Attitude is everything: a lesson from Wednesday.

It rained Tuesday night, drumming on the roof, chewing into the snow, and turning December dreary. It turned Ward Lane into a luge run as I skittered down for an early morning run on Wednesday. I looped behind the baseball field backstop and dropped down to the rail trail, a mealy path in dawn’s light. The Blackwater River, which had flooded just a few days before, whispered within its banks, inching upwards again, and at Bridge Street I turned left, then left again to the hayfield. 

This, I grumbled to myself, is not a winter wonderland.

It’s one of the tricky issues that – from middle school to college campus – parents and educators have to navigate. It’s not an issue that goes away. The drugs change, the delivery mechanism change, the culture shifts, the laws evolve. The only thing that hasn’t changed is simply this: the worry. It’s the single constant in this landscape.

And the landscape is cause for concern.

Creativity.

Earlier this week I took the piece down from the mantel, blew a thin layer of dust off, and carried it over to my office. Carefully. On the bottom, scripted in silver ink, Zada had written several years ago,  “This took me 10,000 hours to make.”  It was a joke of course, but not really. Back a few years everyone was talking about 10,000 hours, ten years, the time it takes to become really, really good at something. Ceramics. Baseball. The Piano. Golf. Chemistry. Writing. 

Gratitude. 

On Tuesday night Proctor's remarkable Dining Services team served a traditional “harvest dinner,” our prelude to Thanksgiving and our opportunity to be grateful for all that we have. The simple meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, squash, salads, and pie drew strong praise from students and faculty. The turkey was moist, the salads varied and crisp. The pie on the dessert table disappeared.

Recently, a New Yorker article caught my eye.  “Better All the Time” by James Surowiecki  (November 10^th) is about the relentless investment in athletic performance that has brought staggering evolution to all games and changed the threshold of what we thought as possible. Nutrition, training regimens, equipment, money, and coaching acumen - everything has changed in sports. Surowiecki then progresses to parse how education has or hasn’t followed the performance track, looking at countries that have and have not progressed.

Last night I ran into Laurie Zimmerman sitting in the English office with a senior who was bent over a draft of his college essay. I could see the essay on her computer, the Word editing boxes filled with suggestions and stacked like matchboxes in the margins.

Politics, baseball, and the learning environment. Before I go too far, let me admit right up front that I have a bias. I have a deep love of baseball and all its agonizingly slow rhythms, its endless season that stretches 165 games from April to October, and the multiplicity of “feel good” stories about persistence and faith. Politics? A little less inspiring these days.

This week I had the privilege of spending from Sunday through Wednesday visiting Burke Mountain Academy as part of their NEASC accreditation process. These opportunities are to be both cherished and entered into with full awareness that sleep and family will be parked for a few days. And the upside? Stepping into another vibrant and focused learning community is some of the best professional development available.