I’ve set out to capture the stories and insights of those who have journeyed with me. I am asking them to walk with me yet again…quite literally. Through informal interviews and candid reflections, “Walk with Me” aims to document the real-life experiences of friends and mentors – from the pivotal moments, to the challenges they overcame, to the advice they have for others.
This collection of first-hand accounts of our walks will provide a roadmap of the trials and triumphs of leadership, learning differences and motherhood – the essential trilogy of my last two decades.
I embarked on this journey with the mindset to learn something new and the goal to nurture a culture of trust and vulnerability. There is so much to learn from one another.
So read on, and let their voices inspire, empower, and guide you as they have me.
A number of things collided last month, and by the end of it I heard myself say it out loud: I want to bring the joy back. For those of us who have spent our lives in schools, that joy drives us, but lately it has been hard to hear the soundtrack of laughter and curiosity over the constant hum of risk and anxiety. So I can think of no better way to sing the praises of independent education than to sing it from the mountaintop, or at least from center stage at the Rosemary Heyl Theatre at Carlow University. That’s where the curtain goes up on Schooled: The Musical. Yes, a musical written by a lifelong educator that shares the joy of impacting a life. I walked with its creator, Peter Nilsson, to find out how a boarding-school English teacher ended up telling the most honest, hopeful story about school we’ve heard in years.
Liz: So when I grow up, I want to be you.
Peter: Come on.
Liz: I want to be writing and then producing a musical, writing and publishing a book, consulting and writing an amazing newsletter that gives everybody purpose and points them in the direction of what they should read. And I’m only touching on the things I know about you, but doing it with such an attitude of optimism that I wish we could clone you.
Peter: I don’t know if you want a lot of me’s running around. That’s very kind. Just trying to do the things we love, right?
If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. I mistakenly called my time leading a school as work. Now that I no longer spend my days surrounded by the joy of young people, I realize I never knew what work as a grind was. I think that is true for all of us who work in schools. Yes, it can be thankless. Yes, it is undervalued. Yes, it is under-compensated. But we change lives and live in the arena of hope for the future everyday. Allow Peter to remind you of your impact.
Peter: Going to a place like Andover was just like a kid in a candy shop. There are so many cool things I could do and be a part of. And I loved that. And I remembered after going to college, music and English double major, I said I’ll work at Middlebury for a year doing music stuff and then I’ll do a teaching fellow year as an English teacher and I’ll see which one I like more. And one year turned into two, turned into three, turned into five at Deerfield. I was really fortunate to land a teaching fellowship there. And what I loved about the work was that at a boarding school was that if you’re in a residential community like that, the school is going to draw on every part of who you are. … as a musician, I was advising a cappella groups, I was writing compositions for student groups, classical compositions. I’m also playing in bands on weekends and having a great time, but I was loving the intellectual life of being a teacher. I was loving the community that I was in.
Liz: But I love that you say that because we often say that in such a negative mindset that when you’re at a boarding school, you’re just asked to do everything. And you flipped it to say it was positive because it tapped into all of your passions.
Peter: Yes, 100%. If you think of this as a job, you’re going to resent it, the way that it sort of creeps into all what you do. But if you think of it as a way of life, then you will find it extraordinarily fulfilling.
Ah yes – the purpose. I didn’t mention that as one of the profound benefits of teaching. You know your work matters. To be a catalyst for another person to find a passion, to overcome a challenge, to reach higher than expected – most people have to manufacture that in their jobs. Teachers live it.
Peter: The things you mentioned— book, school, the musical, and Educator’s Notebook. So I was at Deerfield for 5 years. Music was getting bigger and bigger and bigger in my life, and I kind of had this moment— it was a gradually accumulating moment where I realized that if I never tried to make music my main thing, I’d always regret it. So 5 years at Deerfield, starting my career at a place where many people finish it. I was also single at a boarding school in western Massachusetts, which is a great formula for being single at a boarding school for the rest of my life.
Liz: Imagine single at a boarding school in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Peter: Yes, fair, understood. So I said, you know what I’ve gotta try the music thing. I’ve got to put myself in a different place and see where it takes me. So I uprooted myself, much to my parents’ chagrin… and moved to New York City to be a musician.
In New York, Peter was picking up experiences throughout the next few years that all lead him to where he and his musical about school are today.
Peter: I wrote a one-act Hamilton-style musical celebrating and satirizing boarding school.
I wanted it to authentically call out the good things and the bad things.
People often bring pre-conceived notions to what a musical is. From the very beginning, this production has been about telling authentic stories of students, teachers, and school leaders — and their experiences in schools today. Peter tells me it is meant to highlight the personal and professional challenges of being in schools in a time of turmoil, while also being engaging and fun. He staged it as a love letter to Deerfield as he was preparing to leave for a second time.
Peter: So I wrote this musical and put it up in spring of 2019. Total surprise again to the community except for the 25 teachers who were a part of it. And recorded it and we put it up on YouTube afterwards. And what was surprising to me was how it actually changed the lives of people in ways that I didn’t expect. A guy from the class of 1965, over 50 years since he graduated, writes an email to his classmates, and he says, “You know, Deerfield sometimes sends these newsletters. I sometimes open them, sometimes I don’t. I opened this one. There’s a link to a musical and I watched it. I wanted you to see it.”
I was in a coffee shop a few months later, and this woman comes up and says, “Did you do that musical?” I said, yeah. She said, “I felt comfortable sending my son to boarding school because I saw that.”
I said, what? She said, I just saw the love and the positivity and energy in that room, and I did not know that that’s what it would be like in a place like that. Oh my goodness. What I realized from that was when I was a musician in New York City, I had musicianship, but I didn’t have anything to say.
And 15 years in boarding schools, I had a lot to say about boarding schools. And I said it in a way that sort of felt like that music class in high school… oh, this is who I am.
Your passion meets your purpose and the energy is magnetic and felt far and wide from a single performance. This was just the beginning.
Peter: I saw a post on LinkedIn asking “Does anybody know any innovative performances in education?”
So I sent him the musical. This is late August, summer of ’23. He sends me an email back saying, “I love it, let’s chat.” We chat Wednesday, 2 minutes in, he says, “I love your show, can you put it up in New York City in 5 weeks?”
So, I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. First, my show’s about boarding school and you want something about schools generally for your conference, right? He’s like, yeah, yeah, we’ll be at the conference, we’ll be at the New York Times Center, it’ll be blah blah blah, we’ll have all these people there. Um, and I say, second of all, I don’t even know if I can do that. Like, at Deerfield, I can be the composer, director, stage manager, whatever. But this is New York City, right? So give me 2 days. So it’s a Wednesday, so we schedule a call for Friday. I just call everybody I know for 48 hours. And a friend of mine from college is a theater professor at Carnegie Mellon, which has a good musical theater program. Yeah. And it’s like, yeah, we’ll get you some Tisch kids, we’ll get some Carnegie Mellon kids. Like, I think we can probably do this, or you can probably do this.
Seeds turn up throughout Peter’s story, and if you listen closely, you’ll find one planted in our conversation too. When Peter had just five weeks to put Schooled on a New York stage, one of the first calls he made was to a college friend teaching theater at Carnegie Mellon. When we talked this past February, it seemed like a passing detail. Neither of us knew it was a breadcrumb leading straight to Pittsburgh. On October 18, Schooled takes the stage with a cast from Carnegie Mellon’s celebrated musical theater program, and a conversation between two people who love schools was the moment that seed was planted.
Peter: I learned in New York City you need to first hire a general manager because they’re gonna have contracts, they’re gonna manage contracts, right? And rehearsal spaces and unions and whatever. They’re gonna find you a director through their networks and a casting director. And they’re gonna find you a cast. Takes me 2 weeks to find a general manager. It takes them a week to find a director and a casting director. Takes the casting director a week to find a cast.
So I have 4 days of rehearsal.
Liz: But you’re not using Carnegie Mellon and Tisch Kids.
He can’t say the names of the performers because of the nature of the contracts, but it was leading performers from leading shows that would knock your socks off, I promise. In the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, we were one step away from the broadway legends.
Liz: Oh my gosh, off the chain amazing.
Peter: It was, it was incredible, and I was in seventh heaven, and I felt so out of my league and so spiritually drunk.
It was absolutely incredible. And the response from the educators in the room was, we’ve never seen school presented like this, where it is authentic to the experience. Like, there’s real kid challenges, right? But it’s joyful, right? It’s good pedagogy even in the classes that are in it. I just felt like we need more narratives like that, that are lifting educators, that are lifting education, especially in a time when schools are, like, quite literally in the crosshairs of culture, right? Um, coming out of the culture wars, coming out of everything that’s been happening recently. And so I said, I need to spend more time on this.
In Schooled, teachers and leaders will see themselves and their students in ways that both bring joy and surface questions about what we do every day. Indeed it deserved more of Peter’s time. There was more story to tell.
Peter: I realized I want to make this into a full-length show to really tell the story of what it’s like to be in schools today in a positive way, not some like Dangerous Minds kind of thing again, or even Abbott Elementary, right? If you watch Abbott Elementary, it’s like Gosh, schools are terrible. Yeah, people in schools are terrible. Schools themselves are terrible. Let’s make it comic and maybe have some empathy for it. But there’s so much joy, there’s so much youth, there’s so much investment, there’s so much care from adults, and there are problems. And the key is not to shy away from those, but the key is also not to paint it as one large failed system, which is the narrative that is told over and over again.
So I’ve started after New York in ’23, reconceiving the whole story into a full two-act, full-length, 2-hour narrative for a show.
And October 18th will be its premiere.
Peter: I think it kind of comes back to the same mission and goal from when I was a musician in New York City. Like, I want to leave the world better than I found it. I want it to have its best positive impact, whether that means it goes onto Broadway. Yeah. Or whether that means it is licensed to schools and colleges around the country. Wow. Yeah. Or whether that means it becomes part of regional theater houses. I don’t know.
So I think coming back from that experience was a lesson in like, wait a minute, what’s good for me? Sounds very selfish now when I say it.
Liz: But it’s interesting because even as you said it was selfish. Your being selfish is giving the world Schooled and Irreplaceable and these two things really expand your classroom. And it was only possible because if you want to use your words, you got selfish.
It’s just all those little seed moments that you walk right by and you don’t realize what was planted.
Peter: Yeah, the things we’re pursuing now are like things that were planted decades ago.
Near the end of our conversation, Peter and I kept returning to the idea of seeds: Andover’s required music class, the college friend teaching theater at Carnegie Mellon, the late-night pianos scattered across a boarding school campus. None of those moments looked like much at the time. That’s the thing about schools. We plant seeds every day and rarely get to see what grows.
Sometimes, though, we do. A conversation in February becomes a curtain rising in October. So when I said I wanted to bring the joy back, maybe what I really meant was that I wanted to remember where it had been all along: in the work itself, in the kids, in the adults who show up for them. Schooled just happens to set it to music.
Not your typical researcher or consultant, Liz connects lived experience to transformative leadership. To uncomplicate leadership and education, every story matters and she is just getting started.
On June 4, 1944 Dwight D. Eisenhower told 150,000 troops, who were loaded onto ships and planes and prepared to storm the Normandy beaches…to wait. The weather was brutal, so the planned attack could not proceed, sending waves of dread through men who’d already said their goodbyes and steeled their nerves. Every voice screamed urgent concerns – the Germans might discover the delay, the troops’ morale was cracking, the tides wouldn’t be right again for weeks. One voice offered a sliver of possibility – a brief window of clearer weather on June 6. Eisenhower silenced them all to focus on a single important question: Do we go tomorrow, or do we wait?
Years later, he started thinking systematically about the difference between urgent and important, eventually creating a 2×2 decision matrix that bears his name and ultimately asks, “Are you spending your life on what matters, or just on what’s loud?”
Jonathan Strecker, Head of School at The Valley School of Ligonier, doesn’t need the matrix quite like the rest of us do. Life has imprinted on him what is important. He is not bothered by what’s loud.
Strecker I have a unique perspective because I’ve battled health issues my entire life. Stage four cancer, cardiac arrest, and a lot of different events.
Liz Oh, my goodness.
Jonathan …and people normally respond like that. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” To which I respond, ‘No, it changed my life for the better.’
Liz For the better?
Jonathan Yeah. It’s that song, Live Like You are Dying. That’s exactly how I live my life.
This gentle giant of a man, who stands 6’7, embodies an equanimity and grace that immediately put me at ease. It helped that our conversation began just after he lit a fire in his office. He had greeted me at the front door to the school. His silhouette took up the entire frame of the doorway with a smile to match. He told me that I could find him there at the front door every morning, greeting the children in this K-8 school … except when it snows… then you will find him with the kindergarteners sitting in front of his fire.
Jonathan I don’t want to go into the whole story of the cardiac arrest incident, but what I will say is what I gleaned from that. Because the heart stopped, they had to shock me to bring me back. There was such a peace and tranquility that I had never felt before, that it really downshifted my perspective and gave me clarity on all decisions I needed to make. Life is now so much more about taking care of people and myself, and everything else comes along. The appreciation and the clarity you live with. If I’m pondering over an email I’m not like, ‘On my deathbed, will I really worry about which word I use? No, it’s fine. Let’s go. What is the purpose of the email? And let’s get that out.’
Liz And the other person might not hear it the way you meant it, but that’s not the end of the world either.
Jonathan It just opens up another conversation. I am truly blessed to be at this school, and this is a fantastic school.
And this school, tucked into the foot of the Laurel Highlands with Linn Run streaming through campus, is building a new playground. Not just any playground. A natural playground. In the woods. Actually elevated in the trees in the woods. I’ll let Jon tell you.
Jonathan One of the most important aspects is that the children are outside playing, but in a way that is more like what we probably grew up with. We didn’t have all the distractions of technology and computers. And so as a result, we were outside all the time, climbing and jumping and having a good time. I’ve been playing with this idea that I think will be fantastic for the kids. And what I would love to do is create a nature playground where not only are they in the woods, but they’re elevated in the woods. They’re in the trees. They’re overlooking the pond.
Not pond. Ponds. Ponds with trout.
Jonathan We’re outside all the time studying our fish. We raise our own trout from eggs in the classroom all the way until the children see them as these monsters. And of course, that’d be a great place to see those.
A treehouse playground so the children can better see the trout they raised. I want to be nine again. So did the architect.
Jonathan We showed our original design to a bunch of tree house builders, and he was the first one to say, ‘If you guys want to build what’s on this piece of paper here, that’s fine. I’m just not the right person.’ He goes, ‘I want to dream. I want to envision.’ I’m like, ‘This is the guy.’ He is a child at heart. He’s going to create something that children love, not what we as adults love.
Children are at the heart of everything at Valley School of Ligonier. As they are at all of the schools within the PAIS independent school ecosystem. Jon worries about children today.
Jonathan Over the course of the modern convenience taking root in our society, five different attributes that independent schools find vital to child development, are in decline.
Our IQs are going down for the first time in human history.
We are more antisocial than ever, even though we are able to communicate.
Emotionally, there is a greater amount of anxiety and depression than we’ve ever had before.
Ethically, we have created less trust by creating a me-first society, what’s in it for me rather than what’s in it for us.
And then finally, one in five children has obesity in this country.
So all of our intelligences, intellectual, social, emotional, ethical, and physical intelligence, are all in decline. And we are only on the precipice of AI technology. So what are we going to do about it?
What is Jon going to do? He is writing a book. He samples the ideas on his YouTube channel. He wants to share with others what independent schools live every day.
Jonathan In some schools, if there’s a child who’s experienced a math problem… they’ll say, math problem in, math solution out. Let’s give them more math. Let’s take away their recess. Let’s take away their social time.
There is an alternative.
Jonathan We see there’s a math problem. Let’s figure out, based on these five intelligences, what is the actual cause. If a child doesn’t have friends or they’re emotionally stressed out by math, giving them more math is not going to solve that. It’s just a different way of looking at child development.
Liz You’re right. It’s embedded in independent education. Because we know the child so well, and we care about all the different aspects you just talked about.
Jonathan Independent educators, they understand that they’re responsible for all five of these attributes. It’s not just, ‘Well, I came here to teach history, and that’s all I’m doing.’ That never works in an independent school. We’re like, ‘No, you’re part of this family, and we expect you to help these children get to where they need to be.’ And as administrators, our job is to make sure the faculty and staff are taken care of along these five attributes as well.
Liz Exactly. And that we’re taking care of ourselves.
Taking care of our faculty and ourselves. That hits the urgent and important quadrant in Eisenhower’s matrix.
Eisenhower forced himself past the noise to focus on one important question: is this weather window real enough to bet everything on? At 4:00 AM, he made the call: “OK, we’ll go.” It was, historians say, one of the gutsiest decisions of the war. The rest is history.
The urgent voices are loud: they need more math worksheets; they have too much recess; the school needs faster solutions, stronger gates, higher budgets, and tightened spending. The list goes on. Can we quietly turn from the noise to focus on what’s important? What does this child actually need? What do our teachers need? What do I need as a leader in education?
Jon Strecker knows a leader’s responsibilities are about taking care of people and oneself, “and everything else comes along.”
My daughter was four when the first signs of dyslexia appeared. By the end of middle school, I thought she had made it through.
So when she started coming home junior year with stories that made the educator in me sit up straight while the mother in me wanted to look away, I didn’t know which voice to trust. Was someone just asking her to be compliant and she didn’t want to be? Or had she been coping so beautifully for so long that I’d mistaken survival for thriving?
I carried that question along with a dozen others into a walk through downtown Philadelphia with Zaretta Hammond. If you know Zaretta, you know what happened next. If you don’t, let me tell you: she took every one of those questions, turned them sideways, and gave it to me straight… made me think… with no chaser.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I first met Zaretta in a group Zoom call full of innovative educational entrepreneurs. I needed a listener. She needed nothing from me. And yet she pulled our conversation out of that crowded digital room and became a personal advocate, a mentor, and what she would call a thought partner.
Zaretta: I call it thought partnership. We don’t make enough time for that because we live in such a transactional world that the degree to which we don’t see the immediate return from something gets problematic. I would say it is a core value for me.
Liz: There’s grace in what you said. If it’s not transactional, then you don’t have to carry this weight that I owe you.
Zaretta: Absolutely.
Liz: Every conversation that I sit and listen and offer to be a thought partner, I get a gain, too.
Zaretta: That’s right. We all get smarter in the process. But I also think there’s an element of freedom in it. I say my middle name is Straight up, No Chaser, and this brown liquid just might burn your throat going down. So I reserve the right to tell the truth and ‘shame the devil,’ as my grandmother would call it. And I think that is what makes partnership powerful, as someone is willing to tell you what you need to hear because you’ve left yourself open. The intent is to invite them to reframe it.
I used to thank people for asking good questions to clarify my thinking. I would amend that now that I know Zaretta to invite others to ask me real questions to reframe my thinking. Trust me, there are few people better at that than Zaretta Hammond, a best-selling author and a champion for equity, literacy and the science of learning.
And boy did I have questions for her. Each of the following topics we discussed could be the fodder for a full blog on its own. For instance, after 17 years why is my daughter, who seemed to overcome challenges with dyslexia, once again struggling as a junior in high school? …or… What would it cost independent schools—really cost them—to choose equity? …or … How do you take care of yourself in your grief?… or … When your son’s teacher insisted he sit in a circle instead of reading, what message did that send?
And she lent her own questions to the conversation: If we stopped talking about management and assessment, what would we talk about instead? … or … What’s the difference between a teacher learning something and a teacher being transformed by it?
Contained in our dialogue is a wealth of insights for any of us in education to glean greater wisdom. If this were a live blog, you could tell me where to start. You could click on the question that invigorates you. Instead, you will have to comment on what seems pertinent to you. Maybe there are multiple blogs that come from this one. In the meantime, I will follow my own heart, which will not surprise you, and we will start with my daughter.
Liz: Now, as a junior in high school, she’s coming home and telling me things that the intellectual and the educator knows, ‘Oh, that is a red flag.’ And as a mom, I keep asking myself, ‘Wait, is someone just really asking her to be compliant and she can’t be? Or is there really something going on that started back when she was four and she’s just really done well coping all these years?’
Zaretta: You’ve been an observer of that child for a very long time. So what we also know is whatever those coping mechanisms, as the cognitive load gets greater, which it does by junior year, it’s going to then leap forward again in the middle of freshman year. This is why more schizophrenia happens for young adults, because they go to college and they think, ‘Oh, I’ve got this wonderful social life,’ but if they are underprepared for the cognitive load, then it is going to put a stressor on their brain in a way that disrupts.
Liz: I have never heard it explained that well before.
Zaretta: The research is really clear.
Liz: I’ve had so many people talk to me about why 25-year-olds have mental health crises, but you just made it really clear.
Zaretta: And what we don’t do is we don’t teach them the craftsmanship of learning… when we’re learning in the wild and it gets to be too much, we go back a step. We sit that down like, ‘Okay, I haven’t understood this. I’m at my point of frustration.’ But we’ve told kids, particularly high-achieving kids, ‘Oh, you can keep taking all the classes.’ The idea of taking less classes means somehow I’m less capable. So we’re selling them this at the expense of their mental and physical health. And they see their peers doing that, and they don’t want to lose a step.
This disconnect between how we naturally learn and the forced conditions of schooling creates an anxiety that lives in a student’s body and mind in ways we can’t always see. I think about the students who can’t sleep, who develop headaches, who sit in class exhausted but keep pushing because slowing down feels like falling behind. What breaks my heart is how they start to override their own internal wisdom—that quiet voice that says “this is too much” gets drowned out by the louder message that more is always better.
I had to walk out of the Head of School’s office to finally learn that more is nothing but… more.
Taking an advanced class schedule was never a discussed goal in our home. Spending your time to fill all of the blanks on the college application was not a spoken priority. Not for Grace. Not for Ella. But even without that dialogue, the unspoken expectation was there. I have to pause and unwind my own thinking as a parent to learn to reset the mindset.
There are a lot of common mindsets that Zaretta’s work resets. She urges us to question. Her words compel us to think critically, to challenge the status quo…and when we do that, it can be uncomfortable, but growth and learning often are.
Liz: In the simplest of terms, do you see a way forward for independent education to get it more “right?”
Zaretta: That’s a complicated question.
Liz: Oh, yes, I know.
Zaretta: Because the answer requires people to do things that they’re not willing to do. So the path is clear, but it means you’re going to have to change your behaviors. I have continued to work with independent schools all the way up to last year. I have continued to consult, provide professional learning. But the prestige that people think they have because they’re an independent school prevents them from making changes to accommodate the diversity. We’d like to talk about neurodiverse, gender fluidity, and economic diversity, and their accommodations around that. Independent schools still have a long way to go to talk about the racial rebalancing that needs to happen in terms of who can come, who can succeed and how teachers respond to students who are performing the same but happen to have different racial backgrounds. That is different, more complicated, because white progressive educators are not acknowledging what it means to be socialized into whiteness and how that then flows into our systems. It’s complicated.
In all those examples of diversity, it is complicated for teachers and leaders to know what a child is experiencing. I didn’t even know what my own daughter was experiencing.
Zaretta: All brains survey. Meaning you let stimuli in. You have filters for what you don’t pay attention to. For certain people to not pay attention to certain things can be dangerous. Emmett Till. You don’t pay attention to these rules. These rules aren’t designed to keep you in the box. Black people didn’t design those rules. Black people learned. You do these things, white people interpret that and you may lose your life. Same thing with reading. ‘Don’t look like you can’t read that note. You got to keep that under cover.’
What Zaretta is naming here is something most of us don’t want to look at directly: we’re all walking around with filters or bias shaped by our lived experience, by what we’ve had to pay attention to in order to be safe, to belong, to survive. Those filters are the architecture of how we make sense of the world. For some students, noticing certain things, reading certain social cues, staying hypervigilant to particular dynamics isn’t optional; it’s survival. For others, those same things can remain invisible their whole lives without consequence. This matters enormously when we think about learning because what we notice, what we filter out, what we believe to be true based on our experience—all of that becomes the foundation, the schema, through which we understand new information. We don’t come to learning as blank slates. We come with these deeply ingrained patterns of what to pay attention to and what we’ve learned it’s safe to ignore.
If we’re not aware of our own filters, if we’re teaching from our own unexamined schema, we can’t possibly create the conditions where all students can actually learn.
Zaretta: When you understand how the brain learns, culture is called schema. Meaning this is the knowledge tree. All that we’re taking in, we assign it meaning, and we put it in a place. That is what culture is.
Liz: And you don’t learn anything without bringing what you already know to it.
Zaretta: More importantly, all new learning must be coupled with existing learning. So when you want to learn something new, your brain opens up the synapses because you now started thinking about, ‘What do I already know about that? I heard that in a movie.’ You don’t even have to know exact definitions. You now just are making a connection to, ‘I saw that word before.’ Now your brain literally opens up the synapse, and there’s a chemical reaction where it’s ready to receive new information. All new learning must be coupled. It’s not like it’s a nice thing. It’s essential if you want it to be retained and for new meaning and new understanding to develop. So what ends up happening is because we teach without the science of learning, we’re just covering content.
Certainly, content has its place, but “covering content” is not synonymous with learning.
Zaretta: When I do training, sometimes I start with the game Taboo, one of my favorite games of all time.
Liz: Me too. I love taboo. Worst buzzer, though.
Zaretta: It really is. But the reality about Taboo is a fairly cognitively complicated game. And I have people play it and then we break it down. Like, what did you have to do first? You have to access your schema because now it’s telling you, ‘Oh, here’s the word. Oh, what do I know about that?’ Now you have to look at the five words that you cannot say. So you have to go back to your schema, the branches of your knowledge tree, and say, ‘What’s another way? What’s another branch or understanding or set of schemas that actually are about that, right?’ And now, when you’re able to do that, you have to now look at someone else and say, ‘Where is our communal schema, right?’
Liz: Our schemas have to match for me to guess your word?
Zaretta: It doesn’t have to just match. I have to know where our communal schema is. So I actually… this is the responsive part. In order to help you move forward to get unconfused, I have to sync up our schema, but I have to know where to locate us. It’s not your job as a learner. That’s the responsive part. This is where knowing how you make meaning …what’s going to help you break your cognitive log jam. That is the piece people miss about culturally responsive teaching.
Liz: The metaphor you gave me for Taboo works so well for me to see that what I bring to connect new learning isn’t what my student brings to connect new learning.
Zaretta: Well, here’s the thing. I think that is very true, but I don’t think it’s the whole thing, because then you’re going to discount what you bring. Your communal shared schema is why you want to build relationship, because the more we talk, the more we’re going to see that. These are actually things in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain that I break down that come from other fields.
We have a tendency to keep thinking this is something unique to education that we have to learn. All humans do this. When you meet somebody on the plane, all that small talk is to figure out where our shared schema is.
This is what thought partnership looks like when someone is willing to tell you the truth with no chaser. Zaretta doesn’t just hand you frameworks and research—though she does that brilliantly—she hands you a mirror and asks if you’re ready to look at what you’ve been avoiding. She connects the dots between a mother’s worry about her daughter, the architecture of our schools, the filters we carry from our lived experience, and the neural pathways that make learning possible. And she does it with such clarity, such compassion, and such unflinching honesty that you can’t help but be changed by it.
I walked into our conversation carrying questions about my own child, about the work I’m trying to do at PAIS, about equity in independent education. I walked away understanding that all of those questions are actually the same question: are we willing to teach and lead from an examined communal schema, one that has room for every teacher’s and student’s humanity and every student’s brain?
Zaretta’s work—her books, her consulting, her willingness to be a friend and advocate—invites us into that reframing again and again…as many times as we need it. And for that gift, I am straight up grateful …beyond measure.
Building on the framework from her bestselling book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond offers a brain-based approach to strengthening students’ cognitive abilities in Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power.
Not your typical researcher or consultant, Liz connects lived experience to transformative leadership. To uncomplicate leadership and education, every story matters and she is just getting started.
Ask me about Barb Buchwach and I will begin a story that spans 40 years. Sharing the responsibilities of dorm mother gave us a lifelong bond. Although she has a large loving family of her own, she welcomed me as a sister. In every life decision I faced, she would toast me a bagel then smother it with onion, tomato and cheese and make it feel like home. Barb has that gift of making every person she meets feel like her day was made for the moment she spends with you. You will walk away with a feeling of being loved unconditionally and most likely a slice of banana bread or a container of soup. I could list all of the challenges we faced, but they’re less important now, fading farther into background noise every day. What remains salient are the smaller moments mostly set in Barb’s kitchen. There I have cried a thousand tears, laughed until my ribs ached, and been embraced by unconditional love.
She was one of the first people I wanted to walk with. I almost abandoned this project before it began, but tapping into Barb’s wisdom was worth taking the first steps. She had offered counsel and comfort to so many people, who better to guide me. I listened to our recording many times before taking to the computer to document it. I know I will listen to it again and again. I laugh at her tone and first words every time. Ironically, it began far differently than expected…
Barb: Let’s get this walk over with, dammit.
Liz: Well ok then. First of all, your hair looks fantastic. Does that mean you haven’t done chemo in a while?
Barb: My lung nodules grew a little bit, but they’re still very small. [The doctor] wants my body to have a break because I had a long chemo session. I mean, I did chemo for 15 months straight. Most people get six months. Damn. That’s why my hair is fuller ‘cause I told her I don’t feel great a lot. My muscles are so sore. Blah, blah, blah.
Doc said, “First of all, you have to remember you have pancreatic cancer.”
I go, ‘“Really?”
And then she said, “And you had a lot of chemo, and you had radiation, and you just had surgery on Monday.”
I go, “Oh, so this is normal, to feel like this?”
So I have my hair …until I start the chemo again.
While Barb attributes her strength in battling pancreatic cancer to her community of family and friends, she also blames the stress in her life for its occurrence.
Barb: I did this to myself. I just never seemed to be able to get it all together on my own. I want to be the best at all I do as a mother, as a worker, with my house, … I just couldn’t get it all done, so what I hadn’t done would stay in my mind all the time and cause me stress. Add to that I was in sales for 22 years, and anytime you’re in sales, it’s stressful.
If I could go back 22 years, I would probably tell myself to think of me, and think of it as my job to take care of this body, this life. I always put myself last because I could, and then I just ran out of time. It’s not that I didn’t want to take care of myself. I just ran out of time. And the other things, to me, were more important.
Liz: When you say you ran out of time, you mean you thought you’d get to you, you’d take care of everybody else, and then you’d get to yourself?
Barb: Yeah. And I just didn’t. So I didn’t get that walk in, I didn’t go get a massage once a month, and I didn’t make myself something extra healthy to eat because I’d run out of time in the day. And so if I had to guess, I would say it was all that.
We walk in silence for a little bit. I don’t pretend to know what we are all rushing toward, but I know we have made time our enemy until we realize its finite… until that’s palpable. Our pace is slow. Unlike other walks, we aren’t exercising, we are just putting one foot in front of the other. The fall air and the warm sun seem the perfect background to steal this time together.
Barb: And maybe that’s why I’m doing well, because it’s the first time in my life I’ve had no stress, and I have everything I wanted. I don’t know, everything’s just working out now, and I don’t have stress, and I think that’s really helping me. I just love my kids, my house, my family, my friends.
Liz: Isn’t it amazing? It takes a pancreatic cancer diagnosis to get you to the point that you say, “I have all that I wanted.”
While we both burst into momentary laughter at the irony, she offers some of the most profound advice I have received thus far. She reminds me that I cannot let disappointment define me. When any one of us are “in it,” we feel like it is the end of the world. It’s not. The thing that happened is not what is important in our lives. It is the way we get through it that affects our body, our mind and our heart. Somehow we have to get ourselves into a space of believing that I am where I am supposed to be. There’s always solutions.
Barb: You have to take ego out of it because ego is you thinking about you. You think you’re the cause… you feel like you could have made a difference if you’d have done something right. It’s your ego that says you’re good enough or not. I think you have to let that go and know that there is a higher power, whatever that may be. So let it happen. The key is that no matter what you do, you need to have a passion for it and ego begins to fall away.
We both realize we have had experiences in our lives when we were truly focused without ego. The majority of those moments are when our children suffered. Life can bring you to your knees when you’re a mother. Without knowing from where you draw your strength, you stand and place one foot in front of the other. Barb jokes that sometimes strength comes from Xanax, but we know it comes from our community of love.
Barb: I didn’t always handle the big things well. I let them affect my stomach. I remember plain as day Danny, (her oldest), was twelve. So that means Leah was only six. And Danny was so sick that he ended up in the hospital. And my fears were he had some really bad disease or something wrong. And immediately I was sick too. It was total fear. I couldn’t take care of my two kids that were at home. And you came and you took care of them.
Liz: I guess I’ve never said this to you, but what I saw was a woman who stepped up completely for her child, so much so that you needed a break and were brave enough to let someone else step in… instead of trying to do it all. I always think of that time as an example of your strength.
Isn’tthat part of community? It’s not just giving. It’s also receiving.
Barb: And most people, if they love you, they want to do something for you and they aren’t really sure what to do. So I’ve gotten better with that. I’ll ask people. I called Jeanne today and asked her if she was going to Kroger, and she was. Heck, Matt and Big Dan volunteered to take Mac to the vet.
I’ve always cherished my friendships and my family. And over the years, when I’m good, I would do anything for someone else. Which is a lot easier than letting someone do it for you, but now I’m getting good with it. I say, sure, yeah, I’ll take that, or, sure, you can do that for me. But I still have it in me that I think, what can I do back for them?
We randomly walk through a variety of topics as we near the end of the sidewalk… FMLA, IVF, QVC… and she tucks in a sampling of other insights that could each be the topic for a later walk:
Show up. You don’t have to bring anything. Just you. And if you can’t get there, write.
When you have the energy, take advantage of it.
The more you go through in your life, the stronger you are …and then you realize, this is life.
There is no fairy tale and sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason.
We have to be willing to tell our stories. Others may judge, but that cannot be our worry.
Unlike others I will walk with, I handed Barb the magic wand – even if there are no fairy tales – and asked her to chart the course for my life ahead. She told me to make other Liz Hofreuters. The irony in that takes my breath away – I have too often worried that my girls would end up like me. She reminded me… as only a lifelong friend can do, especially one that is facing pancreatic cancer head on …that I was strong… the collateral beauty of the challenges I have faced. I needed to take advantage of that. She urged me to choose a path full of work that I not only love, but one that leaves me time to travel and visit with Grace…to go to Ella’s things and be involved in her life as much as a 16 year old will allow. To sit with her, my friend Barb. She nudged me and whispered almost inaudibly, “You need that time because that’s who you are and you don’t want to regret that.”
Naturally, she sends me off with a container of soup.
Not your typical researcher or consultant, Liz connects lived experience to transformative leadership. To uncomplicate leadership and education, every story matters and she is just getting started.
Before the White House, Theodore Roosevelt did something that shocked the corrupt establishment of 1890s New York, he showed up. On any given midnight, the young commissioner would walk the Manhattan beats himself and found officers asleep or drinking in saloons, or couldn’t find them at their posts altogether. He faced down his challenges …not by sitting back, but by rolling up his sleeves to do hard work himself.
Why in the world does an introduction to the PAIS staff begin with a history lesson on Theodore Roosevelt? Simple. I learned something new when I walked with Jay Harvey, who has a keen interest in the presidents. He taught me this fact about young Roosevelt and I wanted to share it with you. That … and the fact that these four incredible individuals themselves are known to show up, roll up their sleeves and support schools so children and adults can thrive. Side note…I am not a fan of the term “thrive” – it doesn’t quite capture the essence of what we mean – nor do its synonyms. For now it is “good enough”…which by the way is never enough…but I digress. Back to Teddy Roosevelt…the man in the arena.
Jay: I just think that’s a critical value to understand people. And I think it jumps right into why I feel so passionate about visiting schools, because you have to understand and appreciate what the place looks like, what the feel is…try to get a snapshot of the culture…try to meet some of the people… you can’t do that by sitting in your office on Zoom. You can get the facts. You can go to the website, but…
I felt in reading a lot about Teddy Roosevelt, that the stories of him as police commissioner going out under cover at 2:00 in the morning to see exactly what the cops were doing because of what he was hearing… I take much from that.
Jay Harvey, PAIS Director of Accreditation, is an avid reader of presidential biographies. He has his favorites. You will have to ask him next time you see him. You might assume that he was a history teacher, but no… only as an elective…a passion project about the presidents as you could have guessed. Jay was a math teacher. Deb Borden, PAIS Director of Programs and Research, and I share that profession on our resumes. We were all teachers: Math, Science and English respectively.
Liz: Do you miss the classroom?
Jay: Absolutely. It’s funny. My first year at PAIS, they needed an elective teacher for the fall. It was a math elective – business math. I created these electives in my last two or three years for seniors because all of a sudden, college guidance was telling everybody they had to have four years of math. And obviously, not every school has kids that should be going to pre-Calc after algebra. So I went in and taught it… I just like being in a classroom. Absolutely. I think that’s also what drives me to get out and visit schools so much.
Liz: Is it the kids that you miss? And if so, is there an age group of kids?
Deb: Yeah, middle school.
Liz: It’s middle? Oh, wow. You are a special being.
Deb: I love middle schoolers. I was the head of a middle school, and I love middle schoolers. It’s absolutely my favorite age span.
I just miss their energy, and they’re still malleable, tremendously so in middle school. And they are going through so much with their hormones and friendships and figuring out who they are. They really need adults in their lives who love them. They’re so fun and funny. And I loved the discipline piece.
Liz: Really?
Deb: Loved it. Loved it, loved it. I wouldn’t give it to anyone… because it’s just an age where they make mistakes and make poor decisions. And I just wanted them to know that it’s okay. You made a bad decision. We’re not judging you for it. You’re learning from it.
Liz: I used to say, if your kid hasn’t failed in a big way by the time they leave our school, we’ve done something wrong because this is the safe place to make a big mistake.
Deb: Yeah. And to give them the power to make decisions, right?
Liz: And to do it in such a way that when they are on their own in the high school hallway or college campus, they know how to quickly think through consequences and choices.
Deb: And how to restore friendships… if you’ve made a mistake in that way. You can’t ignore or run away from the impact you’ve had on whatever decision you’ve made, but everything can be solved and resolved. But you have to work at it, and the work is worth it.
Deb’s account makes me miss working with children. There’s a particular purpose that comes from working with students. It’s not found in the lesson plans or curriculum maps, but in being woven so authentically into their growth and development. You get to bear witness to all that unfolding potential and pass on guidance that might just echo in another life for decades. It is generational work after all. It is a profound and humbling moment when you realize you matter to someone’s journey in ways you’ll never fully know.
Jay: I just think people, right? Education is such a people-business. It’s always fighting that fight between community and business,
Of course, you can find this moment as readily on the playing field as you can in the classroom. For Char Barwis, PAIS Business and Office Manager, that field is the pitch of field hockey.
Liz: Why do you love field hockey so much?
Char: So funny story. I played field hockey, and in middle school, my husband’s mom was the middle school coach. He was two years older than us, and he would come to see his mom, and all the girls would be like, “Oh, he’s so cute. He’s so cute.” … I ended up marrying him, which is funny. But yeah, so I played and my sister played field hockey… around us, it wasn’t a big sport, and my kids started off in soccer like every other kid around us at four years old. As a parent, you follow the trends and blah, blah, blah. Because somebody tells you you have to…all the pressure. Your kids have to get involved. That fear. Yeah, the fear. So we did the soccer thing, and then someone said, Oh, there’s a field hockey rec league. And I’m like, Get the heck out of here.
So I ended up signing them up, and they loved it, and they just went with it.
Liz: Is it only a female sport?
Char: Yes. I do believe that boys can play if they wear a skirt. But it is traditionally a girls’ sport. What’s funny is it’s huge in the European countries, and that’s more boys.
There’s something uniquely American about field hockey—not the sport itself, which is played by both men and women across the globe, from India to the Netherlands to Australia—but the way it carved out space in our athletic landscape as predominantly a girls’ sport without a boys’ equivalent. That matters in ways we don’t talk about enough. It created a rare territory where girls owned the field and proudly played in a skirt – a pleated tradition dating back to the Victorian era that stuck, but only just recently changed in 2023.
Char: In the United States, it’s all girls. So my girls, they started going with it. They loved it. It has taught them so much, just even being a captain and with the drama and shutting things down and how they are to the little kids that are coming up and the intimidation that some of those kids are feeling and how they talk to the coach and communicate with the coach and the team and the grit and the hard work. They might not get the recognition, but they still go out there and try their best every day.
Nobody said parenting was going to be easy. We give our children the opportunities we can and try to allow for challenges as well, but watching them navigate those challenges can be harder than expected. And then there is…
Liz: …mother and daughter relationships…those are really unique.
Char: It’s funny when you said, “My daughter doesn’t always like me that much.” And I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, these high school years… “ I warn Mary all the time, and she’s like, “Oh, my God, it’s going to get worse?” Her daughter’s six.
Mary: We keep trying her in all these different sports, and she’s doing cartwheels or picking flowers… On the funny, today, she has Cheer after school. It’s an after-school club. Again, that’s not like I have no… I never have an experience in that…
Liz: I was a cheer coach for six years.
Mary: Oh, so you could…
Liz: No, I can’t help. It was because I was a young woman on an independent school campus, and that meant-
Mary: And they needed a cheer coach. Are you serious?
Liz: I had the right gender and no family. So that made me qualified.
Mary: Oh, my God. That’s so funny. Well, right. That’s how it works.
While she wasn’t a teacher, Mary McAndrew, PAIS Director of Communications, understands independent schools and the families that choose them. She gets it – parenting is an epic love story. It is no short sprint. What is it they say …the days are long but the years are short. Indeed, all five of us are parents. It makes us more empathetic in these positions in ways we should explore further. Moreover, Deb and Jay have the gift of being grandparents as well.
Liz: What’s the best part about being a grandma?
Deb: Oh, gosh. I think reliving your parenting of your own children, but more relaxed and also not feeling that big weight of responsibility. But it is just the best. It was very cool also to see Amanda as a mother…she’s such a good mom. So that was really special, too. And I love babies. So in that baby stage, I could sit and hold a newborn baby all day. Love it.
Liz: What would be your advice for a new grandma?
Deb: Just really appreciate the moments because they grow so fast. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why we moved closer to them. They also both, Reese and Finn, think my husband and I are really cool right now, too . Last week, I took Reese to soccer practice… at the end of soccer practice, all the kids and the coaches get together and they do a little cheer. And she’s like, “Lovey, come on, come on. Come out to the huddle”. And I’m like, “No, no, no, no, I’m not doing that.” And she’s like, “No, it’s okay. I asked if you could come out,” and I didn’t because I’m like, I’m not going to be the grandma that goes out in the middle of the field…but she wanted me out there.
Liz: Oh, that’s priceless.
Deb: It is priceless. Yeah, it’s really nice.
I started this series… Setting the PAIS… with the PAIS staff because I wanted to get to know them better. I wanted them to get to know me better. For example, Char loves to plan events which is the reason she knows, “They love taking the desserts. Always have to have Diet Coke at every single meeting we’re ever at. Everybody loves diet coke.”
Liz: And it’s easy for you?
Char: I think one of my strong points is I’m super organized – I write everything down. So I don’t like letting anything linger. And at times, you’ll see, sometimes that can be annoying. If something is lingering, I’ll keep following up on it…and then when it executes well, it’s very rewarding.
Liz: Are you a zero mailbox person? You have to go through all the mail or you don’t feel like you can’t leave something?
Char: Yes and if it can stay in my inbox, I need to categorize it into… I have different follow-up folders. I can’t have anything unopened in my inbox. It has to be put somewhere, deleted or put somewhere.
In walking with our staff, I also wanted to pull back the curtain a bit – humanize the people behind the programs, the emails, the visits… the people who show up for member schools and walk with them on their journey to impact the lives of the next generation.
Liz: So you put on tennis shoes?
Mary: I don’t get out and play tennis, but they’re kinda tennis shoes. Yeah.
Liz: See, I’m so old that everything that’s like this is tennis shoes.
Mary: What do you call them? I thought you meant like these are like a general-
Liz: Wait, is that West Coast, Pennsylvania…East Coast, Pennsylvania thing?
Is it soda or pop?
Mary: Soda.
Liz: I think I say pop. I’m not pop.
Mary: Do you say hoagie?
Liz: I think we actually say coke for everything. Do you want a Coke? I have Dr. Pepper.
Mary: Okay. No, I would say sneakers. Yeah, I put on sneakers.
Liz: I don’t think I’ve ever said sneakers.
Mary: Oh, definitely. Yeah. I thought you meant legitimately that I’m wearing tennis shoes.
Liz: I’ll come back to… Do I say hoagies? I don’t think so. I think I just say subs.
Mary: Subs? Or some people say a grinder at different places, grinders.
Liz: Yeah, I’ve never said Grinder.
So this Pennsylvania west coaster who cheers for the Pittsburgh Steelers will try to represent while donning my tennis shoes with these amazing east coasters. Afterall, I am the newbie… and everything feels new – not just our vocabulary differences. I cherish this position as learner. I want to show up as my authentic self and ask real questions, so I can learn and maybe we can all question assumptions. Jay said it best when he said, our work is
Jay: …really about uplifting and celebrating schools. That’s what it should be for the most part.
And there it is—the Roosevelt connection with which I started.
Theodore Roosevelt didn’t reform the New York Police Department from behind a desk. He pulled on his coat at midnight and walked into the dark streets himself. Not to catch officers in the act for punishment’s sake, but to understand what was actually happening. To see it. To ask questions. To show up.
A century and some change later, Jay Harvey does the same thing. So does Deb. So does Char. So does Mary. They don’t support schools from a distance or through reports and spreadsheets alone. They pull on their tennis shoes and walk through the doors.
I am doing something I never did before. I don’t mean these walks. I mean celebrating the completion of a challenging goal. I am not running past the finish line – panting for what’s next. I am sitting in the glory of setting a goal that only became harder as the weeks wore on and rising to that challenge for no one else than myself… and being willing to do it all with an audience. Three things made it possible.
Luke Hladek as my force multiplier/producer/friend. Hands down – best partner I could ask for.
Grace and Ella as my north star. You are your own sentient beings – already more than I could have ever dreamed of being…brave, curious, creative and imperfect…but you still need your mom. These walks became a way of leaving some bread crumbs of wisdom for you. Maybe someday you will listen to them all.
Mom and Dad as my quiet muse. I did not set out for you to be part of the walks. How naive. You are part of every breath I take, yet somehow I just kept moving forward when you died. That was wrong. I am glad I finally stopped, so to speak. These walks allowed for the pause to grieve.
I thought one last walk with them might be necessary to complete this transition.
Liz: I remember wondering if I could really take a head of school job with a one-year-old and a kindergartener. And she wasn’t one. She was six months when I was making that decision. And you said to me, “Family dinners can be at the Alpha.” And it just took so much pressure off. Whoever or whatever had instilled in me what good mom, good parenting, good leadership looked like. It didn’t have to look that way.
The pauses I take … you can almost hear me thinking… and hear so much of what remains unsaid as I come to terms with the fact that my path could be mine. It didn’t have to look like anyone else’s. My mom lived that. I never got the chance to tell her how crazy proud I am that she marched to the beat of her own drummer.
I’m glad you wore a thong on the beach, even though it embarrassed the hell out of me. I’m glad your retirement party was a dunk tank. I’m glad you traveled the world. Literally. I’m glad you went without us. I don’t have to ask, did I make you proud? I know I did. But I don’t think you know how proud you made me.
Virginia Ann Dulany was a breath of unexpected joy and unbridled empathy. Her sage wisdom guided more lives than she will ever know.
I remember telling you that I really wanted to have another baby. And you told me I had to do whatever it takes. And if that meant nine months of bed rest and somebody else taking care of Grace during that time, then that’s what it meant. I couldn’t wrap my head around that. But it was, again, that thing that opened the door and allowed me to fight through some crazy adoption process to get where I was supposed to be… the mother of Grace and Ella. I asked you once to retire and come take care of Grace so I could go back to work, and you told me you made more money than I did. So I should take care of my baby. I’m really glad you did.
We shared that – motherhood. I understood her so much better once I had children of my own.
And I think now, as Grace is about to graduate from college, what it must have felt like to see me choose to go back to Wheeling when you had chosen to leave. And you needed to for you. And I’m not sorry. I like the way my life twisted and turned. I like where I am…maybe there’s another reality…there’s a Midnight Library somewhere where I open a book and I make a different choice. And I go to Scarsborough, New York, right out of Princeton, instead of coming back to Wheeling, where I go to the Olympic development training camp one summer instead of coming back to hang out with my high school friends. But I didn’t make those choices. And every choice I made led me to where I am, and where I am is pretty incredible. But there had to be all these silent moments of disappointment that you never opened up to me. You just let me live my life, right up until the end.
Mom used to say, “There are worse things than being alone.” She said it so often, I didn’t hear it and unpack it until she was gone and I learned to love being alone. And then I heard it differently when I heard Kaci Bolls sing Somebody’s Somethin’ – she sang.
… She’s always been somebody’s something. She’s been everything but alone. A daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother– She’s lived every life but her own.
I think that is what my mom was teaching me all along – go live my life. I’m doing that now more than ever. It’s awkward. I was used to living every life but my own… putting myself last. After a lifetime of doing that, I can see why my mom would nudge me “when is it your turn?”
I carry the very best of you. I know I do. Some of it I’m just learning now. At 58, I listen. I try to get people to center on what’s important. I’m trying to get better at writing handwritten notes… but I know there was pain, and I know you passed some of that down, too. And I know you tried not to. And I know I try not to. And for a little while, I thought my job was just to make sure my kids didn’t have the pain, but that’s not a mother’s job.
Nor is it a father’s responsibility.
And dad, It’s taking me 58 years to know that there’s no night in shining armor coming over that hill because you made me feel like you could fix anything. And I think you believed it. And I think all of our frustrations and battles were really about your very deep love and desire to make sure things turned out okay. Control. But you were never in control. But the truth is, you lived your life more fully than the generation before you. It’s okay that living mine more fully than you did. I know how hard you worked to be 10% better, to give me a life 10% better. And I didn’t recognize it. And we laughed at you when you made us look at where the fire exits were or when you worried that the snowstorm was going to come in April. But I do that. I walk into a room and I see all the things that could hurt my kids. But then they’re not toddlers anymore, and the room gets too big and you can’t do it.
I just need to be there. I understand why dad took every one of my calls no matter what – just like I do now – because the moments when it is palpable that you still matter in the lives of your children are priceless.
To know we matter. Isn’t that the gift?
Grace said to me the other day, heading out to breakfast. I’m paraphrasing. I wish everybody wasn’t going to know you. She just wanted to have breakfast with her mom. Oh, I get that. You would come home from work, and I would want you to see me, not the people who are coming to run with you or the football players from Linsly that were going to come over and watch the game with you. I just wanted you to see me. But that’s just the selfishness of the moment. It’s just the innocence of questioning for ourselves how much we matter. I knew I mattered to you dad.
And honestly, you taught me some life lessons in so many ways, but never as well as you taught me on the golf course. Find a little tuft of grass. Put the ball on it. Make the shot just a little easier on yourself. Get your balance. Focus. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your head down. But just before that, look out at where you want to hit the ball. See your vision. Know where you’re going. Take a breath. Calm. As you pull the club into your backswing …right at the top…pause ever so slightly in a nod to the gods…
If I could just do that in all my decisions, I think I’d make good ones. Sure, I’m going to hook it. I’m going to hit a worm burner. But I’m going to hit some good shots, too. And I will learn from the ones that don’t go where I want them to. It’s why we chase the little white ball around the course.
I actually play golf with my dad every time I tee off. I don’t know who said golf is a good walk spoiled, but from where I stand today, no walk can be spoiled… not even when playing a shitty round of golf.
Arthur Brooks says, When you’re in transition, you should walk. Best walk I could have imagined.
And as I walk, I become again the child who never left me… a towhead girl with blonde curls reaching skyward, pumping my legs harder, higher, while a paternal hand guides the swing and a voice sings, Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon… That song lives in my bones. My father wrote it into my origin story, a melody that shaped the architecture of who I would become.
Hearing it again makes me want to dance. And isn’t that exactly what my mother is doing?
The night she was dying, I saw her in an ephemeral dress. The skirt flowing in circles as she twirled toward a waiting partner. The image was hazy at first, dreamlike—but it sharpened into clarity. There was a line. A receiving line of those who had gone before… Troy, Howard, Darryl, Bill, Jean, Dick, Churchie, Uncle Dave, Uncle John, Uncle Charley … Pop- pop… my dad. They weren’t impatient. Time had no home in this dimension. They were throwing her a welcoming. I walked her as far as I could go … and that peaceful image is where I go every time I hear…
I’ve been dreaming of friendly faces I’ve got so much time to kill Just imagine people laughing I know some day we will And even if it’s far away Get me through another day
Cover me in sunshine
These walks have been my sunshine. They have taught me a few lessons I wish I had learned while my parents were alive:
Listen.
Be present.
Show up … especially when it’s inconvenient.
At some point you might be broken open … that discomfort is where growth begins.
So this is a celebration of the series I set out to do, but it’s not really an ending. It’s a thank you……to everyone who listened…. to Luke… to my girls … to my mom and my dad… and mostly to everyone who walked with me. Thank you for your trust… your openness… your unconditional love…for holding up a mirror for me while I thought I was holding up a mirror for you… for matching my steps and keeping the cadence until I could more clearly see my path. I love you all.
It is also an invitation. An urging. Walk with someone. Ask them about their life. Listen like you’ve never heard anything more important. Tell them what they mean to you… while you still can. Let them see you—really see you—in all your imperfect, glorious humanity.
Liz: I don’t know what comes of all this. But if I look back at all the times in my life when I didn’t know what comes of all this, it all worked out pretty damn well.
Not your typical researcher or consultant, Liz connects lived experience to transformative leadership. To uncomplicate leadership and education, every story matters and she is just getting started.
