Category Archives: Stephen Dexter

Tick Tock: The O.G. Decision

September 23, 2025 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

(ChatGPT generation with prompt: person looking window at Big Ben)

I wish I had time to humor you with the series of creative prompts that led to this masterpiece, but this is the best I could to on a Sunday afternoon.

Not that any international educators are looking out their apartments with a view of Big Ben wondering what to do next, but you get the symbolic metaphor.

It’s time.

It’s time to take stock, to give notice (earlier than ever in school history which is an entirely other blog that I will write about) and make a decision about next year. I’m so old that I remember when the notice period was January for a January-February hiring season. Yes, I know. A full winter break to contemplate the future. I get it.

But here we are, just barely crawling out of the startup typhoon and there’s a memo in your mailbox: ‘So are you coming back next year or not?’

If this were a dating situation, it would be a marriage proposal when you opened the door to go to a movie for the first time. Do people still go to movies on dates?

There are few things more difficult than having to decide if you want to go back to a school for another year, and few things more insecure, especially if you have young children. It’s brutal. I’ve been there. I went overseas when my kids were 7 and 2. My youngest just graduated from my school and you can hear the sigh of relief across continents.

But I digress.

There are two simple things that hopefully drive this process for you and as much as you try, you cannot have both.

Do I want to be happy professionally?
Do I want to be happy personally?

What do we want? Both.

Not going to happen. Well, I not going to say never, but once you decide which is more important, you have made up your mind about why you want to stay or leave. Since 2009, I made only one decision to be professionally happy. The rest was all about the family. Yeah, it’s hard.

When we decided “this is the business we have chosen” we made a pact that it would be a very insecure existence, albeit temporarily comfortable for the most part, in faraway lands with lots of adventures. This transaction for lack of security is hard. I gave up a sure pension in American public schools to raise my children overseas and I don’t regret anything other than the fact that my son says he won’t take care of me when I’m eating out of a straw. (I think he was kidding).

Everyone’s circumstances are different. Singles. Families. Dependent spouses and partners. Teaching couples. Distance from relatives. Life changes, etc. etc. The one thing that ties it all together is that you have to be true to yourself and what you want out of this experience.

Yes, it’s earlier than ever and for the time being we cannot change that. Make that list of pros and cons for staying or leaving. Decide if this is for personal or professional happiness (refrain from the greedy both) and go for it.

You can do it. The world needs you now more than ever no matter what you decide.

BONUS INTERVIEW QUESTIONS WHEN IT’S YOUR TURN…

What do you most love about working at this school and what do you think needs to change the most?
What’s the value added proposition to this school that no other school on earth (or the country/region) can offer?
If you offer me a position, what’s the most important thing that I need to know on day one?
What is the school’s top strategic priority and how can I help with it?
They say that schools often take on the culture of their host country environment. How has that happened here and how have you leveraged this culture to enhance the educational experience?
How would you describe the relationship between local and expat staff?
If you could invent a position that the school wishes it could have, what would it be called?

Stephen Dexter

IB Dad

September 20, 2025 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

John Locke, one of the characters in one of the first bingeable television series (Lost) in the 1990s, said famously, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly how I’ve felt as an IB/DP parent.

When as a parent you think back on all of the educational experiences of your child, encouraging them to explore the world from pressing leaves in wax paper to acting in a play for the first time, to writing an essay or figuring out the volume of a pyramid, you probably don’t imagine them crying uncontrollably because their future is going to be ruined if they can’t solve a chemistry problem on solubility or entropy in a subject they will certainly never study again. How did it come to this?

I didn’t have the courage to tell anyone, let alone my daughter, what she could not do.

As a school administrator, one of my least favorite rituals over the past 16 years has been the annual release of I.B. D.P. exam scores in early July. It’s several weeks after the joyful exultations of graduation, the summer vibe starting to kick in, the stress high stakes exams finally dissipating.

Then WHAM. July 5. The ice bucket challenge.

We review the numbers and they are ruthless. You either meet your conditional number or you don’t. (For those not familiar with the I.B. students are predicted in advance to achieve a certain score on their exams and must attain this score to get admitted to university).

The achievers achieve, the middle of the roaders middle road and the strugglers struggle. I have yet to see one of these scores tell me something I didn’t know already, something that seems truly contrary to what was already expected and demonstrated that the child could overcome odds. Yes, there is clearing and backup schools and so on, but we all know that young people set their hearts on something that they are praying by some alignment of stars in the universe they achieve so their lives can be complete.

As long as I’ve been doing this, I’ve cared deeply about the achievers and moreso the strugglers. But for this year it was personal. I was not just the Principal. I was a parent. And it made me really angry that this test was repeatedly telling her what she could not do.

We all know the I.B. Learner Profiles. The profile aims to develop learners who are:

Inquirers
Knowledgeable
Thinkers
Communicators
Principled
Open-minded
Caring
Risk-takers
Balanced
Reflective.

I cannot remember at any point where any of these were enforced or practiced over two years. Thinker, maybe? Knowledgeable?

Here’s my list of the I.B. Parent Profile. The profile is derived from parents that exhibit:

Angst, regret, guilt, helplessness, anger, sorrow, remorse, fear, panic, madness, vertigo

I know that it’s my job to be a much better parent than what the above describes, but when you listen to months (not days or weeks) but months of a young person sobbing that they cannot figure out complex problems no matter how much help they get or how much they study, you start to lose the plot and become very concerned about socio-emotional wellness. After all, the number is always looming.

We raised an empathetic, emotionally intelligent, creative, communicative, mature, thoughtful person. We weren’t perfect but we did our best. Then we enrolled her in a program (that she agreed to because it’s just what you do) that exposed everything she was bad at and as a bonus made it a requirement for her to access her future.

I completely get that the world is a tough, competitive place. I am not expecting that students get to the next stage of their life without disappointment or struggle. I think people should be uncomfortable at times to learn and push themselves to explore new things. I do agree with the principles of the book The Comfort Crisis and am not asking for an easy world that snowplow parents create for our children.

What I am arguing is that it doesn’t have to be through a gauntlet that forces people to do extremely hard (not rigorous, hard) things they are really bad at and probably won’t ever use again. Most kids aren’t going pre-med. Life is, after all, short. A month of grueling, high stakes sit down exams that determine your fate should no longer be the future of demonstrating what it means to be educated for every learner.

It doesn’t have to be like this. The I.B. proved during the pandemic that it didn’t need a month of sit down high stakes exams to make a faithful assessment of student achievement and worth. Using internal assessments and a range of other more creative tools, there were ample means by which students could be crunched into the sorting algorhythm to determine who was eligible for the gold star and who was not. There are thoughtful ways to get the most out of young people, enabling them to shine and make a difference in the world, being capable of some things they are bad at but not having the biologists, chemists, writers and singers all mixed in the same clunky pot of standardized “achievement.”

My experience as an I.B. parent was the worst I’ve ever had over the course of my daughter’s young life. Barbeques, family travel and relaxation were all eclipsed by the big day, the fateful day, the only day that mattered in 13 years of education.

I don’t know if the I.B. gives students the skills to make the world a better place. I know that most of them think it’s good preparation for the grueling demands of university which I guess is a win. In this business we say lots of things about the excitement and thrill of discovery and learning new things and making connections, but that is contrary to the experience at the end of a program designed to sort young people into categories ranging from the can to the cannot.

In the end, she achieved her number. Several of her friends did not. She worked really hard for it. We all cried at the airport in between flights when it came through, people glancing over at us like we just got the results back on Dad’s CAT scan.

I’m not against asking students to climb Everest whether or not they are prepared so that they can say they did it. I am asking that we do a much better job at designing something that doesn’t repeatedly tell people what they cannot do.

Stephen Dexter

Comfortably numb

February 20, 2022 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

At the end of The Martian, Matt Damon sits on a bench in a beautiful park, leaving us to decide whether he’s satisfied being back on Earth having survived a near death experience in space, or if he misses it.

Yes it’s been a brutal two years. Yes, we have lost contact with friends, the human connections of social activity, and the ease of travel. I used to travel 4-5 times a year minimum. Since 2020, I’ve travelled twice. Twice! I’ve forgotten even the basics like how to pack for the plane because I’m so obsessed with trying to get the RAT test on time and making sure my flight isn’t being cancelled.

What I see around me as we start sticking our (vaccinated) heads above the ground again, hoping to return to life as it was, is a gigantic missed opportunity. Our industry, like the food, hospitality, health care, and transport industries, was disrupted and accelerated at least 7-10 years. What was an odd exemption for kids in hospitals and the occasional NASA engineer from mission control beamed on a screen to an auditorium full of restless middle schoolers, has now become the norm.

Hybrid, Hyflex, all the things we imagined happening in 2050 when The Jetsons (boomer alert) lifestyle became reality, were catapulted to the present. And it’s not what we imagined, or hoped for.

We have a lot to be thankful for returning to ‘normal’ but also a lot of things that we cannot return to.

I’m concerned that our desire to return to the comforts of routine after two years of crisis management and pandemic fatigue, will rationalize mediocrity. That after so much stress on our schools and teachers, during which all we focused on was getting through the day/week, that once the fog lifts, we will continue to look inwards, our defense mechanisms on auto pilot.

I hope that I am wrong,. I hope that we don’t fall for the seduction of the way things were before. Because, in all honesty, it wasn’t all that great. 20 years into 21st century learning, the actual glaciers are melting faster than we are moving to make education relevant to the times. Getting back to workshops on MYP Cat 2 in Berlin or conferences on AERO standards in Atlanta just isn’t going to cut it.

We all need a month in the Maldives, a grand celebration of reconnection and re-nurturing. That is undeniable. We cannot simply keep Zooming and embracing the dings in the universe caused by Covid. I’m not saying that. We need to hug one another, breathe in the mask free air of a friend filled room the laughter and excitement of traveling and connecting again without social distancing fears or the guilt caused by contact.

But once we taken that breath, we have to keep moving forward, screen time or not. I have taken three takeaways that I hope to move before the retreating waves of change wash over them.

In person time is more valuable than ever and has to be used more creatively and across disciplines.
Limit the broadway shows: We are the only profession that does 5-6 live broadway shows a day. We have to embrace the asynchronous model so teachers can THINK and COLLABORATE rather than constantly juggle chain saws to keep learners engaged. Sorry, lower school teachers, this probably doesn’t work below grade 5.
Community Engagement: We’ve had classes without walls and project based and service learning for years. But rather than a one off week, it has to be more embedded. If we can Zoom in math and English, why can’t we do an arts residency in Istria for two or three weeks while we keep up with “academics.” online? We have to push the limits on community based learning and the how and where of learning now that restrictions are lifting.
Change the Subjects: I’ve been talking about this one for awhile and have to do a better job putting money where the mouth is. Our subjects are woefully outdated. Science has evolved a little bit and I guess math is math, but the rest are arcane, unimaginative, and need critical redefinition. If I see one more test on the Crusades, I might just need to start one of my own.

I know it’s hard, but once you get your Mojo back this Spring, please don’t become ‘comfortably numb.’ You’ve come too far to leave it all behind.

Stephen Dexter

Vaudeville

December 5, 2021 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

“In the United States vaudeville acts performed variety shows, using music, comedy, dance, acrobatics, magic, puppets, and even trained animals.” (vaudeville/Encyclopedia.com).

I loved this definition. It captured everything that our teachers do every day, multiple times a day. And it’s a key reason why we can’t evolve.

A good friend of mine and former teacher from Quincy, MA (USA), George Smith who died way before his time, used to lament the amount of energy it took him just to get through every day. This is a guy that got 4s and 5s from EAL students on the A.P. exams using graphs instead of English. That was 1997.

He gave me two quotes that I will never forget. And I forget almost everything so this is big for me.

“Sometimes you have to sub for yourself.”

“We do five vaudeville shows every day, five days a week for ten months straight. Even broadway doesn’t have a schedule like this.”

I had the best meeting of the year this past week. Three teachers and myself, sitting in a room, ordering in lunch, (we ate lunch!!) without duties to run to, bells interrupting for the next class, and incredibly no crises peeling me away. For three simple hours, we hammered out the results of a course that we took together, listened to one another’s ideas, and hammered out a product, barely meeting deadline. It felt so good to get something done without interruption, highlighted by the chance to eat.

If there’s one thing this pandemic has taught us, it’s that slowing down, even if forced on us, is like gold.

We have to find a way to manage kids that enables us to step off the vaudeville shows so that we can think and ideate, reflect on what our students really need, what we’re doing badly, and what we need to do next.

With our team, we are trying to push back on the relentlessness of the ruthless timetable (note to self, name for next book), and giving people the time and space to create magic and actually talk to one another, not what the next unit will ‘cover,’ but what will happen over the next several days to connect young people with experiences that will challenge them. One thing George never mentioned was that his vaudeville wasn’t just a performance, it had to engage the audience!!

It’s crazy what happens when the music/drama teacher and the language/outdoor ed instructor share ideas and plan. CRAZY. And wow is it good for kids. Yes, much easier for upper than lower school, but still.

Our work is way too complex to relegate this genius to “prep” time or the occasional PD workshop. The prep time, after all, is just enough time for the troubadour to change to his prince costume for the next vaudeville set.

In the movie Bohemian Rhapsody (and in true life) Queen went to the Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey, England to focus and finish what would become the most streamed song of the 20th century. This wouldn’t have happened if all they did was play five sets of “Killer Queen” every day, all day with only tiny breaks in between.

As we head into peak hiring season, and continue to fill our schedules and timetables with faster, better, more to fill the gaps lost by the pandemic, make up for lost time from lockdowns, and launching the DEI initiative you haven’t gotten to yet, please keep in mind that there are creative and better ways to engage an audience than five live vaudeville shows a day.

Stephen Dexter

Talent is a pursued interest

October 9, 2021 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

Like everyone in this pandemic, my social life is mostly driven by Netflix. For some reason, the Bob Ross documentary was recommended to me. Maybe the internet algorhythm discovered I am nostalgic, maybe it aligned my approximate birthdate with his life. Who knows.

What I do know is that his shows made me not only incredibly relaxed, but filled me with the belief that I could do things even if I didn’t believe in myself.

People loved him because he made them believe they could paint. And if people believed they could paint a beautiful mountain or a forest, then maybe they could do things that they didn’t have the confidence to achieve. He made the inaccessible accesssible, and maybe that’s one of the genius attributes of a good teacher.

In one of his interviews, he said that anyone could paint. He didn’t say that anyone could be a Picasso. He just said that anyone could paint. I remember one of my favorite lines from the movie Ratatouille was, “anyone can cook, that doesn’t mean that anyone should!”

Yes, a lot of his paintings look like motel/hotel art. You may have even seen what you think to be a Bob Ross painting at a flea market. In fact, in the documentary they admitted it was nearly impossible to authenticate a true Bob Ross from a fake. But the point is not that he expected himself or others to become world renowned artists. The point was that people could pursue a talent that they didn’t know they had, even if they didn’t have it. And who knows what could become of that.

If my math teacher asked me the right questions about how I think and what I would do in certain mathematical situations, even though I stopped learning math at Algebra II in grade 11, who knows what I could have done? Maybe if he told me that anyone can do math that I might have been good!I

Tom Schimmer, a world renowned expert on assessment, told my teachers recently that every learner had an emotional reaction to the opportunity to be assessed. What Bob Ross did with his audience was to focus their emotions in a way that enabled them to access a creative side of themselves that they didn’t think was possible. In other words, magic.

I work in a school. I don’t want to stand in the way of the pursuit of talent. But too often I feel that we do. I want to be a catalyst for the pursuit of interest, not an obstacle. And most importantly, like Bob, I want to get people to believe in their ability to do something even though they think it’s impossible.

It’s a sad docmentary. It speaks to the consequences of what happens to artists and people that simply love and pursue something without understanding the business side of things and the evil that happens when cunning overwhelms curiosity. I don’t have an answer for that.

But what I do know is that Bob Ross gave people something to believe in that cut across cultures, religions, educational background, and vaccination preference.

He made them believe that they could do something they didn’t think was possible. Even if they made happy mistakes along the way.

Stephen Dexter

Podium

August 3, 2021 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

The number one reason I’m thrilled that the Olympics are being held now is that it’s the perfect distraction from writing about whether or not we should mandate masks in August. (And of course provides an easy opportunity to chat about winning and losing).

I’m a sucker for the highlights of the ecstatic athletes like the Filipino weightlifter, winning the first gold medal in her country’s history. Her emotional outburst on this individual achievement was such a pleasure to watch (as opposed to the expectation that comes with many nations that anything less than the highest elevation at the podium is a failure).

I love sports because they bring a ruthless simplicity to life. You win or you lose. There are boundaries and nets, the rules are clear and there aren’t excuses. I will sidestep the irony of how this juxtaposes with the Olympic spirit, but my point is that this simplicity is very different from my day job. It would be relatively easy if all we had to do was achieve, to get a number that indicated we did a great job. But I’m not convinced that’s why I get up in the morning.

Which brings me to the release of IB scores in July, the podium moment for many international schools. Like many of my colleagues, I take a reprieve from the summer break to analyze the fateful IB scores, connect with families on their options, and reflect on how we can improve to expand opportunities for our students. As a practice, my school doesn’t post its achievement on social media. Of course I am happy for the collective achievement of international students, but for some reason it doesn’t sit well with me. For every 45, there’s a 22, for every university acceptance, there are dozens of fails. Yes, I get the celebratory aspect, especially in a pandemic, but aren’t international schools supposed to achieve at the highest levels?

I’m a sucker for a great story. I expect the achievers to achieve, just like the American, Chinese and ROC athletes. I don’t get excited about the medal count.

But give me the Italian high jumper tying arguably the greatest high jumper in history and I can’t stop thinking about it all day.

In our business, we talk a lot about growth as being our indicator of success. We want to move the needle on everyone, but the power of education to get someone where they didn’t expect to be (on the podium) is extraordinary. The girl from Syria, sent on scholarship by her family out of a refugee camp. The boy from Mali, displaced by conflict and accessing an international curriculum for the first time in his life. The Senior whose parents divorced and left him in a country far from home. Those are the moments, the indicators of our success, so much more than a number that, frankly, we are supposed to earn. We are, as privileged institutions, expected to be on the podium.

So, until the summer transitions to yet another pandemic opening, I will continue to watch my badminton, pole vault, gymnastics, and diving, looking for the opportunity to make a difference to that learner that might not expect to be on that podium, and to scream in adulation and excitement when they do.

Stephen Dexter

Lupus in fabula

April 11, 2021 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

They courageously took their masks off, one by one, breathing in the fresh, clean air of an early Spring day. It had been months in the making, this sojourn of artists to a neighboring museum, an appropriate stage for the products of a two year journey.

The relief was palpable. They sipped bubbly water, taking in the people crossing the street at the nearby cafe, trying to live out ordinary lives in an extraordinary time. But nothing was ordinary, as this age of uncertainty and stress draped over the annual ritual of hope and commencement like a resilient strain.

The painstakingly planned exhibition reflected more than ever a similarly painful journey of people whose stories had become as significant as the ceramics, sketches, photography, and textiles. Their humanity transcended criteria in a time of crushing challenges.

Lupus in Fabula, an Italian expression, literally meaning ‘the wolf in the fairy tale which is, as we know, the heart of nearly every children’s fable. The expression came from author Bruce Feiler who quoted it in a book I’m reading called “Life is in the Transitions.”

It seemed like an apt metaphor for the circumstances under which these people produced their art.

Several years ago, I invited an expert on data from the National University of Singapore to visit and help me realign my definition of success in school and how I measured it. I was failing miserably in the usual indicators of “success” under which every Principal’s head was lain, pouring my energies into the success of others rather than my own survival in a survival of the fittest culture. My neck was on the line and I needed a win, however small.

She sat down in my office as I closed the door, gently sipping from the tea I had served her, and smiled, waiting for my response to her question. “Well, what is it? You must be doing something well?”

I felt a small lump in my throat. No one had asked me that question in three years at the school.

I told her about the dramatic gains we had achieved with students that came to us with learning and emotional support needs, the improvement in English for the newcomers, the sense of belonging students felt thanks to our advisory program, the discoveries students had made about talents they didn’t know they had in spite of their parents pre-determined wishes for them.

You know, the things we never measured.

She laughed and yelled, “THEN START MEASURING THEM!”

Seven years later, I contacted her to check in and shared the artist story, how they painfully, emotionally, started opening up, exchanging not tales of relief and accomplishment per the norm, but of being judged, rejected, and unhappy. They actually wanted to stay, to remain in the cocoon. It was incredulous, not the usual ‘can’t wait to leave this popsicle stand in the rearview’ I’d come to expect.

The one whose parents were disappointed that he wasn’t taking the path that had been chosen for him but had accepted him for his newfound happiness.

The one whose family lived faraway and couldn’t share in the journey.

The newcomer who had to fulfill dreams at any cost.

The one afraid to leave the house due to a dreaded virus.

The one who overachieved to prove it could be done.

They told their stories and talked about their fears. Their real, deep seated fears that, when looking back, were evident in their art as a connection to the person, not some loosely defined object designed to please an examiner. They spoke not of achievement but in symbolic terms of the wolves that had attacked their fairy tales.

“So what are you going to do with that?” the professor asked. “Can you measure this?”

“I have no idea,” I said. The self assessment of the students, focusing on their humanity, not their achievement, caught me by surprise. I thought they would have reverted back to the old I hope this uni accepts me, and I hope I can go to so and so to live in London and I really hate chemistry but I need at least a four to get in.

But they didn’t. They just talked in a very accepting way, a very courageous, honest way about what had gotten them to this point, for better or worse with circumstances they couldn’t control.

She paused on the phone.

“It’s the great accelerator,” she said. “I don’t know if you can measure this one.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s taken away that moment, that glimmer in the eye when they think anything is possible because in this moment of history they have been forced to realize that maybe it is not. That’s usually an epiphany that hits you in your thirtees.”

We both laughed. Yes, the normal metrics for success had gone out the window. Even the IB has lost the plot on how to measure success, I smiled.

I thought about all the things I poured my life energy into (coaching stressed out department heads, negotiating learning challenges with families, unravelling conflict, attending open ended meetings that unveiled enormous problems with few answers). All of the illusions of control cast into the spotlight by a situation that no one could control.

“So how do you bottle that?” she asked. “How do you take that moment with those people together, sharing that journey in spite of the obstacles and making something of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “All I can think of is telling them to stay in touch with each other and to have a chance to share their story.”

“Gratitude,” she said. “Measure that and you’ve found your metric.”

Stephen Dexter

Credibility vs Visibility

February 24, 2021 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

Lady Gaga has 83.2 million followers on Twitter. The Dalai Lama has approximately 20 million. Cap’n Crunch, the iconic sugary cereal mascot of my youth, has 790. The Weather Channel, 3.8m.

Our ‘truths’ seem to be measured in likes, views, followers and retweets. Visibility, casting itself as the gatekeeper of what we want to believe.

Much has been written about the polarization of people thanks to algorhythms that suggest more of what we want to see and hear. This keeps us in a comfortable, likable, predictable (and dangerous) bubble. Your customized news, entertainment, sports and cultural sources are all here to serve…you.

Kara Swisher the host of the podcast “Pivot,” recently said that ‘feelings are not facts.’ In other words, you cannot just decide not to believe something because you don’t like it or it’s not convenient. You have to do some work.

We used to rely on the teacher, the priest, the judge, the parent, the text as those sources of credibility because they were close to us, visible in the community, tangible and accountable to those around them, and invested in the truth.

Now, that person or information source doesn’t have to be visible to the naked eye or touchable. Credibility is now in the form of upward thumb signs, followers, and shares, a true democratization of what people want rather than what they need to believe. I even read once that most celebrities and influencers don’t even manage their own social media accounts! Can you believe that?

Twitter is starting a crowdsourcing service called ‘birdwatching,’ where, similar to Wikipedia, people can become certified fact checkers and contribute to a credibility rating for postings that trend. On one hand, it’s nice to feel that people are empowered to contribute to truth. On the other, it opens up a world of possibility to those that want to shape others to their versions of what is true.

I belong to a social media group that posts a lot of messages about bikes and bike repair. Lots of people weigh in on a lot of ideas about things from derailleurs to seats to tires. It’s tempting to go with the most liked advice on the best seat to cross Siberia but no one is saying, ‘seats are dumb and don’t exist.’ We all have that basic agreement.

When I was teaching in the 1990s, I used “Lies My History Teacher Told Me,” (by James Loewen) and “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn to offer research based alternative views on factual events. These texts gave voice to the unheard, portraits of actual events that were not invented, but omitted. They made things already credible visible, not credible because they were visible. My students had the opportunity not to decide what to believe (because it was all true), but rather base their opinions on the facts in front of them, contrary as some of them may have seemed. It was also a quieter time, when the information age was only a trickle, allowing students to consider a couple of truths and deciding where to land before they moved onto the next question. Now, it seems as though the firehose is fully opened.

It’s not easy to resist something that has 2M likes or retweets. The visibility, the comfort in knowing others agree, is so human it’s hard to resist. We think something is cute, inspiring, sad, dangerous and we cannot help but to believe it because it makes us feel a certain way.

Feelings are not facts and credibility is not always visible. It takes hard work and a willingness to look past what is easy or agreeable to make up our minds about basic truths that we need to accept in order to keep learning on course and communities together.

Stephen Dexter

Snow Day

December 3, 2020 Stephen Dexter, Jr. Leave a comment

In 2018 I stood next to a man at a bus stop in Singapore. He was wearing a tee shirt that read, “There’s no day like a snow day.” I laughed so hard I had to take a picture (to which he obliged). I asked him if he had any idea what it meant, and of course didn’t. My explanations didn’t help much. It’s a location thing.

In 2009, in my first year on the job as the Principal of a Swiss boarding school nestled on the side of a ski mountain, I relished the first opportunity I had to invoke my executive privilege of calling a ‘snow day,’ which was a spontaneous act of sheer joy proclaimed twice a winter after a particularly heavy evening of powder and an opportunity for the entire school to skip classes and hit the slopes.

In stormy New England in the 1980s as a student and later as a teacher in the 1990s, my eyes would be glued to the television as the names of school districts scrolled in alphabetical order like the returns from a close Mayoral race. Mine was the only one with the letter “Q” so you had to pay close attention right when the “P’s” started:

Plymouth. Pocasset. Popponesset. Provincetown.

And there it would appear, like the golden ticket. Quincy. I’d leap from my chair (even as an adult), screaming at the top of my lungs the tribal, primal scream that had been passed down through the generations.

Snooooow Daaaaayyyyy! SNOOOWWWWW DAYYYYYYYY! I’d jump and down, waking everyone in the house, throwing whatever I could grab up in the air, fist pumping like Kirk Gibson after his famous home run, wild eyed with crazed euphoria.

It was a feeling like none other followed by a sumptuous day of unstructured fun, calling friends for sledding, and forgetting about everything I was supposed to be thinking about for just. one. day.

In 2020, December 3 to be exact, my daughter and I stood at the window of our house in Zagreb, Croatia watching the first flakes of the first snow since who knew when since we stopped keeping track of time in the pandemic and had resorted to the ancient rituals of watching seasons pass and sunrise changes. I put my arm around her and said,

“Hey, on a day like this, we’d probably be calling a snow day.” Like the man at the bus stop in Singapore, she looked bewildered as I explained. When I told her that it was one of the few times of the school year when a feeling of pure euphoria and joy overwhelmed us, she looked up and said, “I could use some of that now.”

And then I paused and had an evil thought. The pandemic had brought with it the end of snow days. I did the quick calculus. Computers. Virtual Learning. Zoom. It was over. OVER! There were no longer any reasons, excuses, or euphoric celebrations. They were a thing of the past. It wasn’t SNOWWW DAYYYY!!! It was, “Due to the inclement weather, we’ll be transitioning to a virtual day. Homeroom starts in 15 minutes. Please make sure you click on the link.”

I couldn’t accept that. I can’t accept that. This was as bad as saying we didn’t need books anymore. I had to do something about snow days, even if they were technically a thing of the past. I had to find a way to capture that spontaneous euphoria, that crazy joy when the routine was stopped, the unplanned was now possible, and we could all just run around and sip hot chocolate or ice tea, and roll around in the snow or surf and sip whatever beverage or comfort food was appropriate to the geography.

I had to find a way to pass onto this pandemic saddened generation that there really is and was NO day like a SNOW day.

I have to find a way.

Stephen Dexter

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