“Good leaders absorb pain; they don’t inflict it.“

Of all the things I learned from my time at Columbia’s University’s Principal program and The NYC Leadership Academy, this is the tenet I hang onto most tightly. Pain is incredibly effective at making things move, but rarely in the desired direction. Expelled by my high school principal one month before graduation for non-compliance and disrespect, I knew intrinsically the risks of placing authority over children with non-loved ones.

But I was never suppose to be in education. I went to art school and was always starting businesses and doing new things. But what was intended to be a two-year sabbatical working with student-inmates at Rikers Island jails changed everything. All under 18 and under unimaginably duress away from home, they came to school each morning with the kind of fight in their eyes that made your fists clenched, too. No matter the crime they were charged with, it was easy to tell that one way or another, they were failed by family, school, and community first.

Children need allies who listen, and doing so has always been our first priority whenever I join a school as its new leader. Double-digit gains on the state tests was the outcome after one year, twice, in different schools. And to have 99% of our kindergartens reading at grade level in April, regardless of race, background, or pronouns, is the testament of the power of the book of love.

“Talking is learning, and listening is teaching,” my mentor would say. But listening is also caring, and the longer I serve as principal, the more I realize that teaching maybe is just caring.

Have a listen.