally ending in a big pile on the desk of some poor sole in the school office. Life does not have to be hard!

Why do the leaders in some schools "get it," and use technology to simplify the process while others continue to operate as if LBJ still occupied the White House? I will go out on a limb and propose that the answer lies in a mindset. Some people look at a problem, and immediate the wheels in their heads begin to turn as they think of how their school administrative software or an Excel spreadsheet can make a molehill out of their mountain. Others retreat to that which is more time consuming, yet more familiar.

I have little sympathy for principals or office personnel who ignore better ways of doing things and wind up making their own jobs harder. They get what they deserve. For me, the travesty is the unnecessary paperwork that is invariably passed to their teachers. Perhaps the day will come when teachers will no longer double as stenographers or accountants and can concentrate their full attention on the craft of teaching. We are not there yet, but I am delighted to be associated with some wonderful leaders in my school system who are getting pretty close.

Ironically, the school leaders who really seem to "get it" the best are also the ones who are hungry for the next trick, the next morsel that will make lives just a little easier for their teachers. The ones who need it the most, however, rock along 20 years in the past.

Earlier this year, my article on Saving Time and Paper With Basic Technology appeared in Principal magazine. It deals with using the tools schools already have at their disposal to save time, save paper, and save our sanity.

For my friends who are in the school business, I wish you a great year and hope you find a few words of wisdom in these posts that will impact you and the students you teach.