Reaching Your YearTential

When I was serving in the principal role at Highland High School, our work led us to some yearly themes that were based upon what the team felt our kids and our building needed. Our students brought a high skill set in many areas to our building, but we sometimes questioned if we were taking them to their highest level. That mindset led to the first theme of How Do the Best Get Better? That became a lukewarm theme that never stuck with our kids, but that’s because the work and mentality about that selection just wasn’t pushed properly by us. Despite that, we carried on in our work. During one late spring/early summer thought session, our minds went to constructing and building a year that would be unlike any other year. We started thinking about not just coming to school, but about making each second, each day, each week, each month and the year really count. We broke down THAT year with a design on reaching our peak as a building, and - quite frankly - we stumbled upon the word YearTential. Obviously, it was about reaching your Potential for that Year. What is Your YearTential? worked and produced impact.

We utilized some anticipated energy for the theme, and in August began a countdown to “your best school year ever”. We utilized social media and our front marquee to begin the countdown from 10 days and obviously made it to “your best school year ever starts tomorrow”. That created some energy! We had t-shirts made and distributed them to every student prior to the school year with the intent on everyone wearing them during week 1, and boy did they wear them. Our guess was that about 95% of our kids had them on during our first YearTential day, and 49 out of 50 staff members had them on. (Remember...no matter how good an idea is, there will always be someone who finds fault in what you are doing). We ended up with four (4) YearTential Activity days during the school year, and each of them took our students away from the requirements of content-area learning and moved a few of their days into the idea of pushing yourself, of what it takes to reach your dreams, of taking advantage of each moment to build yourself into the life you wanted. We had national speaker Marc Mero in during a cold, January day - and WHAT A DAY we had! Mark’s focus and energy that day was about making the best of your life...of overcoming...of chasing dreams. We never want to make kids cry, but Mark put them in a place of happy tears, and he connected with them in a unique way that included motivation. After his speech, each group was dispersed into our auxiliary gym where they had assigned seats based on a color they selected. What they discovered is that they were now sitting at a table with kids they may not have ever spoken to in their lives. They talked about our school building - strengths, weaknesses, treatment of one another, bullying, you name it. It was an incredible unique day in a year where our kids truly were presented with the idea of maximizing their time and pushing their days.

This isn’t a writing about a great plan or a piece about a great day or great year. It’s a look at something that is beyond precious when you are talking about kids in your school building - TIME. Time is the single most important thing we have in order to set our kids into the proper learning mode for the remainder of their lives. In addition, it is what we do with this time that we have with kids that makes all of the difference in the world. They arrive at our doors on “these days” and during “these times”, and it is vital, in my opinion, to ensure that we are giving them and ourselves as educators the opportunities to reach our potential. I can’t imagine an educator, a coach, a parent, or a mentor saying anything more important than when given the time to help develop a life, they took advantage of the time they had with that life and helped that person reach their potential.

Our kids had fun with the word, and some of them made fun of it, but that word stuck in their minds for quite a long time. I can guarantee that they spent a great deal of time at least thinking about the idea of reaching their potential. I went back to Highland a couple of years later for an event, and the kids involved in the event wore their YearTential t-shirts in honor of that year. That stuck with me only from the standpoint that the building had taken advantage of a time period with kids. We didn’t just have another year...we worried about making it the best year.

Time with kids mattered to me last week when, on the same day, two of my former students reached two very different points of their lives. One of them, who played basketball for me, lost a 3-year battle with cancer. It shook my world and obviously those in his life. His group used social media to reflect, and quite often the reflections were about the “time” they were with him or the “time” he had created with them. On the very same day, I found out that one of my former students had been called up to the big leagues the previous weekend - he had reached the ultimate for a baseball player and was in the starting lineup for the World Champions. It became even more than that, as I discovered that during the weekend, he hit his first home run as a major league baseball player. What was going on in his mind as he was rounding the bases? Again...reflections occurred about the “time” people are all together in a building as teachers and learners and as a school community. Reflections occurred on what that time means during moments of the ultimate sadness or of ultimate joy.

Not everyone who reads a blog is an educator, but everyone can understand the idea behind taking advantage of time and maximizing opportunity. At work, home, school, vacation, or anywhere, it’s important for people to remember that the time period they are experiencing can be important for many reasons. There are endless examples - especially for educators - that when the moment of teaching and learning presents itself, we are likely to never have that moment again. YearTential taught me about the pursuit of making the moment you were in as the most important, and that the work put in on behalf of that moment can make all of the difference between just another event or one that impacts people in a very strong way.