A different Kind of Busy

I have completed the first week of school in my first year as an administrator rather than a classroom teacher. I have lost track of the number of times that I have been asked how it is going. My stock response has become "It's a different kind of busy."

I don't have to make lesson plans and I don't have to grade (not entirely true as I am in charge of a handful of students who go over to help at Holy Family, but that doesn't really count). I don't need to make seating charts or worry about remembering the names and faces (difficult with prosopagnosia) of 100+ high schoolers.

Instead, I have a very different set of things to engage my time. Here are a few of my observations:

Meetings take up a lot more time than I had expected. On Tuesday, I sent an email at 3:15 that I had started working on at 8:30 because I kept being called into meetings.
Monday (the first day of school) had 3 crises to be solved. Only one was major: An outside teacher who handles the ACT/SAT prep classes had received incorrect information about her course schedule. We weren't even sure if she would be able to teach a section of 20 students. It all got worked out in the end.
I have a lot more authority than I had thought I would. I had started out responding to questions with "Let me check on that and get back to you." I have come to realize that I am the one who makes many of the decisions. I need to keep the other administrators informed of what's going on, but sometimes, the buck does stop with me.

In a way this is similar to the year that it really sunk in that I was a responsible adult. I was chaperoning the senior Kairos retreat at St. Michael's and was playing poker with some of the gentlemen. Looking at the clock, I realized that it was 1:00 AM! "That's funny," I thought, "Lights out was an hour ago. Why hasn't anyone come in to tell them to go to sleep?" Slowly it dawned on me that the duty fell to me. Hastily, I informed the boys that it was time to go to bed. They didn't listen, but that's another story.

I now have to be interested (or at least seem to be) in sports. This is something that I have mostly managed to avoid during my teaching career. My problems with football aside, I am a nerd and never played sports myself (theater and debate). Now I need to attend games. I guess I should learn a little bit more of the rules. I have already attended the fall sports photos day. That was pretty fun. I had a snow cone and got to meet some nice parents.
Supervision is a lot different when you don't teach the students. In a few years, I probably won't know anybody's name. I'll just call out "Hey, you! Don't throw the lunchbox in the tree!" or "You in the Lexus! Slow down!" or "Run, kid! Bell rings in 30 seconds!"

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