Americans have always been called to be resilient.  Because of the trials of previous generations, we have more and do more than ever before.  Today we are wealthy beyond the standards of most people in the world.

But we are being called to be resilient in our own generation as well.  Today we are being challenged to live life beyond the dreams of yesterday.  We are being called to show our mettle.

​We didn't have air conditioning in my house when I was a kid.  Sometimes we lived on bologna sandwiches.  My grandparents lived through the Great Depression.  My grandfather told me stories about coming home with four flat tires during that time, driving on the rims because they couldn't afford to replace the tires.  My other grandfather was in World War 2, away from his wife and two sons for a long time as they endured some of the scariest times in recent history.

We've endured tornados, terror attacks, wars, political maneuvers, trade wars, gas shortages, hostage crises, and school shootings, but we have always endured.  We have the faith in our system of life.  We have faith in our daily routine.  We have faith.

When George Washington was called to lead, he humbly accepted the challenge.  When Abraham Lincoln was called to write a speech, he peppered it with a challenge to his nation.  When Martin Luther King had a dream, he knew it would not be easy to make it reality.  Each sacrificed for the good of the cause.

That's where we find ourselves today.  Sure, there are uncertainties ahead of us, and as humans we do tend to look for the worst-case scenario as the most likely reality, but friends, let us meet the challenge.  May this be our finest hour.  May our approach to life in this season be a legacy to our country and a blessing to one another.

We have been thrust through the heart with the challenge of survival.  May we respond by thrusting our hearts and souls into the world for all to see.  We are American citizens, and we have the blood and spirit of our ancestors coursing through our veins.  This may be our greatest challenge, but we will not be beaten.

At our school, we are fortunate to have two copy machines.  They are new, this year, and they are quite fast.  They have the ability to scan from and print to both sides of a page.  They can punch holes in the copies, and they can staple multiple pages in a variety of patterns.  They even hold several reams of copy paper, so they won't have to be reloaded as often.

The problem, it seems, is the human component.  Copy jobs can be sent wirelessly through any computer that is connected to the system, and many teachers like to sit in their classrooms to hit the PRINT button.  Ideally, from that position, one would then walk to the printer to pick up the copy or copies she printed.

But that ain't happenin'.

Instead, a person will hit PRINT and then forget that the copy is waiting to be picked up.  Then, when I come along, I set the unidentified page(s) on a shelf beside the copier.  When the person finally makes her way to the copy machine, she spends unnecessary time sorting through the random pages on the shelf to look for hers.  It seems like a waste of time to me.

Then there is the person who physically walks to the copy machine to kick off a series of copy jobs that will take many, many sheets of paper (Perhaps this person then makes her way to the other copy to print pages, as well.). The trouble with this is that the person walks away, leaving the machine whirring and clicking along, and does not babysit the process.  The machine jams?  Someone else waiting to make copies will clear the jam if they want to eventually get to their own business.  The paper runs out?  Someone else will refill the machine.  So many copies stack up on the tray that no more can be pooped out?  Someone else will neatly stack them to the side.  The copier explodes?  Someone else will pull the fire alarm.

My point is this:  please babysit your copy jobs!  It never fails that if I send something from my classroom, and then walk to pick up what I have printed, something will be wrong with the copy machine, or my job sits waiting in queue with a dozen others, and I don't have the time to wait.  My planning time is precious, so I need to spend it being productive and not working on unexpected maintenance on a machine I know nothing about.

Except on rare occasions, here's what I do:  I take my laptop to the copy machine to make all of my copies.  I stand there to make sure the machine does what it is supposed to do.  I feed the paper into the tray when the machine stops.  I clear my own jams.  I clear the output tray and neatly stack my copies.  It's that easy...and I have the peace of mind that I have remembered to pick up all of my jobs and that I have not unexpectedly held up someone else.

Here is another selection of videos (very short ones) that connect with our upcoming excursion to Boston, Massachusetts.  These outline some of the locations that I will navigate to and around while leading a cohort of teachers from the state of Kentucky.

Before the week I will spend in historic Boston, Massachusetts, I am up to bat for a pedagogy session in Wichita, Kansas.  It's not a long drive through Kansas to get there, but things are pretty flat and straight through the vast farmland.  The last time I was there with my family, we were still wearing masks because of COVID.  At the time, we just skirted Wichita on our way to Hutchison to visit the Strataca Salt Mine and the Cosmosphere.  It was rather hot outside and the car's air conditioning was working to keep up.

This time, it's business.  I will present professional development for Wichita teachers in June, based on the Gilder Lehrman unit entitled The American Revolution:  The Boston Massacre, "Yankee Doodle", and the Declaration of Independence, 1770-1776.  That's not a new unit for me, as I have been looking at it for the session in Boston about a week and half later.  However, with the Boston unit, I will have already met with the teachers three time previously.  Therefore, I will have already presented to them some of the foundational material needed for the session.  This will be my only contact with Wichita educators, though, so my approach will need to be different.

It's important that they understand the unit, but at the same time, it is a "how-to-teach" session, and there is a lot of explanation and demonstration that goes into that.  Yes, we will look at Paul Revere's engraving of "The Bloody Massacre".  Yes, we will look into Yankee Doodle's lyrics.  Yes, we read through the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  But...we will need to think about the importance of making a proper analysis of primary source documents.  We'll try out the strategies of shared reading, key word identification, text-based questioning, and more.  Two hours seems like a long time, but there is so much that I could pack in that I'm really going to have to consider what can be left out.

At some point, as well, it becomes a matter of reading the crowd and discovering where they want to go with the day.  Considering this is educational professional development in June, I suspect for many of them, they will want to go to the beach or on a cruise - anywhere other than a room for a meeting.  I've been on their side of things, and I know how it feels to finish a school year and then be subjected to long, painful professional development.  It has to be pretty good at that point to be effective.  It's going to be hard to keep them interested and engaged.