Polio in 1954 and Cancelled School

Sixty-seven years ago, when my father was five, his entire spring term of kindergarten was cancelled because of the polio epidemic.  He was delighted.  He could play outside!  All day, every day!  At the perfect time, too!  Winter had faded; trees were blooming into spring and the days were lengthening into warmth.  I imagine him, all full of sass, dusty nose and monkey bars and bikes and baseballs, sprinting pell-mell down the street to stir up mischief.  Many kids weren't allowed outside, but some kids were, and they thought it was great fun to sneak up to spy on the houses of kids who were stuck inside, and feel very, very sorry for them.

School was closed because a neighborhood girl got polio.  The vaccine had just come out—my father remembers the shot— but it came too late for her.  Adults talked about it relentlessly.  They worried.  It was a different time, so the worry and infection was kept relatively local.  Dying wasn't the fear;  death statistics actually weren't that eye-popping.  It was this: Polio sought out kids.  Kids!  The fever was polio's weapon—it climbed so high kids' arms and legs stopped working.  For the rest of their lives.  My father knew a boy who got a fever at a church picnic one Sunday afternoon, was hospitalized the next day, and when he came out six weeks later he'd lost use of his leg forever and ever and ever.

My father's mother stayed inside and prayed and made hamburger soup.  His father went into the city to work and slept with a gun beneath his pillow.  They were scary times, and polio wasn't the only fear.  But it wasn't scary for a boy with a free pass to play outside, untethered, for months and months. And besides, with school closed, he wouldn't get in trouble with his kindergarten teacher at nap time anymore.  He was asked to sleep on a little rug.  He couldn't.  He couldn't be still.

And here we are, all these years later.  It's been said these are unprecedented times.  Maybe not, but they are different.  Right now, parents all over are fighting conflicting urges.  Let the kids outside to play, or keep them inside with known germs?  Hoard food and toiletries, or be generous and take only what is needed?  Scramble for schedules and structure, or let things play out naturally?  Fight against screen time, or look the other way for a few months?  Back and forth, back and forth.

Someone asked me if am am scared.  No, I'm not.  I wouldn't even know what to fear, actually, and—thanks be— I'm in a mental place where my fears don't take on a life of their own.  The younger me worried relentlessly about all possible versions and outcomes of all possible problems.  In third grade, I sat in class and systematically, diligently, doggedly gnawed every fingernail down to blood, ripped every cuticle until I bit my lip in pain.  Worry used to give me a perpetual stomachache.

Mark Twain said worrying is paying a debt you don't owe.  He also said he'd spent most of his life worrying about things that never happened.  So worry isn't the answer here.  It's a side affect, certainly, but it's not a strategy or a plan.

There are strategies and plans, and they are different for everyone.  I'm finding my own, just like I'm finding good in all of this. I won't list my good things here, lest I be judged, but they're there.  They always are, if we look hard enough.

A cancelled conference... But! Yay! A new book!

I'd been waiting for the email, assuming it would come.  Coronavirus fear kept building, and all the media output, opinions, and cancellations were piling up.  On the phone, my sister said it was coming.  She was making pancakes for her kids, so I heard the rattle of the spatula and the sizzle of the butter behind her words, and I could picture her shrug.  "They have to cancel, Jen.  They can't not.  It's too scary."  My friends and colleagues said it was coming; one of them, in particular, should be in Austin right now at the SXSW conference, a trip she'd been excited about for over a year. She'd gotten an email twelve hours before her flight telling her it was off. Ahh, but I held on: Maybe cancellation wouldn't happen.  Not to me.  Not to me, to us, the thousands of people who love ASCD's Empower20, one of the best-known and highest-attended school leadership conferences in the world.  Hope isn't a strategy, of course, but it's all I had:  I so hoped this virus would run its course by the time a decision had to be made.

Alas, the email came at noon yesterday:  Empower20 was cancelled.  Contact your airline and hotel, they said.  They were sorry, they said.  Give us a minute, they didn't say.  Give us a hot freakin' minute and don't flip out and please, please understand, they didn't say.  I was overcome thinking of the people scrambling to unravel all the strands of planning—and then cancelling—such a gigantic undertaking.  There was much to do. Much to unpack, undo, unthink.  I ached, too, for the people who'd had to decide to actually pull the plug, of the Board of Directors who had to raise their hands in an aye vote. The impact of that vote was enormous.

On hold with the Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles, trying to find a human being who could cancel my three-night reservation, I tried to calculate how many people were affected.  Tens and tens of thousands.  Hundreds of thousands. More?  And all the conferences, really, all over the world—all the meetings, events, performances, all the years of planning, buying, ordering, consulting, scheduling, shuffling, marketing, organizing...

Sheesh.  My head spun.

Sheepish admission:  Yes, I took a selfish moment to mourn the death of my presentation.  It was titled No Way, Not Me:  Disrupting the Path to Principal Burnout.  I was really proud of it.  Finally I'd mastered Google Slides, and finally was going into a presentation with full confidence. But my presentation was—is— an itty bitty microscopic casualty of this whole thing, and I didn't let myself be bummed, because my bummed-out-ness was inconsequential in scale, and of course would do nothing to contribute to fixing a single part of this mess.  So I'll keep washing my hands, walking my dog, and look forward to this virus doing what it needs to do so we can do the next right and fun thing.

Besides, I have something to look forward to!  This!  Yay!  Late next week my new book will be released!

  
Like my first one, it is published by ASCD and is called The Principal Reboot:  Eight Ways to Revitalize your School Leadership.  The book covers eight categories that tend to get pretty tricky-and-sticky for principals, and holds a bunch of ideas for how to start to have a bit more fun with the job.  It's a book for veteran principals, sure, but it's also for anyone who works in a school and is looking for innovative ideas to boost things a little.  Bring some shine and sass to an immensely complicated and exhausting job.  Avoid burnout.  Be inspired.  Have fun.  Laugh.

So far, I'm unspeakably blessed that coronavirus has only marginally affected my life and my plans.  But a lot of people have lost a lot.  I'm thinking of them all.