Love Being a Principal

This past semester, I had the good fortune of having Corey Topf do an internship with me. (Honestly, I think I may have benefited from the experience more than he did.) As we reflected on our time together, he asked me the following question - if my children were considering becoming a principal, is it something that I would encourage? Whoa!

Being a principal isn't easy. It is stressful, it is challenging, it is defeating, it is never ending, it is exhausting, it is more. I think that Baruti Kafele summarizes it pretty well in his Tweet (below). Even more telling are the responses that his Tweet generated; if you get a chance, scroll through some of them.

Circling back to the original question that Corey asked me, my answer was yes. My answer is yes. My answer will always be yes. I can't imagine anything better than a being a principal. Coincidentally, around the same time that Corey had asked me that question, I had just visited my son's second grade classroom to share about my job as a part of their unit of learning about communities.  The Slides pictured, below, outline the top ten things that I love about being a principal.

Being a principal can be hard. But there are things that we can do to combat those difficulties. My friend, and fellow principal Jessica Cabeen outlines a lot of those things in the recent post that she wrote for Edutopia, The Importance of Self-Care for Administrators (linked). The things that Jessica shares are real things that we NEED to do in-order to thrive. The reward can easily outweigh the risk. Doing those things, with the right attitude, mindset, perspective make it easy to love being a principal. And that's the bottom line, my advice to my kids, do what you love.