Sometimes it is not just about the perspective

Managing Your Boss

Kristin Gilger had excellent suggestiong for building relationships with your principal but they only work for those without bulleyes on their backs. It is painful to realize that this is my current role on campus. It is not how I expected my final teaching years to go.

It was another time and another century and I was young. I remember my principal pulling me aside and sharing with me his belief that education was in need of lots of new, (read young) enthusiastic teachers like myself. The kids deserve it, he said. Older teachers, he was implying had lost their edge and their commitment to the kids with whom they worked. I bought it. I totally agreed.

Fast forward 25 years later: I am that older teacher and the principal I have now whispers in the ears of other, new (read young) teachers telling them how exciting their enthusiasm is and how the kids need people like them. They buy it just like I did. They know they are the salvation for public education of the 21st century.

As an older teacher, at the top of the pay scale, who dares to tell the principal "no" and "you are incorrect", I feel like dead teacher walking every day.

Listening to Gilger, I wished that some of her excellent strategies could restored a poisoned relation, but sometimes the perspective is lost and no management skills can change that. Like the photos below, once shot, they are set.