Another ice bucket challenge

Thanks to Mr. Floth and Mr. Yates for being good sports this morning and fulfilling their part of the challenge from yesterday. We managed to get it in before it started raining.

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

It's all fun and games....until you are nominated!  Many of you have seen the ALS ice bucket challenge.  It's a great way to raise awareness and funds for ALS.  A family friend of mine lost his mom to ALS a few years ago.  It's been fun to watch everyone get ice water dumped on them but I was secretly praying no one would nominate me to do it.  Well, last night I was just about to go to bed when I decided to check my FB feed and low and behold I was challenge by a friend who is a parent at Freeman via her kids, our students.  As I showed my husband the nomination, he said I had to do it at school.  I agreed.  A 5th grade teacher was also challenged so I called her up and we decided we would take care of this challenge in the morning.

So...to prove our dedication to the ALS ice bucket challenge, see our video below.  It was fun and the kids enjoyed watching us get dumped on.  Boy, was it cold!  I think I got a brain freeze on the outside.  After our fun, we nominated Mr. Floth and Mr. Yates to do the challenge so we will see if they pay up tomorrow.

Enjoy!

So...uh...what do you do all day?

“So what do you do all day?”  Is a common phrase you will hear from people when enquiring about your job.  I often chuckle and think, “if you only knew…”  In fact, just in the last 2 weeks I have heard this phrase more than once.  So in case that question has crossed your mind I thought I would shed some light on what takes place in school.

The role or duties of a teacher have changed dramatically over the years.  However one thing has never changed, the caring relationship between teacher and student.  Teachers aren’t just teachers.  They are counselors, friends, parent like figures, nurses, listeners, problem solvers, etc.  I get tired of hearing the joke that teachers have a cushy job.  They only have to work 8-4, have no nights, weekends, holidays, and 3 months in the summer that they don’t have to work.  Well, from the outside that may appear to be the case.  I usually respond to that phrase with, “well, we all choose our professions so if you wanted summers ‘off’ you should have gone into education.” 

Sure there might be a few teachers that put in the minimum, but I have never come across them.  My colleagues come into work before the first bell and will sometimes work until 6pm.  If they do go home at 4, they usually come back after dinner or take at least 1, if not 2 or 3 bags of work home to work on.  Weekends and holidays are consumed with coming back into the building to spend time doing all the tasks that are hard to complete during the school day.  There are always copies to make, projects to design or cut out, papers to grade, and lessons to plan.  Summer vacation was a welcomed break.  Most years, I would take a few weeks or at least June and relax, not even think about school.  But really, as a teacher, your brain NEVER stops planning and thinking.  Yes, it’s true, there aren’t kids in the building from the end of May until August, but a teachers’ brain never shuts off.

When school is in session, teachers are “ON” duty literally from 8 to whenever they go home.  Even then, there are papers to grade, lessons to plan, books and materials to read, parents to email or call.  Sure teachers have lessons to follow, but often times there are things that come up during the day that you don’t plan on.  A kid getting sick or hurt, reviewing a lesson because it didn’t go as planned the day before, a special event or visitor to the school, parent contacts to make, the list goes on.  It can really be exhausting.  I have always said that I love teaching because every day is different and you never know what the day will bring.

Well, the same could be said about school secretaries, custodians, and principals.  As a teacher, I always wondered how things couldn’t get done more efficiently as a principal or why I didn’t see them in my room more often.  When I was studying to become an administrator, that was one of the things that I wanted to be sure I did, be more visible in the school.  So it hasn’t even been a full week of school and I am quickly learning what a principal does, besides manage behind the scenes.  First of all, my email inbox is always full of new messages.  So I try to sift through the high priority messages and respond, file the others into folders if I need to reference them later.  I have a “to-do” list that is constantly being added and subtracted to.  I have been doing walk-throughs in the building, watching students and teachers.  Helping out where I can be of assistance.  The lunch room is always in need of more hands, so I will spend time in there visiting with the students, asking them how their day is going, eating lunch with them, and opening food items or cleaning up spilled milk.  Usually I will hang out at recess for a while, or covering for teachers and paras when needed.  Lots of other jobs come up throughout the day that I never dreamed up, mostly because this is a new position for me.

I could go on and on with the various jobs that people have around school.  Everyone works hard to make a school run.  They really do.  The secretaries and custodians spend a lot of time making sure the school is running, but they probably get the least amount of recognition.  Their job is year round and doesn’t really have a beginning or an end.  Summer isn’t much time to sand and wax floors, repaint, make repairs, and deep clean to name a few.  As far as the secretaries go, the paperwork alone that comes through is overwhelming to me.  They have to be very organized.  Most people tell me they would never want to be a principal, well I would say I would never want to be a school secretary!

You know, I look at it like this; everyone thinks someone else’s job is so easy but until you actually do someone else’s job, don’t be quick to say it’s easy.  There are so many great people that make schools run.  I have been blessed to always work with great people who care about their students and treat their co-workers like family.

So the next time you catch yourself wanting to ask someone who works in a school, “So what do you do all day?” know that they are working hard, really hard.

Welcome!

August 8, 2014

Welcome to From the Falcon's Nest!  This blog is designed to share educational updates, thoughts, and experiences from the desk of the elementary principal.  Let me introduce myself.  I am Erin Sieh (pronounced "see").  This is my first year as an administrator and I am lucky enough to be starting my career as a principal at Freeman Elementary School.  Freeman is a consolidated district that began in the fall of 1998.  I will be sharing more on the history of the school in a later post.

My education career started back in high school when I was a senior and wanted to be a teacher’s assistant.  I really enjoyed my math teacher at the time and thought maybe teaching math would be a good idea.  I spent time helping a junior high math class discover more complicated numerical equations and patterns.  As I spent time in that environment I began to think I wanted to study the field of education in college.  Hastings College was where I decided to go, but I was still toying with the idea of becoming a nurse.  I had a love of music which made me also consider minoring in music.  You see, I have a lot of interests and I like to be busy so it was tricky to narrow down what I wanted to do.  I quickly decided my first year of college that education was the route to take, instead of nursing, but which area of education was not so clear.  

I began taking lots of English classes thinking I wanted to be an English major.  A person can never have too many books after all, but WOW, was there a lot of reading.  I read so many classics in college. (Oh that Jane Austen class during Interim was a treat!)  As much as I loved reading, I realized that there were a lot of other people that had such a deep understanding of the materials that I questioned if I could serve the students in the best capacity as they needed.  I liked math, but not calculus and trigonometry.  So I was in a bind.  There were a lot of subject areas that I was interested in but not enough to major in just one area. 

Thankfully I had an amazing advisor who suggested I take a look at an elementary classroom.  I thought she was crazy and I wasn’t that excited about it because junior high was where I thought I was destined to be.  So to appease her, I gave it a shot.  It didn’t take long to realize elementary was definitely where I needed to be. Since that elementary practicum, I never looked back. 

The rest of my college days were spent studying the elements of being a teacher, making lesson plans, bulletin boards, grading student work, and absorbing as much as I could about the field of education.  I quickly made friends who were emerged into the same classes as I was and we bonded over which teaching materials were the best or sharing our favorite children’s literature.  By the time I graduated I was over the top excited to have my own classroom.  Certain I was going to be a 3^rd grade teacher somewhere I started applying all over eagerly anticipating a phone call to accept my first “real” job. 

In the end, I took an elementary music teaching job in Blair.  I taught K-2 grade music in 3 different buildings.  Even though I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a music teacher I was still excited to jump into the teaching world.  Much to my surprise I enjoyed teaching those little kiddos music.  They were SO excited to come into class every day to sing and dance and play with different musical elements.  The highlight of the year was usually the spring concert, despite the stress that led up to it.  

After two years, we moved to York where I subbed around the area in every grade and subject possible…except Ag or shop class I guess!  That was invaluable experience.  Wow!  After that I decided every teacher should be a sub if only for a few months.  My chance to become a classroom teacher happened after my one year of subbing.  I was given the opportunity to work as a 5^th grade teacher at a private Catholic school.  I will share some of my experiences from that in future posts.  After learning the ropes, I decided that I loved it!  I did some junior high coaching as well. 

Soon it was time to start thinking about a Master’s degree, but picking the area was more difficult.  After much exploring and research I was determined to study administration.  Most people said I was crazy to want to be a principal, but I was excited about the idea.  I wanted to be an advocate for teachers and help them grow professionally.  I spent summers driving to Lincoln to take classes at UNL and during the school year, took online classes.  After living in York for 5 years, we (my husband and I) decided it was time to move to a bigger city.  We ended up in Gretna where he commuted to the west and I commuted to the north.  I went back to Blair where I taught music, but this time I was going to be a 3^rd grade teacher, where I always wanted to be (I thought). 

Shortly after our move I finished up my Master’s degree from UNL in Educational Administration.  It was important that I finished my degree before we had kids knowing that it would be so tricky to be in school, teach, and have a baby.  Five months after graduating, we welcomed twin girls to our family.  Upon receiving my degree I started to view education a little differently.  Half the time I was looking through the looking glass as a teacher and the other half as an administrator.  For 3 years I soaked up as much about being a principal as I could, emerging myself in literature, and spending time attending conferences and workshops about administration.  I couldn’t wait to be a principal, but knew the timing wasn’t quite right.  I was sad to think about not having a classroom of my own students that I could teach and grow with every day.  There were so many special families that walked in and out of the classrooms that I taught in, but I knew there were more ways I wanted to help in schools.

This last spring I was offered the Elementary Principal job at Freeman.  Words could not express how excited I was to be starting down the administration path.  One of my colleagues congratulated me by saying, “Congratulations, welcome to the dark side!”  That is a big joke in the admin world, but I was determined to not make the word “principal” a bad thing.  I constantly told people that I wanted to be a principal, not for headaches and complaints, and negative parent conversations.

I wanted to be a principal to make school an enjoyable environment to be in.  I want staff to get up saying they can’t wait to go to work.  I want students to love their school, have pride in it, and discover a love for learning even when things get challenging or there are tests to take.  I want to build relationships with families and the community, to showcase the school in a positive light and be proud of the work that goes on daily.  There is so much negativity in the world today and education has their fair share of it but what doesn’t get recognition is the positive, the good things, the amazing things that kids are capable of. 

So here I am, starting out my journey on the other side of the desk this fall.  I wake up excited to get to the office and start making a difference.  This year making a difference will have a new perspective.  I get to work with everyone in the building, all families that walk through the door, and the community.

I hope you enjoy reading posts From the Falcon’s Nest this year.  I welcome your questions or comments (as long as they are respectful) any time. 

So here’s to a great 2014-2015 school year!