“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...“

I can’t tell you exactly what James Joyce meant by that quote but it leapt off the page at me when I read it this afternoon in Dubliners. As promised Joyce is at times hard to digest but I felt that his efforts at telling these stories of people in Dublin, Ireland was motivating. So, I thought I would tell some of my own from time to time on this platform

So I recently (today) decided I might take up blogging and then I remembered that I already had a blog that has been just sitting here dormant where my wife and I left it many years ago. Of course, a good deal of life has happened since. We now have three children and do far less international travel. One thing directly impacting the other. We are both still educators and I have now been a school administrator for just shy of a decade. We have run marathons. We have completed advanced degrees. Sadly, we have lost loved ones along the way. One thing is for sure, however. We have grown through these experiences.

Over the years I have often found frustration with some aspects of the educational environment. As a child I found that the focus was on existing abilities. The approach to teaching and learning was as limiting and fixed as the culture that existed around it. What it needed was a new culture. The components of which I have recently researched as part of my doctoral work. As a teacher and school leader, I have found that there is serious and urgent work to be done in working on the systems currently in place. But more so, it is specific personalities that have ensured things remain fixed. This has been to their benefit, not in advocacy for kids.