It really hasn’t been long since I left admin to return to the classroom, just roughly four months. So I’m certain I’ll discover a difference between these two roles that is much more profound and insightful in the future. But so far, the biggest difference is this: Emails.
As an administrator, especially at the district office, I received literally hundreds of emails a day. More than 50 each Saturday and Sunday. It was a mountain of correspondence that I set aside official quiet time every morning to review, but continued to check throughout every seven days and nights of the week. I know I would have been more productive if I completed my 30 minutes of email time each morning and then left subsequent messages unread until the next day.
But two things: 1 - An urgent issue at the district level has the potential to seriously impact hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to respond quickly because the emergency happened after 9 a.m.
And 2 - I started my professional career nearly 40 years ago as a young newspaper reporter. No email, no text messages, no social media. I had a mailbox. Scribbled messages left in that wooden cubby were my bread and butter, and I’ve never recovered from obsessively checking messages all day every day.
(Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning hilarious and extraordinary Miami Herald crime reporter, writes about the same unbreakable habit in her book Never Let Them See You Cry. Or maybe it was The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. Both great books.)
I just checked: Since Friday afternoon, when my principal sends out her weekly update and celebration newsletter, I’ve received five emails. Before her newsletter arrived on Friday, I received a total of 19 emails that day.
Emails are interesting because, unlike letters and text messages, all of them seem to carry an air of urgency. Especially since email migrated from living exclusively on the desktop to being a 24-hour presence on my phone, each message seems to yell for attention.
As a site and district administrator, I often received sensitive emails that were sent to me just to keep me in the loop. Absolutely necessary. If you work in a system of more than two people, you should document important things and include your supervisor. I very much appreciated folks who understood to cc their managers, and then explicitly stated they were keeping me in the loop, not expecting a response.
However, I didn’t realize how much these dozens and dozens of emails took up space in my brain and soul. So much real estate and energy, and when I walked away, I felt that weight slowly dissipate. Four months in, I don’t feel it at all.
It’s like when you have a bad cold, and you might find momentary relief but remain congested for weeks until one day you wake up, and you can breathe.
My plan for re-entering the classroom is to fill that real estate with focused, personalized lessons and interventions, targeting the exact young humans that sit in my classroom this year. It’s a different kind of urgency, one that sits so much better on my soul.
