As a student of statistics, I’ve learned that a confidence interval is the surest way to report on a sure thing!  Today, however, I am going to predict a 100% chance of rain :-).  It’s pouring outside right now and it’s been like this all week.  We left behind one of the hottest summers and rolled into the wettest fall on record.  Central Texas has been hit particularly hard with devastating flooding and reported fatalities, and videos like this one showing live coverage of a bridge collapsing as the Llano River bears down on it.  Most of this excess water has flowed into the bloated Lake Travis, now filled to 132 percent capacity and engineers have started opening a series of control gates to relieve the water pressure.

It has been a little over a year since Hurricane Harvey made landfall in the Houston and southeastern coast area, becoming one the costliest storms of all time with $125 billion in estimated damage. Besides the enormous amount of rain, recovery was immediately complicated by Hurricane Irma, which hit Florida, and Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico, because FEMA and other federal agencies had to share their personnel and other resources.  I remember at the time thinking back to Hurricane Katrina and how it forever changed New Orleans and the gulf coast.  Katrina was personal for me as it hit my home state and became professional when evacuees were ultimately routed to an abandoned Walmart here after being displaced from the Superdome, then Astrodome, and finally Reunion Arena.  Overnight our city grew by 400 residents, some 250 being school-aged children.  As part of the district’s response team, I helped to enroll these students onsite at the makeshift shelter the Walmart had become.  They came with no records, no belongings, and for some, your heart just ached because they were unaccompanied.

I suspect the memories of 2005 resurfaced when Harvey hit and I remember sitting my boys down one evening for a teachable moment.  In the context of change, I was trying to reassure them it wasn’t about what happens to you in life but how you respond that matters the most.  Change is hard and there is comfort in routine.  As I leave for work every morning, I put on the same watch my parents gave me when I graduated from college and the same ring my wife gave me shortly thereafter.  Both of them rest each evening in a leather valet tray that sits on the counter by the back door.  So I asked my boys if disaster struck and you could only save one thing, what would it be?  I told them for me, it would be that leather valet tray because when I see it I know I’m home, wherever that may be.  What artifacts do we similarly allow students to find comfort in?  As we collectively send safe thoughts down south to the flood victims, and as folks in this business, we know the school house needs to reopen and routine needs to be reestablished.  Principals model this every day as they are often the first person kids see when they arrive and the last when they leave.  If we know we have to keep the change, maybe we can share the constants a bit more.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend an event with our director of instructional technology and chief information officer on digital transitions.  The symposium was intended to unpack the EdTech landscape and lay out strategies for sustainability.  What it became was a polished bait-and-switch marketing front for vendors (ahem I mean solution providers) to distribute sliced bread.  By the time we reached the “alien incursion data literacy game,” we decided it was time to go!  On our way back from the event we reminisced about this age of technology we are in and when each of us entered it.  For me, the Canon NoteJet 486 was the MacGyver of all advancements (the Swiss Army knife of cool).  I mean really – it was everything perfect.

Later that afternoon in the office I did a quick internet search to basically remind myself of how hip I really was back then for having the NoteJet and found this write-up in PCMag, arguably an authority on such matters:

“7 Bizarre FrankenPCs That Are Better Off Dead”

Cannon’s strange-looking NoteJet 486 stands out in the annals of weird notebook history due to its integrated BubbleJet printer (Canon’s trade name for its inkjet printers) that printed three pages per minute. This 7.7-pound computer also sported a 9.5-inch monochrome VGA display and a 486 CPU for around $2,500. (And if you were so inclined, you could also buy that neat trackball remote thingy.)

So I decided I was done with artificial intelligence (AI) at that point and needed to employ more self-help strategies to cope with the realization that my glory days may have yet to come!  And then I went two for two when reading about the “dark side of emotional intelligence” in this article by The Atlantic.  Many of you are familiar with the term emotional intelligence which has gained mainstream popularity and originates back to efforts to formulate an emotional quotient (EQ).  To oversimply, EQ sought to balance and temper IQ, the idea being that it’s maybe just as important to be able to read the room as it is to read in the room.  I was reminded of this social construct earlier this week in conversations about smart kids who do not so smart things.  As we become more and more dependent on various technology, perhaps now more than ever the skills required to build relationships become most important.  When did text etiquette replace the rest of etiquette?  And as shepherds for young people, do our values and beliefs align with what we expect from them?  These are their formative years and as such maybe it’s the setbacks that generate the best solutions.  And maybe part of our role then is to be “space providers” while they wrestle with their multiple intelligences.