Full disclosure … I like predictability.
I like knowing that certain things have order and certain outcomes will occur. My science training conditioned me to make order out of disorder — to put things into virtual ‘buckets’ of similarities. I am conditioned to align characteristics and form inter-relationships between things. Once something is in a bucket I prefer that it stays there and doesn’t move.
Predictability brings me comfort.
Predictability = Security
Like many people in education I’ve been through a few interviews — for myself it’s probably somewhere north of 30. It sounds like a lot and I suppose that it is a lot. However, sometimes there were multiple interviews for the same job — positions like Science Department Head where I needed to interview in several different schools, or in the case of my current position as Superintendent I had 4 rounds of interviews.
And if I look from the other side of the interview table when I worked in Human Resources, district leadership and school administration I’m sure that I must have interviewed at least 300-400 people.
Be Yourself — It’s the Person You Already Know the Best
So, all being said, I’ve been in a ton of interviews. I can’t even accurately estimate the number of resumes that I’ve read — it must be over 2000.
And over my past 30 years in education I’ve noticed a few things that I think can make a big difference when someone is applying for a job. I thought that you might be interested in hearing some of them.
As I get older I see more grey. Ya, ya, ya … the hair jokes .. I get it. Nice!
What I’m talking about are my observations that we don’t live in a binary world of ‘Yes or No’ , ‘Black or White’. We just don’t typically live in “All or Nothing” scenarios. Our world is a series of sliding position points along a continuum. It isn’t static, measured once and labeled. It is a complex, multi-dimensional, constantly evolving space.
Need proof? OK. Some examples that are right off the top of my head include:
Practice MAY make perfect
Musical ability
The point being, we have some ability or knowledge in lots of areas — some are just more developed than others. And in many cases increased practice results in improvement.
So our world is a patchwork of grey! Different shades of ‘greyness’ which indicate our varying abilities.
The Power of Why 