Mike's Midweek Musings - Vol 3
Mike's Midweek Musings - Vol 3
Daylight Savings, Rule of Three, and Conflict with Parents
Howdy,
I hope you all are making it through what I like to call The Fuzzy Week.
Has time slowed down? Sped up? Who can say? All I know is my kids are acting like they forgot how to sleep but learned how to get pickle juice on every hard surface in the house.
This, too, shall pass.
It’s been a couple of weeks. As I stated in the maiden voyage of Midweek Musings, I’ll post around midweek when I have something substantive to share. And this is one of those weeks. (They’ll typically fall about every other week).
You’ll notice the longer read is for paid subscribers only this week. I don’t want to bait and switch you with a paywall after reading half the story. That drives me nuts.
However, I will sometimes (not always) make parts of the longer reads paid. I do this for three reasons:
I have bills to pay, like everyone else!
I only do it on pieces that I’ve spent a significant amount of time researching and writing.
Paid subscribers are typically the first to respond with an encouraging word or a gentle rebuke. They have some skin in the game and feel personally invested in me. I appreciate that. There are some things I’d prefer to share with about 500 people that I wouldn’t necessarily share with 8,000. Though all 8,000 of you are more than welcome to become paid subscribers 😂
Just to nudge you a tiny bit, the article referenced in today’s longer read is so good that I printed it out, read it multiple times, annotated it, and will continue to think it over for months to come. It’s one of those rare finds!
Enjoy!
P.S. The results of the salary survey are in! Tons of interesting data to share with everyone … likely towards the end of the month. Thanks again for participating!
Four Things to Share This Week
Quick Hits:
How’s everyone doing? A survey [10 sec]
Three is the Magic Number [1 min]
Paging, Catherine! 😂😂 [20 sec]
A Longer Read:
Believe It Or Not, It’s Simple [6 min]
#1 Is it getting hot in here?
#2 The Rule of Three
As an administrator, I used the famous Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize my time. Did it work for me? Meh.
The problem was that I simply had too many things in the upper left quadrant (“Urgent” and “Important.”). You can never get it all done.
I’m a fan of simplifying. So, I’ve been trying the rule of three.
You could use it very easily with your whole leadership team in a simple shared Google Doc. Let me know what you think.
And from the same source listed above, I love this quote:
“We set very aggressive goals. And it’s okay not to hit them.”
#3 Nine Year Olds Know. It. All.
The Longer Read (6 min)
#4 Six Essential Skills for Connecting with Contentious Parents
Just so you know, you don’t have to do anything wrong to be sued. As a lawyer friend of mine likes to tell me, “Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason.”
Comforting thought. That should be on a coffee mug somewhere.
Keep that in mind when I tell you the following: I was named in four lawsuits during my first year as an administrator.
That’s right. Four. It was a tough year.
I think I could’ve avoided at least one of those if I had read the article I found last week.
For some context, I came from a small semi-rural district of about 4,000 students, with a lot of socio-economic diversity. Suddenly, I found myself in a district ten times the size and at a school nestled in a high-income neighborhood near Nike’s world headquarters and a large Intel office.