what I learned from the 2007 election

1. Sometimes, positive wins.
Our Board campaign started off innocuous enough, but turned into a slugfest--on the Olympian comment boards, and in a few vitriolic emails, especially--with a flurry of punches thrown at the Olympia Education Association, current board members, the candidates, a state representative, and anyone else within pugilizing distance.

For the most part, our side either stayed out of the fray or took a judicious, measured stance, avoiding a response in kind. In the end, it turned out that the loudest, most negative spectators were putting off more people than they were firing up.

2. I take these things a lot more personally than I let on.
In my private life and here on the blog, I'm calm, reasonable, dispassionate as a matter of course. I learned that I save my angst for the unconscious. I got to the point where I could monitor my stress level by the poor quality of my sleep--and the inverse, dream-wise.

3. You just never know.
The Simple Majority measure passed. On election night, it took a nosedive, but ended up nosing ahead. The nose knows, but I sure didn't. (For what it's worth, the nosehair-thin margin, in the end, is indicative that people won't mind funding schools, but they don't want districts to go levy-happy. Hmm... maybe it's time to fix our state's bizarro funding inequities?)

4. Politics can be fun.
But not as much as teaching.