Well she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now. Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now and with the radio blasting goes cruising just as fast as she can now (Beach Boys)

Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash

Seth Godin tells us that most of what we do at work is one of three things: 

• Fun: It's engaging, it gives us satisfaction, people smile.
• Urgent: Someone else (or perhaps we) decided that this paper is on fire and it has to be extinguished before anything else happens.
• Fear-based: Most common of all, the things we do to protect ourselves from the fear we'd have to sit with if we didn't do them.
• Not on this list: important. A day spent doing important work is rare indeed. Precious, too.

Today was a good one at work for me (must be, because that's what I told a fellow Principal who rang me on the way home today to check in with me).

Fun - staff meeting at 8.15 is always fun times, plus I had fun teaching my Year 10 English class and learning some dance steps for a staff item after school. I smile a lot at student actions during the day - one boy today was hilariously wearing surgical gloves - when I asked why (DER!) - he said, with a grin - 'Covid!'

Urgent - checking the UE status for my Year 13's and getting rulings on various requests HAD to be done today. 

Fear based - Thursday is my deadline for filling out a weekly report for my Board of Trustees equivalent (called Campus Administrators in our context), plus a weekly report for my immediate line manager (called a Regional principal), and responding to all of the staff reports that are due every Thursday. This all takes me a few hours every Thursday.

Important - doing a report on a professional discussion about MAP Growth data today was in this category - it was a polite request from a colleague, but an important one because it got me thinking about next steps in the data analysis. That will have positive repercussions for student learning.