Post-Rant: A Happy Ending (or, "The Iron Team Lives On")

Friday, 5 October 2007 Clay Burell Print This Post

Kent: Now, banish’d Kent,
If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemn’d,
…Thy master, whom thou lovest,
Shall find thee full of labours.
–King Lear I.iv.5-8

Photo Credit: “Iron Team” by 3blindmice on Flickr (via Everystockphoto.com)

What. an. intense. week. or two.My last post was a rant against what I perceived to be the beginning of the end for our fledgling 1:1 program: filtering and blocking websites due to the possibility of finding sexual content.

I would (and will) fight the same battle, and as passionately, every time that Filtering Foe draws near. But in this instance, I regret one thing: I didn’t first speak to my admin privately to advise them to re-think their directive.

There’s much to be learned here on all sides, so I’ll share it.

First, my admin didn’t first ask my advice before broadcasting that directive in an all-faculty email. Had that happened – had I been included in the conversation about Everystockphoto.com (which is a similar service to Creative Commons Search) – then the policy directive might have been different. Even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t have blindsided me with such force, because I would have known and been prepared for it.

And I would have written with less heat.

In fairness, it must be hard for administrators to make the shift, since it’s happening too fast to be taught in college M.Ed. programs and such. This will take time.

Second, I should have had a cup of coffee and taken some quiet time before writing my reply. I wrote it as forcefully as I could for a reason: I wanted to soundly thrash the idea that content-filtering and site-blocking is a good idea. Similarly, I sent my email “all faculty” in order to de-stabilize the idea’s acceptance by the faculty. In other words, I wanted to re-frame our initial picture of “school 2.0″ and its possibilities.

But fatigue, shock, and disappointment that I hadn’t been included in this decision – an example of a bigger question concerning vagueness about my role in our 1:1 launch – eclipsed what my better judgment should have remembered, and it’s this: as I’ve said many times in these pages, my high school principal really is first-rate. Without his advocacy over six long months of negotiations, debates, and never-saying-die about becoming an Apple school, we’d all be suffering with PCs right now.

And in my passion to attack an idea, my language could too easily be construed as an attack on him as well. That I regret.

So I’ll let the follow-up email I sent to the faculty speak for itself: it couldn’t be more sincere, and it should have been labeled, “The Iron Team Lives” ~

Dear All,A real quick clarification in case anyone mistook my argument _for_ school policy as, instead, an attack _against_ anyone: that wasn’t the intent.

This _is_ a crucial issue, and deserves “passionate” debate. In my desire to keep one point of view from settling too firmly about it, I chose to “reply all” when articulating a different viewpoint – but I did it upon waking from an overdue nap after the workshop, which robbed me of much sleep, and reading that email first thing, before coffee. I wrote and hit “send” before doing an e-tone check.

I can’t un-ring that bell – but I can add this: I should have known Rich meant his email to be a temporary guideline pending further discussion and debate, which we all know is (thank goodness) Rich’s leadership style.

So for the record, two things:

1) The day before the workshop, I happened to tell Rich in a meeting with Jason and Wade that I didn’t think I’d ever find a better principal to work with (and I told him I wasn’t “blowing smoke up his whatever,” which was true); and because that’s true, I want to make sure that that’s public knowledge;

and 2) Rich didn’t ask me to write this. I offered to do so willingly. We’ve done amazing things together over the past few months. Most of the credit is his.

So here’s to more discussions about the high seas we’re sailing

Thanks all,

Clay

So what does this all come down to? Careful communication, it seems to me. And it’s noteworthy that the whole teapot tempest occurred in that worst of web 1.0′s communication tools: email.

One more post for my “apologies” tag. But a good one to post as an epilogue and denouement.