Traditions Communicate Values

I am writing this on Easter Sunday, and this year, I am in a liturgical church for the first time.  Tradition and ceremony are the bread and butter of the liturgical church all year, but during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Maudy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter, Anglicans are at steroid levels of tradition in which every moment, color, and piece of fabric are symbolic and meaningful.  I have loved every minute of it, and it reminds me that traditions communicate values.

Some families have holiday traditions, like reading from Luke or attending church services on Christmas Eve, communicating that they care deeply about keeping the birth of Jesus at the center of Christmas.  Non-religious families may read "Twas the Night Before Christmas," showing that they value time with family sharing a story they have loved.

Even on this blog, I have a tradition.  Every Thanksgiving, I post about educators who have formed my life as an educator, from my own middle and high school teachers to my current administrators to my group fitness instructors at the Y.  This yearly practice reflects my penchant for reflection and gratitude.  

If there is any industry in the world that participates in tradition, it is education.  Schools have dozens of traditions.  There are the obvious, holiday concerts, spring musicals, and graduations.  There are traditions for the first day of school and the last day of school.  Some go back for generations.  

At my school, we have some special ones.  For example, the night before the first day of school, parents of seniors come and decorate their parking space with chalk.  We have a Grandparents' Day celebration, which, even though it has changed somewhat over the years, has been consistently happening for over 30 years.  These communicate that we value the families our students come from and their participation in our community.  We have a high school spiritual retreat, called Ignite, every year and weekly chapel services, communicating to our students that we care about their spiritual formation.  We have an annual basketball game in support of the Kay Yow Fund and a number of yearly service projects, communicating our value of service outside the walls of our school.  And my favorite meeting of the entire year is the last one teachers have before we check out for the summer.  It's called "The Shout Out Meeting," and I consider it sacrosanct.  There is nothing like that meeting to communicate our care for each other as human beings, and it is a lovely way to end the year.

We are heading into the part of the year with more traditions than any other.  What traditions does your school have?  Why do you do them, and what values do they communicate?  Are they values you want to communicate?  If not, is it worth doing or should you replace this tradition with something new?  It matters and should be thought about carefully because, as writer Will Durant said, "We are what we repeatedly do."

Commitment to a Value (and the Value of Commitment)

Yesterday, I submitted the last page of our school's yearbook for publication.  

As you can probably imagine, it's been a strange school year in which to produce a yearbook.  There have been few events that we would normally have had.  No Grandparents' Day in the fall, the day in which I usually take the bulk of photos for chorus, band, and elementary school students (and obviously, no Grandparents' Day page in the book).  No homecoming dance for which I often get coverage of the high school students who aren't athletes or theater kids (and obviously no homecoming dance pages).  No field trips that usually provide an opportunity to get variety in photos.  When the school year began and yearbook planning started, we weren't even sure if there would be sports to cover or clubs that met in person.

When this happens, you have to re-evaluate your practices, but if you have been operating from a set of values, you have a place to start.  For our yearbook staff, the primary value has always been coverage of people.  Events give pages a theme and a structure, but we don't cover events; we cover people.  Jostens has helped with this for the past 15 years or so by tracking all of our tagged photos as they are placed.  (The coverage report is the greatest tool I have.)  For years, I have driven into my students that our primary goal is trying to get as many people as possible to have a minimum of three placements in the yearbook.  When I grade their pages, they lose points if they have left a member of the team out (assuming we have a photo of them, which we work hard to get).  At the end of each class, I tell everyone to save their page at the same time, so I can announce our current percentage.  We celebrate coverage milestones by coloring in a chart on my bulletin board.  

As this year began, we knew this would be a challenge.  It is difficult to tag pictures of students in masks.  Facial recognition relies on several structures of the face, including cheekbones and chin, so it was less reliable than usual.  Smaller class sizes this year mean more classes and schedule changes made finding the time to take photos more difficult.  

Because we are committed to the value of covering each student, we had to find ways to make it happen.  I spent a day going from classroom to classroom on our elementary campus getting teachers to identify students.  I emailed list after list of names of students still needed, and teachers responded by taking photos of whatever they had going on that day.  Students attending class virtually means some photos were of faces on a computer screen.  There are a number of photos of an iPad with just a smiling face and even photos parents sent me of their students working on their computers at home.  My staff conducted interviews with students to replace some of the pages we would normally have with "profile" pages.  They emailed me when someone was present in-person who had been virtual or came and got the camera to go take a shot of that one kid we hadn't been able to get.  Our vocal ensembles had strict restrictions on in-person signing, so we didn't have lovely group photos of singers in formal wear (or at the Christmas event at the governor's mansion), but we do have a statement from every member and a QR code that links to the videos of their virtual songs.  It's been . . . a lot, but because they were committed to the value of coverage and the help of dozens of people, we ended the yearbook at over 99%!   I cannot say 100 because there are three students on the coverage report that are not at 3 placements.  Two left the school during the first semester (and I guess it would be creepy to follow them to get another photo).  One virtual student simply would not answer my emails, asking for one more.  She has her reasons, and we are all doing our best right now.  

For all the reasons listed above, I would have cut my staff enormous slack if we had not been able to reach this goal this year.  But because they are committed to a value, there is value in their commitment.  I hope that someday, when they are adults and this COVID year is a memory, they will hold onto the idea that commitment to a goal based on a value means they can meet challenges and do hard things.  I hope they will remember the value their commitment had and what their hard work meant to others.  I hope they carry the value of commitment with them and that it is especially meaningful when that commitment is to something they value.

A sneak preview of our cover