Move Your Bus by Ron Clark

Author:Ron Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

13

Take the hint

Wanda had been noticing how well the new Driver, Drew, seemed to respond to the suggestions that Rufus and Joan were always making. He was always saying yes to them. Maybe Drew is a pushover, she thought. Now, Wanda has no interest in making a suggestion that would create more work for any of them, but she has a wonderful idea for an oh-so-minor route change that would allow them to stop for lunch at her favorite barbecue spot. Pulled pork with mango salsa—YUM! Drew listens attentively to Wanda’s suggestion, then politely explains to her that this idea just wouldn’t work. “No, really,” Wanda insists, “it’ll be great!” She continues to push. And push. And push some more . . . until finally Drew just has to shut her down. Wanda sulks the rest of the day, and it really isn’t pretty.

You have to know when and how to pick your battles. If you are sitting in a meeting with your team and you make a suggestion, it’s important to read the temperature of your supervisor—and be perceptive enough to realize that going against the direction she is trying to go in will be very risky.

At RCA, we plan one day a year where we surprise the students by telling them it is the “Best Day of School Ever!” As soon as they arrive, we completely shock them by loading them onto buses and taking them all over Atlanta, where each of their classes takes place for one hour before they are bussed to the next location. They may have science in a cage with elephants at the zoo and then go to math class in Philips Arena, where they have to figure out the fastest way to count the thousands of seats that are there. It’s a great deal of fun!

The first year we tried this at RCA, one of our staff members wanted to have the students participate in an activity that would be very high energy and require a lot of movement. At the meeting with the team, I explained that we didn’t want to do that because our students would be in dress uniforms and they’d get too sweaty. She replied that she’d already called the location and they said yes and that she really wanted to do it. I explained that the activity didn’t even tie in well with her academic subject and that she needed to find an activity that related to what she was teaching. She was visibly upset.

That night I got an email from her stating that she wanted me to reconsider letting her do the activity. I wrote back and again expressed that I didn’t want the students to get sweaty in their dress uniforms and that she needed to find something else. The next day she came up to me and said, “Mr. Clark, I just wanted to talk to you one more time about my activity. I think it will be awesome if we could do it, because I can find a way to tie it in.

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