Happy pay day! Happy three-day weekend! I hope you have fun.
TPEC Faculty Meeting
Please remember that we're scheduled to meet with FUSD HR Director Dietrich Sauer on Tuesday morning at 7:30 AM in the Library to review many key components of the new Teacher Evaluation instrument and related procedures. It will be essential that you arrive on time, ready to take notes. We will take an hour to review this new information. See you then.
Need some help?
PTO co-president Christie Kinkade has a list of contact information for parents who are willing and eager to help out around Marshall School. If you have a need for a parent volunteer, please feel free to contact her.
Calendar
- Monday, 03 Sept.
- NO SCHOOL, Labor Day
- Tuesday, 04 Sept.
- TPEC training with Dietrich in the Library, 7:30
- Wednesday, 05 Sept.
- Arts, Site, and Science Councils in the Library, 5:00
- PTO in the Library, 6:30
- Friday, Sept 7
- iPad training for Primary teachers
Bobby Macias and Melissa Bianco have done great work as your department chairs for the last two years. But we all agree, it's time to allow others to take on this role. The job comes with a small stipend, and a job assignment that includes coordinating our 301 logs and some staff training. If you're interested, please let me know. If we have more than one person interested at each level (K-2; 3-5) we'll hold some sort of a run off election.
Duty Schedule
Please review your weekly duty schedule and make every attempt to arrive at your assignment on time. Those who do duty in the Hollow and Cafeteria, please make every attempt to keep students out of the halls and classrooms prior to the bell in the morning.
Remix
Copy Transform Combine
Based on my perceptions of late, much talk has been had, and much attention has been paid in recent weeks to our school's letter grade, our correspondent decline in student achievement, and what, if anything, we're going to do about it. As I said at the beginning of the school year, I believe there is much we can do in order to reverse this temporary assessment of our performance.
I believe this is short-term trend.
I'd like to reiterate that sentiment: I believe there is much we can do to reverse this short-term trend. Marshall is not a "C" school. Nor is it a place unprepared to work toward greater achievement, both among its students and our faculty alike.
We have what we need to improve. It's already here. It's our programs. It's our community.
Most of all: It's you.
I believe that what we must endeavor to do from this point going forward is make every attempt to ensure that we're using all of our resources, and every advantage that's already in place here at Marshall in the very best, most clever ways possible in order to allow our organization to perform even more optimally.
This is what Great people and Great organizations do. They don't reinvent. They remix. They synergize. They take the assets they have and recombine them to make things work better.
Henry Ford once claimed, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.”Everything we need to ensure Marshall's future success is right here. Or it has been done elsewhere before. If we can lay our hands on those things, we need to copy them. If it already exists here but can be used in new ways to enhance student achievement, then we need enable it to do so. We don't need to find a new thing to do. Maybe we just need to borrow a few good ideas. Better yet, maybe we need to remix what we do in order to do it better.
I'm not alone. Steve Jobs also admitted to the same ideal when he said, "Picasso had a saying, Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
The question for all of us to ask is: are we remixing, copying, and combining our assets in the best ways to make us as efficient, productive and successful as we can be?
We've already begun to do so by implementing a specials schedule which enables our special area teachers to become embedded collaborators in your academic curriculum at the classroom level for hours at a time each week. We're still in the learning process with this new approach, but it's working. I'm excited about the effect it will have on our students' achievement. And I believe our opportunities to capitalize on the resources we already possess, by looking at our many other unique assets in similarly new and innovative ways abound.
I am not embarrassed to admit: I stole a lot of these ideas from the video embedded below.
And, while it's intent is to argue in favor of greater copyright freedom in order to encourage innovation, it contains some very inspirational stuff on this subject of remixing to enhance performance and success.
I hope you'll watch it.
Did you hear what Kirby Ferguson said at about the nine-minute mark? He said, "We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness, it's a liberation from our misconceptions.”
I truly do believe in each of you and your ability to be Great teachers. Therefore, I believe that we can accomplish Great things together and that we will not allow ourselves to persist as an average school for long. But in doing so, I also believe that we can and should make better use of some of our assets to take better advantage of what we've already got in order to become even better.
That's what Great people do. And so, as Ferguson said, "Let's begin."
Acknowledgement
Please acknowledge that you read this post. Thanks!
Acknowledgement
Please acknowledge that you read this post. Thanks!
