Finding Your Seat

Both of Our Boys made a Mini-Metro basketball team this year, our oldest made the 5/6 A Team, our youngest made the 5/6 B Team. We spend a good part of our Sundays in gymnasiums in and around Chittenden County. We are proud to sit in the bleachers and cheer for Our Boys and their teammates.

The coaches for both teams ask that their players arrive at least a half hour before the game starts. Once we enter the gym, whether home or away, the first thing that we do is scan the crowd to find a familiar face. Usually we are not the first family to get there, one of Our Boys will find a teammate, and we all climb into the bleachers to sit next to our friends. My Wife was reflecting on this at a recent game and mused out loud, "This is just like high school. Whenever you walked in to the gym for a game, you always looked up into the crowd to find your friends."

I think about the number of times the students in our schools walk into rooms on a daily basis, seeking out a familiar face. Perhaps it's a classroom, the cafeteria, or even the gymnasium. When they walk into a room, they too are seeking a friend. Students and adults alike seek out spaces next to people they know.

We do this because our lives are about relationships, it is how we interact in the world. It doesn't matter how old we are, when we walk into a room, we look for those we know. We find the people in our lives who have connected with us, who have given our lives meaning, who we have walked with us on our journey. We look for those who add to and enrich our lives, whose very presence enhances our own experience, and with whom we grow as people in the world.

Too often in schools, I think we focus on the distinctions between adults and students. Certainly there is a power dynamic that naturally exists, given that we have spent more time on the planet than our younger counterparts. And we also need to acknowledge that often, we have much more in common with our students when it comes to relationships. I'm not suggesting in any way that we are equals. I am suggesting that at times, the basic needs of adults and students are quite similar.

Especially when walking into a room.

Photo Courtesy of Etsy

Taking the Test

On Monday, November 26, I sat down in Classroom 102 at Champlain Valley Union High School. I chose a seat at the front of the room, and took a moment to review my notes. For the first time in many, many years, I was taking a test.

Since I was in high school, I've loved officiating. I made the junior varsity baseball team as a sophomore but in the winter of the following year, tore all the ligaments in my ankle. I was at a track meet and when walking back to our hotel, I turned to talk to a friend. When I did that, I also accidentally stepped in a hole. My baseball playing career was over and I had only played basketball through my freshman year.

But I loved both sports and wasn't ready to walk away from them completely. I started umpiring minor league and little league baseball games, and refereed some basketball games as well. When we moved to Vermont, I investigated my options for basketball officiating and found the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials (IAABO) Chapter 105. I had done some officiating several years ago when Our Boys were much younger, and now felt like a good time in our family life to get back into it.

Dan Shepardson, a member of the IAABO Executive Committee, a long time basketball official, and the athletic director at CVU taught the class, with another veteran official Alejandra Barrenechea. I put in the study time, did the practice exams, and reviewed the material as we went through it. And yet I was still nervous, remembering all the times I had sat in classrooms feeling like this through my educational career.

At the beginning of the last class, Shep began prepping us for the exam. When he started to go through the details, I'll be honest, I started to tune out. But something he said got my attention. He offered to read the exam to anyone who needed it. This was a class that included some high school students, some college students, and several adults. All of us were there by choice, but we all had different needs. As I listened to Shep offer to meet the needs of anyone who had trouble reading, I started to relax. The kindness and humanity that Shep was offering made my nervousness begin to dissipate.

In a room of diverse learners, it was made clear that everyone was welcome. Whether or not we took advantage of it, Shep's offer demonstrated a commitment to every single person in that classroom. The reality is that Shep wanted every single one of us to pass the exam but almost more importantly,  to be sure that what we gave for answers represented our knowledge of basketball officiating.

I thought about all the students that felt like me when they first walked into a classroom the day of an exam, nervous about putting what they know on paper. As educators, we need to ensure that what we get from our students on assessments is everything that they know. We have to commit to each and every learner that we will go to great lengths to be positive what they put on paper captures all their knowledge.

Even if it means reading to them.

Photo courtesy of Rivermont Collegiate