I was recently doing a Teach Like A Rock Star event in Baltimore, MD.  Sitting right there on the front row were 3 WONDERFUL ladies from Baltimore County Public Schools.  They run the amazing libraries in that school system.  One of the ladies, Fran Glick (an absolute Rock Star in her own right), found this article and was kind enough to pass it along.

I love this story.  It serves as an excellent reminder to us all as to why we continue to work for and with students.  It seems every time I talk to someone  who has experienced some personal or professional success, I’m always able to trace the foundation for achievement to a teacher.  What I often hear is, “That year changed everything.”   Look for that quote in the story.  It’s in there.  It always is.

Like we say at our Teach Like A Rock Star events: Let everyone else in the kid’s life ask him to do better.  Let everyone else ask him to do a better job. Everyone else is already telling him to stop doing this and stop doing that.  YOU be the one to ask him to be amazing.  Challenge your kids to be fantastic.  Demand your kids to be incredible.  Expect your kids to be awesome.  Because, when you do, you just never know what might happen.

Thanks for passing along this one, Fran.  It’s perfect.

Talented and Gifted: In one year, she taught her students to see the wonders of their talents — then and forever

By Steve Hendrix

Sunday, May 9, 2010

His mother was teaching a new program that would change her students’ lives forever. A lifetime later, they helped teach him how she did it.

The last time the musical “Spamalot” came to town, my phone rang. Sir Bedevere was on the line.

“Is this the Steve Hendrix who grew up in Americus, Georgia?” began one of those delightful reconnections common in the age of Google. The voice from the past was Christopher Gurr, an acquaintance from decades ago who was now touring the country with the Broadway show.

We met at Old Ebbitt Grill, and Christopher filled me in on his career: many seasons of summer stock and regional theater, brushes with Broadway and four years of standing ovations as a principal in Monty Python’s medieval satire. A contented man, excelling in his art. I toasted him with my Guinness.

He thanked me and paused over his own glass. “You know who I should really thank for becoming an actor?” he said. “Your mother.”

My mother?

She had been Christopher’s fourth-grade teacher in 1976. While it was a surprise to have it pop up at lunch, 1976 was a year I’ve actually thought about a lot. It was only her second year of teaching, which was a career thrust upon her when divorce left her a 42-year-old single mom with two young boys and a résumé that was nearly blank. It was the year she was asked to create a special class for exceptional students. It was the year Christopher and almost everyone else I’d ever met from that class cited as their best school year ever.

And it was the last year of her life.

I was 13 at the time, right at the edge of adolescence. Having no idea that cancer was doing its insidious work, I was spending my mother’s final months locked in the irons of a tweener’s sullenness and silence.

Not so her students, who were two and three years younger. For three decades, I’ve been jealous of 21 Cherokee Elementary School kids who got to enjoy my mother’s last year in just the right way: freely delighting in the glow of an exceptional woman who had found, in a school room, a meaningful new outlet for some extraordinary charms.

I’ve often wondered what she meant to the handful of students who knew her in that school room. Wondered, but never asked.

“Are you kidding? That year changed everything,” Christopher said 34 years later. “It changed the way I looked at school, at learning, at who I am. That experience was a big part of what we all became in life.”

He ticked off the fates of several of classmates from that year, many professionals and artists among them. It was a remarkably accomplished and sophisticated roster for a town where students weren’t often encouraged to aim much beyond the shops of the little downtown or the boundaries of the family farm.

“We still talk about her,” Christopher said. “You ask anyone who was in that class. It was huge.”

Ask them? Why not.

One of the first of the scattered alumni I found was Neill Kipp, who appears in class pictures as a shaggy-haired blond with an eager smile. I cold-called him one evening at his home in Denver, explaining who I was and wondering whether he had any recollections from that distant cranny of his childhood.

“Do you have 15 minutes to talk about that?” I asked.

Neill was silent for a long minute.

“Wow,” he said finally. “Mrs. Hendrix’s class. That’s going to take a lot longer than 15 minutes.”

***

The first thing they noticed when they walked into class on that hot September day were the desks. There weren’t any. Instead, the old textbook storage room they had cleared for Americus’s first talented and gifted class was filled with tables. And rather than rows, they were in groups and circles that would change every few weeks.

The second thing was the woman in the white pantsuit standing tall amid the little chairs. She had a blue scarf around her neck and a necklace of polished turquoise and Navajo silver. Her auburn hair, freshly colored for the start of school, was swept back from her forehead and curled over her shoulders in “That Girl” swoops. As the children filed in, she greeted them in French. Bonjour! Bonjour! Bienvenu!

“I swear she had sunglasses pushed up on the top of her head,” that first day, Christopher said. “We had never seen a teacher quite like her.”

Elfrieda Booker Hendrix was always the unlikeliest of small-town teachers. She was striking and leggy, known for big sunglasses, fiery hair, even the occasional feathered boa on nights out. She stood out in Americus, a town of 18,000 set amid the pecan groves of southwest Georgia, where she sported one of the few mink stoles to be seen at Friday night high school football games. On some nights, I knew, that matching fur muff concealed an elegant little silver flask of Canadian whiskey to ward off the autumn chill. A schoolmarm, she wasn’t.

But a teacher she was, albeit briefly.

She wasn’t born into a rich family, but they were rich by the time she got to school, thanks to a string of successful businesses that ranged from land development to bus lines. A willowy teen with a snappy blond cut and a sharp wit, she settled easily in the cocooned life of a Savannah belle. She went to the elite Pape School, spent several summers in Havana with monied friends and ended up at Burnham-by-the-Sea, a mansion doubling as a summer girl’s academy in Newport, R.I.

She left the University of Florida in her senior year to marry a man of a very different cut, an Air Force enlistee stationed in Savannah. My father, James Hendrix, was the son of a mill worker from north Georgia. He had grown up without a father and had never been to college. But he was handsome, smart, funny and, like her, loved to throw a good party. They had two sons. She didn’t work, but she opened a dress shop once with a friend, helped manage an art gallery, volunteered at local theaters.

After my father’s enlistment and a few unsuccessful years working for his father-in-law in Savannah, we began to move around the country as he chased a star-crossed career as a cement salesman. He took us to towns in Georgia, Arizona, Southern California, never keeping a job more than a few years. I didn’t know much about his battles with depression and alcohol until many years later, when they had already overwhelmed the marriage.

They returned to Georgia in 1973 and divorced.

Soon after, late at night, my distraught father somehow flipped his car on a rural highway. He was given last rites at 3 a.m. Miraculously, he lived. But his shattered leg would keep him in veterans hospitals for more than a year, and he would never hold down a serious job again. When he could walk, he moved in with his own mother, 200 miles away. Any chance of meaningful child support was left in that crumpled Pontiac Bonneville on the side of Highway 19.

My mother, brother and I moved to a brick rental house on the edge of her father’s farm outside of Americus. She plunged into an accelerated teacher certification program at the local college and a year later was looking for a full-time slot. She was hired to teach fourth grade at Cherokee for a salary of $8,127. But, almost immediately, she was asked to launch the special program for talented and gifted, or TAG, students, and by the fall of 1976 she was greeting her bright, bewildered charges in a foreign language.

The French was just a sample. They would be learning it together, she said, as they found their places. And they would be learning electronics and chess and space exploration. And they would keep journals and write plays and make puppets. They would publish a newspaper and dig for fossils and … phew.

My darlings, she told them, I’m not sure just what all we’re going to do, but we are going to do a lot, and we are going to do it together.

“It was completely different from anything that had come before,” Neill said. “Before, it was always five rows of desks, with the teacher at the front of the room talking. There would be lots of grand pauses while a student went to the board to work a problem or write a word. Dull, is how I would describe school up to that point.”

The kids selected for that class were seven fifth-graders and 14 fourth-graders, all of whom were testing at three or four years above grade level.

“They were taking the tops out of any test we could give them,” recalled Patsy Knotts, the system’s curriculum director at the time. “They were bored stiff.”

It was just as the gifted education movement was coming into vogue among progressive educators, and Knotts persuaded her superintendent to give it try. At first, not all parents were enthusiastic about pulling their kids out of the regular classroom. One father told Knotts he didn’t want his son labeled an egghead. But the kids themselves knew they were already marked — by their fellow students. They were geeks decades before geeks ruled the economy, culture and eyewear design.

“We were all pretty odd by South Georgia standards,” said Frank Lowrey, at that time a fourth-grader. “We didn’t hunt or fish. We liked ‘Star Trek.’ It wasn’t always comfortable in other classrooms. We didn’t always fit in.”

Suddenly, they found themselves in a room where reading wasn’t mocked, where being creative, outlandish, even effete didn’t risk a punch from a recess tough.

“It was a sanctuary,” Christopher said. “Before that, I was hiding out. She looked us each in the eye and knew us as individuals.”

During the first month of school, Mrs. Hendrix visited each of her new students at home. She wanted to meet their parents and brace them for the pell-mell year to follow. But mostly she wanted to give the students a chance to see her off that front-of-the-class pedestal.

Mrs. Kipp served cherry pie. While the grown-ups talked, Neill and his new teacher played a game of chess on the couch. At the end of the game and the visit, she looked steadily at Neill and said, “I can tell you’re a very patient person.”

“It was just a casual compliment,” he said. “But I can still picture her saying it. Ever since that moment, I have thought of myself as a patient person.”

She was exhausted after her first week. And euphoric. She could already tell that the bored had become the enthralled.

“I’m good at this,” she said one night with spent surprise, leaning back on the couch, her bright teeth beaming between glossy red lips. Even at the end of the work week, her makeup had just been freshened.

***

One of the first big class projects, Mrs. Hendrix announced, would be a play. They were going to stage Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” Neill and a fifth-grader named Becky Thurman would direct. Everyone would work on the set. Mothers, of course, would sew the costumes.

The production encompassed almost all their subjects. Building scenery would reveal geometry. Decorating them was art. Decoding the dense English was reading. Dickens’s portrayals of class and poverty were portals to social studies.

“The thing I remember most about that year was the pace,” Neill said. “It was driven. She never had a down day. She never came in dull or slow. She was a charismatic leader, and we all responded.”

Brad Ewing, then a fourth-grader, was the town crier in Scrooge’s London. That was fine, but what he really got into was his second job, running the spotlight.

“I really loved electronics and taking things apart,” Brad said, “and that was not something I had been allowed to do in school much.”

Despite his interest in things electronic, Brad was no obvious prodigy. “Based on my grades and test scores, most guidance counselors would say anything but math or engineering.”

But Mrs. Hendrix invited him to bring in some of his home-wired gizmos. She let Brad and Frank rig the class bulletin board with working lights. For a lesson in arithmetic, Brad assembled a kind of abacus out of colored blocks, astounding his teacher.

“She said, ‘One day, I’m going to be able to say that I knew the person who invented these really cool things,’” Brad recalled. “I became kind of determined to make that come true.”

His mother remembers it, too.

“I picked him up one day, and he said, ‘I’m going to be an electrical engineer,’” June Ewing said. “He came home happy almost every day from that class. He had so much fun learning, and that has stayed with him.”

For Cynthia Counts, it was the mock court. The pixyish fourth-grader defended Christopher against one pretend count of bike theft, arguing before a mock judge who was played, at my mother’s request, by Americus’s real mayor. Later, the mayor called Cynthia’s parents to say their daughter should consider a future career in the law.

“They were over the moon,” Cynthia said. “So was I.”

Every subject, even the ones that made some kids groan, came with a twist. Angel Myers, a tall and competitive fifth-grader with long red hair, was known as a demon at math — not the subject so much, but for dominating the calculation races Mrs. Hendrix would hold to make lessons more fun. Neill remembers them well but not so fondly.

“She’d put the problems on the overhead, and we’d race to see who get through them first,” Neill said. “I never won. You put Angel in any kind of race, and she would smoke you.”

For Tracy Peabody, an abstract-minded fifth-grader who had always been frustrated by having only an hour of art each week, designing and painting the set was the best part of the Dickens project. She also played the Ghost of Christmas Future, which is normally a mute role. But my mother thought everyone should have at least one line, so she wrote a Dickensian one of her own for Tracy. A lifetime later, she can still recite it instantly.

“Scrooge sleeps. I shall wake him with my silence; and with my silence show him Christmases yet to come,” Tracy said, laughing at the durability of some memories. “I probably think about that class three times a week.”

At school, my mother was proving a master at reaching kids. At home, she had a tougher audience, at least in me. My brother, Jim, a high school senior almost five years older, had made it through adolescence. He was able to talk unstiltedly to her about this engaging new work of hers, about our precarious finances, about those menacing upheavals that seemed to be settling into safe new rhythms. He was a reliable aide-de-camp as she planned our move into an apartment in town and other getting-on-her-feet advances.

I was at the peak of youth’s lonesome reticence. Even when I was interested in the projects she was grading on the dining room table, I would only sneak a glimpse over my Hardy Boys book.

“Look at this puppet that Brian Hewitt made,” she said, standing in front of me with a llama dressed in a Mexican serape. “Have you ever seen anything so adorable?”

She pulled the book down an inch. “Why don’t you make one?” she asked. “We’ll do it together.”

“Maybe later,” I murmured, shaking off the fingers, pulling up the book. After a minute, she turned back to the table covered in her students’ work.

She spent hours preparing for class. Outside of some newly minted principles of gifted education, she was pretty much making it up as she went. Except for the long division and other mandated stations of the standard curriculum (which the kids blazed through each day before lunch), she kept them out of textbooks as much as possible. And out of the classroom.

For a unit on personal finance, she gave them phony checkbooks and took them “shopping” at the Piggly Wiggly.

For astronomy, they drove six hours to tour the spaceflight center in Huntsville, Ala., much to the delight of Brad, who wanted to be a “UFO-ologist” at the time.

“What fantastic fun it all was,” Frank Lowrey said. “It was staggering, the variety of things she exposed us to in that nine months. She was just a natural.”

***

It’s hard to look back on my mother’s earlier life and find the great teacher waiting to be born. At least not a great traditional teacher. It’s not that she had been a frivolous person. But she was fun-loving and social to the extreme. In Southern California, my parents fell in with a movie star crowd, spending weekends with Andy Devine and Buddy Ebsen and other aging B-list actors around Newport Beach. My mother could always generate a crowd of male admirers. And she was an adult who could sleep till noon. She wasn’t one who spent a lot of time on domestic chores. Neither my brother nor I remember many home-cooked meals, even when she wasn’t cramming for a new career or prepping for another day in the classroom. She could lay out a gorgeous cocktail buffet, but at the kitchen table, it was more likely to be frozen macaroni.

And yet, there were less glittery surfaces on that prismatic personality. She read constantly. Bridge, too, became a passion. She achieved master status and began growing a shelf full of tournament trophies.

But the biggest hint of those future chops as a teacher was her love of the dramatic, the theatrical. She dressed herself in costumes; she relished the sound of well-turned words; she basked in the center of an audience’s glow, whether a ring of men or a class of wide-eyed school kids. She had an intuitive sense of how to capture attention and forge a connection. That was how she made an impact.

One morning as the mild winter rain wet the playground outside, Mrs. Hendrix made an announcement. The play was going big-time. She had persuaded someone at Georgia Public Television to broadcast it statewide as a holiday special. The class would be traveling to Atlanta to perform it for a studio taping.

“I’m very proud of you, my darlings,” she said over the shouts of glee. She was standing, beaming, next to an oversized chess set the students had made from Pringles potato chip cans. At that moment, there wasn’t a happier classroom in Georgia.

She was still beaming when she came home later to the news that a police car had been to our apartment.

Now I wasn’t just a boy in a bad mood. I was a boy in trouble.

***

I was standing in the back of our apartment with my friend J.D. Bodine. He was a year older and had a BB rifle with him, shooting desultorily at trees, cans, fence posts. He gave it to me, and I promptly let one go at a boy riding his bike along the road 30 or 40 yards away.

I didn’t know who it was, but it didn’t seem possible to hit him, and it didn’t seem like a big deal if I did. BB gun wars were a staple of neighborhood fun at the time. It felt like aiming at a jetliner high in the sky.

But I did hit him. And it was a big deal. He rode over to show me his forearm. The BB was lodged just under the skin. He rode off to tell his parents. Three hours later, I was written up for discharging an air rifle within the city limits.

One of the few times I ever visited my mother’s school during class hours was the day I was there waiting for her to take me to my juvenile court appointment. She rushed through a half-hour of conversational French as I sat alone at the back of the room, not understanding a word. Preparing to take her delinquent son to see a judge, my mother was speaking an entirely different language with her happy students.

Christopher remembered seeing me in class.

“I thought, ‘My God, she has children?’” he said. “I couldn’t image what their lives must have been like. To have her as a mother, it must be so Bohemian, so fun.”

Right then it wasn’t. The judge told me I had to be in the house by dark for 30 days. “Stay out of trouble,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Your Honor,” said my mother, standing next to me in an uncharacteristically plain sweater. “We will.”

A month of curfew. That was nothing compared with the look she had given me the evening I told her what I had done and that the police had come by. It was a look of disbelief, fright and exhaustion that shattered the scrap of defiance I had mustered. I cried and cried.

After an agonizing minute, she picked me up, limp and liquid, and sat with me on the green shag carpet of the staircase. She stroked my hair and held me. I could smell the White Shoulders, which she wore even on weekdays, even at school. It smelled like safety.

Everyone makes mistakes, she said, or something like that. The important thing was to learn from them, etc. But then she told me a story I can still recount nearly verbatim. When she was 18 in Savannah, she had bought, without permission, a pet monkey, which proceeded to defecate over every inch of her mother’s dining room.

“Big trouble,” she had said, laughing. But then she stopped. “No more BB guns, right?”

No judge could do better.

The months galloped by. A string of suitors passed through the guest chair at our dinner table until one finally stuck, Glen Martin, a conscientious junior high principal from nearby Albany. He was a sweet, stable man and a big help to my mother as she plowed through the school year. Her class went to Atlanta and taped its Dickens. But as the weather warmed, so did simmering resentments about all the cool things Mrs. Hendrix’s class was doing. As her kids roamed the school, gathering news for the Cherokee Constitution, the class paper, they began picking up barbs from other teachers. “Y’all doing any work today?” “Have you learned to divide yet?”

It was worse at recess.

“‘All TAGS are fags,’ I heard it more than once,” Neill said. “By the end of that year, we started to feel that Shangri-La was falling apart.”

The principle of the school, Jim Head, was getting an earful from parents who wanted their kids in a class like that. It became obvious that dedicating one teacher to one small class of the select was unsustainable.

By Field Day, Head had announced that next year’s TAG program would be scaled down and spread out. Students would stay with mainstream classes, and many more of them would be chosen to go to my mother’s classroom one day a month.

The program did go on. Other great teachers were recruited, and it became a strong tradition in Americus for many years: hundreds of kids making art, writing plays, building puppets and otherwise finding the joy in doing stuff, which is just another way to say learning.

But there would never be another year quite like that one.

Early in the fall of 1977, just a few weeks into the new school year, my mother got sharp pains in her stomach. Her doctor in Americus sent to her a doctor in Albany, who sent her to a doctor in Atlanta. By then the cancer was all over her, especially her liver.

She spent two months enduring useless chemo and getting sicker at Emory University. My brother, 18 then and a freshman at the local college, heroically took over at home — a job he wouldn’t give up until I graduated from high school. I remember long, silent drives to Atlanta, staying at a motel near the hospital and walking through halls filled at visiting hours with bright flowers and grim faces.

My mother’s lipstick looked even more dramatic against her now pale face. She would turn her head slowly as we came in, smiling brightly, unfolding a long arm toward us, palm up for the taking. I remember the tube in that arm, leading to an ever-present, always beeping chemo machine that she had named Mehitabel, after a satiric cat from a long-gone newspaper feature.

I was willing to talk then. If only I had the remotest idea of what to say.

***

A girl stopped Cynthia on the stairs atschool, breathless with gossip. Had she heard?

“Mrs. Hendrix died!”

“She did not!” Cynthia remembers screaming in response.

Officially, administrators didn’t say much to the kids, just that Mrs. Hendrix wouldn’t be coming back. TAG class was canceled for the rest of the year. The administrators didn’t want to upset the students. For most, it was their first encounter with death. It was mine, too. It was my first time in a mortuary. I’d never been to a funeral. My grandparents were all alive. They were there that day, mourning their daughter. Her four brothers and sisters were there. She was the first.

“My baby, my baby,” my grandmother said over and over as they closed the door on the hearse.

Her baby. My mother. No one expected to be there that day. The timing was all wrong. In the normal course of things, we would have found our footing again. I would have emerged on the other side of teen reserve, processed the divorce and fallen back into her arms.

Instead, when I woke up, she was gone.

I remember seeing some of her students scattered around the pews, sitting in colored shadows as sunlight poured through somber stained glass. I remember seeing them cry. And that was something I didn’t do, at least not in public.

I remember wondering, as I tried to ignore the solemn finality coming from the pulpit, just what my mother had meant to them.

***

Frank Lowrey won a debate scholarship to Emory University, another scholarship to Emory Law School, clerked with a federal judge and is now a partner at Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore and one of Atlanta’s top appellate lawyers.

Neill Kipp founded Kipp Software and is a software architect in Denver. He has four children, all of whom have participated in gifted-education programs.

Bob Sawyer is a graphic designer who owns his own Web development firm in Atlanta. He still has a copy of my mother’s obituary from the Americus Times-Recorder.

Brian Hewitt is a high school science teacher in Loganville, Ga., who still has the Mexican llama puppet he made in 1975. In 1983, he was named his class’s “Star Student,” an honor based on test scores. Per tradition, he was allowed to name his Star Teacher. Brian asked if he could pick his late fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hendrix. Administrators asked him to name someone still living.

Tracy Peabody became a professional glass blower and is now an artist living in Monroe, Ga.

Brad Ewing, who now goes by his first name, David, did become an electrical engineer; he did work for the space program and did become an inventor of “many cool things.” He lives in Huntsville, Ala.

Angel Myers, the tall redhead who loved to race, went on to become a competitive swimmer and won three gold and three bronze medals at the 1992 and 1996 Olympics.

Cynthia Counts is a First Amendment and media lawyer in Atlanta. Twenty-six years ago, she was elected a graduation speaker for the Americus High School class of ’84. She stood in the hot sun of that June day and, in the middle of her speech to a thousand friends and family, asked 21 classmates to pause and remember way back to Mrs. Hendrix’s class at Cherokee Elementary, to remember a year of school that would last forever.

There are other standouts, other artists, engineers, a bank president. My mother would have been so proud of each one of them. She loved them all — a capacity that really great teachers share with really great mothers.

I’m not jealous of that class anymore. After talking to a bunch of kids who were also crazy about my mother, I understand more what a genius she had for seeing into the soul of a child. And I know how clearly she must have seen into mine.

Steve Hendrix is a Washington Post staff writer.He can be reached at hendrixs@washpost.com.

Just a FANTASTIC month, for sure!!

We started this month’s tour off in Hollywood, FL and it was a great event. It never ceases to amaze me: there are just so many wonderful teachers that show up to our TLARS professional development events. We had teachers and principals from all over the area join us, including educators from Broward, Miami-Dade, Lee, Brevard and Sarasota schools to name just a few. We even had one Rock Star Teacher – Kristine Maraganis – join us from Chelmsford High School. No, NOT Chelmsford, Florida – Chelmsford, Massachusetts!! That’s right, she made the 1,500 mile trip all the way from Massachusetts! Kristine wore her Teach Like A Rock Star t-shirt and sat in the front row and we even had a few minutes to chat. I’m telling you – she’s an AWESOME educator who loves her students and is making a difference in their lives each and every day. (Kristine, we put a few gifts in the mail for you and you 4 boys. Look for them soon!)

From Hollywood we flew north to Jacksonville, FL. We had about 100 teachers join us for another FANTASTIC day. Districts like Duval, Clay, Pasco, Wayne, and Leon sent their most influential educators to bring back the information to their schools. The largest group – and, they were so much fun, too – came from Durbin Elementary School in St. Johns County. These 13 Rock Star Teachers smiled, and laughed, and shared the entire time. I LOVE groups like this! They really do add so much to the day! (Thanks for sharing the “game card” with me, Durbin Rock Stars! You guys crack me up!!!)

Our final stop this month was in one of my favorite cities – NEW ORLEANS! (That would be ‘Nawlins, phonetically speaking.) We held our event at the newly remodeled Crowne Plaza Airport. Wow, what a great venue! We’ll be heading back to this hotel for sure. For our first time to New Orleans, we certainly had an AMAZING group of teachers. St. Mary Parish, St. Charles Parish, Union Parish, and Calcasieu Parish all sent us their Rock Star Teachers. And, we even had a few teachers from Okaloosa, FL make the drive over.

Be sure to check out our upcoming dates! We have 12 events over the next 2 months. Get ready Albany, Boston, Dulles, Baltimore, Midland, Longview, Nashville, Memphis, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, and Charlotte! Here we come!!!

Here’s just a few pics for our April Teach Like A Rock Star Events:

Rich Redmond and I go way back.  As in, waaaaaaaay back – to the 80′s, that is.  That’s when we met at Texas Tech University as percussionists in the music education department.  Actually, he was the percussionst.  I was just a drummer.  The moment Rich stepped on campus, it was obvious that there was something special about this guy.  Even as a teenager, he had this – I’m not sure what it is, really – “quality” about him.  Maybe it was the confidence that oozed from him.  Maybe it was charisma.  Maybe it was  . . . heck, i don’t know what it was.  But, whatever it was, he had it – “The X Factor.”

Haven’t you had the experience when you meet someone and there’s just “something” about the person?  It makes you think, “Wow, is this person like famous or something?”  Rich Redmond is that person.  (Truth is, back then even as a teenager, Rich was famous – REALLY FAMOUS.  Except the only person on the planet that knew he was famous was Rich.)

Anyway, Rich and I have kept in touch over the years.  I’m on the road doing my thing with teachers and Rich is in the studio and on the road playing drums for Jason Aldean, a platinum-selling country music artist.

Over the last few years Rich has done some clinics for drummers.  They were all really drummer specific where he would talk about his journey and what took to become a high-demand, recording and touring Nashville drummer.  Recently, our conversations about his clinics have shifted.  You see, of course Rich wants to help up and coming drummers, but he also wanted to do more.  He wanted to use his amazing talent and ability to reach even more people.

As a result, today Rich is presenting his “CRASH Course for Success” to high schools students across the nation when he’s not playing in the studio or the stadium.  I recently had a chance to go check out his presentation over at Seven Lakes High School in Katy ISD.  Rich uses the acronym CRASH for teaching kids the foundation for success: Commitment, Relationships, Attitude, Skill, and Hunger.  I will tell you this: Rich’s presentation is good.  Damn good.  Rich is engaging, he tells stories, he plays drums, and most importantly:  THE KIDS LOVED IT!

And, I also figured out what “The X-Factor” about Rich is.  You know what it is?  It’s his passion.  Rarely do you see anyone so authentically passionate about something in their life.  Whether he’s in front of 10 kids or 10′s of thousands of beer-swillin’ Jason Aldean fans, you get the same thing from Rich – an 18 wheeler full of passion.  See what I mean.  Check out this CLIP of Rich from one of his workshops and do 2 things:

First, remember he’s playing in front of just a handful of kids, not the Superdome. And second, while your watching go ahead and turn the sound down.  Just watch.  Don’t listen, just look.  See what THAT kind of passion looks like.  The kind of passion that fills every cell.

The question is, as educators, are we bringing THAT kind of passion to our classrooms for our kids?  As teachers, when we step “on stage” in front of the kids, are we filling our souls to the brim with that kind of excitement, enthusiasm, and passion for teaching and learning?

As we talk about in our Teach Like A Rock Star events for educators . . . If we’re going to see it in our kids, we have to be it in front of them everyday.  We can’t grow it in the kids, until we can show them exactly what it looks like.

A HUGE thanks to Rich Redmond for reminding us all of that great lesson.

Rock on!

~Hal

Then it hit me.

Education isn’t just one way. It, like most avenues of life, travels with reciprocity. And as the principal, the Chief Everything Officer and Instructional Leader, I found myself simultaneously astonished and inspired at the lessons that were delivered to me by the very students to whom I’ve pledged to deliver lessons.

Every decade is special. The 1970s had bell-bottom pants and disco music. The 1990s introduced us to interns with thongs. The 1770s were full of revolutionaries with white wigs. Well, the school year just ended marked my 10th in school administration, so I thought I’d wax poetic a little bit as I stroll down memory lane.

However, like the Roman god Janus, I’ll maintain my forward vision as I’m peering back. Today, while I reminisce about the last eventful decade, I will scrutinize the lessons taught to me by the students I’ve known so that our future endeavors in the principalship might yield even better, stronger, more consistent results.

10. Never give up. I was cussed at, spat upon, shoved, insulted, threatened, and told I have pointy elf-ears…all by a boy named Marcos. Nevertheless, it was my responsibility — nigh, my obligation — to remain steadfastly professional, respectful, and optimistic, so I sought deep to see the talents and gifts of this 12-year-old. Beneath the bullying exterior was an intelligent, athletic little boy — who was destined to be a leader. Keeping a strengths-based view allowed Marcos to stay in school, to eventually turn that scowl into a smile, and become a leader on his high-school track and field team. Without the consistent support and chances to be successful, he may have been a coulda-been drop-out street punk.

9. Nothing works for everyone. Exceptions prove the rule, don’t they? Whether we’re talking about behavior plans, lesson delivery, classroom management, assessments, extracurricular events, or even daily schedules, it’s important to consider the individual students’ strengths, tendencies, goals, and motivations. Let’s allow Danielle to stand during circle-time since she’s antsy; let’s permit Conner to doodle in his journal during a lecture because it actually helps him listen; let’s sanction Barney’s 15-minute break every hour because it will prevent a 3-day suspension for destruction of property when he throws his desk in frustration from the demands of being a quiet student. Though each of those actions violates the school rule, the exceptions are necessary for the individual child in question. Without them, it hits the proverbial fan.

8. We’ve got two ears, too. We need to listen to our kids. A student named Michelle used to be a chronic castaway from the library because she refused to sit down for the read-aloud. The teacher gave her the obligatory three chances, then sent her away for being disobedient. Upon arrival in the office, she’d accept her punishments with a scowl and sadly count the days ’til the next library class. Turns out Michelle had a bone condition that prevented her from sitting on the floor for extended periods of time, yet her teacher had never allowed her the opportunity to explain herself. Once it got out in the open, a simple solution presented itself: she could sit in a chair on the fringe of the group. Without intending to do so, by not listening, we were damaging this girl’s love of stories and learning.

7. Relationships, relationships, relationships. I heard a good quote the other day: “They won’t care to learn until we learn to care.” I’m not sure who gets credit for it, so I’ll leave it at that. Nevertheless, I had a young man named George, who came to his teacher one year with a tremendous reputation for being a troublemaker. He spent the majority of the year as a troublemaker, and had conflict after conflict with his hapless teacher. They had never bonded and built the rapport necessary for his own sense of efficacy. Before considering a move to a more-restrictive behavior-intensive program, we moved George to a neighboring classroom with a teacher he respected and who returned that respect. George turned over a new leaf and flourished — because of high expectations, a sense of effort-optimism, and a strong teacher-student relationship.

6. It takes a village. I used to think it was my responsibility to reach just one student in a deep, profound, grasshopper manner. Then I sought to reach ’em all. Well, to the ol’ Pete I say Good luck, pardner. Relinquish control. It’s not just you, the principal, that makes a big difference. Every child needs an adult, not always the CEO. If I relate to a particular student like a shin and a shin-high rose thorn, but another adult has a magnificent bond, fantastic! If I don’t have any ideas to support Althea’s learning goals, but a team of six staff members comes together and brainstorms a plan that will work, wonderful! They’re our children, not just mine and not just yours.

5. Set goals. Without a goal, we’re just meandering down the river of life paddling for the sake of paddling. If we don’t know where we’re going, we’ll never know when we get there, and we’ll be awfully tired and grumpy along the way. Katie, a first-grader, took one look at an end-of-first-grade reading passage and crossed her arms defiantly. She said she’d never read all those words, but when we divided the words into more manageable portions and set short-term goals, she met ’em easily! She was reading like a second-grader by the time the snow melted in April.

4. Attend to the Whole Child. I worked with a fourth-grade girl named Lori who was a miserable student, full of self-doubt, and whose shyness made her difficult to approach socially. She struggled in school and struggled with making friends. Academic tasks had no meaning and she began to spiral downward. Then we had a special performance of a dance troupe, and they asked Lori to join them on stage, in front of our entire student body, for a dance-off. Shy, uncomfortable little Lori sprang to life before our very eyes. Oh, could that child move! From then on, she beamed as classmates recalled her skills and poise, and she began to connect with peers and, subsequently, academics. What if we had noted that skill earlier in her school career? Could we have staved off her insecurities and tapped into her esteem?

3. Simple is good. We sometimes think the most sophisticated computer games, the most elaborate playground structures, and the most otherworldly activities are the answer for our students’ TV-like five-minute attention spans. Foster, a fifth-grader, is one of many I’ve seen who can sit under a giant tree, pick at the dirt with a stick, and pretend to unearth fossils of creatures from yesteryear. I’ve had a group of 20 play soccer with a broken chunk of a bike helmet when I lost the ball-shed key. Countless students have figured out how to slash and jab at each other with invisible light sabers. Abe Lincoln, not one of my students, learned to write by scratching coal on the smooth side of a shovel. Creativity and imagination are our friends, and we ought to encourage them.

2. Laugh. What are our faces telling those around us if they aren’t smiling? One particularly rough day, when the discipline seemed to fall from the sky like gumballs pouring out of a wrecked gumball-delivery truck, the teachers were grumpy as a green Muppet from Sesame Street’s famous garbage can. I must have been seething and fuming down the hallway when a first-grader stopped me and asked, “Mr. Hall, are you mad?” I didn’t answer right away, but then said, “Well, yes, actually I am.” Then he replied, innocently, “Is that why your face and your socks turned red?”

We all have a Marcos, a Danielle, a Foster, a _______ (you fill in the name), and each has a story. How do we view them? What lessons are they teaching us? How can we use those lessons to turn a profit (in human capital) in our high-stakes educational system? Those lessons, and all that follow, take us to the #1 lesson…

1. Always strive to be a better you. What did you expect? The time is now. Let’s learn our lessons.

Pete!
Article by Pete HallEducation World®Copyright © 2009 Education World
08/17/2009

Education World ® Administrators Center: Pete Hall: Ten Things I’ve Learned from My Students

What an AMAZING time we had on the road this past week.  Four GREAT events in four days.  I must say, the travel was grueling, but, in the end, we just might have had our 4 best events EVER.

We started off the week in Atlanta with about 100 excited and passionate teachers.  It was a great day – we laughed and learned a lot.  From there we moved on to Charlotte, NC.  Talk about Rock Star Teachers!!  Wow!  I’m so impressed with the quality of educators at that event!! After the Charlotte gig was when things got a little . . . well, interesting.

Our flight to St. Louis was delayed, which meant we missed our connecting flight to Nashville.  So, after lots of looking, we finally found a car to rent and drove all night (yes, you read that right, ALL NIGHT) from St. Louis to Nashville. We made it there just in time to shower and set-up and had an amazing turn out with about 150 teachers.

Also, while in Nashville, we had a chance to see our new “merch” designs.  Mike “Merch Monkey” Arnott brought our new shirts, and stickers, and window clings, and lanyards, and mugs all with the TLARS logo.  This stuff is AWESOME!!  See for yourself at The Rock Shop.  (GREAT stocking stuffers!!)

After Nashville, we flew to Jacksonville.  We arrived at the hotel just before 11pm.  It was then that I knew for sure we were going to have a great show the next day.  When we arrived, there were about a dozen teachers hanging out in the lobby already engaged in . . . “staff development”, if ya know what I mean.  ; )

In fact, the event turned out great.  There were groups of teachers from all over the state.  It was an amazing day and I made lots of new friends that I hope to see again soon when I go to speak at their schools.

Thanks to EVERYONE who made the week so INCREDIBLE & MEMORABLE.  It was awesome!

Next up in December: Phoenix, AZ – San Diego, CA – Los Angeles, CA – Oakland, CA.  See all of our Tour Dates HERE.

Rock on!

~Hal

Jamie Vollmer’s classic that deserves a re-read every once in a while:

“If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business very long!”

I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of inservice. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife.

I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous in the middle1980s when People Magazine chose our blueberry as the “Best Ice Cream in America.”

I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging “knowledge society”. Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement!

In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced – equal parts ignorance and arrogance.

As soon as I finished, a woman’s hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant – she was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload.

She began quietly, “We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream.”

I smugly replied, “Best ice cream in America, Ma’am.”

“How nice,” she said. “Is it rich and smooth?”

“Sixteen percent butterfat,” I crowed.

“Premium ingredients?” she inquired.

“Super-premium! Nothing but triple A.” I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.

“Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”

In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap…. I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.

“I send them back.”

“That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!”

In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!”

And so began my long transformation.

Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night.

None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.

*Jamie Robert Vollmer, a former business executive and attorney, now works as a motivational speaker and consultant to increase community support for public schools. His new book, Schools Cannot Do It Alone is available on his website www.jamievollmer.com

I just love this student! Check him out speaking at the Dallas ISD back to school opening ceremonies. I can’t wait to see where this kid ends up in life. I have a feeling that a pretty big future lies ahead for this little guy!!

Can’t see it on YouTube? Check it out HERE>>

On Sunday I made my trip west on I-10 to San Antonio to speak at Stevens HS in Northside ISD. Talk about a phenomenally BEAUTIFUL campus!! Wow, this place was amazing. Using the same architects as Cy-Fair ISD, just northwest of Houston, Northside ISD built an incredible school for their kiddos. I can always get a “feel” for a school as soon as I walk in a school. And, when I entered Stevens HS, it was obvious by the cleanliness and the organization and signs that this was a place full of spirit and pride where teachers really care about their students.

On a side note: On my way to San Antonio, and on my way back home, I ALWAYS make a special stop along the way at Bucee’s. For those of you not from Texas and have never been, Bucee’s is one of those places that you’d have to see to believe. Just imagine: a gas station in the middle of nowhere with dozens and dozens of pumps that you have to wait in line for no matter what day of the week where you can also buy jewelry, buffalo jerky, homemade fudge, a sling shot, and just about everything imaginable that you could print a beaver on. Like I said, you’d have to see it to believe it!

Just quick video about stairs and fun. A GREAT concept to apply to our classrooms!!

What a fantastic day yesterday in Garland ISD!! We had a few hundred teachers attend Teach Like A Rock Star at the Garland Special Events Center (a totally beautiful venue, by the way). I knew it was going to be a great event because when Georgia booked the gig, she said, “I just talked with the absolute coolest principal on the planet! Her name is Kenda Willingham at Davis Elementary!!”

Georgia was telling the truth! Kenda was AMAZING. The venue was incredible, the teachers were awesome, AND I even got to have lunch with some super-inspiring educators.

OH! Let’s not forget my new BFF – Gwen! She was so fun to have on stage. And, I found out later it was her birthday!! How perfect is that?? I hope that standing ovation you experienced made for a great day, Gwen.

Thanks to EVERYONE in attendance yesterday. You all made it a very special experience!