What Alan Bean Taught Me About Priorities

As a young teacher in my prime I rode the wave of technology integration. I was passionate about thinking and writing with tech and lucky to be in a newly created position as Language Arts & Technology Coordinator in a small rural school district in Nevada. I wore two hats that fit well.

However, creating change in a conservative county was like swimming hard up fast river.  If you gave up you drowned. Fresh from the classroom, I was passionate about my craft.  I had a full tank teaching spirit to keep me going. Doing professional development on the writing process and converting the district from typewriters to word processors had me living my values. 

However, as the classroom faded and I learned the ins and outs of district politics I became disenchanted.  My bosses did not share my core belief that students were the number one priority.  Bitterness tinged my idealism. 

Then I met a wise man with enormous institutional experience and a unique perspective on our world.  For a brief time he became my mentor. It's a an experience I've always treasured.

The man was Alan Bean the fourth man to walk on the Moon. (March 15, 1932 - May 26, 2018)

Sitting at the dinner table with my young family, my daughter asked Alan what it was like walking on the moon.  

He smiled and said "Like wading in thigh deep corn flakes".) 

He was a graduate of the Top Gun fighter school. He landed planes on aircraft carriers at night. He walked on the moon. He was the right stuff.  

His two months as Skylab Commander had given him a literal global perspective. He debunked a myth for me: "You can't see the great wall of China from Earth Obit. The materials are too similar to the background colors of China and the wood smoke pollution ruins visibility from space." 

As the director of operations and training during the Challenger Mission he'd seen his crew lost to disaster.  As a fine artist he painted space exploration events he witnessed first hand.  In every way Alan Bean was true explorer and a remarkable man.

I'd written a grant to bring Alan to my school district to give a series of lectures to our kids. My delightful job was to be his guide. I talked to him initially about his art. My father as well as my grandfather were artists.  I understood the process. I think my unorthodox approach (Bean's art first, his explorations second) help us connect.

At one point I opened up about my frustration with the school district.  I put kids first. I was very much a classroom teacher in a temporary administrative position.  I wanted my district to put kids first too.  Alan asked me where in the top ten list of priorities the school district placed students.   I answered about 6th on the list. (Values like personal power, prestige, appearences and money were well ahead of kids.)

Bean told me something that I took to heart: " If your top priority (value) is in the top 10 of the organization you are working in, stay with it. If not, time for a change."  

Sage advice from someone who rose in the Navy and NASA to the top of the pyramid (and literally all the way to the Moon).

So I ask you: how many of your top 10 values are shared by the system you work in? 

Listen to Alan Bean:  If you find values congruency, stay put. If not; change the culture of your workplace, or change your work place. This is just what I did more than a decade ago when student welfare slipped off the top ten in my district.

I did take a leap into private enterprise. I went corporate for a few years as a sales trainer and tech writer for a UNIX based networking company.  There I learned very hard lessons about what it was lto carry a shield for an organization where my values had no meaning. I'd traded a teaching career where I could follow my passions for double the salary, a sharp office, and a big title.  The value of these things came home to me as I was flying into Las Vegas in our corporate jet. I was on the way to Comdex with the company elite. There was typical small plane turbulence as we landed. I held my breath waiting for touchdown. Suddenly we slammed into the tarmac.  I remember thinking thank God we're on the ground. Next thing I know we're in the air sideways with the engines screaming and a Vegas hotel towering above us. I remember thinking "I'm going to die with people I don't respect."

Our pilot flew us out a it. I got off that plane very glad to be alive. I then spent the next 3 days of my life following the CEO of my company around as he paraded his ego up and down the vendor isles.

This experience helped me 'clarify my values'. Then the time came to make a choice;  follow a friend to a Silicon Valley start up, or take a pay cut or go back to the classroom.

I followed my heart. I was born to teach.  I returned to teaching and have never regretted the move.

As I think back over the last decade to the groups of educators I've worked and learned with with at the Milken Family Foundation, ISTE, the Illinois Science and Mathematics Academy, and the University of Wisconsin Stout I feel the strength of purpose and resonance that comes from spending my time with folks who hold common values.

I earned my 10,000 hours of expertise by passionately pursuing my dreams and living these values:

• Put the student at the center
• Learn and teach how to think
• Empower students with technology
• As a teacher, always be a student
• Do good work
• Be grateful for the chance to earn an living with your mind
• Show up and give the best you've got each day
• Be an optimist about the future
• Help teachers become writing teachers
• Help teachers become information fluent

If I'd stayed in the Silicon Valley game I doubt my list would look like this. I'm proud to be a veteran teacher and lifelong learner. I'm endlessly excited to be alive and thinking in these revolutionary times.

I've learned that to preserve my teaching spirit I need to live my values.

~ Dennis Thomas O'Connor
January 29, 2013

One student, One classroom, One day at a time

This question has been on my mind for a few days. "Share  one or two stories about stuff  YOU’VE done to “disturb the force.”

I could use this as an icebreaker discussion prompt.  I'd change it to "Share  one or two stories about what YOU’VE done to change the world."

Snap shots:

A young woman calling my name in the Las Vegas airport years ago.  She ran up to me, "Mr. O'Connor do you remember me?"  

I did. Her name was Crystal.  If you look at a person's eyes the name sometimes pops up. 

"I'm the only one in my freshman class at UNLV who knows how to write!  Thank you for teaching me."


A knock on my classroom door after school.  I open the door and see a huge man standing there.  I had to look up to see his face (and I'm 6'4").  

In a deep voice, "Hello Mr. O'Connor remember me?"  I looked at his eyes and remembered the little 5th grader.

"Merlin, is that you in there?  I treated you good in the 5th grade right?"  

He smiled and we talked.  He was just back from Pakistan where he was on embassy guard duty with the Marines. 

Teaching a young kindergarten teacher how to start and use an Apple //. Watching her learn more in a two day workshop than anyone I've ever meant since.  Two years later she hired me as the Training Director for a computer company where she was the Sales Manager.  She went on to be a silicon valley multi-millionaire.  I turned down her offer of a fast track job in San Jose and returned to classroom teaching a few months later. 

Over the years this random validation has happened often enough to assure me the 25 years I spent teaching kids was time well spent.   Public school in Northern Nevada  left me burned out and broke, but I wouldn't change it.  It was the good work. No regrets.

Snap shots of the dark side:

Sitting in a little room with the personnel superintendent being grilled and threatened with termination. (This particular guy was a typical bully. He enjoyed making kindergarten teachers cry. We locked horns many times and I usually won. This was the same guy who later asked me to become a principal.)

Having a school board member yell at me in an open meeting "If you don't like it around here why don't you just leave?"  (My nickname at the time was "The Tom Hayden of Douglas County". 8-)

(This one's a personal favorite.) An outraged parent sitting opposite from me in the principal's office saying, "How dare you teach my child to question authority!" (How dare you teach her to write, to think!)

Carrying a picket sign at a school board meeting and being reminded by a fellow picket. " I don't know how this is going to go for us.  There's plenty of holes in the desert. " I taught in rural Nevada for most of my career.  Within three years all who carried a picket sign, were gone from the district.

Online

Online early 80's:  Getting a poem from a boy in Idaho that I published on my BBS kids writing site.

Online early 80's: Saving my school district 30k on a computer purchase because I could use e-mail.

Online turn of the century:  teaching someone deep in Alaska how to create a capital letter using a keyboard.

I could go on, and probably will, since this is a sweet writing prompt.  But I notice the pattern here. I'm talking about one to one interactions that had a ripple effect in my life and the lives of others.   This ripple effect is something I believe in.  For most of my teaching life my focus has been one student, one classroom, one day at a time.

Mantra: Repeat daily for 20 years:

Show up and give the best you've got on any given day.  

Accept that some days will be much better than others.

Over the years I've taught at least a 1000 teachers from around the world in my online classes.  

I know that for most, I opened doors for them. 

I know by helping teachers I've influence hundreds of thousands of kids by helping their teachers.

Ripples, Ripples, Ripples

Confessions of an American Teacher: Choking on it...

I’m not supposed to talk about this.

Guilt, wrapped in denial, and re-enforced by a federal court order are powerful ingredients that still induce my silence.  These words are leaking out, extruded under high pressure that’s’ built over the years.

I have to tell. I have to face what happened. I have to get the ugly reality written.

Maybe it will stop the headaches and the sleeplessness. Maybe I’ll be able to recapture my hope again. If I can just tell it, get it out on the page and expel this evil hairball that’s clogged my teaching spirit for so long. Maybe I can believe in American Schooling and stop seeing the whole system through the lens of my own experience.

As I look back I realize I should have stood up sooner.  Oh, I took a stand and took a major hit for my ethics. It cost me my job, most of my pension, a good chunk of my self respect.  

Standing up also launched me. Cutting lose (and being cast out) made me build skills and muscle.  My life is so much better now. I’m more self realized, more articulate, better educated and making three times the money I made back in the classroom. 

Hell I should go back and kiss the sobs for kicking me in the jewels and waking me up. Ultimately they helped me find my way to a better life. As a friend told me just the other day: “..it’s an honor to be extruded from a dysfunctional system”.

But I still know that I waited too long. That when the test came, I stood and fought, but it was with an attorney and not my fists.  (And I do crave some vigilante justice.)  Instead, I fought fair.  And just like my lawyer warned me up front; I got no justice. There was no satisfaction.  Wrongs were not righted. There was a little money, but nothing was made whole.  

My hired gun, the professional cynic, the street fighter in the three piece suit was so right when he said, “Starting a lawsuit is going to war, and it’s a sin to go to war.”

It took many years to work my way out to the end of the plank. I must remember the good years in the classroom. I built a learning world I am proud of to this day. But as my school district disintegrated, more and more of my energy was spent fighting for the freedom to do the good work.  More energy went into watching my back and fighting the system until eventually, most of my juice went to just coping with the controlling, totalitarian bastards set on destroying what they couldn’t duplicate or control.

I can remember thinking first they came for the…

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

~ Martin Niemöller (more or less)

It was all gallows humor when I began thinking that way. I didn’t realize how real it would become.

I was happy in my little enclave, my realm of responsibility, my small pond where I was the big fish in a remote school on the edges of the district orbit. We were the outlier, out of the way, easy to forget. The District Office was busy way down in the valley.  They dismantled and reformed the other schools, instigating the strategic plan, rewriting the history books. Bringing their brand of conformity.  It would take them years to get to me and mine.

Still I knew that the Borg were coming… and that, by all accounts resistance would be futile.

One day I found myself holding a picket sign in front of the school board meeting. I don’t remember the cause.  Radon in the classrooms? Sick building syndrome? 0% pay raise, benefit cuts?  

I don’t remember a lot of what happened; denial spews brain fog. Regardless, walking a picket line was a futile thing to do in a ‘right to work’ state with a school labor approach that came down to, “There are plenty of holes in the desert”.

Our pictures (complete with signs) appeared on the front page of the local paper. Within a few years all of us would be gone. A combination of psy-ops, burn-out, retirement, and despair took us all. 

I didn’t see it coming.

I didn’t get it. 

So naïve. I thought doing the right thing would protect me. I couldn't believe the leadership of my district would trade the welfare, safety, minds and innocence of kids just to flex the little power they had.  

Admittedly, I’d called them fascist lemmings who worshiped at the altar of appearances at the expense of common sense.  But like a fool, I didn’t get what it really meant to be right about them.

That’s why I got my Pollyanna ass kicked by the system.  It took me half a century to grow up.

Here I am still crying about it.  At least I’m not numb any more. At least I’m finding my voice.

At the heart of my anger is the betrayal I still feel. The Assistant Ass, who eventually became the Top Ass, was an old colleague. We’d known each other for years.  While we weren’t friends, I thought we had respect for each other.  I remain amazed and infuriated that this fellow, who was one of the smartest, most able, even brilliant educators I’d worked with would sell his integrity for a little piss-pot job in a backward school district out in the sticks.  

I’m shocked and I’m angry that he became a banal, evil little man. By the time he reached the top, he was morally bankrupt. And what was he on top of?  A backwater, small town conservative, rural school district with delusions of grandeur.

So here I am again. Pleading with myself and ranting on the web about the betrayal of innocence I was part of as a public school teacher.

Why can’t I spit this out? I still can’t name it. 

Damn.