THE BALANCE

Today, I got to have lunch, while I enjoyed watching kids learn. But that was totally indicative of what I had to do today. Meeting, followed by scheduled meeting, followed by unscheduled meeting, followed by another unscheduled meeting, followed by yet another scheduled meeting, and not to forget the four people that wanted to see me but couldn't.

I both hate and enjoy these type of days. Enjoy because they go by fast. Hate because they go by fast and you feel there may be critical areas that you needed to work on. In fact, there are critical areas that I couldn't get to because of the nature of the day and job. Then there's the little voice inside you that says, "You could cancel the meeting/practice you have with the students." Something I do quite regularly and never hear the end of. Today, I held to the student commitments but it was tough.

The nature of the job and trying to find the balance.

L E A D E R S H I P

Leadership as defined by Webster: "to direct on a course or direction" is one of the many definitions. I've read a fair share of leadership material and suspect throughout my career, I will read more. One of the overriding themes in the leadership materials is the notion that leadership is an art.

If it truly is an art, and I believe it is, it is one that is constantly worked on and examined and honed.

In education, leadership is often synonymous with data and outcome. This is WASL ground the next week, and with it, the notion that we will see how well one leads as it directly relates to WASL scores. This will be year three in my tenure of WASL scores. I've posted the last year's data below:

Grade Level	Reading	Math	Writing	Science
3rd Grade	44.1%	47.1%
4th Grade	41.7%	27.1%	39.6%
5th Grade	45.7%	24.5%		9.6%

Do I believe we'll do better? Of course. The question is asked: How much better? Time will tell, though I wish we didn't have to wait the (in my humble opinion) ridiculously long wait for results.