"Normal"

In the days before selfies and cell phones, long before the Internet connected us all, students and parents still sought to live normal lives as normal people. When you glimpse back through time, whether it's The Glass Menagerie, Sixteen Candles, Can't Hardly Wait, or Notting Hill one discovers that "Normal" is just an illusion. As parents, teachers, students, and community members, we look at the past and dream wistfully of easier times. Times which seemed to be more patterned, more relaxed, and more normal. We assume its because of "parents today," "kids today," or "technology" that our world is more of a struggle, more complex, or more challenging. We point to entitlement and arrogance of others and yet we aren't ready to accept that there are consistently challenges, crises of identity, and eventually overcoming the barrier.

No Child Left Behind put us all on the "Lake Wobegon"path. We worked as schools, families, and society to become a place where as Garrison Keillor said,"all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."  Legislation that forced us forward to the illusion that all children could be above grade level. A number calculated as the mean of that same population. Through this legislation, states, districts, and schools, began a race towards ratcheting up expectations, policies that identified children as failures, promoted retention practices even though the research clearly identifies the correlation between retention and dropping out of schools, and penalized almost everyone involved. The epitome of this will be the PARCC results when released this December will indicate less than 40% of students meet or exceed state expectations. In the quest to be normal or above average, we have become failures.

The reality is, no one ever leads the normal life. We all have stuff. Things that get in our way. We discover money doesn't solve all of our problems, just ask a professional athlete. It helps, but it doesn't solve them. Fame doesn't solve all of our problems, just ask an actor or actress. It gives you resources, but also challenges. The reality is, each of us has challenges. Each of our children have their own set of gifts and own set of problems. As a principal, I would often say to my students and their families, know what is on the back of your baseball card. Be open and willing to see those statistics, the strengths and the challenges. Be honest with yourself about what each of those are and use them to your advantage. 

When we look inside The Glass Menagerie, we discover a family that looks perfect on the outside has it's own demons on the inside. In Sixteen Candles, Samantha (Meg Ryan) and Robin (Jami Gertz) stare at Caroline, the senior with the perfect body and the perfect boyfriend, only to discover as the night goes on that Caroline's world is falling apart just like everyone else. In Can't Hardly Wait, Preston (Ethan Embry) longs for Amanda Beckett (Jennifer Love Hewitt) but discovers that her life is just as problematic as his.  No one has a normal life. No one has it perfect. No one has it easy. We are all working on something different. It's easy to look in from the outside and ask why is that person's life so easy or that person's child so successful. We've all got stuff and we are all making it one day at a time.

Just Saying No

Bad Decision