Have a Good Life

Accepted a summer blogging challenge. 

I decided to accept a challenge from Melinda Miller to blog twice a week this summer.

First, I thought I would give an update as to where I am and what I am doing.

In September of last year, I accepted a position as an assistant principal in an elementary school in my district. This is where I want to be, and it is truly amazing. I am so glad to be here. I didn't think that I would like elementary school as much as I do, but I really enjoy it. Being a middle school teacher, I didn't think that I would enjoy all these little kids, but they are a lot of fun. I do miss the conversations about ideas that you have with older students (which was still very infrequent in the middle school).

I have known for a long time that I wanted to be a school administrator. Here are the things that I love most about my job, in no particular order:

1. Being around kids again. They are fun, and I love seeing them learn. 
2. Helping adults and kids solve problems. We all have problems, and it doesn't take a genius to solve it, but it does take a listening ear. 
3. Building a culture. This will happen more when I am a principal on my own, but my principal is great and shares my philosophy, so it is a ton of fun.
4. Every day is new and exciting. One day could be filled with a lot of discipline issues, another day with a lot of teacher observations, another day with a lot of counseling with teachers or kids, another day immersed in data and interpreting and analyzing it, and another day can be a mixture of all that. I love that things change all the time. 
5. A new perspective. Elementary school is the foundation. It is where immense learning and changes happen. Kindergartners go from having baby-fat chubby faces to losing that baby-fat while they are learning to read. It is exciting.
6. Family atmosphere. With a smaller faculty, and fewer kids, we feel much for familial than in a middle school. That is neat to experience. I really care about these teachers and students. I feel like I still have a chance to make a difference in their lives. 

Twitter version: Use ScanSnap, OCR, Hazel, and Boxcar to digitize, notify, and sort all witness statements from students.

Why Go Paperless?

One thing I have learned about myself is that I get overwhelmed and bothered by big stacks of paper on my desk. I don't like having people come into my office when there is all that mess, and I don't feel like I can do anything. I also like having access to the things that I need somewhere on my iOS devices, if I am not by my computer.

I recently picked up the great iBook by David Sparks called Paperless. It is a great read, and Sparks goes into great detail about how to be paperless. He gives a lot of great tips and walks through many different types of software in screencast format. The screencasts are especially beneficial because I like to try things out, and the screencasts are targeted on specific tasks and show how it looks doing that task in the different programs. It helps seeing what you are reading.

He gives some good tips for naming conventions, and recommends three tips: 1. Assume Senility 2. Always put the date first 3. Always use lower-case. Here are our naming conventions as they stand right now. That is subject to change.

Old Workflow

1. Secretaries collect witness statements.
2. They put them in my box.
3. I take them from my box and go through them.
4. I put them in a pile on my desk, or in my to do box on the desk. 
5. I don't get around to all of them, and I just keep shuffling them from one pile to another. 
6. When I do finish them, I write the incident number on the witness statements and send them to the principal's office to be filed. 
7. Occasionally, we need to look at old witness statements. We've needed to find old statements about 10 times this year. So, more than once per month, which means we need a good system to help us find old statements. 

New Workflow

Simple idea version

How the simple idea version actually works

1. Secretaries usually collect witness statements.
2. Secretary puts witness statements that I need to review in the scanner (or sends them right to the teacher if she knows they can deal with it).
3. Statements are OCR'd as they go through.
4. Hazel reads contents and when it sees "WITNESS STATEMENT" in the document, it renames it to "witness statement.pdf" and sends it through dropbox to my computer. 
5. My action folder has a Hazel rule that renames files called "witness statement.pdf" to "to do 2012-05-18 witness statement.pdf".
6. I get a Growl notification on my iPhone (through boxcar) that says "Work - to do 2012-05-18 witness statement".
7. Then I open my dropbox folder on my phone and see that I have a witness statement in that folder. I can pull the kids out right away, or wait for a bit, depending on the severity. 
8. When I deal with the problem, I rename the file using Snippets by Conceited Software. The snippet I use is "/wit" which expands to "2012-05-18 witness statement - ##firstname lastname##" where there is a fill-in form for the student's first and last name. (before renaming, I split the multi-page PDF with all the witness statements into a bunch of single-page PDFs and rename them all using the above snippet.)
9. Once the file is renamed, that means it is completed and logged in our student information system. 
10. Also, once the file is renamed, Hazel sees the new name that starts with the year, and moves it to the Student Folders folder where...
11. There is another Hazel rule which sorts it into a subfolder which is alphabetized by student last name(!)!
12. Then, I have a year's worth (or more) file of all statements by all students that have filled one out!

I did the bike tour again. I wasn't going to do it, but a good friend at work said he was going to, and he is a better rider than I, so I thought it would be a good challenge.

Turns out, we weren't able to meet up, so I couldn't ride with him, but I finished about 15 minutes after him.

The ride was pretty good. I didn't spend too much time drafting other riders. But I did hitch on a couple trains here and there.

The ride was a little bit different than last year, but not enough for it to be a big deal.

This year, I had a heart rate monitor and a speed and cadence sensor attached to me and my bike. I really like having those; they make the ride much more enjoyable. Since I didn't have to worry about much, I kept the screen on my heart rate graph, which was pretty cool to see.

I didn't focus on my speed at all, which is good for me because it usually makes me go slower.

I did get stopped part way through the ride as my chain fell off as I was shifting. That is always a bummer!

Last year it took me 1 hour and 20 minutes to ride 23.87 miles. This year, however, it took me 1 hour and 16 minutes to ride 23.84 miles. My average last year was 17.9 and I wanted to hit 18 mph average and I got 18.7 mph average. I was pretty stoked about that.

I did not run out of energy, despite not eating any carbs. That was cool, too.

I had a chat with one of our really great kids at my school today. While we were talking, I asked him what he wants to be when he grows up. He said, "When I grow up, I just want to be a good dad and be there for my family."

This kid gets it. He knows what is important in life. What is really important. It is not about money, careers, fame, or anything else. It is about being a good dad who is there for his family.

This kid is going to Have a Good Life.

Do you ever hear some popular piece of wisdom and think, "Duh! I learned that in Primary"? I do. All the time. I read a lot of research for work. It seems that most research is common sense and if we just think about it for a couple minutes, we could come to the same conclusion. We can usually come to that conclusion because we were already taught it, by our primary teachers.

My point is, Jesus is the source of all truth, and so new research will almost always lead back to His gospel. That is the point of learnedinprimary.com. There, I take the research that I am reading, and I apply it to lessons that I have already learned, long ago.

Go on over and check it out. Let me know what you think. I publish a new post every Monday. If you have any requests, let me know.

I took my daughter with me to work today for "Take Your Daughter to Work Day". She is 4 and loves preschool and can't wait to go to Kindergarten.

She had a great time at work with me and loved the attention she got from the students and loved being with big kids. She did really well, and we even got to ride the bus in the afternoon.

What really amazed me was how the other students interacted with her. Being the Assistant Principal, I get to deal with a lot of kids who struggle in various ways. Those kids were exceptional when they were around her, without fail. It was fascinating to see how they changed when she was there. I really enjoyed seeing how they were kind to her, compassionate and very friendly. One fifth grader even got her set up on a web site where she could play games. He took great care to make sure that she was on a game that was appropriate for her. I was really proud of my "other" kids for treating my kid so well.

I don't know exactly why they were so good to her, but they were, and it really made me remember that they are great little people that I get to work with every day.