Adversity
January 25, 2012
It’s been said that adversity causes some people to break and others to break records.
Author Keith McFarland spent seven years studying the performance of 7,000 companies, after which he made this pronouncement: “The top performers had one thing in common. Each went through a period of pronounced difficulty – often serious enough to threaten the firm’s existence.”
McFarland continued in The Breakthrough Company: “Great companies, I discovered, arise not from the absence of difficulty but from its vortex,” its whirly mass.
The key during tough times, according to McFarland, is not to focus on survival, but instead to ask fundamental questions, to face facts that might have gone overlooked in more prosperous times, and to identify and integrate the new knowledge and insights that adversity can bring.
Schools and school sports, today in the vortex of adversity, may actually do more than merely survive our present difficulties if we too examine obstacles and opportunities previously overlooked, and then make positive use of the lessons that sometimes only adversity can bring.
A Scottish author of the 19th century with the optimistic name Samuel Smiles wrote: “The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.”
School Overload
January 29, 2016
I don’t know how school administrators and local boards of education do it. Every year, pressure increases on them to improve student performance in core subjects, while every year, lawmakers and government agencies try to make schools the place to solve, or at least respond to, more of society’s problems.
Expanding definitions of disabilities have required expanding public school responses. School employees now must be trained to respond to a myriad of student allergies. Schools have been made the place to address drug abuse, bullying, sexting, drunk driving, sudden cardiac arrest, seat belt use and much more.
This would be okay – in fact, it would be really good because it would solidify that the local school is the center of each and every community. But if schools are not given the resources to both improve student academic performance and address every threat to student health and safety, then no more should be asked of schools.
Right now our Michigan Legislature has dozens of bills that would make new demands on local schools. Most of these bills, on their own and in a vacuum, would be good – like the requirement that schools provide curriculum and professional development in warning signs for suicide and depression, and the requirement that students be certified in CPR before they graduate high school.
But until schools are given more time and money to perform current mandates, it’s time for legislators to put new bills in their back pockets and for government agencies to back off.