Without getting too inside baseball, my new job involves working at an alternative middle school in the midwest. Our current way of teaching students coping and life skills doesn't work. The rest of the district has a system in place, and another teacher and I trained in it this week to evaluate it for our school. We were very impressed and now we're putting together a way to sell it to the administration and staff. If we can get people to buy in, I think we can revolutionize the place. This is part of my GAL experience, I think; I'm determined that I'm not going to make any decision based on not making waves. I'm going to look for the waves that need to be made and make them. Better to fail at something excellent than to succeed in keeping your head down . . . and it's not like keeping my head down has made me successful in the past.
IF we can pull this off (and it is genuinely a big "if," mostly because I don't know whether the current staff and administration can come together and implement a simple but demanding system) we will be giving this school a better shot at changing the lives of the 100 or so kids most likely to drop out, get shot, shoot somebody, go to jail or otherwise burn out before they have a chance. Not just to maintain them and get them to comply long enough to last another year in the district, but to give them skills to change their lives for real. It will really matter that I worked there. Nothing will be perfect, but some terrible things will be better because of what I did.
Of course, that's what happens if we succeed. If we fail . . . .
