What a Good Assistant Principal Actually Does Write 500 words on the gap between the job description and the real job. What does it actually take to hold a building together from that seat? What does nobody tell you before you're in it?

When I applied I talked about improving how students understand what they are learning. I wanted to primarily focus on how I could support teachers in guaranteeing the curriculum for students.

The superintendent who hired me worried that I wouldn't like the discipline part of the job -- but that wasn't the case at all. I loved working with students who were struggling a little bit. I remember someone in particular. He always had trouble making it through the day but he would come to my office and blow off steam...and then he could get back to school

Looking for Buckeyes

 The other day I walked around Whetstone Park in Columbus looking for Buckeyes. Many people don't know that the Buckeye is actually the seed of the eponymous tree. When I talk to people in New Hampshire they have no idea that the "Buckeye" that they hear about in relation to the very good football team is a real thing.

It was a nice walk around the park but I didn't find a single tree.

I did find an interesting tree that had dropped very green pods that were just smaller than a ping pong ball. At first they appeared to be solid round balls. On closer inspection they were similar to an armadillo in the way that they unfolded. The parent tree also looked coniferous so I wondered if the pods were a variant of a pine cone.

Pool Rules

Years ago, I vacationed with my wife and three young daughters at a fine hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. The place caters to the winter sports clientele and has lots of free hot chocolate and coffee.  It also has both an indoor pool and a heated outdoor pool with a gigantic attached hot tub. Like most hotel pools the establishment also displayed their affinity for signage. When I counted I totalled seventy-three safety rules between the two pools. 

I have long been fascinated with pool signs. I became a lifeguard just after my sixteenth birthday and worked around pools, on and off, for the next ten years. Swimming pools inside and out are festooned with signs on all of their walls. Small signs, big signs, sometimes the same sign on every wall.  And when you begin to look carefully they make very little sense.

One of my favorite themes is graphic descriptions of what you can’t do with your body. On one sign, “14.  Spitting, blowing of nose, urinating or defecating into the pool or onto the deck, improper public displays of affection, and profanity are PROHIBITED.”

Most of the rules take this form. Little parallel structure within the rule or from rule to rule and a low bar for what belongs together. Why don’t public displays of affection have their own rule?  If they are codifying that one cannot poop into the pool or on the deck, what about the grass around the pool? Does capitalizing prohibited change much?

The other characteristic of pool rules is that they often are long. Rule 14, above, above comes from a list of thirty at the Gurney Park Pool in New York. new year’s eve at an indoor/outdoor pool complex that had 75 distinct rules.  The point of all of these rules seems to be to cover everything that could possibly go wrong.  But in trying to do that, lists are created that don’t hang together around any kind of central theme and often the posted rules are not the real rules.  Our local pool in Concord, New Hampshire just put up brand new pool signs with fifteen rules.  They include the typical fare, no diving, no open sores, shower before going into the pool, etc.  But the biggest rule that lifeguards are told to enforce is no pool toys. Why didn’t they put the rule that they care most about on the new signs?

In addition to missing rules it is often the case that the posted rules aren’t the rules at all.  When we went to the pool for New Year’s there were many signs about no alcohol at the pool.  But the lifeguards themselves handed out red cups to those swimmers that were drinking out of cans or bottles.