Worry looks around,
But faith looks up!
THE BUZZARD: If you put a buzzard in a pen that is 6 feet by 8 feet and is entirelyopen at the top, the bird, in spite of its ability to fly, will be anabsolute prisoner. The reason is that a buzzard always begins a flightfrom the ground with a run of 10 to 12 feet. Without space to run, asis its habit, it will not even attempt to fly, but will remain aprisoner for life in a small jail with no top.
THE BAT: The ordinary bat that flies around at night, a remarkable nimblecreature in the air, cannot take off from a level place. If it isplaced on the floor or flat ground, all it can do is shuffle abouthelplessly and, no doubt, painfully, until it reaches some slightelevation from which it can throw itself into the air. Then, at once,it takes off like a flash.
THE BUMBLEBEE: A bumblebee, if dropped into an open tumbler, will be there until itdies, unless it is taken out. It never sees the means of escape at thetop, but persists in trying to find some way out through the sides nearthe bottom. It will seek a way where none exists, until it completelydestroys itself.PEOPLE: In many ways, we are like the buzzard, the bat, and the bumblebee.
We struggle about with all our problems and frustrations, never realizing that all we have to do is look up!
That's the answer, the escape route and the solution to any problem!
Just look up!
FD: This email reminded me of a book I was given by my first school principal: Who Moved My Cheese?
Considering what happened to that school, I should have left and looked for new cheese earlier.
Samuell parents, students plead for security moves Purge of weapons, gangs from school soughtAuthor: Joseph Garcia Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News THE Publish Date: December 7, 1989
Word Count: 964Document ID: 0ED3D0B90725CBD4
Unconvinced by officials' assurances, parents and students at W.W. Samuell High School called Wednesday night for the strongest possible measures to make the school secure one day after a teacher's aide was wounded in a gang-related shooting.
Many among the 220 parents, students and staff members gathered in Samuell's auditorium implored the school district officials to get weapons and youth gang members off the Pleasant Grove campus immediately. They...
Unconvinced by officials' assurances, parents and students at W.W. Samuell High School called Wednesday night for the strongest possible measures to make the school secure one day after a teacher's aide was wounded in a gang-related shooting.
Many among the 220 parents, students and staff members gathered in Samuell's auditorium implored the school district officials to get weapons and youth gang members off the Pleasant Grove campus immediately. They...
It never seemed to have got better ...
Samuell High faces a final year to improve before it faces closing
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 24, 2008
By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News kfischer@dallasnews.com
Three different people, three different perspectives, one common theory for Samuell High School's chronic underachievement: Too few are committed to seeing the Dallas school succeed.
Cathy Weaver (far right), a freshman reading teacher at Samuell High School, and her daughter Emily, 13, decorated Ms. Weaver's classroom Friday. " style="CURSOR: pointer" onclick="return clickedImage(this);" height=121 alt="KYE R. LEE/DMN" src="http://www.txcn.com/sharedcontent/dws/img/v3/08-24-2008.N1A_24samuellMAIN1.GNQ2FBMS0.1.jpg" width=175>
KYE R. LEE/DMNCathy Weaver (far right), a freshman reading teacher at Samuell High School, and her daughter Emily, 13, decorated Ms. Weaver's classroom Friday.
Too few students, says 2008 graduate Clyde Pikes: "A lot of the time, my peers ... didn't want to receive the education that was given."
Too few parents, says mother Tarhonda Woodfin: "Parents put too much responsibility on the teachers, and they don't do their part."
Too few in the school district or in Samuell's Pleasant Grove neighborhood, says former principal Daniel Johnson: "Until the community gets involved and the district goes out and recruits real good, experienced teachers," nothing will change.
But something will change at Samuell in the school year that begins tomorrow, for better or worse. The latest round of state ratings tabbed Samuell "academically unacceptable" for the fourth straight year – a streak that will result in the school's closure if its scores don't jump this year.
The Dallas Independent School District just restructured nearby Spruce High School to avoid closure and has indicated that Samuell will meet a similar fate if it doesn't improve this year.
The Dallas Morning News visited Samuell several times last school year to better understand the obstacles impeding improvement and to learn more about its efforts at reform.
In the evolving drive to improve American public education, revamping inner-city high schools is the effort du jour. Dallas, too, is focusing on high schools.
A recent national report put DISD's graduation rate at 44 percent. The state recently rated 10 of Dallas' 22 non-magnet high schools "academically unacceptable" and would have included eight more if not for a temporary state reprieve on a new dropout standard.
Persistent problems
Samuell's struggles, and those of most inner-city high schools, are rooted in persistent problems: too few effective teachers, students arriving with inadequate skills, absentee parents, too few community resources, and hard-to-break cycles of poverty.
Samuell teachers have been pushing ahead with improvement efforts for more than a year: Saturday tutoring, teacher training, programs on teamwork and camaraderie, and small, career-themed learning communities that are set to launch this fall.
But the efforts only go so far if students and parents don't participate, said Ms. Woodfin, a mother of three current and former Samuell students. Teachers last year held a math and science "lock in" – a sort of educational slumber party.
"It wasn't a party – they had tutoring and all kinds of activities," she said. "But the main thing was they had a hard time getting kids to come."
DISD leaders are hopeful that Samuell will improve. Achievement trends in most subjects are heading in the right direction, albeit slowly. Yet the school enters this important academic year with many questions and few solid answers.
Samuell lost three of seven administrators over the summer, including the principal and the academic dean who were orchestrating improvement efforts. Although energetic and optimistic, the new principal has never led a high school.
In addition, the school has filled 57 vacancies in the last two years among its 118 teachers, many to comply with state orders to replace underperformers. Most were filled with teachers having little or no classroom experience. This summer alone, the school replaced 10 of its 18 math teachers.
Good math teachers are crucial. Only slightly more than one-third of Samuell's students across all grades passed the state math TAKS exams last spring, well short of the 50 percent needed to escape closure this year.
But even if all the improvement efforts come together, and scores improve, the school could still stumble on other factors that determine a school's rating.
Test scores, for example, must hit state targets for student "subgroups" – black, Hispanic, white and low-income. Next year, schools with graduation rates below 75 percent will be tagged "academically unacceptable." Samuell's rate in 2007 was 55 percent.
Turnover
As with any organization, churn at the top can disrupt a school and impede improvement efforts. When Daniel Johnson became principal at Samuell in 2005, he was the third principal in three years.
The first thing he noticed was that Samuell "didn't feel" like school, he said in an interview last school year. There was no student-produced work on the walls. Groups of kids roamed the halls instead of attending class.
"When I walked in, I was like, holy cow, I'd never seen anything like it," said teacher Jade Esquivel. "There was a real sense of fear before. It's not natural for mobs of kids to be in the halls or just to wander into your room when you're in the middle of a lesson."
Brittany Douglass spent nearly three years at Samuell before transferring to a magnet program at Lincoln High School. It wasn't uncommon, she said, for students to show up to class and then leave right after attendance was taken.
"You always had kids walking in and out, a lot of distractions going on," she said. "You had teachers who cared, but it seemed if they lost control, they just gave up."
The school climate has improved since then, Mr. Esquivel and others said. A dress code pushed out some troublemaking students who didn't want to conform. The number of "hall walkers" has been greatly reduced. Student artwork and classroom projects plaster the hallways, where they remain for weeks untouched.
Now, with Dr. Johnson taking a new job in Cedar Hill and Academic Dean Kathryn Carter leaving to become a principal elsewhere in DISD, Samuell faces yet another round of turnover.
Its new leader is Israel Cordero, an elementary school principal who taught and coached at Samuell 10 years ago. Joining Mr. Cordero will be a former academic dean from W.T. White High School and Joy Barnhart, a former W.T. White principal with a no-nonsense reputation, hired to advise Mr. Cordero.
"I am new as a principal, but I'm not new as a person in Samuell's community," said Mr. Cordero, who's been on the job about two weeks. "I've been able to hit the ground running and not have to learn how to navigate" the school and staff.
Trustee Nancy Bingham, whose district encompasses Samuell, considers Mr. Cordero a good pick but acknowledged he'll have to play a "perfect game" to avoid a fifth academically unacceptable state rating.
"I've just got to be optimistic that they can do it if we get them what they need," Mrs. Bingham said.
And what, exactly, does Samuell need? Quality teachers, for starters, said its former principal and others, including Mrs. Bingham.
Samuell was restructured in the summer of 2007 under state provisions for low-performing schools. Twenty-eight teachers were released from the school, selected primarily because of their students' scores on standardized tests.
Ultimately, the overhaul, called a "reconstitution," meant Samuell had about three months over the summer of 2007 to find 28 new teachers, in addition to the 12 vacancies created through normal turnover.
The issue of teacher quality confronts school systems across the country. Nationally, there is a shortage of qualified math and science teachers. Study after study has found that the least-prepared, most inexperienced teachers invariably end up in the nation's neediest schools.
In the end, 23 of Samuell's 28 "reconstituted" teachers were replaced by newcomers to the profession. Seventeen came in under the district's "alternative certification" program, which places people switching from other careers in classrooms while the district trains them to be teachers.
Last year, DISD began offering experienced teachers a $6,000 bonus to teach in 16 low-performing schools, including Samuell. Although thousands were eligible, only 65 teachers made the switch. Five went to Samuell. Mrs. Bingham said maybe it's time for the district to try a new approach. "Maybe we should explore a Peace Corps kind of program where we send [veteran] teachers into some of these schools," she said.
PTA growing
Teachers now at the school say they need parents to be more involved. In 2005, the PTA had three members, but had grown to about 185 last year.
Recent graduate Clyde Pikes III noticed too many young and inexperienced teachers during his three years at Samuell.
"Most of the teachers are younger teachers, and it's hard for them to control the students," said Mr. Pikes, who was active in student council and the school's debate team. "One of my teachers was in his first year out of college, and it was hard for him because he was just as young" as his students.
But he didn't blame adults for the school's struggles.
"You have a lot of teachers that really, really care, but a lot of the time my peers didn't recognize how much they could benefit from that," he said.
'She's a nobody'
Mrs. Carter, the academic dean, was responsible for evaluating teachers. One day last fall, she visited a few classes.
The first was loud but orderly. Students remained in their seats, calling out names and ages of athletes as the teacher plotted the information on an electronic whiteboard. After the names and ages were logged onto the graph, the students entered the data into their graphing calculators.
Two doors down, the classroom of a new alternative certification teacher was in chaos.
In the back of the room a student, Roberto, leaned with his head against the wall. Sunglasses on and mouth running, he emitted constant chatter aimed at anyone and everyone.
The teacher, 62 years old and brand-new to teaching, told the teen to be quiet.
"What are you going to do about it?" Roberto shot back.
A girl walked into the classroom and began passing out cookies, creating a minor flurry as kids scrambled to snag one. Roberto was talking again, pulling up a hooded sweatshirt: "How old do I look? How old do I look?"
One student nodded toward the dean and asked a classmate, "Who's she?"
"She's a nobody," the classmate replied.
As the teacher began yelling – "Sit down!" "Be quiet!" "Stop that!" – two students walked out, followed by the girl with the cookies. Turns out, she wasn't in the class anyway.
In the hallway a few minutes later, Mrs. Carter was asked why the school didn't replace that teacher with somebody better.
"It's November," three months into the school year, she replied. "Who would we replace him with?"
By early spring, though, two alternative certification math teachers, including the one above, were informed that their contracts would not be renewed for the 2008-09 school year. In an unusual move, their students were dispersed into the classes of more experienced teachers. The two non-renewed teachers served out the remainder of the year as teacher assistants and tutors.
The move bumped the veteran teachers' class rolls above the district class-size limit, but Samuell administrators saw the switch as necessary. Better to have too many kids assigned to good teachers than hundreds learning little from inexperienced ones. This summer, Samuell faced its usual hunt for teachers. As of Friday, it had filled 15 of 17 vacancies.
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 24, 2008
By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News kfischer@dallasnews.com
Three different people, three different perspectives, one common theory for Samuell High School's chronic underachievement: Too few are committed to seeing the Dallas school succeed.
Cathy Weaver (far right), a freshman reading teacher at Samuell High School, and her daughter Emily, 13, decorated Ms. Weaver's classroom Friday. " style="CURSOR: pointer" onclick="return clickedImage(this);" height=121 alt="KYE R. LEE/DMN" src="http://www.txcn.com/sharedcontent/dws/img/v3/08-24-2008.N1A_24samuellMAIN1.GNQ2FBMS0.1.jpg" width=175>
KYE R. LEE/DMNCathy Weaver (far right), a freshman reading teacher at Samuell High School, and her daughter Emily, 13, decorated Ms. Weaver's classroom Friday.
Too few students, says 2008 graduate Clyde Pikes: "A lot of the time, my peers ... didn't want to receive the education that was given."
Too few parents, says mother Tarhonda Woodfin: "Parents put too much responsibility on the teachers, and they don't do their part."
Too few in the school district or in Samuell's Pleasant Grove neighborhood, says former principal Daniel Johnson: "Until the community gets involved and the district goes out and recruits real good, experienced teachers," nothing will change.
But something will change at Samuell in the school year that begins tomorrow, for better or worse. The latest round of state ratings tabbed Samuell "academically unacceptable" for the fourth straight year – a streak that will result in the school's closure if its scores don't jump this year.
The Dallas Independent School District just restructured nearby Spruce High School to avoid closure and has indicated that Samuell will meet a similar fate if it doesn't improve this year.
The Dallas Morning News visited Samuell several times last school year to better understand the obstacles impeding improvement and to learn more about its efforts at reform.
In the evolving drive to improve American public education, revamping inner-city high schools is the effort du jour. Dallas, too, is focusing on high schools.
A recent national report put DISD's graduation rate at 44 percent. The state recently rated 10 of Dallas' 22 non-magnet high schools "academically unacceptable" and would have included eight more if not for a temporary state reprieve on a new dropout standard.
Persistent problems
Samuell's struggles, and those of most inner-city high schools, are rooted in persistent problems: too few effective teachers, students arriving with inadequate skills, absentee parents, too few community resources, and hard-to-break cycles of poverty.
Samuell teachers have been pushing ahead with improvement efforts for more than a year: Saturday tutoring, teacher training, programs on teamwork and camaraderie, and small, career-themed learning communities that are set to launch this fall.
But the efforts only go so far if students and parents don't participate, said Ms. Woodfin, a mother of three current and former Samuell students. Teachers last year held a math and science "lock in" – a sort of educational slumber party.
"It wasn't a party – they had tutoring and all kinds of activities," she said. "But the main thing was they had a hard time getting kids to come."
DISD leaders are hopeful that Samuell will improve. Achievement trends in most subjects are heading in the right direction, albeit slowly. Yet the school enters this important academic year with many questions and few solid answers.
Samuell lost three of seven administrators over the summer, including the principal and the academic dean who were orchestrating improvement efforts. Although energetic and optimistic, the new principal has never led a high school.
In addition, the school has filled 57 vacancies in the last two years among its 118 teachers, many to comply with state orders to replace underperformers. Most were filled with teachers having little or no classroom experience. This summer alone, the school replaced 10 of its 18 math teachers.
Good math teachers are crucial. Only slightly more than one-third of Samuell's students across all grades passed the state math TAKS exams last spring, well short of the 50 percent needed to escape closure this year.
But even if all the improvement efforts come together, and scores improve, the school could still stumble on other factors that determine a school's rating.
Test scores, for example, must hit state targets for student "subgroups" – black, Hispanic, white and low-income. Next year, schools with graduation rates below 75 percent will be tagged "academically unacceptable." Samuell's rate in 2007 was 55 percent.
Turnover
As with any organization, churn at the top can disrupt a school and impede improvement efforts. When Daniel Johnson became principal at Samuell in 2005, he was the third principal in three years.
The first thing he noticed was that Samuell "didn't feel" like school, he said in an interview last school year. There was no student-produced work on the walls. Groups of kids roamed the halls instead of attending class.
"When I walked in, I was like, holy cow, I'd never seen anything like it," said teacher Jade Esquivel. "There was a real sense of fear before. It's not natural for mobs of kids to be in the halls or just to wander into your room when you're in the middle of a lesson."
Brittany Douglass spent nearly three years at Samuell before transferring to a magnet program at Lincoln High School. It wasn't uncommon, she said, for students to show up to class and then leave right after attendance was taken.
"You always had kids walking in and out, a lot of distractions going on," she said. "You had teachers who cared, but it seemed if they lost control, they just gave up."
The school climate has improved since then, Mr. Esquivel and others said. A dress code pushed out some troublemaking students who didn't want to conform. The number of "hall walkers" has been greatly reduced. Student artwork and classroom projects plaster the hallways, where they remain for weeks untouched.
Now, with Dr. Johnson taking a new job in Cedar Hill and Academic Dean Kathryn Carter leaving to become a principal elsewhere in DISD, Samuell faces yet another round of turnover.
Its new leader is Israel Cordero, an elementary school principal who taught and coached at Samuell 10 years ago. Joining Mr. Cordero will be a former academic dean from W.T. White High School and Joy Barnhart, a former W.T. White principal with a no-nonsense reputation, hired to advise Mr. Cordero.
"I am new as a principal, but I'm not new as a person in Samuell's community," said Mr. Cordero, who's been on the job about two weeks. "I've been able to hit the ground running and not have to learn how to navigate" the school and staff.
Trustee Nancy Bingham, whose district encompasses Samuell, considers Mr. Cordero a good pick but acknowledged he'll have to play a "perfect game" to avoid a fifth academically unacceptable state rating.
"I've just got to be optimistic that they can do it if we get them what they need," Mrs. Bingham said.
And what, exactly, does Samuell need? Quality teachers, for starters, said its former principal and others, including Mrs. Bingham.
Samuell was restructured in the summer of 2007 under state provisions for low-performing schools. Twenty-eight teachers were released from the school, selected primarily because of their students' scores on standardized tests.
Ultimately, the overhaul, called a "reconstitution," meant Samuell had about three months over the summer of 2007 to find 28 new teachers, in addition to the 12 vacancies created through normal turnover.
The issue of teacher quality confronts school systems across the country. Nationally, there is a shortage of qualified math and science teachers. Study after study has found that the least-prepared, most inexperienced teachers invariably end up in the nation's neediest schools.
In the end, 23 of Samuell's 28 "reconstituted" teachers were replaced by newcomers to the profession. Seventeen came in under the district's "alternative certification" program, which places people switching from other careers in classrooms while the district trains them to be teachers.
Last year, DISD began offering experienced teachers a $6,000 bonus to teach in 16 low-performing schools, including Samuell. Although thousands were eligible, only 65 teachers made the switch. Five went to Samuell. Mrs. Bingham said maybe it's time for the district to try a new approach. "Maybe we should explore a Peace Corps kind of program where we send [veteran] teachers into some of these schools," she said.
PTA growing
Teachers now at the school say they need parents to be more involved. In 2005, the PTA had three members, but had grown to about 185 last year.
Recent graduate Clyde Pikes III noticed too many young and inexperienced teachers during his three years at Samuell.
"Most of the teachers are younger teachers, and it's hard for them to control the students," said Mr. Pikes, who was active in student council and the school's debate team. "One of my teachers was in his first year out of college, and it was hard for him because he was just as young" as his students.
But he didn't blame adults for the school's struggles.
"You have a lot of teachers that really, really care, but a lot of the time my peers didn't recognize how much they could benefit from that," he said.
'She's a nobody'
Mrs. Carter, the academic dean, was responsible for evaluating teachers. One day last fall, she visited a few classes.
The first was loud but orderly. Students remained in their seats, calling out names and ages of athletes as the teacher plotted the information on an electronic whiteboard. After the names and ages were logged onto the graph, the students entered the data into their graphing calculators.
Two doors down, the classroom of a new alternative certification teacher was in chaos.
In the back of the room a student, Roberto, leaned with his head against the wall. Sunglasses on and mouth running, he emitted constant chatter aimed at anyone and everyone.
The teacher, 62 years old and brand-new to teaching, told the teen to be quiet.
"What are you going to do about it?" Roberto shot back.
A girl walked into the classroom and began passing out cookies, creating a minor flurry as kids scrambled to snag one. Roberto was talking again, pulling up a hooded sweatshirt: "How old do I look? How old do I look?"
One student nodded toward the dean and asked a classmate, "Who's she?"
"She's a nobody," the classmate replied.
As the teacher began yelling – "Sit down!" "Be quiet!" "Stop that!" – two students walked out, followed by the girl with the cookies. Turns out, she wasn't in the class anyway.
In the hallway a few minutes later, Mrs. Carter was asked why the school didn't replace that teacher with somebody better.
"It's November," three months into the school year, she replied. "Who would we replace him with?"
By early spring, though, two alternative certification math teachers, including the one above, were informed that their contracts would not be renewed for the 2008-09 school year. In an unusual move, their students were dispersed into the classes of more experienced teachers. The two non-renewed teachers served out the remainder of the year as teacher assistants and tutors.
The move bumped the veteran teachers' class rolls above the district class-size limit, but Samuell administrators saw the switch as necessary. Better to have too many kids assigned to good teachers than hundreds learning little from inexperienced ones. This summer, Samuell faced its usual hunt for teachers. As of Friday, it had filled 15 of 17 vacancies.
and then it got worse...
DISD board lacks plan for Spruce, Samuell high school students
06:31 AM CDT on Tuesday, March 24, 2009
By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News kfischer@dallasnews.com
Days before Dallas school trustees are scheduled to vote on a preliminary plan to close two troubled high schools, board members are still far apart on a workable plan.
The primary sticking point: where to send 1,400 low-performing students who would be displaced from Spruce and Samuell high schools and whose dreadful test scores could land more district high schools on the state's closure list.
About 2 p.m. Monday, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa told reporters that trustees favored turning Spruce and Samuell into single-sex campuses as part of an ambitious reorganization that would be required if scores at the schools do not rise considerably this year.
But by 6 p.m., that idea was off the table, as trustees balked at the plan's requirement to send hundreds of failing students to Conrad and Roosevelt high schools.
All the hand-wringing, however, will be moot if students at Samuell or Spruce meet performance goals this year. Test results that will determine the schools' fates are expected in late May. If they do meet goals, the schools will remain open. But if scores don't rise considerably, the state will shut them down.
The district could reopen the campuses next year, but state rules prohibit more than 50 percent of current students from returning. That means the district would have to find new schools for roughly 1,400 students currently attending Spruce and Samuell.
Only a few schools in the district could take in that many students, and Roosevelt and Conrad high schools are the leading contenders. The district implemented a pre-emptive restructuring of Spruce last summer, shipping several hundred students to Madison and Lincoln high schools. But in doing so, administrators made concessions to those schools that forced several hundred low-performing students into alternative schools.
The prospect of having 1,400 low-performing students looking for new schools did not sit well with trustees Monday. Trustee Lew Blackburn was clear that he didn't want them headed en masse into his district, which is home to Roosevelt.
Doing that, Blackburn contended, would effectively doom Roosevelt to its own state-ordered dismantling next year. Roosevelt could enter its fourth year of low performance next fall if scores don't rise this year.
"You're adding [problem] students to a problem school," Blackburn said. "How does that help Roosevelt? We're just shifting students from one [low-performing] school to another."
He appeared to have the support of several trustees, who perhaps were seeing the fates of high schools in their districts when they were told that as many as six more high schools could be up for dismantling next year if scores don't improve.
Hinojosa said Blackburn's comments reveal his own frustrations over the state rules, which require students to enroll in different schools as part of the restructuring, even when districts have no place to send them.
State rules require that trustees vote on a restructuring plan for Spruce and Samuell by the end of the month. Trustees said they doubted they could agree on a plan by Thursday's regularly scheduled monthly board meeting. They talked Monday about holding an emergency meeting Saturday, and perhaps another next Monday, to meet the state deadline.
"This whole thing [of shifting students] is unrealistic," said board president Jack Lowe.
Mr. Cordero, Samuell's new principal, is optimistic about his staff and the opportunity to turn things around.
"The energy levels here are very good right now, and the staff is excited," he said. "All of the conversations I've been involved in are about how this is going to be a wonderful school year."
I hope that he had a good year and his students do well.
I am surprised to see that the Cheese book is now a free download: http://ee.sharif.edu/~commi/Comm1_files/WhoMovedMyCheese.pdf
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life', published in 1998, is a motivational book by Spencer Johnson written in the style of a parable. It describes change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to said change by two mice and two "little people", during their hunt for cheese. A New York Times business bestseller since release, Who Moved My Cheese? remained on the list for almost five years and spent over two hundred weeks on Publishers Weekly's hardcover nonfiction list.[1]
Soiler Alert!... you might just want to read the ending.
Uncompromising, Hem turns away the new cheese to his friend's dismay. With knowledge acquired along the way, Haw heads back into the maze. Still going deeper into the maze, impelled by bits of new cheese here and there, Haw leaves a trail of writings on the wall, hopeful that his friend will be aided by them in his search for new cheese. Still traveling, Haw one day comes across Cheese Station N. Abundant with cheese, some varieties strange to him, he has found what he is looking for. After eating, Haw reflects on his experience. Pondering a return to his old friend, Haw decides to let Hem find his own way.
Finding the largest wall in Cheese Station N, he writes:
Change Happens
They Keep Moving The Cheese
Anticipate Change
Get Ready For The Cheese To Move
Monitor Change
Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
Adapt To Change Quickly
The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
Change
Move With The Cheese
Enjoy Change!
Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again & Again
They Keep Moving The Cheese.
Cautious from past experience, Haw inspects Cheese Station N daily and explores different parts of the maze to prevent complacency from setting in. After hearing movement in the maze one day, Haw realizes someone is approaching the station. Unsure, Haw hopes that it is his friend Hem who has found the way.
Criticism
Some managers are known to mass-distribute copies of the book to employees, some of whom see this as an insult, or an attempt to characterize dissent as not "moving with the cheese".
Some managers are known to mass-distribute copies of the book to employees, some of whom see this as an insult, or an attempt to characterize dissent as not "moving with the cheese".
In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural re-organization", or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way.
This misuse of the book's message is seen by some as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally.
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams claims that patronizing parables are one of the top 10 complaints he receives in his email.[2]
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