Picture this: Three girls (around 13 years old) walking around the playground of a middle school. They are carrying a stick from which dangles a dusty condom. They are giggling, trying to get others to look. The condom keeps falling off the stick. They scoop it up from the ground over and over again. Nearby, watching, stands a prim and proper educational administration professor, dressed in her best business suit and three-inch heels.
I am that professor, and for three days in mid-semester, I became a middle school principal. If I am to gain insights to help me prepare the prospective school administrators in my charge, I must interact with teachers, students, school secretaries, custodians. I must get in the trenches every now and then.
Lesson 1: This is hard work.
I work hard as a professor, teaching two graduate classes, handling “administrivia,” advising students, speaking, writing, conducting research, traveling, attending meetings. I grew up on a farm, where my parents insisted their children get a taste of manual labor. It's made me work hard. But being a principal calls for a different type of hard work.
In the principal's office, I talked on the phone to a parent who was upset because her son had been suspended. At the same time, two students began fighting in the hall. It was a minor altercation, but I couldn't help wondering, what if it had been more serious? What if a child had been hurt while I sat behind my desk, taking a quick gulp of coffee as I tried to placate a parent? Would the injured child's parents understand?
I had similar worries as I walked around the playground during recess. I was doing all I could to supervise the students I could see, but what about those out of my sight? Were the teachers on recess duty with me doing their jobs? Could they return to their classes and teach effectively after having no break?
I anticipated problems; I imagined the worst. I dashed from place to place so that the teachers, staff, and students could see me. And the fact is, I had it easier than most principals. I didn't have to write reports or handle routine correspondence; I could let some things slide until the real principal returned. I didn't have to worry about support from the district office. The superintendent was a friend and colleague of mine. I knew he trusted me.
It was the emotional intensity, I concluded, that made me so tired at the end of the day. Moving so quickly from fire to fire, frequently doing more than one task at a time. The principalship demands your heart and soul—and that's hard work!
Lesson 2: Hone saintly human relations skills.
Yes, I'm generally considered a likeable person, a peacemaker, even maternal. I work for compromise and consensus. But in three days as a principal, my human relations skills were taxed. As one of my own professors had reminded me, “You can't make everybody happy.” But I tried.
The easiest people to deal with—and this will probably come as no surprise to most principals—were the children. Sure, I had to break up a fight. You don't make kids happy when you discipline them, but I found that a gentle, caring style made them calmer and more willing to accept the consequences of their actions. I had to deal with name calling: “He called me the B word.” “No, I didn't!” “Yes, you did and you talked bad 'bout my mama, too.” How do you fix hurt feelings? How do you get children to focus on learning and not on their own perceived inadequacies? By listening and talking, I made it through that one, too.
Faculty and staff posed a different human relations challenge. They were a dedicated, hard-working team. Yet there were times when I had to reach deep within myself for the spunk, the compassion, or the iron resolve to deal with one or another of them. One staff member asked to leave early, and her colleague told me she was a “lazy old woman” who never worked anyway. The secretary saw a teacher leave the building during his planning period, a habit the regular principal was trying to break.
My first morning, I walked the halls and noticed children streaming from a classroom into the restroom. They looked into other classrooms, laughed, talked, and generally disturbed those still in classes. I ushered them back to their own classroom, and found the teacher seated behind her desk. She explained she always gave her students a head start. I asked her not to do it again, and she was not happy! Other teachers stopped by after school to say thanks, but I still wonder: Should I have overruled the teacher in front of her students?
Thinking back, I realize my experiences were fairly routine. I had gotten off pretty easy. I didn't have to deal with violence, bigotry, sexual harassment. Furthermore, I knew that after three days, I would be back at the university, never having to see these people again.
Lesson 3: Expect the unexpected.
While I faced nothing dire, I was alarmed by the unpredictability of the job. As a professor, my biggest surprises are, say, voice mail messages that make no sense, or students who ask questions that tell me they have no idea what I'm talking about. Principals get more surprises. Wasps, for example. Yes, stinging insects! How a wasp nest grows unnoticed in a classroom I can't say. Nor can I say why the wasps began to swarm while I was there. But it did and they did. Worse, a student was stung. We emptied the classroom and called the custodian, who couldn't go in and spray on account of his asthma. What oracle could have predicted that? And who would have thought the black stuff oozing from a youngster's lips was ink—ink he inadvertently siphoned off while sucking his pen?
The ability to deal with ambiguity, with the unpredictable— even the inexplicable, should be in every principal's job description.
Chastened and Wiser
Needless to say, I came away from the experience with a renewed respect for those who play principal every day. When do they have time to lead, to reflect? To develop a vision for what they and their colleagues want their schools to be? Principals are out there, day after day; making friends, making enemies, all the while working to maintain an effective organization. I salute these educators. I thank the principal who let me walk in his shoes for three days; I think I'm a better professor because of it.
Oh, yes. The condom story. What did I do? What any pretend principal would do. I ordered the girls to put that thing down and go inside to class. I then returned to my office to get a tissue, went back to the playground to retrieve the condom, and, without thinking, dumped it in my wastepaper basket. There it sat the rest of the day, in plain view of everyone. Alas, lesson 4: Street Smarts. You don't learn everything in school.
