This week has been extremely frustrating. Without going into too much detail, our state recently passed a law that will require a significant amount of extra work for many teachers. This law doesn’t address a widespread problem (there was only a single misunderstood incident in one school), but a few partisan legislators jumped on it, blowing it all out of proportion to pander to their base … and the end result was this new unnecessary law. Grrrrrr!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was venting about this a bit to my old mentor, who today is an endowed chair at a major university. He’s had a lifetime of experience in multiple settings (including top leadership positions in Texas and Pennsylvania), and has served as a consultant to hundreds of school systems in more than forty states. Simply put, he’s “been there and done that” too many times to count. He’s always been a fount of wisdom and I truly value his input. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After we discussed this situation back and forth for a while, he offered this comment that was so insightful I just had to share it: “Forget about trying to influence the system. \u00a0Focus on working with individual students, individual teachers, and individual schools and you will make a meaningful difference. And occasionally, you may even get the chance to influence policy on a broader scale.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wow, just wow! I hope this encouragement to “refocus” helps you as much as it did me, especially in these “interesting” times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Note: Just to be clear, this post is only my personal opinion. It in no way represents an official position by my department, my college, or my university. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week has been extremely frustrating. Without going into too much detail, our state recently passed a law that will require a significant amount of extra work for many teachers. This law doesn’t address a widespread problem (there was only a single misunderstood incident in one school), but a few partisan legislators jumped on it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[415,412,411],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-individual-focus","tag-personal-influence","tag-state-legislation","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2283,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/2283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/morelan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}