Holding Steady

 You can't step in the same river twice. 

This is the kind of phrase that sticks in my head as if it were wisdom. It is a metaphor for how unrelenting change is. The water rushes on and each time you stick a foot in it the swirls that form around your ankles, knees, waist, neck are new.

Or something like that. 

Applying this model to working in public education, it helps to think of all the new policies, programs and curriculum that come down the stream are the river in which I find myself. Recently I was asked if I would mind teaching art next year rather than computers. My initial response was to try and figure out a way to halt the flow of the river and instead continue to stand in the safe, still eddy in which I have grown so comfortable over all these years. I am, after all, an institution. 

Except that's not exactly true. The institution is the school in which I work. Not me. I have been clever and cagey enough to avoid being swept away by the currents that roil around me when so many of my colleagues have disappeared downstream long ago. I have achieved this by making small adjustments in my stance and learning when and how to shift with the current as it rushes past. 

Keeping my head above water is the main thing. 

I have seen highly principled educators leave rather than deal with the inevitable adaptations to which they will be asked to conform. That's not me. I have my principles, but I also have a principal, and I tend to do what I am asked with an eye toward keeping my time in the river with my aforementioned head above water. 

Negotiations and scheduling will continue to play a part in what happens next, but the way I can keep the river from changing is by keeping my feet firmly planted on the riverbed. Those slippery, shifting rocks that erode and tumble downstream.

It's a metaphor. Get it? 

Or is it a simile?