This morning was spent recalling incidents while teaching at the University of Northern Iowa where I was employed from 1969 until taking early retirement in the year 2000. Some memories stand out as positive moments and others as less than productive circumstances. It is the purpose in this document to illustrate to the younger and less experienced leaders in the field of education just how to keep ones focus while dealing with the everyday problems which unfortunately come with the job. Example 2. “Sometimes you just have to stir up the water” I have worked for five directors of our…

When it is 4:00 AM and you can’t get back to sleep, what do you do? As I lay in bed, thoughts of the past day, political debates, and discomfort from the last piece of pizza run through my head until I had to do something a little more productive and now I’m at the computer again. When I started thinking of this post this morning, my first thought was, will my wife truly understand the significance of this post. Will she grasp the concept of the comparison of memories of old trumpets, cornets, flugel horns, trombones, slide trumpets and…