With 3,065 students — the largest reported enrollment  of any high school in Central Texas — Cedar Ridge could soon become an athletics giant.
                                                                        — Austin American Statesman

I’m finishing off my first school year as one of five assistant principals at Cedar Ridge, and am coming to terms with not being a “small schools guy” any more.

My standard sound bite has been that I try to bring a “small schools mentality” to the big school.  Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds good and folksy, like I’m coming from a tiny rural district in West Texas, where the principal doubles as the bus driver and the football players all play both offense and defense.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of little things to like about a big school. 

I love driving up to a big Texas high school in the fall, when the sun is hitting the parking lot hash marks, and casting long shadows on the marching band as they work out their formations.  The digital metronome clicks out a beat that can be heard for miles, and the amplified voice of the director, standing 50 feet up in the tower, barks out feedback. 

“Faster, Cody!  I need you to be faster than that!”

I love the sight of the choir, dressed in their formal wear of black tuxedos and dresses, loading on to cheese buses that will take them to the statewide UIL competition.

I love the SWAG.  Every new Cedar Ridge T-shirt I receive is like that Christmas present in back of the tree that I hadn’t seen before, or the Easter egg that none of the other kids noticed behind the drainpipe.

Oh, and in the case of my particular large school, I love driving past the horse stables as I roll up at around 8 in the morning.  The only horses I ever saw at my small schools in New York were the mounted police who clopped by every so often, causing my students to ooh and aah and ask if they could put their horses. 

I suppose the one thing that remains the same is the attitude I try to bring through the door every day.  Humor, kindness and a positive pre-supposition that the rest of the people in the building — adults and children alike — are there for the right reasons are probably the three best things I bring (and have always brought) to the table.  My hope is that this will benefit the young people I work with, whether in a school of 300 or 3,000.  Only time will tell. 

Since coming to the state of Texas in 2008, I’ve been directly employed by two schools — Austin High School and now Cedar Ridge High in Round Rock. I’ve also worked indirectly for secondary schools in Lubbock, Crosbyton, Dallas, Fort Worth, Haltom City, Everman, Atlanta (TX) and Manor. There have been awkward moments at all of these schools, especially now that I am more solidly “embedded” where I am at Cedar Ridge, when I’m in a classroom or some other public spot, and the announcements come on, normally at the beginning of the second block.

First comes the Pledge of Allegiance to the US flag, a droning liturgy of rote memorization that I hold deep in the recesses of my cerebral cortex. It rolls off my tongue, and I’m happy to recite it, not out of any excessive sense of patriotism (Lord knows I could never be accused of that) but because I respect the fact that my students may have relatives in the armed services and that some of my teachers have served as well. I figure these people deserve my respect, so I drone the pledge like everyone else, hand on heart, standing tall, as I guess a role model should.

Then comes the much stranger experience for me: the Texas pledge. Growing up in New York, I never had to learn a second pledge. Intoning to one flag — the big one — was enough. Texas, in all its self-adoring pride, pledges allegiance to its own flag. My boys do it every morning, facing the Lone Star flag.

I mention it now only because I caught myself yesterday morning at 10:44, standing in my office, and saying the words from memory for the very first time:

Honor the Texas flag,
I pledge allegiance to thee.
Texas, one state under God,
One, and indivisible.

I’m not sure why it happened or what it means. Perhaps I am now a Texan, despite that I’m “not from Texas,” as Lyle Lovett sings.

Oh and by the way, if you just stood up, with your right hand in a pledge salute, you’re a Texan too.

Last Friday, on the morning of Friday the thirteenth no less, I came close to being in a serious automobile accident — with both my sons in the backseat of the car. I had woken up exhausted and looking forward to the end of what had been a difficult work week. My usual obsessive concern about the children getting to school on time gave way to a carefree sense of “Ah, it’s Friday. We’ve been early every day this week, so screw it. If they’re a couple of minutes late, we’ll live with that.”

Lately I’ve been taking a new route, introduced by a friend, that takes me through the farmlands of “Old Manor,” both to the boy’s school and then to my job.

That morning, we were in the middle of the usual banter, with their music blaring through the car speakers. (I tolerate KISS-FM,” or whatever it is until they get out, then switch back to KGSR — my station.)

Rihanna or Katy Perry or somebody was emoting to a heavy beat, and we were talking about the likelihood of extraterrestrial aliens coming to our town, when I absentmindedly took a right on Fuchs Grove Road, which took us toward my job, rather than left to their school.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll just turn around here. I don’t think you’d have been on time anyway. It’s already one minute past the late bell.”

At that very moment — 7:41 in the morning on Friday the 13th — I made a leisurely broken U-Turn, and as I made a left onto the normally barren road, I totally failed to see a blue sedan coming at us in the right lane, at full speed.

Rather than lean on the horn, the driver did what most people do here instead: he flashed the headlights at me. I floored it and luckily no one was coming from the other direction. We made it out unscathed, the sound of the other car’s tires skidding to slow down behind me. I watched him right himself and continue driving away in my rear view mirror.

“Holy shit we almost died,” I said without irony. It was a moment of complete, unabashed, breathless sincerity.

The boys found this hilarious, of course, and giggled at my having uttered “the S word.” My heart felt like it would leap up my throat and out my mouth, and I couldn’t stop apologizing to my sons in the back.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Jackson reassured me. “Nothing happened. We’re all okay.”

I knew that I had been granted a major reprieve, and that had the stars been aligned to even the slightest variation of where they were at that terrifying moment, my world, and that of my entire family, could have been changed forever. I had to shake off the urge to imagine the unthinkable — shattered glass, misshapen metal, children’s bodies broken, all because a weary father didn’t do the one thing he consistently tells the boys to do — look both ways when they cross the street.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, our 9 year old Diego has become a chess enthusiast. He was introduced to it at school; our local Superintendent has a vision that every student in the district will become proficient in the game of chess. The thinking is that all of the skills one needs to do well in chess are the skills needed to exceed in school, and in life, as well. Apparently the research supports this.

Yesterday morning at about 9 I brought Diego over to Blake Manor Elementary, where he was to participate in the district’s annual chess tournament. It was his first time competing in the game of chess, other than the games he and I play on my wife’s iPad, or the games he plays with friends in his after school program, presumably.

I wasn’t sure how he’d do; in fact, I was pretty sure he’d play one game and be vanquished by a more serious player. I had him dressed in full little league baseball uniform, so that we could hop in the car and head over to his game.

Six hours later, Diego was done. Bleary eyed, he came out of the heavily guarded elementary school gymnasium sporting two medals. Apparently he’d spent the day(the entire day) playing in two different brackets — third grade intermediate, in which he’d won a bronze third-place medal, and third grade beginner, for which he’d won the silver, for second place.

To say I was proud doesn’t quite do the emotions justice. It’s one of those primal things, when a dad sees a son do well in competition. It’s a joy that defies description, even by those who pride themselves in putting words together for effect.

I think the reason this particular activity hit me so hard is that it connects me, quite directly, to my past and to my family. When I picture my grandfather — my Opa — Bill Fuchs, I see him sitting in his chair in Larchmont, New York, at 42 Maple Hill Drive. He’s wearing a cardigan and horn-rimmed glasses and is smoking a cigar. He’s contemplating a book, the newspaper, or the chessboard. It was not unusual for him to have a number of games going via post; apparently one of his favorite opponents was a man who was incarcerated at Sing Sing, if I’m remembering right. I wish I’d thought to ask for more details.

My father, too, enjoyed chess, and taught my brother Mike and me at a fairly young age. I have a vague recollection of trying to watch one of the televised chess tournaments on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. It may have been Bobby Fisher and Kasparov, I’m not sure.

Neither Dad nor Opa lived long enough to meet my children. I wonder if the intensity of my emotions can somehow be ascribed to this fact. Maybe some residual emotion, left over from whatever remains of their spirits, has joined with my own pride to make my heart swell, seeing my son contemplating his next move, cheek resting on his palm, much as I did at his age, and as my father did, and his father before him.

I just caught a glimpse of myself in the early-morning mirror of a plate glass window, and my beard was so gray it was striking. Okay, if someone were describe it kindly, they might say “salt-and-pepper.” Not only do I have the usual, obvious reaction about aging, but I’m also reminded of the summer of 1980, when I was 17 and my father would have been 52 — just a few years older than I am now.

I recall this moment because it was the one time in my life I remember my father intentionally growing a beard. We were staying in a rented house on Old Montauk Road in Montauk, Long Island. It was modern and on stilts and had a commanding view of the beach. Having two weeks off, my dad decided he would let the beard go, and we were all struck by how gray it was. It was a bit of a wake up call, I realize now — a reminder of the time that had gone by without our having noticed.

So I’ll need to do two things: First, I’ll need to live life as I did back then at 17 — with abandon and a sense of wonder. (Okay, not as recklessly.) And two . . . I’m gonna go shave this thing OFF.

Watching my sons playing Little League baseball for the first time this spring, I’ve been yearning to be able to have just a moment with my father. I’d like to be able to sit across from him at a booth, drinking coffee or beer, so that I could tell him one thing.

“I get it now, Dad. And I forgive you.”

My father, like all of us, carried around his fair share of guilt. He had two children whose childhoods he’d essentially missed, due to his choice to move three thousand miles away from where they lived with their mother. I often felt he did his best to make up for how absent he was for the two of them by being as present as he could be for Mike and me. And he always was.

Another helping of guilt was layered onto my father’s plate when it came to his relationships with us. Once my brother and I began playing organized sports, Mike showed an ease and coordination that eluded most kids his age — it most certainly eluded me. (I’ve since figured out that I’m a pretty good athlete; my younger brother is just on a higher plane than most of us, athletically speaking.)

Hanno’s guilt came from — surprise, surprise — his mother. She complained to him, sometimes loudly enough for me to hear, that he was spending an inordinate amount of time with his youngest, shagging fly balls, playing tennis, etc.

I was always embarrassed whenever I became aware of the well-meaning attention of my aunts or grandmother. (My mom stayed fairly silent on this matter, I believe.) To me, it felt like pity.

Of course I’ll do what I can to learn from the ways of my father — good and bad; that’s what we do, right? I’ll cultivate strong relationships with both my boys.

But as I watch Jackson out there on the ball field, grabbing up ground balls and gunning it over to first, my heart does swell with Daddy-Pride, and I want to tell my dad not to worry about all that attention he paid to my brother. He was, like my son Jackson, a sight to see after all.

Some time back in the mid-1990’s Susan Dreyer and I sat together and proctored one of the Regents Competency Tests (RCTs) we were administering that year. We did our best not to distract our students as we passed notes back and forth to each other.

We came up with a little parable about a girl with a lisp who goes up against a horrible monster known as the Rancid, Clammy Toothasaurus (RCT — get it?). She reaches out to educator and author of one of my favorite books about teaching and learning, Horace’s Compromise, Theodore “Ted” Sizer (“Theth,” as she calls him) who does battle with the beast.

(Our principal, who was friendly with Sizer, sent the piece to him, and Sizer wrote a very kind response, which I’m hoping Susan may still have somewhere.)

I thought of the Toothasaurus for the first time in years yesterday. If the RCT was some kind of menacing beast, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills is a Gargantua that could swallow it in one gulp. Maybe it’s the “Titanic Ass-whoopin’ Killer of Souls?” Ted Sizer has been dead for a few years, and one wonders whether even he — the man himself — could have vanquished this one.

Of course, it’s not so much about the exam itself. I never even saw the actual test, which is more to the point. Thanks to No Child Left Behind (or “No Child Left Untested,” as Debbie Meier calls it), the mechanism of organized testing has become the bully that shoves the educators out of the driver’s seat and takes over a few times a year.

On these days, we the adults scamper around in fear of the Auditors who may come into our school and find us “out of compliance.” We do our best to maintain a sense of control on testing days. What it really adds up to, however, is that our vehicle has been commandeered by the state and we’re in the passenger’s seat, winking at our students who sit obediently in the back seat, strapped in tightly to their car seats, where they dutifully fill in ovals on their bubble sheets with their number-2 pencils, hoping, as we do, that everything will work out all right and that we will arrive at our destination (whatever that may be) safe and relatively unscathed.

My Cedar Ridge students wear some awesome tees. Here are some of my faves, in no particular order:

I put the MAN in Romantic

Love Exists

I Heart Vampires

I’m a Keeper

I Heart Haters

Tell Your Girl to Stop Texting Me

(In big, white block letters on a black hoodie sweatshirt, worn by a sweet-looking little girl) NRA

NO MAN
(stick figure man, with prohibition slash)
NO PROBLEM
(This one was particularly good, because I saw it on Valentine’s Day.)

(Based on a tweet by Dan Fuchs)

Anyone who knows anything about high school administrators knows that lunch duty is a part of their job. You stand in the cafeteria and don’t do much of anything, other than provide an adult presence, and maybe a sense of safety for those young people who find being in a gigantic, noisy room with 700 of their peers a bit intimidating. Occasionally you correct naughty behavior. Once in a great while, you prevent a fight from happening or escalating.

I actually don’t mind my time in the cafeteria, each day from 12:45 to 2. In fact, it’s kind of a nice break in the action, and I get to have good interactions with our students. I have good fun with them, like pretending I’m a waiter, either just after they sit down (“Good afternoon, ladies. Has anyone told you about our specials today?”) or as they linger after the first bell has rung (“How was everything here, all right? Can you get you anything else? Coffee? Desert?”) My experience brings the script right back, and there’s always a moment where they’re not quite sure what-all is going on. Then I let them off the hook, and tell them — in the latter case — to get to class. I even taught my “family handshake” — the one I invented with my two young sons’ help — to a couple of kids.

There are a few features that make our lunchroom feel a bit less like a prison commissary (than say Evander Childs Campus, where I had my last AP Job). For one thing, there’s a Java City at the south end of the room, where kids can sit and sip on a latte, a little removed from the din of the rest of place. Also, the chairs are individual and can be picked up and moved, which they are, daily.

As a result, you get the big, over-populated (and invariably LOUD) tables full of popular kids — either the jocks, or the artists, or the skate geeks. There are a few tables that stand out — the one with the very mature students who eat, calmly chatting, as though they’re in a quiet Bistro somewhere, the singletons, who prefer to read a book as they eat, and the “Loud Nerds” table, where artsy kids need to continue their self-expression through primal scream therapy. The fumbling search for identity is undeniable, as these young ones figure out how they fit into this microcosm of an even more confusing world, just outside our doors.

I learned something crucial about myself, and my feelings around a very serious aspect of parenting last night.

I had joined my friend Neil, along with a couple of his friends from high school, in order to celebrate his 200th variety of beer at the Flying Saucer in Austin. Just as I mentioned her to the group, my wife called me.

“Hey, I just conjured you up!” I said, cheerfully.

Her voice was panicked. “Dan! There’s something wrong with Ally. She won’t stop crying and shaking, and she’s panting really heavily.” Ally is our one and a half year old shepherd mix that we rescued from the Town Lake Animal Center this past August.

I had just started eating a really delicious burger, and downing a lovely brew, so I tried to suggest that I would finish before leaving, but the desperation in her voice rose, when she said, “Come home now. Please.“

I gulped down a bit more of the beer and put my burger and fries in a to-go box, then said good-bye to Neil and his friends, before making my way back home.

At 9:00 on a Saturday night, the only place you can take a pet in distress is the Emergency Animal Hospital of Northwest Austin. Like almost every other money-making concern in that area, it’s a storefront in a strip mall. Its sign shines in bright red hospital block lettering and can be seen from Route 183, which flies by overhead at 65+ mph. My six year old insisted on accompanying me and Ally, the latter of whom had compliantly hopped up into the car and sat next to me in the passenger seat the whole way there.

Luckily there was no one else in the waiting room when we arrived. The receptionist, nurses and vet were all very kind to us and to Ally, and we were in and out of there in less than an hour. As it turned out, Ally had suffered an injury to the soft tissue in her tail — maybe a torn ligament or something. When I questioned Jackson about it, he claimed that one of his friends had been pulling on Ally’s tail earlier in the day.

There are a couple of strong reactions I found myself having, once I confirmed the story with his older brother. First, there’s the whole complicity of watching someone hurt another creature, especially one who is thought of as a member of your family. I expect my children to step in and intervene — to stop cruelty from happening, or to report it, at the very least. That being said, I was a kid once, and I can remember some dark things I did to animals that I’d rather not recount. Never, though, was a family pet the victim of any of this violence.

Also, Ally is such a sweet dog that it breaks my heart. The reason she’d been crying was that she could not resist the urge to wag her tail — a dog’s version of smiling — despite her injury. Even as a child was pulling at her body, giving her extreme pain, she never struck back, never protected herself. Never bit.

I must reiterate for my boys that no one has the right to hurt them. There are people out there who may try and hurt you. When they do, you must strike back. Protect yourself.

“Bite.”