27 Years (Thoughts on School Culture, Part II)

27 years ago I was 21.  My dad was my age currently - 48.  I don’t recall what he was doing at that time of his life, but I know that I was not in a good place. I had graduated high school and taken a year - or maybe two - off, working odd jobs and not liking too many of them. I had decided that I would move back home after living in what I can only call a “drug house,”

where people were using their kids as mules, and
I was waking up to people shooting heroin into their veins, and
snorting cocaine into their nostrils off of broken shards of mirror, and
I was the only one to somehow still be holding down a job.

And while I didn’t think about it at the time, I am now very thankful that my mother even let me move back home.  I decided to enroll at the local community college, and begin working at my stepfather’s gas station, pumping gas and doing oil changes and tire rotations and minor automobile things of that nature. I was not a mechanic, and had no plans of being a mechanic, although at one point I do recall entertaining ideas of taking the business over.  I’m glad I didn’t, though.

Every decision I made from that point on - as a teacher, a Dean, an assistant principal, principal - all led back to those days in my troubled youth and early twenties, days where drug dealers were my mentors and the only time I ever looked anyone in the eye was when I was trying to pass off that I was telling the truth to avoid getting beat up or killed.

While those days are long gone now, and I am the first one in my family to achieve the status of Doctor, the memories still haunt me, still motivate me, still remind me of what could have been...

And so I use them.  I use the memories and I use my experiences and I use what I know internally to be good and true and right... I use all of this with what I bring forward every day onto the high school campus.

It is what I lean on when leaning into a kid who is

failing or
making excuses or
not pulling his weight or
allowing things to happen to him instead of the other way around...

It is what I know about building culture. Because this is the first step.  This is where you begin.  You have to know what you are bringing with you every day, what you are putting out there every day, what you are leaning on every day, before you can ever begin talking about culture, before you can ever begin to understand how to change a culture, or to know what it smells like or feels like or looks like.

I brought my dad into this a few paragraphs ago.  There are some obvious reasons why he showed up today, and some not-so-obvious ones as well.  One of the not-so-obvious reasons is that I have not seen him in over 5 years.
Until today, that is, when we met for lunch.
And so he was on my mind and I had to write about him so that I would be ready for our meeting.

While that lunch meeting with my dad is not the subject of this entry (good fodder for a future post, however), he does play into this Culture Equation.  He does have a part to play.

It's in what I bring every day.  I need to recognize it.
It's in what I put out there every day.  I need to be able to name it.
It's in my work with students and teachers every day.  I need to be able to understand it.
It's in my blood and my emotions and my head and my heart.  I need to be able to harness it.

It's the energy that we bring to the school campus every day.  If we don't know it, we don't know ourselves.  If we don't know ourselves, we can't possibly begin to know others.  If we aren't able to get to know others, we can't begin to recognize and understand culture.