Reflections on Boston

I was in Boston all of last week for the National Catholic Education Association conference. Here are some highlights.

NUMBER ONE
The opening days of the conference were excellent; I met a number of prospective students and principals who wanted their teachers to consider our courses, but the last day of the conference was dead. I’d given everything away and it was just as well because no one was interested in graduate study, and interest in my neighbors’ products was equally dismal.

So in comes two mid-career teachers and one gasped, “A hall-pass timer! This is the coolest!” Jim Wehrly of Stokes Publishing displayed in the booth next to me various kinds of timers for classrooms.

It was almost as big as the old fashioned board of education, so it would be hard to misplace. “It’s also water-proof,” says Jim—just in case kids drop it into the lavatory sink while washing their hands.

“Does it shock them if they’re late?”

Jim said it didn’t, but I looked to me like he was making a mental note.

“I’d like to record my voice on it,” said the teacher, “so when they’re late they’d hear my voice, ‘Get back to class, get back to class’—and only I could turn it off.”

Despite the excitement, they moved on without buying anything.

NUMBER TWO
I talked briefly with a teacher who looked amazingly like my doctor, except 20 years younger. I told her but she hardly knew what to say. In fact, she looked incredulous, as if her name had just been called for the Hunger Games. Two colleagues appeared and asked what she was doing. She lilted her head and said, “I look like a doctor.” Then they laughed at the assumed absurdity and wandered off.

NUMBER THREE
This is a great walking city, especially if you appreciate grand old buildings. On my three-mile walk to the convention center, I five-story mansion condos built in the late 1800s for the upper-middle class, I am told. Though you can still see the beauty in these great row houses, they have long since been chopped into apartments and now look like over-Botoxed movie stars.

And the grand old churches! They not as big and intricate as European cathedrals, but they are stone-craft works of art. I can’t even imagine how they built them without cranes.

As in many cities, people on the street generally avoid eye contact or look through you.
And yet—and yet—I saw a burley Black policeman (who was big enough to have been a retired New England Patriots lineman)—so here was this big guy making faces at a giggling baby in a stroller. What a great moment!

My next conference is the National Charter School Association in Minneapolis. That’s in late June. Then, it is off to New Orleans in October for the Virtual School Symposium. Students and alumni visits are always appreciated. Please contact me if you can go.

Like or not: Professionals expected to be role models

If you’re going to be a professional, you have to reflect the standards of your public. And if you’re a doctor or educator, your standards should be higher than the aggregate values of the community.

Yes, it’s your life, so why should you care what anyone else thinks? Because even if you don’t set yourself on a pedestal, others do, and like it or not, with the mantle of being a teaching or medical professional comes public expectations.

And now, social media are teaching more and more professionals hard lessons of life.

For example, resumes display your best side, so human resources professionals are now going to Facebook and other social media to get a truer picture of applicants. They fear that someone with one or more Facebook pictures showing alcohol consumption may have a drinking problem that could affect their work, or someone with sexuality-focused photos on Facebook might make inappropriate contact with patients or students. Questionable photos and text could keep professionals from getting jobs or could get them fired.

The case of a mortuary student at the University of Minnesota makes a poignant point.

She threatened her ex-boyfriend with a sharp instrument on Facebook, presumably so he’d leave her alone, and she was the one who got suspended from school and who became the object of a police investigation. Authorities take these things seriously. In the wake of Columbine and many other school killings since then, how could they not take threats seriously? And doing so on Facebook is the same as buying an ad in the newspaper or signing a confession.

What’s a professional to do?

Glori Hinck, a 2010 M.E.T. grad and an associate professor of chiropractic education at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minnesota, suggests six remedies for potentially career-killing social media faux pas.
• Don’t make your personal Facebook site public.
• Further, understand that nothing on the internet is truly private.
• The new timeline function in Facebook allows anyone to see what you did in any given year, so old photos are no longer buried.
• Patrol your social media sites. There are ways to view how your site looks to others.
• Consider how many friends you have on Facebook. Most users have 533 friends, which is the size of a small town and, she says, they can’t all be friends in the traditional sense, so be careful what you share with these people.
• Don’t be friends with patients or students on personal FB sites.