A Plan or a Journey

I remember senior year of high school fairly well. Probably most of us do. It is a capstone year. Thirteen years in the making. For me, it was 24 years ago. Bush Senior was president. We had gone to Kuwait and Iraq for the first time. I had applied and been accepted to Kalamazoo College, bringing my lovely 3.0 gpa and looking forward to swimming, foreign study, and becoming a diplomat. Nearly a quarter-century ago, that was the plan. I was prepared for it, having taken Spanish, French, and German in high school. At the time my Hebrew was somewhat decent as I had learned it through camp, Hebrew School, and Sunday School. I had some basics civics classes and a pretty decent background in world politics. That was the plan. Like Laverne and Shirley, I was ready to take on the world.

I remember senior year of college fairly well also. This may be even easier for many of us. It was the capstone year in which we have trained, learned, and explored. Now it was time to take on the world. For me, it was 20 years ago. I was graduating from Kalamazoo College with a double-major in Chemistry and Political Science. Got my teaching certificate on the side as it was only 3 extra classes at the time. I had spent 3 months in Spain a couple of years earlier for foreign study but was planning to use that at all. I had a great job lined up to go teach Chemistry and coach swimming at Lee M. Thurston High School. And I did... for 4 years.

Since then, I've had a fair number of jobs. All that made sense at the time. All that created new opportunities. All that were fun. Few that "college and career readiness" prepared me for. I went from a High School to an elementary school. At the stop after that I was principal and Dual Language coordinator, which required me to dust off my Spanish that I hadn't used in over a decade. Stop after stop, the only thing consistent about them is that the titles made sense in vertical order. What I discovered is we can have the greatest plan in the world, the greatest skill set in the world, but each stop in the journey is unique. Each place, each role, each situation requires us to work with awesome, special, invigorating people. Each task requires unique solutions that quite frankly will work only for that situation. Each job requires us to create, communicate, innovate, accept others, and grow.

I'm pretty sure many of the classes I took in high school and college have very little application to what I do today. The most relevant classes maybe the Spanish classes as I do need to communicate in the language more than I ever imagined. Somewhere along the line, I learned to think. I learned to become a situational engineer and solve problems. I learned to accept that nothing was going to be the same from day to day or from job to job.

As we talk about college and career readiness. As we prepare students to enter the world. Maybe we need to have a different thought process. Maybe it's not the content and coursework but rather the thinking, problem-solving and communication skills. Could our work with students be more valuable if we were placing thinking challenges in front of them, encouraging them to collaborate, and having them share their solutions? Rather than covering a course, would solving real problems in the field result in a deeper level of skill development.

Many of us make a plan for our lives but life seems to happen while we are making plans. The journey is a winding road with many starts, many stops, successes, and failures. It's not the skills we have developed but rather our willingness to think, change, adapt, and restart that determines our ability to succeed. The journey is not over until we decide it is. Each day a step forward towards some unknown horizon. We can have a plan all we want, but it's the journey that matters. As we discovered in Bull Durham, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains."

Box of Chocolates