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The Least Wonderful Time of the Year

No, this post is NOT about to be 2,600+ words bashing the Christmas season for being too commercialized or sappy or anything else. I’m actually loving the holiday season this year. Anyone who’s read this blog before probably knows why.

What this post IS about is STAAR Testing – specifically, STAAR End-Of-Course (EOC) Retests for those high school students who are cursed with the requirement of taking them. I will also share a personal story about what I now believe was proverbial “Testing Hades,” and how I helped get my staff (and myself) through it using humor.

I have previously confessed on this blog that the final dozen years of my K-12 education career had me wrestling with self-loathing because, as a so-called “assessment professional,” my biggest role was training, implementation, and support of a system that is deeply flawed at best. There are a host of reasons for these flaws, many of which would involve exposition that would truly be agonizing to read. What it comes down to is primarily inconsistency.

STAAR is fundamentally inconsistent as a matter of course because everything about its construction is constantly changing. The state curriculum of Texas public schools, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) is regularly revised. Subject area TEKS are reviewed and adjusted at least once every 10 years on a rotating basis. Schools don’t have to contend with full-scale revisions all at once, but teachers of a given subject know that they will have to adjust planning and teaching within a decade at minimum. While a decade doesn’t seem frequent on its face, the reality in a classroom is that it may take several years after revisions are published to determine the best way to approach certain TEKS standards instructionally. It’s not like anyone can just flip a switch, make a couple of tweaks, and all students magically respond positively to whatever the new TEKS are.

And as you might expect, the process of assessing any new TEKS learning standards can also be messy and flawed over several years. This is why TEA randomly selects districts and campuses for specific field tests every year, usually in February. A typical TEA Field Test is similar to an actual STAAR test, and campuses are required to implement them with the same approach and security protocols that they use for the actual STAAR test in the spring, except there’s no payoff for a field test. Whether students do well or poorly, they will never be rewarded or punished. They will never even know how they scored. Reporting of results is minimal, because the point is literally to test the test items themselves and determine if they’re reliable and valid. If you’re thinking that your children might become lab experiments each February so that psychometricians can analyze results, you would be correct.

This process is also why actual STAAR tests in the spring include “field test items” that may or may not actually be scored. And it’s why TEA will rewrite and revise items continually between STAAR testing cycles, which occur annually each April for Grades 3-8, but every April, June, and December for high school students. There’s a continual item analysis process to seek out a reliable and valid test, and as you might expect, some STAAR tests are more reliable and valid than others. Small comfort to a high school freshman who learns he has to retake an EOC even if the test itself was poorly constructed.

The revision process, combined with the desire of schools to “teach to the test” so that scores improve has created its own cottage industry. A legion of consulting companies have developed with intent of helping schools and their teachers to analyze released items from STAAR tests, connect those items to the TEKS standards being assessed, and determine ways to adjust instruction so that the teachers may better prepare students for what they might see on the STAAR. Is it good instruction? Sometimes. Your mileage may vary, as they say. But “teach to the test” has become scientific (or pseudo-scientific, in many cases), all in the name of accountability points, property values…and, oh yeah, “for the children.”

Speaking of those children – we all want them to excel, right? We want them to score well since it’s evidence that they’re learning, it’s good for self-esteem, yada, yada, yada. But of course, it’s not always so simple. Remember that this is a test that students will see only once per year. (Theoretically three times with upcoming legislative changes.) And when they see the test next year, it’ll be a bit different from last year because Grade 8 is different from Grade 7, which is different from Grade 6, and so on, even if the subject is still Reading or Math. It is no wonder that most schools see drops in Math scores, for instance, from Grade 4 to Grade 5, year after year, even as students change, because Grade 5 Math is typically a bit more challenging than Grade 4 Math. What’s more, the actual passing standard might be adjusted thanks to the magic of the “cut score.”

When you visit TEA’s website, you might run across the STAAR Performance Standards for Grades 3-8 and EOC. You’ll see austere tables listing the Scale Scores required for a given student to reach Approaches, Meets, or Masters Grade Level performance categories as handed down by the gods themselves…er, I mean, by TEA officials. These categories and scale scores are unchanged (thanks to the auspices of either Odin or Ra; I never remember which), but the real sausage is made after students have completed the tests, psychometricians have analyzed the results, and TEA constructs what’s known as a Raw Score Conversion Table. Take Grade 5 Math, for instance, which had 42 items that were scored in 2025. TEA takes every student raw score, from 1 to 42, and links it to a given Scale Score. Those links then determine what raw score a student needed to reach the Approaches / Meets / Masters level from the Performance Standards. It’s all computed AFTER THE FACT, because TEA looks at the distribution of student raw scores statewide before deciding where, in fact, “passing” will be located. In 2025, a Grade 5 student in Math needed to get 17 of 42 items correct for Approaches, 26 for Meets, and 34 for Masters. In 2026 and beyond, those raw scores could change depending on how every student in Texas fared on that year’s test. It’s a moving target every year. It might not move much, but it can move. Is it possible that public relations and political concerns can impact where the cut scores fall? You tell me. It was certainly curious that accountability ratings in 2023 and 2024 went to court, then in 2025 most districts and campuses in the state saw their STAAR scores and ratings increase. I don’t have the time or inclination to lay out a full analysis of the data over those years, but it sure was a curious coincidence.

The bottom line is that passing standards can be, and are, adjusted year-to-year as cut scores are linked to scale scores. “Passing the STAAR” is, itself, an exercise in inconsistency. What’s more, “passing” isn’t always the end for students in high school. Current TEA guidelines require students to reach Approaches Grade Level or higher in all 5 EOC-assessed subjects – English I, English II, Algebra I, Biology, and US History. (I won’t open the Individual Graduation Committee or the Substitute Assessment cans of worms; those are other deep-dive posts.) The students currently taking December EOCs are those who have previously not passed one or more tests, or who were Absent or otherwise missed their opportunities in April and June. When a student finally achieves those scores and passes their classes, graduation is on the horizon. Perhaps college? Not so fast. “Approaches Grade Level” is passing for graduation purposes only. TEA has a whole other set of standards for what is called “College, Career, and Military Readiness” (CCMR). And Approaches on STAAR EOC ain’t one of them. In fact, STAAR scores don’t matter AT ALL for CCMR accountability standards, and they won’t grant students access to Texas public colleges and universities…at least, not without some type of remedial learning. So now, high schools in Texas offer the TSIA2, SAT, and ACT at least once to all their students in an attempt to get as many students as possible to meet CCMR requirements. More testing for our high schoolers! Isn’t it grand? In fact, it’s several grand paid each year by the taxpayers, or by the students themselves.

Lest you think we only torture the high schools and their students, there’s a whole set of other accountability measurements that primarily impact elementary, intermediate, and middle schools and their students – the Progress Measure, brought to you by TEA through each year’s STAAR tests. The intent is actually well-meaning and fairly intuitive: Students should show growth, also called academic progress, in their year-to-year performance on STAAR Reading and Math tests. Easy, right? Of course not! You might think that an intuitive approach to growth would be that a given student should score at or higher than the previous year’s raw or scale score to show progress. Or perhaps there should be a set of score ranges that might overlap so that students wouldn’t be penalized for missing one more item than last year. But you would be wrong in both cases. Instead, TEA determines progress based on the student’s performance among the Approaches / Meets / Masters standards, which we’ve already established may change thanks to cut scores. Essentially, in order for a student to “meet progress” officially, that student must match or exceed the performance category from the previous year. If they reached Approaches last year, they must reach Approaches, Meets, or Masters this year. Here’s the problem: because those performance levels are matched directly to a specific raw score, it’s possible for a student to “not meet growth” based on a single test item. Consider the Grade 5 Math scores referenced earlier, and suppose a 5th grader in 2025 got 34 of 42 items correct in 2025 to reach Masters Grade Level. It just so happens that in 2025, Masters on Grade 6 Math also required a raw score of 34 out of 43 items. BUT, in 2026, IF the Masters Level ends up being raised to 35 items after TEA’s psychometric analysis, AND this same student gets the same raw score, 34 on Grade 6 Math, the student will actually DROP to Meets Grade Level. That might seem fine, BUT this student will be deemed “Did Not Meet” for the progress measure in Math. By a single item. Even though the student passed the test easily, getting 79% of the items correct when it only takes 37% to “pass.” Is this equitable, fair, justifiable, reliable, and/or valid? You tell me.

Knowledge of such flaws and inequities are just some of the reasons that it became more and more difficult for me to justify continuing to work as an “assessment professional.” It became increasingly difficult to pretend that the system was defensible, let alone worth training teachers how to implement it appropriately. Of course, when it came to the insanity of the system, Grand Prairie ISD said “hold my beer” and added layers of local assessment to this Least Wonderful Time of Year. So began the creation of Testivus.

Here’s how it happened: The high school calendar in GPISD had students attending classes for roughly 3 weeks after Thanksgiving break. Week 1 was mostly instruction; TEA allowed districts to offer December EOCs that week, but GPISD elected to wait. Week 2 was when GPISD offered December EOCs over four days (Tuesday through Friday because TEA at the time did not allow STAAR tests on Mondays). But GPISD also added four (4!!!) additional days of local assessments – “Q2 Summative Assessments,” they were called – and required “shutdown” testing for EOC-assessed courses. What’s more, the US History Q2 Summative HAD to be given on the Friday of Week 3 because of district policy on semester exams, meaning we had to hold both the final day of EOCs AND a major local assessment on the same day. On a Friday, no less. Self-induced torture. Or should I say, district-induced torture. Somewhere in those 8 days, non-core subjects also had to offer Semester 1 Exams. As you might imagine, the schedule was somewhere between confusing and downright comical. As an administrator, it was a death-defying juggling act just to create a coherent schedule, and then we had to communicate it to the staff and students. So I had a choice: either tear out my hair, elevate my blood pressure, and otherwise stress myself out at the holidays trying to make it work, or have fun with it. I decided to have fun and approach it with humor. So Testivus was born.

Testivus, as any good Seinfeld fan would infer, was a riff on Festivus, the fictional holiday “for the rest of us” in response to the rampant commercialism of Christmas. We needed something bizarre to associate with, and yes, resist, the madness, because there was no way to comprehend it without also admitting it was strange and convoluted. I even created a logo for it that I included on documents I gave to the teachers. I made jokes about it in e-mail communication. I was also brutally honest. “This is what happens when district tries to shoehorn more than 8 tests into 8 days. You might argue it’s the counterpoint to the miracle of Hanukkah.” Eventually, my humor got me in mild trouble. It just so happened that the husband of the district’s head of data and accountability worked as the chief security officer on our campus, and he received the mass e-mails I sent to the staff. He would forward said e-mails to his wife. But rather than contact me herself, she asked the district testing coordinator (DTC) to call and badger me about my humor. It so happens that the DTC’s personality is often quite dramatic, dialing any little issue up to 11 (shout-out to Nigel Tufnel) immediately. So I was told, “Senior district administrators are reading your e-mails, and they are not amused. I guess you’re trying to be funny, but to them it sounds like you’re pitting your campus in opposition to the district.” Fine, whatever. I expressed regret to her that she was being asked to deal with it, but the reality was that district was pitting itself against campuses by inundating us with local assessments literally layered on top of state assessments. I make no apologies for calling that out, nor would I apologize for fostering some empathy and camaraderie with my campus colleagues through humor that they genuinely enjoyed. And you know what? In Fall 2025, Grand Prairie ISD nixed those plans, removed “Q2 Summative Assessments” from the calendar entirely, and instead created “Fall District Assessments” on a different week in November. Granted, they still managed to make it awkward (not worth outlining how here), but they changed their approach to local assessments. Maybe the actual message behind Testivus, and my humor, resonated with someone, after all.

So if you’re winding your way through a similar situation, navigating the nonsense passed down from someone who doesn’t realize the negative impact on your students and teachers, I wish you a Happy Testivus. Hang in there, do the best you can under the circumstances, and most of all, laugh about the laughable. Go ahead and roll your eyes at the outlandish. Give yourself permission to have fun with it instead of getting upset. And most of all, realize that none of these things…zero, nada, nenhum, nüt…will matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Treat your students and your colleagues with dignity, empathy, and kindness in this most blessed of holiday seasons, and let the absurd wallow in its absurdity.

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In Praise of Teamwork

This post, surprisingly enough, connects strongly to voiceover. Back when I started this blog in August, I intentionally and specifically stated that this is not a voiceover blog. And my posts thus far have borne out this statement. Most of them have focused on observations related on some level to my teaching career, including notes about leadership, assessment, and presentation skills. I’ve also posted on topics pertaining to my experiences in band. Naturally, I’ve mentioned my retirement from K-12 public education several times since that’s something that has dominated my life since the end of June, and it’s a major reason why I actually have time for this blog and for my voiceover career.

That career is progressing as we speak. I’ve established some leads, gotten a handful of auditions, and even booked a few jobs. I’m not where I intend to be, but every journey begins with its first steps, as they say. And what I’ve learned along those few steps is a critical lesson – one that I’ve realized applied in my education career far more than I expected, and one that I think applies to voiceover more than many of us appreciate. That lesson is the importance of teamwork – how the individual contributes to the team and how effective teamwork actually helps the individual. It’s an underrated lesson for my friends and colleagues in the voiceover industry.

Back when I began my education career, I didn’t exactly anticipate that teamwork would be terribly important. It wasn’t a clear priority in my education coursework at the collegiate level. We participated in cooperative learning, and we were coached how to use it effectively, but I don’t recall explicit instruction on the importance of teamwork within the profession as a matter of course. It was a more general “collaborate with your colleagues” theme. The trend of Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in education was not in vogue at the time. And if I’m being honest, my so-called “mentor teacher” during my first year was somewhere between ineffective and a total waste. I was teaching government that first year, and all I got from him was literally a printout of his “lesson plans” for the class (dot-matrix printout, no less), which was what he provided for administration but not nearly what he used for his actual class. I suppose it was a start, but it was hardly helpful and certainly not comprehensive. He would occasionally throw me the bone of an odd handout now and then. But this was hardly teamwork, and I was hardly a teammate. This type of thing went on for roughly three years, and I felt nearly alone as a teacher during that time. For three years, I figured things out for myself. Then I was moved to World Geography at what was then the “9th Grade Center,” where I spent two years, and my perspective changed dramatically. World Geography teachers operated as a true team. There were projects that all the teachers assigned. There was collaboration. I was actually valued as a colleague, and I was free to offer my own ideas and create activities to share with my peers just as much as I could borrow and absorb from them.

Those two years altered the trajectory of my teaching career. After three years feeling like a solitary soul marooned on an island, I experienced two incredible years as a valued member of a viable team. When I returned to the senior level teaching government and economics (the old “mentor” had retired), I was assertive and proactive in establishing teamwork, collaborated more, and genuinely improved as an instructor. It helped that there was some turnover in the staff, and the newer teachers were also more willing to engage with each other. And I believe the process helped all of us excel, not just as subject-area teams, but also as a department. By the time I had advanced to teaching AP Macroeconomics, I had established strong rapport with my colleagues who taught AP US Government. We taught these students on an A/B schedule, so they alternated these classes daily, and we as instructors worked so that our teaching connected with each other’s, reinforcing what students were learning in both classes. The result was better learning for all of those AP students in both courses. It was educational teamwork at some of the highest level I ever experienced.

As my career in education continued, the benefits of teamwork were consistently apparent, especially when I worked in central administration. We had a small department in Research & Assessment, but the tasks each of us worked on connected well enough that our team was always moving forward impressively for the district. All in all, I think I experienced a solid 22 straight years of effective teamwork. The actual level of effectiveness varied at times, but it was always there, and I probably took it for granted. Then I left Mansfield ISD for what I thought was a better opportunity, and better salary. A higher salary was nice, but it was not a collaborative environment. Teamwork was replaced by top-down micromanagement, headed up by someone who was simply not equipped or ready to lead effectively. She thought she had all the answers, and the other three of us were basically expected to do her bidding, even if she wasn’t clear what that was. I was not valued for the ideas I brought to my job; I was basically expected to read the mind of my supervisor and maintain the status quo in 100% detail. And when I didn’t, when I had the temerity to show initiative and originality, I was diminished and even demeaned. It was a negative environment, plain and simple, bereft of any teamwork.

So when I interviewed for what would become my final position in education, I had one answer for the question, “What do you hope to accomplish in this role?” My response: “I want to become a viable member of a high-functioning team.” I had experienced that feeling, and I had experienced what it was like to lose it and feel like I was expected to be a mindless, boring cog. I just wanted to contribute to a team again. And fortunately, I got that experience again. Yes, there were issues at the district level that ultimately led me to retire from the profession, but I can honestly and definitively say that my time at Grand Prairie High School was a positive experience as part of a high-functioning, well-managed team. I learned so much from my colleagues, and they learned from me. We collaborated on a multitude of projects, and our students benefited. We had each other’s backs. Maybe it’s coincidence, but I believe many of us became lifelong friends, as well. Quite a team, and I will always look back on that place, and so many of those colleagues, fondly.

So what does this have to do with voiceover? It comes down to how we as VO artists see ourselves. There’s a common idea (and joke) in the industry that we’re all a little strange because we spend all day talking to ourselves in a padded room. And it can definitely feel that way. But my own experience has taught me that this idea really isn’t the case. Granted, my background is primarily Live Announce, so I often find myself in an environment where there are people around me. Many of my gigs throughout the year have people in the stands, and on the field or floor, and I’m even in charge of running all the audio at times. I’m also my own roadie for a lot of jobs. And you know what? It’s exhilarating, and I love it.

As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post, I had the chance to work NCAA Division I college basketball recently – three games so far at the University of Texas at Arlington (which is also my alma mater). And even though PA folks often see ourselves as “the voice above the crowd,” the truth I’ve gleaned from these experiences is that whoever is on PA is not simply in an environment “with other people around.” No, they are…you guessed it…part of a team. The team consists of everyone involved in the game presentation – production director, production assistants, band, cheerleaders, dance team, on-court entertainment, etc. Two hours before tipoff, we go over the run-of-show, which outlines every activity of the day or night, including pregame, timeouts, halftime, and postgame. There are a variety of PA reads, but there are also a multitude of other happenings, and the objective is to time everything out right down to the second whenever possible. The goal is to provide a high-quality game experience for the fans while at the same time recognizing all the sponsors involved with UTA Athletics, and above all, respecting and featuring the game on the floor. It is its own a machine with video, graphics, live music, recorded music, and a true cast of characters, all layered on top of and designed to support the performance of the team. As the PA guy, I am simply one part of the experience. And I will emphasize again, I love it. And it’s really not about my voice, although I truly think my pipes were made to resonate in a stadium or an arena just as much as others’ were made to feature trucks or food or Disney movies. I love being part of the event, fulfilling my role, and adding to the ambience that’s being created. Being a viable part of a high-functioning team.

For my VO friends, that’s something that I think is critical to your, my, and our success as VO professionals, no matter what genre we’re working in. It is way too easy to record an audition or a job listening solely to our own performance. It is way too enticing to get caught up in our own voices. If you want to understand what creative professionals hear – REALLY hear – you have to imagine yourself in the arena, if you will. You have to hear yourself with other aspects of the entire production in mind: the images and/or video that your voice will be used to enhance, the music and other sounds that will be layered with your voice, the objective(s) and goal underlying what the creative team is trying to accomplish. Get out of your own head and away from your own voice. Listen. Take direction. Take a broader perspective, then figure out how your voice fits it and adds to the larger mix. And contribute.

For my education friends, and for anyone else reading this post, “teamwork makes the dream work.” “Be a team player.” “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” (Although you can’t spell team without an “m” and an “e.”) <Cue groans> Sorry. Just kidding. That all sounds kind of trite and silly, much like most bumper-sticker philosophy. But teamwork really does make you better. If you’re in an educational leadership role, that means you have to involve your team members. Seek their input. Accept their ideas and figure out how to integrate them into the larger plan whenever possible. Don’t micromanage. You don’t have all the answers, nor should you. If you’re in a rank-and-file team member role, step up! Know what your role is, and do your part. Contribute. At the same time, Speak Up! If you have ideas, state them in an organized and appropriate manner.

The bottom line is that, no matter your industry or profession, life isn’t meant to be lived in isolation. Each of us can grow individually, but we advance further by working with each other, sharing ideas and activities, sometimes disagreeing, but ultimately learning and developing as both individuals and a group. In a world that seems to value individualism and “I’m gonna get mine” greed way too much, the benefits of collaboration and cooperation through teamwork have gained importance. It’s a lesson for educators, for voiceover pros, and for society at large.

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Ode to Black Friday

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I am particularly thankful for many things this year, as I posted yesterday. This morning, I resumed my daily ritual of morning walks/runs that I’ve adopted to improve my health. Typically, I head to one of the many lovely parks provided by the City of Arlington, and on my way this morning, I drove by a couple of retailers whose parking lots were populated with more cars than usual for that time of day. And something occurred to me that hadn’t resonated for many years: It’s Black Friday!

No, not the 1869 financial crisis. (He said, knowing most people wouldn’t be aware of any such event.) And not even the term from Philadelphia in the 1950s. (Feel free to look that one up, too.) I speak, of course, of the Day After Thanksgiving, when retailers like to pretend their accounting books go from the red (taking losses) into the black (making profits) thanks to the surge in holiday shopping. Because now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to gear up for Christmas. Commence the Christmas shopping.

A little personal history here: I grew up in a household that was very much built on a foundation of paper – books, magazines, and more than one daily newspaper. So I read a lot, although I will freely admit that I was more devoted to the periodicals than I was the books. I suspect it’s the part of me that decided to major in history in college; after all, newspapers and magazines that document what’s happening around us each day will become primary sources of historical knowledge in the future. I just know I preferred them.

Sundays, as it turned out, weren’t just for Mass. They also included the ritual of the Sunday paper. (And we had TWO!) If you recall, the Sunday newspaper in its heyday was packed. There were stories that had been built over the course of the week by the staff, additional features, additional opinions, more reader letters, and of course, ads. Lots and lots of ads, because retailers would publish their specials weekly. Now, as retailers began adopting Black Friday as a positive marketing tactic in the 1980s, the newspaper on Thanksgiving began to grow. Black Friday specials, and hence, more ads. The trend continued into the 1990s, and its growth was fairly organic. The “holiday doorbuster” came about, where a store that normally opened at 10:00am would open as early as 9:00, or even 8:00, or *gasp* 7:00am on the day after Thanksgiving. And they would feature limited-time specials that would expire at or shortly after the normal opening time. The idea, naturally, was to get you into the store earlier than normal, knowing that a given special might draw you, but you would still shop for additional items to get your Christmas shopping done. It was a classic marketing tactic, even if the special itself was a loss leader.

And I will freely admit, I loved it. There was something really cool about checking out the ads in the paper sometime on Thanksgiving Day (for me, usually after food and football), then getting up early on the day after Thanksgiving to shop a little. It was a neat break in the routine that said “It’s the Holidays.” I fondly remember 1996, when I headed to Kay-Bee Toys at The Parks at Arlington with my new sister-in-law so that I could get some cool toys for my niece and nephews on their doorbuster specials. Call me a sucker; I don’t care. I genuinely enjoyed it. I woke up at 6:00am to get to the mall by 7:00am for an 8:00am opening. There were perhaps 50 people waiting outside the store that morning, and everyone was actually very chill about what they wanted. No running, no stampeding, no yelling, no complaining. The employees didn’t seem to mind, either, since they only had to arrive a couple of hours earlier than normal. It was genuinely a fun experience. And these experiences remained fun for several years.

And then they killed it. The opening time kept getting earlier and earlier. Eventually, retailers started opening at midnight. The specials started getting more ridiculous in that they were much cheaper, but severely limited. That really only invites the madness, the running, the stampeding, the fighting, the complaining. The fun of Black Friday dissipated for me. I knew I was definitely done with it the year my in-laws camped out overnight outside Best Buy for the chance at a laptop for $500. A 6:00am wake-up during a holiday is fine, but I’m not sitting awake all night in the cold just to save some money. What’s worse is that the retailers started working with manufacturers to create specific Black Friday merchandise. You were no longer getting a normal item at a remarkable price; you were getting a once-only item that was created cheaply to sell to you cheap. Not the same.

Now, I realize that Frank Costanza created Festivus in 1997 in response to retail madness, and that was during the time when I still enjoyed Black Friday. I will admit that I never worked hard to get the specific hot toy of the year – no Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo. I suppose that my experience might have been different if I was diving deep into Black Friday shopping instead of just dipping my toes.  I was at Kay-Bee instead of Toys R Us, where it probably was crazier. I might stop at Target, but never Walmart. I’m certain there are some people out there who worked retail in the 1990s, hated Black Friday back then, and think I’m insane for saying I used to enjoy it. That’s fair, and my perspective is no doubt framed by my personal experience. But the bottom line for me is that, as is often the case in the USA, marketers and retailers decided to take things past the point of diminishing returns. Too much of a good thing. Kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Remember when Target, Walmart, and other stores actually opened on Thanksgiving Day? I can think of only one good thing about those days. My oldest, who has autism, would always be really wound up after spending Thanksgiving at two different houses with extended family from both his parents. So the ability to take him out to Grand Prairie Premium Outlets at 8:00pm on Thanksgiving so that he could walk with his father and release some energy was valuable. But I also recall feeling really terrible for the employees who had to leave their own families early that day to go to work. And I wondered about the benefits for the shoppers. Was it really worth it to go out on Thanksgiving Day to acquire more stuff?

Mercifully, those days are now behind us. But along the way, Black Friday has gone from an organic, interesting (and perhaps maddening) retail phenomenon to yet another contrived concoction of American advertisers. After the advent of Cyber Monday for online retailers, the actual concept of Black Friday has morphed into essentially a weeks-long festival of discounts online and in-store. If I had a nickel for every time I see “Black Friday Starts NOW” in my e-mail, I probably wouldn’t need to worry about saving any money on their special deals. The fact that retailers are willing to give us 15-30% off everything for a week or more is basically an admission that they’re inflating their margins most of the year. And instead of lower prices consistently feeding a stable retail environment that survives, if not thrives, we get inflated prices for much of the year with brief periods of unbridled spending, insane traffic, long lines, massive crowds, and a generally miserable experience.

And then there’s Small Business Saturday, “brought to you by American Express.” It was started in 2010 as a purported effort to support smaller stores who were harmed by the 2008 financial crisis. And while it seems like a well-meaning concept (because who thinks it’s a bad idea to help small business?), it is bitterly ironic that American Express is involved. Ask any small business owner, and they’ll freely tell you they cannot afford to accept American Express because the transaction fees for sellers are higher than nearly every other card. But then, irony in the USA appears to have quietly died many years ago, so who knows?

So Black Friday used to appeal to me, but it’s grown tiresome and I now actively seek to avoid it. And yet, I take heart in this development. My children are now grown, and their association with Christmas has evolved such that they value experiences and the spirit of the season far more than they do the quantity of presents under the tree. So we spend more of this season going out to see lights, watching movies, and of course, participating in Mass and other church activities. We still exchange a modest number of gifts among our family each Christmas, but we really have moved on from the consumer-driven aspects of the holiday. It’s refreshing. Meanwhile, I will always have my romanticized memories of a gentler time in American retail. And I will tip my hat to stores like REI, which closes on Black Friday for their “Opt Outside” initiative – they encourage everyone to avoid shopping and pursue an outdoor activity after all the food from Thursday. They even give their employees a paid day off to do the same. Sounds like a plan to me.

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Thankful for a Wonderful Year

Today is Thanksgiving, and it remains a Top 3 favorite holiday for me (I’ll write about the other 2 as they come up over the next 12 months). While I enjoy a day of family, food, and football, those are not the main reasons it’s a favorite. No, I enjoy it because it is a day devoted to gratitude. While that gratitude may align with the tenets of several religions, Thanksgiving Day isn’t reserved for any specific one, and I find that appealing. Considering that life itself is fairly miraculous, biologically speaking (especially for humans compared to other species), and our lives of prosperity in this place and time are filled with abundant relative luck, it just seems fitting that we spend at least one day per year reflecting on how blessed we really are. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or not, if you even believe in God, or if you worship according to a different tradition.

2025, for me and my family, hasn’t exactly been an easy one. We dealt with a broken, leaking water heater in March that flooded a portion of the house and left us living in a nearby hotel for two weeks. Then we shared a single bathroom among 4 adults for an additional two months. In the summer, a routine mammogram for my wife led to an additional scan and eventually, a surgical procedure. For me, a physical exam and blood test in the spring led to some new daily medications and a few dietary alterations. Plus there were other nagging little issues throughout the year – nail in a tire here, minor illness there – the usual annoyances of life. The most bizarre incident of the year definitely happened in July, when a man (already known to Arlington PD as sometimes homeless and a frequent drug user) literally ripped the passenger side mirror off my car, walked off with it, then tossed it by the side of the road.

And yet, despite it all, I am perhaps more grateful this Thanksgiving than I have been in a while. We have had challenges, we have faced adversity, but we are still blessed in ways we need to appreciate. I honestly suspect that for me, whatever trials we did face may have actually emphasized how good we have it in the long run. I don’t want to offer a big laundry list of items; instead, I will focus on three fundamental things for which I am most thankful as we approach the end of 2025.

Good Health. “Wait, didn’t you just say that both you and your wife dealt with some health issues this year?!?” Yes, yes I did. But in the end, we’ve overcome those issues and established ourselves as relatively healthy, especially for our ages. My wife’s mammogram led, as you might have suspected, to a mention of “the big C,” but the subsequent procedures she endured revealed that it was caught early. Like, REALLY early. Designated as “Stage 0,” where it was identified and removed as particles, before any cells had a chance to organize and create the need for chemotherapy or radiation. Was it scary? Absolutely. But once the process was over, we were grateful that modern medicine has advanced to the point that it could be addressed this early. For the foreseeable future, it really just means more frequent and vigilant scanning to ensure similar particles don’t return. If that happens, we’ll deal with the ramifications. But the doctors have all indicated that the chances of recurrence are minimal.

As for me, I can say that learning about A1C levels in the blood was certainly educational, and it obviously wasn’t welcome news to hear that mine was too high. The same blood test also revealed high cholesterol, and I also found out I have high blood pressure. Fun! Time for a few drugs and dietary changes. I even tried Ozempic for a couple of months until insurance would no longer cover it. In the grand scheme of things, none of it was a big deal. Sure, I have to avoid fatty foods, sugary foods and bread now, but I do not miss them. Those foods and I had a great run, but all things change. I have to take 3 tiny pills once per day. So what. I needed to ramp up my physical activity even more, which I welcome.

As my doctor (who is awesome, BTW – Dr. Eric Hoffman in Arlington) pointed out, addressing these issues now, making the necessary changes, taking the appropriate prescriptions, etc., is far preferable to stubbornly adhering to old habits and rolling the dice with the ramifications in 5-10 years.

The bottom line is that, while my wife and I are not in perfect health (and really, who is?), we are healthy. The issues we’ve faced this year, in our mid-50s, are miniscule compared to what many, many people deal with. And we have been able to take care of these issues with minimal headache and expense. Considering what others experience versus what we have experienced – Good Health, check – thankful for it in 2025.

Supportive People. This item of thanks started, frankly, very trite. “Family and Friends,” yada, yada. And make no mistake about it, my family and friends are amazing. My wife is awesome, we still love each other madly, we get along great, and we still have enough disagreements to keep it interesting. My kids…also awesome. They’re now beyond teenage years (during which we had the good fortune of never dealing with typical teenage nonsense), they’re growing into responsible adults, and we’re able to relate to them very well. As for friends, I honestly don’t have a lot of close friends who I see and communicate with regularly. But those close friends that I do talk to regularly are also terrific – we can share details about our lives and reminisce about the past with equal energy. Also, we’re able to share frustrations about the petty annoyances of life without judgment. Just some good-natured venting at times.

But the more I thought about “family and friends,” great as they are, the more I realized that my gratitude in 2025 really moves beyond that relatively narrow scope. I have been blessed with supportive people in a much broader sphere of influence. Consider my doctor, for one, who I’ve already acknowledged as awesome. I come from a long line of stubborn know-it-alls, and part of breaking free of that attitude entails having professionals I can trust. My doctor is one of them, mainly because he pushes past any of my stubborn instincts and tells me plainly what I need, not what I want, to hear. I’m grateful for that because I know I’ll be healthier than my parents if I receive straight talk. All the doctors and other medical professionals under whose care my wife and I have been this year…also thankful for them. I’ll throw my auto mechanic in there as well – Pat Murphy in Arlington. Needed a brake pad replacement this year, and I’m not one to do it myself. Murphy’s Auto was literally the first and only place I called, because I know he’ll do it right and not try to sell me something I don’t need. If you have an honest, trustworthy mechanic, you, too, should be thankful for them.

It may seem odd to be thankful for insurance, but we’ve needed it this year – home, auto, and health. Our insurance has not disappointed. Our adjusters for the home repairs from the water heater and the auto repair on my mirror were professional and patient with us. I always felt like we were being served appropriately, never upsold, and never dismissed. In a world that often seems to grow more cynical and self-absorbed, it was gratifying. Our health insurance has also been much better than expected, even after we changed from one provider to another in September. Sure, Ozempic is no longer covered and now too expensive, and I would certainly love to see universal healthcare in the United States, but the costs we’ve encountered for necessary procedures this year have been acceptable, and the prescriptions we have are downright cheap. I know there are many Americans who cannot say the same, so I am incredibly thankful for our own situation.

But I think the supportive people for whom I may be the most thankful in 2025 are coworkers and colleagues, past and present. I retired from K-12 public education in July 2025, and the toughest part of the process was saying goodbye to many coworkers who are just really good people. Fortunately, I am able to communicate periodically with some of them. I also took a part-time job with my long-time church parish in October, and I’ve learned that my new coworkers are also incredibly nice, decent people. I’m truly thankful for coworkers who are drama-free and easy-going. We all need to appreciate people like this more. Reflecting on past coworkers has also generated much gratitude in my heart this year. One of my friends and coworkers from Summit High School lost a 6-year battle with cancer earlier this year. Of course, I miss him and was sad that he passed away, but the occasion also led many of us from years past to gather as we shared memories and supported his current colleagues as they dealt with his death. I was the first to say, “We need to gather together like this more often, and next time, let’s make sure it’s not just because someone has passed.” And I mean it. Like I said, I don’t have a bunch of close friends, but I am thankful for all the colleagues I’ve had over the years, because I consider so many of them friends despite the fact that we don’t see each other every day anymore. “Don’t be a stranger” is a mantra we need more often, and I hope to stay connected to some degree, particularly with many of my more recent colleagues who are still in the trenches of public education. I am thankful for the support of so many, and I hope to reciprocate as they traverse the nonsense that the current education system brings their way.

Retirement. Ah, yes, I saved the easy, long-hanging fruit for last. And it IS easy, right? You would think anyone who retires in a given year would say “I’m thankful for my retirement.” Who wouldn’t? But my retirement has proven serendipitous on several levels in only a few months, and that really fuels my gratitude for it.

To start, if I’m being truthful, I’ve been “ready to retire” for easily about 7 years now. I decided that I wanted to pursue voiceover as my official second career back in 2018, when I created my LLC, signed up for coaching, attended VO Atlanta, and really started taking the business seriously. In my last couple of years in Mansfield ISD, I was able to utilize and build my VO skills within the context of my education career. When I left for Birdville ISD, my VO career came to a not-quite-screeching halt. My boss there (who was horrible in several ways) kind of resented that I had a VO business because it meant I wasn’t going home and working 2-3 extra hours on assessment and accountability nonsense. During my 5 years in Grand Prairie ISD, I did what I could on the VO side, but the two careers were clearly separate and not terribly symbiotic. My education career very much “crowded out” my voiceover career. I realized during these years that I couldn’t fully embark on voiceover like I wanted until I was free of education. Based on my age and where I was in that career, that meant retirement. I even tried to retire in 2024, but much like Michael Corleone, “they pulled me back in.” Only to experience a year that was at once farcical and tumultuous and idiotic and exhausting and unintentionally comical. At least I finally pulled the proverbial trigger this year and didn’t look back.

And it’s worked out for my VO career to some degree. Thanks to a nice reference from UT-Arlington’s Associate Director of Bands, I made my way into PA announcing for UTA men’s and women’s basketball. They’re auditioning several different voices in 2025-26, and I’ve already announced three NCAA Division I basketball games so far. There might be more later this season, and I have a legitimate chance to book that gig full-time by Fall 2026. And I’ve continued to book other PA work for Spring 2026 and beyond. Besides PA work, I’ve had more time for coaching, the ability to record a new demo and revise another one, and I still have additional coaching and events to come before the end of 2025. 2026 should definitely be my year for aggressively marketing my VO business and pursuing a wider range of work. (Finally!)

In the meantime, as you might expect, retirement has improved my health. It turns out not having the daily grind of waking at 5:00am, spending time in traffic, working 8 or more hours each day, and spending more time in traffic has been beneficial. Who knew, right? My initial diagnoses regarding blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol came at the end of May. My last day dealing with the idiocy of educational assessment was June 17. In September, I had a 3-month follow-up appointment – my weight was down, along with my blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Coincidence?

And yet, I did try to mess it up. Another district had a Director position in central office, and I applied and interviewed, foolishly thinking that a higher salary might be incentive to stick with K-12 education for at least another 3-5 years. Maybe this actual logic, or simply trepidation at the thought of not getting an ISD-based paycheck. And I was the leading candidate…but in the end, the district hired someone else. Not sure why that happened, but I don’t care, because sometimes we end up grateful later on that things didn’t actually work out. See, I received the news literally while I was in the waiting room at one of my wife’s medical procedures. My retirement – and enhanced free time – allowed me to be right by her side for all of them during her ordeal. I didn’t have to take time off, go back to work and focus on stuff that I had missed, or really ever think about anything but supporting her. Coincidence?

Then in September, the opportunity to work at my longtime church parish became available. It’s essentially a record-keeping job, 4 hours each day, in a low-stress environment, with great people (as I noted earlier). The work may seem like mostly menial tasks to an outsider, but it’s rewarding to serve the church I’ve attended since I was 3 years old, and it certainly matters more to me than any of the standardized assessment noise had become. (Read more about that here.) And the salary from this job more than offsets the difference between my retirement income and my previous salary. So I am literally making more money now in a low-stress, high-satisfaction situation than I was when dealing with high school testing tasks ad nauseam. Coincidence?

I am thus incredibly thankful for retirement, not just in general, but specifically at this time in my life, and in this year. Considering all the pitfalls I seem to have encountered since about 2019, throwing me off-track, to have all of these things working out in my favor now falls somewhere between magic and divine intervention.

It is not lost on me that we have, in the end, received good fortune in 2025, be it from God, or fate, or karma…whatever. I am thankful for all of it. I refuse to get caught up in self-pity over health challenges, or an added expense here or there because of “sh** happens,” or a lost job opportunity. We’ve been the benefactors of decent insurance coverage and excellent care from a host of professionals, medical and otherwise. I have been the recipient of camaraderie and support from some fantastic people, and my primary intention is to ensure that I match that support and show proper appreciation for them. And I have finally retired from my first career, in which I had clearly advanced to the “negative returns” phase, to pursue the next one, and enter the next phase of a life that I consider far from over. 2025 wasn’t a challenging year; it was really a watershed year. And I am absolutely grateful for what it has given me.

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Debunking Myths about Teachers

Recently, in honor of World Teachers’ Day, I wrote a post about why teaching can be the worst, and why it’s the absolute best. In that post, I said, “There are a host of myths about teaching and teachers that I will delineate in a different post later on.”

Welcome to…Later On. Granted, “myths about teaching” is hardly ground-breaking content; there are a host of blogs, articles, and social media posts where teachers grouse about how clueless non-educators can be about the teaching profession. I understand this, and I make no claim that this post is anything more than stuff I’d like to get off my chest now that I have the time.

“Summers Off”: Let’s start with a common one, and an easy one to debunk. One of the first gifts I received when I began my teaching career was one of those signs that says, “Three Reasons for Teaching: June, July, August.” Insulting? Maybe. Inaccurate? Yes, and horribly so. Technically, you can say that teachers get “summers off” because they are not officially working in the classroom during that time. But the real myth is in how people interpret that phrase, and how that time is spent. For one thing, teachers are still expected to get additional instruction for themselves during the summer. Call it what you want – professional development, extended education, personal growth, etc. There is an expectation that each teacher find, enroll in, and attend something. It used to be minimum 12 hours of such instruction, so roughly 1.5 to 2 days, depending on how it’s structured. More importantly, this time is UNPAID. The teacher often has to pay a fee out-of-pocket to get this instruction. Occasionally, districts will host their own professional development conference designed to fulfill these requirements at a nominal cost to the teachers. There are also certain organizations that host events designed for teachers at minimal cost. Either way, it’s not like the teachers run out of the building after the last bell rings and go on vacation until next year’s first bell rings. There are commitments required of them even when they’re technically off-contract.

The other problem with this myth is the notion that a teacher’s paychecks during the summer months are somehow “money for nothing.” Here’s how things work in reality: A typical teacher contract is based on a Daily Rate of Pay multiplied by the Number of Contract Days (Instructional + Non-Instructional, such as district staff development and workdays). Let’s say your Daily Rate is $350 with a contract of 187 days >> $350 x 187 = $59,840. $59,840 ÷ 12 = $4986.67, which would be your gross monthly pay. Keep in mind, those 187 days are worked during the school year, so the paychecks for non-contract months like June and July are actually deferred payments. Work now, earn later. Definitely NOT money-for-nothing.

“Teachers only work 187 days a year? Wimps. I work 365.” No, you do NOT. The average worker on a 5-day week with 2 weeks of vacation yields 5 x 50 = 250 days of work. Yes, it is 63 more days than a teacher contract, but that typical worker also leaves after 8 hours. Teachers often stay well past their contract time, usually to help students and/or grade papers. Keep in mind, too, that those 63 days are NOT PAID. Also, show me another profession where, if you have to take a day off, you also have to provide a complete plan for a substitute worker – who will likely be untrained for your job – so that the task you’re missing that day still gets completed.

Teaching is inherently altruistic: Ah, yes, how people try to justify paying teachers less. I remember sitting at a summer conference for economics teachers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas when a presenter was talking about disparities in pay between teachers and certain workers in private sector finance jobs. She literally said, to a group of teachers, “you all are somewhat selfless and motivated by compassionate forces, so you’re willing to accept lower salaries.” You can imagine the chorus of responses. She was trying to justify the disparity with an assumption about the teaching profession. It is an all-too-common refrain anytime someone wants to justify obscene compensation for one group against unfairly low compensation for another: “You’re not in it for the money; you’re in it as a ‘calling.’” It’s ridiculous. I prefer the philosophy espoused by the Joker in The Dark Knight: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” A good teacher deserves to be paid as such. The overarching problem in society as that the system doesn’t value education, as an industry, the way it does others like finance or entertainment. One might also think, “Just teach college or private school and make more money.” Wrong again. The fact is, as underpaid as a typical public school teacher is, he/she is making more money than is likely in a collegiate or private school setting. Society doesn’t really value education. (Yet another future blog topic.) Mercifully, beginning teacher compensation has increased substantially since I accepted an annual salary of $21,000 per year when I started in 1994. Society has at least begun to figure out that better pay draws better teachers. But there’s still a long way to go.

Teachers “ended up” there: This myth is essentially born of a favorite bullsh** maxim you might’ve heard – “Those who can, do; Those who can’t, teach.” I am ashamed to admit that my own father uttered this to me once when I was younger. (Although I won’t be delineating any of my daddy issues anytime soon.) This one is patently insulting, assuming that the person who stands in front of your children (or yourself) is only there because they failed at what they really wanted to do. Typically, this myth is accessed when someone simply doesn’t like something about the teacher – personality, how the teacher treated their precious little one at some point, you name it – so they grasp at an intentionally demeaning idea in an effort to somehow reduce the teacher’s authority by diminishing their purpose in the profession. Because if you ended up there, surely you shouldn’t garner any respect, right? But rest assured, I and the vast majority of my colleagues could have chosen a multitude of careers instead of teaching. Heck, during my first five supposed “summers off,” I looked around for other jobs and received interviews and offers. But none of them ultimately held the appeal of my teaching career as I was building it in those early years.

Teaching is easy to get into: This myth is basically a corollary to the previous one. And it’s another one I’m ashamed to admit I have heard in my own family. You might’ve heard something like this – “I’ll try to do ___________, but if not, I’ll just teach.” Beware anytime someone suggests they can just proceed into a given field; it’s dismissive and disrespectful. Oh, you’ll just move into a profession in which it’ll take years to feel competent, and even more to feel like you’re actually doing well? You’ll just go into a profession where you have to manage the behavior of other people’s children and learn to hold their attention well enough to help them actually learn something? This myth isn’t ridiculous or insulting; it’s laughable. It assumes that all you need to teach is knowledge of your subject and perhaps some PowerPoint slides. It doesn’t acknowledge the need for presentation skills, or patience, or classroom management ability, or a host of other skills that a teacher draws from on any given day. It ignores the specialized abilities that are minimal for the most marginally competent teacher. Considering the exodus of qualified, certified teachers from the profession into other jobs, along with the teacher shortage they leave behind, you would think this myth would rightfully die. Instead, we still have a teacher shortage, and more districts than ever find themselves filling jobs with uncertified teachers. If teaching was so easy to pursue, these things wouldn’t happen.

Teachers only teach to the test: This myth is a recent favorite among people who like to decry the current system of state assessment and accountability. And on one level, I agree with them – the Texas system of assessment and accountability is kind of a mess…but that’s another post for another time. “Teaching to the test” itself, as a criticism, is a myth because the reality is, ALL good teaching teaches to the test. When I taught AP Macroeconomics for a dozen years, I was expected to teach to the test. It was literally my job as the instructor to offer enough instruction for my students to succeed on the AP Exam. Give them all the tools they need. On a broader level, curriculum and pedagogy are driven by knowledge and skills, i.e., what students should know and be able to do as a result of instruction.  For an athletic team, the test is the game, and all preparation, instruction, practice, and coaching teaches toward success in that event. For a music ensemble or a theater troupe, the test is the performance, and all preparation, instruction, and rehearsal teaches toward success in that event. So it goes for academic classes, as well. When a geography class is studying a unit on Latin America, all preparation, instruction, and practice work teaches toward knowledge and skills associated with that region. Will there be some drill-and-practice? Probably. Will certain themes and topics be covered multiple times? Absolutely, especially things with which students appear to struggle. There is nothing wrong with this. Do you really think the teacher simply offers a series of high-minded lectures with no discernible target in mind? Of course not. Good educational planning is often done in reverse. The teacher identifies the learning targets and plans an instructional sequence leading to them. They teach to the test. If you, as a parent or student, cannot stand the activities being used in the STAAR era, your quarrel is with the test itself, not the practice of teaching to the test. And I will gladly join your battle with STAAR, because it’s a well-intended system that has run amok in its evolution. Let’s create a better test and teach to it. You’ll be surprised at how much instruction improves, and how students enjoy the experience more.

Teachers try to indoctrinate students: This myth is definitely a more recent phenomenon, and it’s primarily driven by politics. Typically, the people promoting this myth are the same ones decrying nebulous concepts like CRT, DEI, and “woke ideology” in the schools, despite the fact that they cannot cite any specific evidence of their existence. Nevertheless, the narrative promoted in this myth is the same as it’s always been…that you, your values, and your very way of life are under attack by these horrible teachers who entered the profession primarily to carry out some illicit intent. These same educators who they’ll characterize as incompetent imbeciles are still somehow so smart and crafty that they’re secretly conspiring to indoctrinate your kids into a belief system that runs counter to everything you hold dear. It’s the politics of anger, because the whole world is clearly going down the drain, and someone has to be blamed for it, damn it. This mindset is literally as old as politics. Tell a group of people that their lives and the world they live in is terrible, and it’s someone else’s fault. Teachers have become a convenient scapegoat just as they were in previous historical eras. But the truth is that the vast majority of teachers don’t have time to inject their own political, social, religious, or other beliefs into instruction. The demands of the curriculum, classroom management, grading, and other tasks are too great for anyone to worry about it. And the power and influence needed to succeed at any indoctrination effort are typically beyond most teachers’ reach. We’re literally trying to get students to sit down, pay attention, and do their work. If a teacher really had the power to indoctrinate, most would use that power to get students to show up to class on-time, participate appropriately, and complete their work.

Coaches are lazy and poor teachers: I saved the worst for last, and it’s especially appropriate because Texas HS Coaches Day was just last Friday, November 7. This myth has been around forever. It’s certainly been spread through movies and television, and it’s your typical low-hanging fruit at any given school: Coach So-and-So is a lazy, terrible teacher. He only shows movies in class, no one does any work, he doesn’t care if you come to class…yada, yada, yada. This myth is also, in my opinion, the most egregious based on three decades in public education. And I worked in social studies, so believe me, I taught with coaches. Lots of coaches. Here’s the thing about coaching: Coaching IS teaching. You help students establish knowledge and skills about their sport and their opponent. You help them build on what they do well and fix what they do poorly. And you work to position them to succeed. You do these same things in any academic classroom, whether in a core subject or an elective. This is why I can probably count on one hand the number of coaches who I believe were poor classroom teachers. And you know what? Those coaches were also poor coaches. You know what else? I can probably count at least the same number of “non-coach” teachers who were poor teachers. The point is, not everyone’s cut out to teach, regardless of whether or not they are hired as an athletic coach. What’s more, not everyone who is cut out to teach is also cut out to coach. There’s an even bigger demand on coaches in terms of time, commitment, knowledge, patience, dedication, and compassion. Sure, there’s a stipend, but it does not come close to covering the true value that coaches bring to students. Instead of lauding teachers while dogging coaches as somehow inferior to teachers, society should be lauding coaches even more for the extra time and care they devote. Same for band directors. Same for instructors in other fine arts. Same for all the club sponsors who stay after school and work on weekends with students. You really have no idea how many adults in a typical school go above-and-beyond for your children until you’ve been around them day after day, week after week, year after year. Chief among these are coaches. And while it may seem convenient to cite specific news items about specific coaches in specific places who are placed on administrative leave, dismissed, or even arrested for something salacious, then say, “All these coaches are awful,” remember this: Those events made the news because they deviate from the norm. Your local news is ultimately interested in ratings. “Breaking News: The coaches at your local school all worked late today to keep your kids safe and help them improve” doesn’t get ratings. It doesn’t get any attention.

That really is the bottom line regarding myths about teachers: It’s all about attention. “Teachers work hard, don’t get paid enough, and generally do a good job” is a true statement. It also doesn’t capture much attention, whether on a news broadcast, in a movie or TV show, or certainly on social media. What will get attention? Complaining in general, but also complaining about teachers – how they get summers off, or how they should stop asking for higher salaries, or how they’re only teachers because they can’t do anything else, or how easy it is to become a teacher, or how they just teach to the test, or how they’re trying to poison the minds of children, or how this or that coach is lazy and good-for-nothing. They’re all easy attention-getting claims to make, even though they’re untrue. But Americans are regularly fed the notion that our education system is failing, so these myths gain traction as people grasp for explanations. It is true that education in America has problems, especially compared to other nations, but the reasons and potential solutions for these issues are actually complex and require us to examine ourselves, both individually and collectively. And people don’t want to deal with complexity, and they certainly don’t want to engage in some tough self-examination. But perhaps it’s time we do, and stop promoting lies about the people who do their best for our children every day.

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Is the Friday Night Lights experience Overrated?

Texas high school football is a unique obsession. I mentioned in a previous post that I did PA for a high school football game earlier this season, and I’ve also had the occasion to run the scoreboard for a local high school a couple of times, including this past Friday. It is also no secret that I have been a sports fan literally all of my life.

I remember my first high school football game: Arlington Lamar vs Irving MacArthur, Fall 1973 at UT-Arlington’s old Memorial Stadium. I sat on the home side with my siblings. I vaguely remember repeating most of what the PA announcer said to a random kid sitting near me (seeds firmly planted in me at a young age). It was the first of many. I would estimate that over the course of my life, I have attended around 300 high school football games – that includes games I attended with my older siblings and games I attended while in junior high. When I was in junior high, I even attended a few games with my older sister while she covered them for the local paper early in her journalism career. Then there were games when I was in marching band in high school, when my old high school was involved in the playoffs and I attended, and when I was a high school teacher. I was also at a few games with the UTA Marching Band, both as drum major and doing PA, when we were playing postgame exhibitions. Throw in all the games I announced over the course of roughly 14 years in a previous district, and the total has to be around 300. I used to love high school football fiercely, especially playoff games. Favorite high school football memories: LD Bell vs Trinity at Texas Stadium to conclude the 1983 regular season (in the pressbox with my sister, keeping stats) and DeSoto vs Cedar Hill at Newsom Stadium in December of 2006 (on the mic doing PA). Both of those games featured packed houses – Texas Stadium’s lower bowl was full in 1983, and Newsom Stadium overflowed in 2006. At that 2006 game, I got to call Von Miller’s (yes, the Super Bowl 50 MVP) name all afternoon because he was involved in so many tackles. Today, I think I still like the activity, but I’m not sure I love it anymore, and it’s not just because I’m old or otherwise burned out.

The question I pose is this: Is Texas high school football – “Friday Night Lights,” as people like to call it thanks to the brilliance of H.G. Bissinger – really that great of an experience? Or is it overrated? Maybe it’s vague and indecisive to say so, but my answer is officially “Yes And No.” There are some things about it that I still very much enjoy. There are other things that I personally find a beat-down of the highest order. And away we go…

The Good:

  • The Two-Sided Stadium. In college and the pros, the stadium is mostly filled with home fans, with a smattering of visiting fans scattered about or shoved into one section. (The main exception is Texas-OU at the Cotton Bowl, which is a fantastic atmosphere that basically proves my point.) High school has home on one side and visitor on the other, and the back-and-forth energy of that setting can be mesmerizing, especially as the weather gets colder and the games get bigger. Those specific games I mentioned earlier were really magical in part because of the two-sided stadium. It’s amazing to hear the roar on one side contrasting with the silence of the other, based on what’s happening on the field.
  • The Alma Maters (or if you prefer, School Songs). Before the game, it can be a pretty cool moment. Heck, I can still sing my own high school alma mater. It doesn’t make me cry or anything, but I do enjoy it. After the game – especially a close, hard-fought game, it’s often a poignant experience. One side is elated as they hear it, the other is disappointed. Again, this experience takes on more meaning later in the season. During the playoffs, some of these kids know it will be the last time they stand with their teammates for this moment, and there’s a lot of emotion. And that is the absolute best, because that connection between teammates matters more than the scoreboard at the end of literally any and every high school football game.
  • The Run-Throughs. I grew up seeing the paper signs the cheerleaders would spend all week making, and those were awesome. These days, team will have big reusable vinyl signs with velcro down the center, and many schools just have a giant inflatable tunnel and/or sculpture for the team. Those are also awesome, even when they look awkward. (You could ask me about “Deuce the Jaguar” sometime, but you might not want to read the full story in print on that one.) A good run-through, whether a sign or an inflatable, sets the tone for a high school game perfectly.
  • Fight Songs. THE. BEST. I don’t care whose fight song it is. I kind of like them all, and I absolutely love many of them. You simply cannot beat a good fight song. “But do they have to play the fight song so much?” YES. Yes, they do. Why would you even ask that? If the band is playing the fight song a lot, it usually means good things are happening on the field. But even if it doesn’t, who cares? Full Disclosure: Arlington High School was our bitter rival when I was in high school, but I absolutely love the AHS Fight Song, maybe even more than my high school’s. You cannot beat a good fight song, and it’s impossible to beat one into the ground by playing it too much. If you hate fight songs, I’m not sure we can be friends.
  • Drum Cadences. Another of The Best. Call Fight Songs 1A and Cadences 1B. College bands often play cadences in the stands and to march on and off the field, but there’s something unique about the high school drum cadence that’s played while action is taking place on the field. Add the dancing and other visual things the band does during the cadence, and it becomes a thing of beauty. Perhaps somewhere there’s an Arlington Lamar High School alum reading this who knows exactly what I’m talking about when I mention “The Guillotine” during “Mountain.” Literally, IYKYK. And if you don’t, you missed out. Some bands even bring the drumline down to the sidelines during the 3rd quarter so the cheerleaders and spirit group can jam out with them. Here, here. Rock on, man.
  • Spirit Songs. No, not the Fight Song, and not “Stand Tunes.” (We’ll talk Stand Tunes later on.) I’m talking about ultra-short songs that the band plays in the stands which are specifically designed to get the crowd and the team energized. “Go Big Blue.” (Or whatever color you prefer.) “Eat ‘Em Up.” (!!!) We used to have a straight, swing, and polka version of Eat ‘Em Up when I was in high school, and it was glorious. Some schools play the William Tell Overture. Duncanville High School traditionally opens every game with “The Planet Krypton” fanfare from John Williams’ score to the 1978 Superman, and it is amazing. Mansfield High’s band plays “Eye of the Tiger” at the kickoff of every game. I find Survivor’s original to be one of the worst songs of the 80s, but as a spirit song on a Friday night, it works. More Spirit Songs, please.
  • Friendly Visits by the Band and Drill Team. One of the best traditions at any high school football game happens when the home drum majors and drill team officers head to the visitors’ side during the second half, introduce themselves, and greet the visiting band/drill team. Then they escort the visiting drum majors/officers to the home side, where they introduce them to the home band/drill team. It’s always a lovely moment of camaraderie among performers across school boundaries.

The Bad:

  • Halftime. “Whaaat? Didn’t you recently have a post about how great marching bands are?” I did, indeed, recently post about how marching band is awesome. (and thanks for reading, if you thought that.) And it IS. And if you have a chance, you should attend a marching band contest, because it might blow your mind. But the football halftime itself is a beating, especially in the month of October, when every band tries to perform their entire contest show. The bottom line is that 28 minutes for a football halftime is way too long, any way you slice it. I recently saw a school play a 2-minute hype video for the drill team, then the drill team did their “march-on” routine, then they introduced every single officer and spirit girl and special girl and on and on, then they finally had the actual drill team performance. Then the band performed their full contest show. And then they did it all again for the other school! I’ve heard people insist that high school halftimes have taken 40 minutes or longer, and while I can assure you that’s not likely, it sure can feel that way. And yet, for the performers it nearly always feels rushed, especially when the teams emerge from the locker rooms and begin warming up while the show’s still happening. (Don’t get me started on that team in Idaho that ran out through the band’s performance.) That’s why some band directors will, when it’s serious contest season, have the band perform post-game, where they can focus strictly on their own competition show free of distractions and have more control of the performance environment. It’s a smart play, allowing the fans attending for football to focus on it, and the parents attending to watch the band to focus on it. While it makes for a late night for the band, the ability to dedicate the post-game environment solely to their own performance can be beneficial.
  • Homecoming. When you’re in school and are sweet on someone, homecoming is a lovely date night, even if you’re in the band and have to go home, shower, and change before you head out to eat dinner at 10:30pm or later. You’re in high school; enjoy it! But for just about everyone else (also some students, including my own children) “HoCo” (I despise that abbreviation, BTW) is a beating. Technically, “homecoming” is supposed to be when alumni “come home,”but it’s often unlikely any meaningful sampling of alumni actually shows up. Maybe a class celebrating a specific reunion. No, homecoming as it exists now is mainly little more than a celebration of the popular kids. Sure, some schools will occasionally crown a special needs student as king or queen, but statistically speaking, the same students who have been popular since, like, second grade are the ones who get to be part of the “court.” And we tell the world who their parents are, what their favorite memory is, where they’re headed next, yada yada yada. “And please welcome last year’s homecoming king and queen” (who you won’t remember) to crown this year’s. Please just jab a fork in my eye. I do have one favorite homecoming memory from my years doing PA: One school sent their own announcer to the booth for the ceremony. This guy made an error, saying “Your Homecoming Queen is…” before reading the boy’s name. Then he said “And your Homecoming Queen is…” and read the girl’s name. He didn’t even realize it, but all of us in the pressbox did. Two homecoming queens, well before that might even be considered a thing. The game staff joked about how progressive that was, but I still wonder if the Homecoming King’s parents heard the gaffe and got upset.
  • Stand Tunes. I did say we’d talk about this one later. I railed about this one slightly back in September. There’s nothing wrong with a decent arrangement of a song for the stands. But do they have to be all the same? Seriously – Rock and Roll, Part 2 (aka “The ‘Hey’ Song,” aka “The Only Song We Know”), Seven Nation Army, and Pretty Fly – remove them from the face of the earth, and half the bands in America would have nothing left to play. Does every band have to play these? Do something different. Give me some Bruno Mars, Chappell Roan, or even Taylor Swift. Heck, throw it back to Earth, Wind, & Fire or The Gap Band. Just stop playing the same stuff everybody else plays. Surely there are other good arrangements of other energizing songs. Or…break out a specific spirit song, like I mentioned earlier.
  • Disengaged and/or Nasty Fans. I realize that there are many fans in the stands who are A) parents of the players; B) parents of one of the performing students, like band, drill team, cheer, etc.; C) faculty and staff there to support their students; D) friends and family of someone involved in the game and surrounding activities; E) students standing (all game) in the student section because they want to support the team F) other actual fans of the team, whether community members, alumni, whatever. And as long as they support their team, bring it on. I humbly submit that these attendees are too often in the minority at your typical Friday football game. The majority are the types I cannot stand, including G) fans who are constantly yelling at the coaches, officials, or both; H) students and adults who talk trash to opposing players and/or coaches; I) students who attend the game not to watch but to be seen. Your proverbial mileage may vary, depending on the school. My observations have generally been that it varies based on how small-town or suburban the school is. The more small-town your school, the more engaged the fans. The more suburban the school, the more likely you are to see disengaged fans, especially students who are at the game purely as a social event, with no interest in what’s actually happening on the field. And nasty fans who think it’s acceptable to talk sh** to teenagers and/or underpaid coaches and officials need to go live under a bridge like the veritable trolls that they are.

If you’re keeping score (and since it’s about high school football, you probably should be), you may notice that I have 7 things listed under The Good and only 4 things listed under The Bad. But the word count is 862 for The Good and 1,038 for The Bad. So clearly, I like more things about Friday Night Lights than I dislike, but I have over 150 more words to say about what I dislike. And that, friends, is why my answer to the question, “Is Texas high school football…really that great of an experience?” is a clear “Yes And No.” The next time you attend a game, cheer for your team, try your best to soak in everything you enjoy about the experience, ignore what you don’t like, and fight your way through any disinterested or dysfunctional fans on your way home. Make sure the time you spend there is time well-spent.

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The Good Old Days

It’s been a very reflective fall so far. At the end of September, I shared a piece I wrote about the passing of UTA Director of Bands Dr. Douglas Stotter on what would have been his 65th birthday, and I shared some thoughts on the brevity of life. Last week, it was all about teaching and how rewarding I found the classroom experience to be. Then another friend and colleague departed this world last Friday after a 7-year battle with a rare form of cancer. So I guess I’m making this week’s post the conclusion of a philosophical trilogy highlighting just how much we should all appreciate the connections we make, especially if we’re educators.

I’m reminded of the TV show, “The Office.” In the series finale, Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) delivers one of the more poignant lines of dialogue on the show: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days, before you’ve actually left them.” I honestly feel fortunate that, throughout my education career, I actually took time to look around and think “these ARE the good old days.” Maybe it was the fact that I happen to like 10,000 Maniacs’ “These Are Days,” and I’ve always cherished graduations and the conclusion of a given school year. Frankly, that was always one of my favorite things about teaching – a school year can be incredibly intense at times, but it ends. There’s a summer to look forward to. (Although it’s not truly a “summer off,” as some people assume – but that’s another post I’m working on.) There’s the ability to take stock of where you’ve been over the past year and plan on where you’d like to go in the coming one. Educators can thus compartmentalize each year and hopefully string together several good years while minimizing or even eliminating the worse years in-between. And looking back, I feel incredibly lucky that my career was, mostly, a collection of 5-year periods that were definitely more positive than negative. Full disclosure here: I usually avoid identifying where I worked because I want to keep my reflections more general, but I will break that guideline on the remainder of this post.

My career began in August 1994 at Mansfield High School. Those first 5 years were, in a word, rough. Not because of MHS – I actually enjoyed working there, taught some amazing students, had some incredible and supportive colleagues, and really learned a ton about this profession. What made it rough was just the nature of teaching itself. In your first year of teaching, you feel like, “ I suck. This sucks. Why am I doing this?” Teaching is a unique profession largely because there’s no amount of training that will adequately prepare you for what you will actually experience. Sure, your education professors will tell you things, some courses will allow you field experience, and you’ll actually be in a classroom doing the work during student teaching. Except student teaching is usually only 12 weeks, and they aren’t really your classes. You’re borrowing them, kind of like grandparents borrow the kids for an afternoon. You’ll eventually give them back, so the investment – or the sense of despair when it becomes difficult – never fully settles in. In your first year of teaching, when it’s your name on the class schedule and the gradebook, you’re mainly trying to stay afloat and avoid getting depressed. The good news is that it does get easier as you gain more experience, see what works and what doesn’t, and figure out how you want to do things. For me, the extra challenge also came from having a composite certificate in social studies. I got handed a class full of 100% special education students for economics and government (in the days before inclusion became the norm), then I got a world history class added to my schedule, then I got switched over to world geography at a different building. Then I was assigned to teach economics and government in one building before I traveled to a different building each day to teach world geography. All within my first 5 years. Fun times! But I persevered, I was learning, I was improving as an instructor, and I was in an environment that grew more supportive each year. By the end of year 5 in the Spring of 1999, I felt like I had arrived as an educator with a viable career ahead of me.

You might think what’s coming next is the old twist, “but behind the scenes, things were falling apart.” Yet reality was that the next 5 years were terrific. As I improved professionally, I settled into a more focused role in economics and government, and later AP Macroeconomics. I once had a student tell me, “you’ve really found your calling, because this class was very cool and defied my expectations.” Those were also the years where I got to create and teach “The Impact of Music on Society.” (Read last week’s post for more on that class.) Along the way, Mansfield ISD grew enough to >gasp< split into two high schools. (Trust me, people at the time thought it was the end times.) I opted to teach at the “new” school, which actually occupied the “old” building. (Yes, it was weird.) And Summit High School opened with a bang, with lots of achievement right out of the gate. And I remember looking around at both the MHS staff and the SHS staff during those times and thinking to myself, “This is awesome. Soak it in.” And I truly adore so many of my colleagues from those years.

By fall 2004, Summit High School was in its official third year, and I had completed a decade of teaching. Again, you might expect this next 5-year period to be a downturn, but it actually may have been the peak of my education career. It was during this time that I started splitting my time between teaching and campus assessment. I called myself a “TV teacher.” You know how, on TV shows, teachers appear to teach only one class filled with brilliant students? That was me – I taught one class of AP Macroeconomics for 90 minutes each day, plus I had a conference period, and 2 periods each day to work on campus assessment. It was during these years that I also began announcing varsity football games. I was kind of living the dream. It was a glorious time, even when I was occasionally asked to step into other classrooms if we were short on substitutes. My students were, as you might expect, top-tier. My colleagues were unbelievably good, and I often paused to recognize how great the atmosphere was. And the 2008-09 school year culminated with my selection as Teacher of the Year for Summit High School and Secondary Teacher of the Year for Mansfield ISD. Truth be told, the campus award mattered more to me because I was selected by my colleagues. The district award was obviously a huge honor, but it mainly involved a series of essays and an interview. The decision of my peers was a much bigger deal because of the caliber of competition within my own campus. There were literally dozens of other teachers who were deserving of the campus award, and any one of them would have also deserved the district honor. Had I been asked to make a speech as the winner, that’s exactly what I would have said. But alas, the district didn’t begin asking teacher-of-the-year winners to speak until the next year.

That following year was when things finally started cooling off, wasn’t it? As a matter of fact, it was. There wasn’t any dramatic drop-off, but the fall of 2009 saw the first perceptible decline, at least from my perspective. It’s the nature of the profession – one person is promoted, another one changes campuses or districts, someone else leaves the profession, and another person moves out of state because of a spouse’s job. There were still some stalwarts and past colleagues remaining, and the newer teachers were fine, but as you might expect, things just weren’t the same. Maybe it was me, because I was also considering the prospect of a move into central administration since I was excelling on the assessment side of my job. So these were the years when I ultimately transitioned from TV teacher to a job specializing in assessment and accountability. Would I consider these 5 years a “down time” in my career? Not really, but because it did not reach the heights of the previous decade, it might have seemed disappointing, mainly because I had been fortunate to work with such great people, and that group was slowly splintering. Change happens, and we don’t always view it positively.

The transition to central administration was successful, though, because the next 5 years were absolutely incredible. The Mansfield ISD Department of Research, Assessment, & Accountability was relatively small, but it was mighty, and I loved getting to do good work with great people. I learned so much about K-12 education from a broader perspective beyond the high school level, and it was immensely rewarding to assist campus and central administrators as they worked to navigate the challenges of 21st century assessment and accountability. Was it as rewarding as campus work? Honestly, comparing them isn’t fair. It was definitely different, and it was satisfying in its own way. More importantly, I was privileged to work with a team of people who were not just excellent colleagues; they were truly admirable people. And make no mistake, I sought to live in the moment and appreciate what I had while I had it.

Then I left Mansfield ISD, mainly because there were bigger changes afoot in the district on a political and bureaucratic level, and I believed that I would be marginalized sooner or later. Our little department wasn’t a complete afterthought, but neither were we a priority. It wasn’t exactly a “quit before you’re fired” situation because my job wasn’t really in jeopardy, but there was proverbial writing on the wall. So I went to Birdville ISD, drawn by a higher salary and what seemed to be greater potential. I’m sure there are quality educators in BISD, but I wasn’t around them or the district long enough to appreciate it. Instead, I worked for someone who I thoroughly believe was ill-prepared for a supervisory role, and things didn’t work out. I learned some tough lessons trying to overcome the adversity of the situation. Enough said.

Then I landed in Grand Prairie ISD, where I would conclude my career. And it ended up being a fitting bookend. My first 5 years in Mansfield were rough but grew increasingly easier. My last 5 years in Grand Prairie, were also rough, yet ironically, they grew increasingly more difficult. Against that backdrop, I got to work with some extraordinary colleagues who became as dear to me as my peers from the best years at Mansfield and Summit. But it was different this time. At Mansfield, we were a campus coming into our own, seeking to reach new heights. At Summit, we were a new school hungry to live up to the bold motto “A Tradition of Excellence.” The experience at both schools was fantastic with fabulous people. At Grand Prairie, we were a historically underachieving campus looking to reform the campus culture and overcome a decades-old inferiority complex. GP was definitely more challenging for many reasons, and the people I worked with there gave their absolute all toward that reform. Many still do, although some have moved on, as I did. But I am grateful that I worked with educators who truly “fought the good fight” against bureaucratic and political roadblocks from the state and even their own school district, all in service to a student population that most needs educators willing to fight for them. In some ways, I appreciate these colleagues more because of the setting.

So what’s the point of all this reflection on my career? In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” In other words, don’t get so caught up in the work that you don’t appreciate the people. Education can be a demanding profession, so it’s an easy trap to fall into. Sometimes you have to pause, disconnect from the planning, the grading, the testing, and the activities, and make an actual effort to escape the trap. I consider myself fortunate that I paused and acknowledged my good fortune as much as possible. I certainly hope I showed my appreciation for my colleagues appropriately. It’s not something that I planned as I entered the profession; it just became habitual for me. I suspect suffering through the roughness of my first 5 years gave me an outlook that made me more introspective, and therefore grateful for the good times. And I know the roughness of the final 6 years, with the wisdom I had gained over time, definitely helped me look for the proverbial lights among any darkness. The bottom line is, don’t take anything for granted. These may well be the good old days. Soak it in. Be grateful. It will not always be this way; change is always on the horizon. My friend and colleague David McDonald left this life on October 10, and while I am immensely sad, I have no regrets about my own interactions with him. He knew he had a friend in me who thoroughly admired him. He knew he had friends throughout his career at Summit High School who loved him and will love his family now in his absence. To you reading this, I offer more than just “hug your loved ones.” Obviously that’s true, and you should. But appreciate your colleagues, too. Maybe you’re a private person who doesn’t seek friends at work, and that’s fine. Everyone has their boundaries. At the same time, it costs nothing to be personable, appreciative, or kind. When it’s all said and done, no one will remember the work. No one will remember that bad student or that bad day. No one will remember a specific lesson, a faculty meeting, or certainly a test. Everyone will remember the people who brightened their days. Cherish them.

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On Teaching

Sunday, October 5, 2025 was World Teachers’ Day, an international day for celebrating the work of teachers. The day was established way back in 1994 (my first year of teaching), but the intent behind it goes back before I was born, to the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers. If you are or have been a teacher, you should check it out; it’s an interesting read that outlined things you’ve probably talked about at some point in your career. In 1966. Almost 60 years, later, teachers are still fighting to get some of these ideas treated seriously in the U.S., and certainly in Texas.

I haven’t actually been a classroom teacher in 12 years, although I have gotten to use my teaching skills when training teachers and administrators on testing topics – in live presentations, in videos, and even through documents designed to provide guidance. And you might think, “Well, that’s still teaching,” but it’s just not the same. Trainings for adults might be technically called teaching, but there’s an energy in a classroom of actual K-12 students, no matter the age, that is unique. That energy gets even more unique as you examine classrooms for different subjects. An English classroom differs from a math classroom, which differs from a music classroom, which differs from a culinary classroom. They’re all distinctive. They’re all special. For me, as a retired educator, they should all be treated as sacred.

And that, ironically, is ultimately why teaching is the worst. Because although an individual teacher might want the classroom to be considered sacred, or at least treated with respect, reality in the U.S. is that it’s not. From the 1966 Recommendation:

Teaching should be regarded as a profession: it is a form of public service which requires of teachers expert knowledge and specialized skills, acquired and maintained through rigorous and continuing study; it calls also for a sense of personal and corporate responsibility for the education and welfare of the pupils in their charge.

That seems clear and sensible, right? And yet, the teaching profession in 2025 is subject to a monumental variety of forces that, despite what may be good intentions, actually interfere with the teacher’s professional responsibilities, especially in public education. There are a host of myths about teaching and teachers that I will delineate in a different post later on. There are politicians constantly seeking to interfere with the curriculum, either on a general or specific level. Lately, in Texas, it’s all about legal requirements to post the Ten Commandments while at the same time removing any and all suggestion that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are worthwhile concepts. Oh, and be careful not to create any lessons that some parent could construe as “critical race theory” (if they can even define what constitutes a CRT lesson for K-12). There’s going to be interference from whatever the latest social media rage bait is, no matter how ridiculous, undermining the curriculum, whether it’s actual lesson topics or simply books that someone insists are offensive or subversive. And certain subjects, like social studies, are regularly politicized as different topics are tabbed to add or remove from the state requirements. Curriculum revision is a fact of educational life, but too often, it’s influenced by political whims and imaginary threats instead of new knowledge or priorities worth emphasizing.

But curriculum isn’t the only road block for teachers. Remember that the accountability system is supposed to help us “identify failing schools,” which too often means we’re going to hammer the teachers in those schools. We’ll call it “support,” but we’ll also ignore that many schools are failing because the assessment system inherently works against students of, shall we say, a certain socioeconomic and/or demographic status. And behind that support is an ongoing threat of dismissal for the very teachers trying to serve marginalized students. Even among high-performing schools, there’s an inherent pressure related to performance. In the era of A-F accountability, parents and community – particularly in wealthy districts – expect their school to get an A just like so many helicopter parents lose their minds when their precious angel gets any grade below 100. It becomes an obsession. I remember being at a meeting of district administrators early in the A-F era when my district at the time scored 89.7, which rounded up to an A. They literally bought Crush brand sodas for the principals (Because “crushed it,”…get it? <insert eye-roll here>) and encouraged people to cheer and high-five each other. For an 89.7. And just last year, at the last campus where I worked, I sat with the rest of the staff as a central administrator stood in front of us presenting accountability data. Keep in mind, this campus had long struggled with TEA’s metrics (those pesky socioeconomics and demographics) and usually hovered around D and even F territory. Yet this lady talked – earnestly, with a straight face – about how close we were, with just a few “adjustments,” to making an A. “We know how to play TEA’s game now.” I literally had to stifle laughter; maybe I need to start drinking whatever liquor she consumes. That campus did make a C in 2025, but I don’t know if that result was celebrated for its improvement, or if it was reviled because “we thought you could do better.” Either way, the obsession is insane.

That’s ultimately why I treated my job over the past 12 years as “I’m here to help you stay sane.” Because TEA’s system of assessment and accountability really is insane, born of legislative mandates that lie somewhere between absurd and preposterous. I have no doubt that TEA’s staff are doing their best to make it work, but in the end, they are at the behest of politicians. Even the Texas Education Commissioner is himself a politician. He has never been an educator; he was a software developer who won election running unopposed for the Dallas ISD School Board. He has since leveraged his political connections into different positions, including Commissioner in charge of TEA, under the guise of being some kind of expert on public education, despite never having actually worked in public education. He has visited classrooms, but he’s never taught in a classroom. His general perspective on schools is, like it or not, a contrived one, because everybody rolls out the proverbial red carpet when the commissioner is visiting. It’s the nature of the position. Even with the best of intentions, he has never authentically experienced what a classroom teacher experiences.  He’s never had to manage unruly children when the moon is full. He’s never had to grade papers. He’s never had to improvise when a lesson falls flat or technology isn’t working correctly. He’s never had to experience a fire drill, an illegally pulled fire alarm, a malfunctioning fire alarm, or a genuine fire alarm in the middle of class. He’s never had to attend Open House after a difficult day of classes. He’s never had to deal with students who don’t come to class or turn in work. He’s never had to call and e-mail parents when their children aren’t coming to class or turning in work. He’s never had to deal with parents who unjustifiably have problems with his classroom management, his grading, his teaching style, or accusations that he’s catering to his favorite students. He’s never had to sit in ARD meeting after ARD meeting. He’s never had the mind-numbing duty of administering STAAR, either in a testing room or as a monitor of a hall or restroom. And he’s never had to experience an evaluation system that seeks to judge a wide variety of classrooms and teachers, each of which is distinctive in its own right, on a single, one-size-fits-all rubric. He’s also never had to experience the so-called calibration process that administrators are required to struggle through to complete such a rubric. None – I repeat, NONE – of these politicians have been expected to experience the consequences of their mandates and pronouncements. The teachers (and often, the students) are the sufferers of the insanity.

So teaching can be the worst, primarily due to politicians and bureaucrats who never ingest the medicine they’re concocting. And yet…teaching is still The Best. School board members (also politicians) may attend graduation and shake students’ hands, but they don’t experience the truly authentic emotions that teachers get to experience as they congratulate those same students. Those emotions are born of connection. Regular connection, as experts – yes, trained professionals – strive to reach young people and help them learn content and skills, not just because they’re required, not just because they’re in the curriculum or on a test, but because those young people can become better adults through the experience. Sometimes that regular connection happens over the course of several years and is therefore even stronger. Teaching is the best because of that connection leading to celebration of big moments, like awards, achievements, and milestones such as graduation. Teaching is also the best because of little moments filled with humor, compassion, adversity, frustration, persistence, and more. Teaching is the best because there is enormous satisfaction to be had from working with students to develop good habits, build confidence, and use their own minds and abilities to learn, to achieve, to excel. And perhaps seeing them after they’re no longer your students and discovering that you’ve inspired them toward something they might not have imagined while sitting in your classroom. There is nothing like it.

“If teaching is so great, how come you didn’t stay in the classroom or return to it before you retired?” I left the classroom because of an appealing opportunity based on the work I got to do and the people with whom I got to work. Even though circumstances changed over time and the work became an unfulfilling grind, I don’t regret the decision to leave the classroom. I sometimes engaged in self-loathing and perhaps despair, but I also fought the good fight in the face of madness. And after 12 years away from the classroom, I didn’t believe I could work myself back into proverbial “teaching shape” to handle the day-to-day tasks that would appropriately serve a group of students. At least not enough to justify staying in the system, especially with the political nonsense that continues to happen in Texas. Nevertheless, as I look back, I can point to my time in the classroom as, perhaps, the most rewarding years of my career. I got to work with some remarkable students. I believe I became an excellent instructor of my subject, and I developed a strong rapport with my students – both were necessary for economics, where you’re teaching “the dismal science” as a graduation requirement to students who otherwise would not choose to be there. I got to teach other subjects, with similar reward. I remember teaching an elective class called “The Impact of Music on Society” in the days before the obsession with testing and labyrinthine accountability. I got to create the class and develop the curriculum from scratch, so I crafted something that took my music background and married it with my training in social studies subject matter. It was a popular class, and more challenging than some students expected. Perhaps the biggest reward came when I was selected for a teaching award by one of my students in that class – a top graduate – who talked about how the topics we covered in the course allowed her to make deeper personal connections with her parents and grandparents, over music. As a musician and a teacher, it was eminently fulfilling. That was a very public recognition, but my favorite one was very private, a little over a decade ago. A former student was on-campus to pick up some documents and was visiting her high school teachers. She told me that my AP Macroeconomics class inspired her to get a Bachelor’s degree in economics, and she was next headed to law school and wanted to specialize in economic law. Talk about an overwhelming and rewarding moment. No politician, no mandate, no state assessment, no accountability framework created that moment. It happened because I worked to connect with my students, help them see things in the subject that mattered, and help them see things in themselves that also mattered. I had the honor of hearing first-hand that my work paid off. Thousands of teachers do the exact same thing as I did, every day; they’re doing it even as you read this. Hopefully they, too, may realize in no uncertain terms that the work they do in service to their students pays off handsomely in the future.

Here’s to teachers. And to teaching.

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Reflections on Life. (Hint: It’s Short.)

The past few days have been really busy, including two performances of the UTA Maverick Marching Band’s 40th season without football. (Read all about that HERE and HERE.) Hearing UTA’s new Fight Song after each of those shows reminded me about Dr. Douglas Stotter, the Director of Bands who orchestrated the song for the MMB, and who would have turned 65 years old today had he not passed away suddenly last April. So in his honor, I’ve decided that for this week’s blog post, I will share a piece I wrote for a memory book compiled for his memorial concert last spring.

“I will admit that, when I heard Dr. Douglas Stotter was named Director of Bands at the University of Texas at Arlington back in 2005, I probably wanted to dislike him.

Mind you, I didn’t know him. What I did know was that Phil Clements was the Assistant Director of Bands at UTA from 1994-2004 and had served as Interim Director of Bands in the year following the retirement of Ray C. Lichtenwalter. I had become friends with Phil, both as the Voice of the UTA Marching Band and as President of the UTA Band Alumni Association at the time. And it seemed to me that Phil deserved to be named Director of Bands and have “Interim” taken off his title. When that didn’t happen, I was disappointed, and I may have wanted UTA’s new Director of Bands to be problematic. You know, full of faults and ego, and generally unlikeable. This person should only stick around about 3 years because UTA was merely a stepping stone to his next career objective. That way, whatever disappointment I felt could be justified, and I could wallow in bitterness and self-satisfaction and say “I told you so” about what was happening.

So here comes this guy, Doug Stotter, to my alma mater by way of Indiana University. Someone coming from a high-tone program in the Midwest just might be that person.

But Doug Stotter was the complete opposite of any and all of those horrible things, and he completely doused my disappointment and quelled any bitterness.

Affable. Amiable. Approachable. Self-deprecating. Humorous. Loved music. And I mean, LOVED music. Most of all, loved teaching music, and was great at it. Down-to-earth. Disarmingly nice. Surprisingly understated and composed.

Clearly, UTA was no stepping stone for Dr. Stotter. It was a career destination, sharing his knowledge of and love for music year after year, with quiet wisdom and humility. The music world often embraces loud, boisterous directors with showy conducting styles. I was never in a Doug Stotter ensemble, but I always got the sense from seeing him in front of his students that he didn’t need to yell at anyone, wear conspicuous clothing, or make grand gestures to get his point across. But don’t mistake lack of show for lack of preparation. Dr. Stotter’s ensembles were always prepared, and he conveyed messages clearly through eye contact with the performers, which is probably why he didn’t need grand gestures. His face was telling the performers, “we’ve worked on this, now play it.” He had a reserved acumen, a restrained energy that still projected passion for the music being performed. Love for music doesn’t always need to be shouted, and Doug showed that. The performance of his ensembles speaks to the effectiveness of Dr. Stotter’s teaching, and by that metric, it was remarkable. I didn’t attend every concert, but every time I did, I wondered, “Were we ever that good?” Because Dr. Stotter’s ensembles were SO good. And what turned out to be his final concert was truly sublime, an experience I will never forget.

But countless students can speak better than I can about Dr. Stotter’s love for and approach to music, and the lessons he imparted to his students. What I really value now are the interesting conversations we would always have. Sure, Doug loved music, but he had interests far beyond the world of band. I would typically encounter him the most during the marching season, usually in the pressbox before a UTA show. I was always impressed that Doug remembered my wife and sons and asked how and what they were doing lately. He also had knowledge of and interest in my own career, even though it had moved fair away from the music world. It’s a little ironic that we would see each other at marching band shows and talk about almost anything but marching band. Seriously, how many band directors would you expect to carry on a conversation about economics or educational assessment? One of my favorite MMB memories was the overnight to the Broken Arrow Festival near Tulsa, OK in 2016. The staff and I rode separately in a rented van that Doug drove throughout the trip. We had a stopover outside the Tulsa area for a rehearsal, and Doug and I ended up taking the van to pass some time driving around the area. We talked about a variety of things – sharing college band stories, discussing Kappa Kappa Psi, etc. He asked me about teaching a “traditional” high school class since he wanted my perspective on how it compared to a band class. It was probably only an hour or so, but it was truly engaging conversation. I only wish there was time for more, and I will miss my encounters with Doug immensely.

Thanks for subverting my expectations, Doug. I will always take comfort knowing that you got to conduct an epic concert right before you were called home. RIP”

I find it fitting that UTA hasn’t immediately replaced Dr. Stotter with an Interim Director of Bands and has, instead, enlisted a slate of guest conductors to work with their Wind Symphony throughout 2025-26 for The Dr. Douglas Stotter Artist-In-Residence series. An excellent course of action given the sudden nature of the situation last April.

Here’s a fundamental thing I learned from Dr. Stotter, and certainly in the course of my education career, as well: People Have Value, So Value Them. That doesn’t mean you have to be a super-gregarious extrovert shouting “let’s make a difference.” Just be kind. At his core, Doug Stotter was simply a kind person who wanted to help his students, and who was nice to others. He quietly showed people that he valued them. He happened to do so professionally as a band director, but anyone can achieve the same objective, no matter what their profession is.

Doug’s sudden passing also underscores another important lesson: Hug your loved ones, and let them know that you care. Show appreciation to mentors, colleagues, anyone who has had a positive impact on your life. Life Is Short, and you may not know when it’s the last time you get to speak with someone.

And just for good measure, one additional lesson: Because Life is Short, spend yours doing something you enjoy. I was deeply disturbed and shocked by Doug Stotter’s sudden passing, but I took solace in the fact that he got to do exactly what he loved at perhaps the highest level right before he left this life. And that realization was at least part of the impetus for me to retire from public education. There was no way on this earth that I wanted even a remote possibility that I could pass away in the midst of…testing. No. Way. There were other factors in my decision, but if you’ve read some of my earlier posts, you know how I grew to feel about the testing realm, and it was time to say goodbye. Know when it’s time to say goodbye in your own profession (or personal life), because we won’t always know when it’ll be our time to go.

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40 Years of “The Marching Band Without Football” – Part 2

Yesterday, I posted Part 1 about the UTA Maverick Marching Band, including a history of the successes and ultimate demise of UTA football, and how UTA’s marching band managed to continue without a football team to play for. READ THAT POST HERE.

TLDR: UTA football was a once-proud program that slowly crumbled due to stadium issues and poor win-loss records, which led to faltering attendance and financial losses until the program was cancelled on November 25, 1985. But the UTA Marching Band survived as an academic pursuit thanks to the vision of Ray C. Lichtenwalter and the support of President Wendell Nedderman and his administration.

Year 1, 1986 – the UTA Marching Band, “New Direction.” That was literally the name the band used on promotional materials and in the announcement script. The official band t-shirts given out during summer band camp were changed from “UTA Maverick Band” to simply “UTA Marching Band.” Maverick (Movin’ Mav) football was gone. Not only was the very act of fielding a marching band without a football team audacious, but the 1986 band performed a musically bold show: H. Owen Reed’s La Fiesta Mexicana. The subtitle of this piece is “A Mexican Folk Song Symphony for Concert Band.” Assistant Director of Bands John Carnahan arranged the music and wrote all the drill. Percussion Coordinator Michael Varner arranged the percussion. Colorguard legend Karl Lowe choreographed the guard. For the era, it was ambitious and forward-thinking, in keeping with the UTA Band’s usual approach. For a band that was used to doing body waves as the team ran onto the field and performing college football halftimes, it was, at times, too much. The show itself lasted over 12 minutes, far more than a college band was used to. The show was approaching the level of a drum corps production for the era, but without daily rehearsals to perfect it. The 1986 performance tour was also ambitious, because the band needed to prove itself to University officials that first year and show just how this thing could work. There were two different postgame performances at high school football games. There was a Saturday where the band played after Prelims at the Plano East Marching Festival before returning to Arlington to play after Finals at the UTA Band Alumni Marching Contest. The highlight of the season was a trip to Austin for the Westlake Marching Festival, where the band performed to the pressbox side, then turned around and performed again to the visitors’ side, since that’s where all the high school band members (and prospective UTA students) were sitting. One exhibition, two performances. That first year was monumental and exhausting, but it showed that the UTA Marching Band meant business and wanted to accomplish something special, something unique.

1987 saw the UTA Band perform Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Another musically ambitious production developed by the same staff, but the show wasn’t quite as long and the tour wasn’t quite as demanding. In 1988, John Carnahan departed, as did Karl Lowe. UTA hired Bobby Francis as Assistant Director of Bands, but instead of moving forward with the planned production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, UTA instead performed selections by Aaron Copland, including Rodeo, Billy the Kid, and Appalachian Spring. There was a noticeable drop-off in performance. It was becoming clear that some of the stalwart students hanging on from the days of football were getting a little tired of band by itself. 1989 was a critical year for the band, as the goal was simply to recapture a higher performance level in a show that featured an eclectic mix of music from Jerry Goldsmith and Sandi Patty. (You read that correctly.) 1989 also featured the final shows wearing the uniforms UTA first wore in 1978, and after 12 seasons, they were showing their age, both dated and worn-out.

1990 was my fifth and final year as drum major (as a solo Drum Major, at that). More importantly, the season ushered in new uniforms – a significant investment by the University – and the genesis of the student advisory committee, which helped decide the music and general programming for the show. “A Fantastic Journey,” featuring Krypton Fanfare from John Williams’ score for Superman, along with music from Back to the Future, The Boy Who Could Fly, and The Last Starfighter, was not as high-brow as Reed, Holst, or Copland, but definitely accessible music with a connecting theme. The staff added Denise Williamson (now Armstrong) as the guard director, and the band’s personnel had cycled through to include students who really wanted to be in the UTA Marching Band not for the novelty, but because they wanted a chance to perform in college at the highest possible level. The powerful sound was back. The visual performance was elevating. Indeed, a fantastic year, and I was privileged to lead the ensemble as 1990 proved that the proverbial experiment from only 5 years prior had emerged as a legitimate program.

The remainder of the 1990s retained a similar pattern – music from The Rocketeer and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Jesus Christ Superstar (1992) – including an exhibition at the UIL State Marching Contest, and Cats (1993). Bobby Francis departed in 1993 to become Director of Bands at East Texas State University (now East Texas A&M), and UTA hired Phillip Clements (now the Executive Director of the Texas Bandmasters Association) as Assistant Director of Bands. Phil came in from the University of North Texas with DCI experience, and his expertise allowed the band to ascend even further. The music of Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the Who’s Tommy, and more…shows that combined musical excellence with exciting themes that the band could easily portray and audiences could really enjoy. In 1998, Dr. Jack Gibson, the band’s P.A. Announcer since 1978, decided to “retire” from the job, and I was invited by Mr. Clements to take over. I felt privileged yet again to associate directly with this ensemble and showcase their performances with my voice to conclude the 20th century with “Arabia!” (1998), Stan Kenton’s Adventures in Time (1999), and “Peace, Love, and Revolution!” (2000).

2001 was another watershed year in the history of the UTA Marching Band, as they traveled to Indianapolis to perform an exhibition at the Bands of America Grand Nationals Championships. The other BOA exhibition band that year? The University of Massachusetts Minuteman Marching Band, under the direction of the legendary George Parks. UTA’s show was called “Passion!” and opened with a rendition of Ravel’s Bolero, featured an assortment of Latin music, and concluded with Ginastera’s Danza Final. The most ambitious program since 1986, clocking in at 11 minutes, because, well…Grand Nationals, buddy. I will never forget watching the band rehearse inside the old RCA Dome at 1:00am on Saturday morning in preparation for an exhibition later that day. I will also never forget their epic performance, or enjoying a rather satisfying dinner with the entire staff at The Eagle’s Nest after the show. That momentum carried over into 2002 as the University financed another set of new uniforms for the band’s production of Moulin Rouge, featuring music from the Baz Luhrmann film.

Then came 2003, which was, in my humble estimation, the pinnacle of the UTA Marching Band’s performances since the end of football. By this time, the band had become a veritable machine. The members were all really mature and businesslike. If the buses were to be loaded by 3:45pm, everyone was seated and ready to go by 3:30. That kind of group. The show was called “Colors” and featured Samuel Hazo’s Ride, Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” and music from the Cirque du Soleil show La Nouba. The show had everything, and Moondance was the closest I’ve ever heard a marching band get to drum-corps-level energy. CHECK OUT THE SHOW HERE.

In the spring of 2004, Ray C. Lichtenwalter retired. He received many accolades and a David Maslanka work commissioned in his honor, all deservedly so after 37 years at UTA and 30 years as Director of Bands. Phil Clements was named Interim Director of Bands with UTA alum David Clemmer as Interim Assistant Director of Bands. The Clements/Clemmer team oversaw  “A Show You Can’t Refuse” in 2004, featuring music from The Godfather, and while it wasn’t quite the level of “Colors,” the band was still incredible. But come 2005, the University named Dr. Douglas Stotter as Director of Bands, and the marching band staff cleared out. No more Phil Clements, David Clemmer, or Denise Armstrong. Dr. Stotter hired an Assistant Director for the 2005 season who seemed promising, but he alienated students and eventually resigned literally one week before the 2006 summer band camp (what a lovely guy). Dr. Stotter ended up having to hire a different Assistant for 2006, then another one for 2007. The instability (along with certain decisions by the University) hurt the band’s numbers over these years and all but gutted the colorguard. The band still performed well enough, but for those who followed the UTA Marching Band since the end of football, “What happened?” was a common refrain.

In 2015, the University financed uniforms once again that were more traditional and featured the latest “A” logo of the school. The Assistant Director of Bands was John Zastoupil (now Director of Bands at the University of Tennessee), and his intent was essentially to rebuild and work toward what the band used to be. The band was now referenced as the “Maverick Marching Band,” or MMB, as UTA sought to rebrand slightly and emphasize the Maverick mascot again. Dr. Zastoupil departed for a promotion in 2017, and Dr. Christopher Evans (no, not the Captain America actor) signed on as Assistant Director of Bands, where he still presently serves. 

Dr. Evans, quite honestly, is someone who “gets it” and has sought to honor the legacy that the UTA Band has built since 1986. He’s previously worked with top-tier high school bands in Texas and is familiar with the demands of a unique college marching program like UTA’s, both as a performing ensemble and as a teaching lab for prospective band directors. He also understands the need for stability and is acutely aware of how even only a few shaky years can decimate a program. Dr. Evans has guided the band toward steady growth each year, even navigating all the unusual protocols of the 2020 season to accomplish a “virtual” exhibition season. The colorguard is still unusually small these days, but the band’s numbers and performance level have risen over the past decade. The MMB is now receiving additional funding from the Department of Student Affairs, and new uniforms are also on the horizon for 2026. In spite of Dr. Stotter’s untimely passing in April 2025, Dr. Evans has maintained a rock-solid foundation for the students, and I hope he gets a fair shot to continue at UTA as Director of Bands. It’s my privilege to showcase the MMB at each performance, and I look forward to many more years in that role as the band progresses further toward 50 years and more without UTA football. Here’s to a continued fun and rewarding journey.