Author: Mr. Chase

The Evil Question

Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Evil exists. I can’t speak to the broad evil outlined here, but the narrow definition of evil is real. In attempting to explain, I’m also attempting to avoid the supernatural bird’s nest of thinking that doesn’t serve the conversation.

Evil exists because we need the word. People take actions in the world toward which I would point and say, “That is evil.”

The difference, the frustration come in our willingness to too easily ascribe evil as the cause of most of those actions with which we disagree.

Suggesting that and expecting anyone in America can rise up from poverty given hard work and a firm grasp on their bootstraps is wrong. It is not evil.

Fostering hatred of the poor, the different, the other and advocating they be treated as less than and denied human and civil rights is evil.

Actions which result in the unintended oppression of others, the pain and suffering of your fellow humans are wrong. They deserve fitting consequences for the actor, and they are still wrong, not evil.

Actions made with malice and the intent of silencing, oppressing, and breaking the spirit of others are evil. Even if those actions fail to result in their intended effects, that does not make them any less evil.

Evil does not have to be effective to be evil.

We all carry some piece of it with us. I’ve always imagined that the horror I experience when I see man’s grossest inhumanity toward man is partially driven by my fear of such acts being perpetrated on me or a community to which I belong. Somewhere, splintered off in the dark part of my psyche, my horror is also driven by the possibility that I too could perpetrate such evil.

That is humanity, living with and recognizing the evil we could do to one another and actively working against it – choosing compassion, good, and empathy in both the big and little moments.

I do not know if I believe people are inherently good or inherently evil. It makes more sense, instead, to believe that each person holds within them the potential for unimaginable good or unimaginable evil and to stand back in awe of how good the vast majority of us actively choose to be each day.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

A History of a Thing I Lost

Light Reading

Are there books you can read more than once? I’m talking outside of the fervor with which you approached Harold and the Purple Crayon or Dr. Seuss as a child. Are there books that keep bringing you back to their pages for more?

For me, the list is incredibly few. At its top sits The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. I won’t pretend that an 18th Century book by Samuel Johnson first published in serial form fits my go-to profile for favorite books. This one, though, is an example of the right book at the right time.

Rasselas and I first became acquainted during Fall semester of freshman year in college. The prof who taught my required Foundations of Inquiry course was also an 18th Century Brit Lit scholar, and he used a quotation from Rasselas at the top of his syllabus.

Our discussion of that quotation on the first day of class influenced a line of thinking for me that was something like, “College. Okay, yeah. I see how I could like it here.” And, I did.

I found Rasselas on the shelves of the local used book store and devoured it over winter break (a tradition I kept for many years after). The book became my gift of choice when friends faced major life choices and changes. I have no knowledge of whether or not any of them read the book, but handing it to them was an act of saying, “This was a flashlight when I needed it. I hope it can be the same for you.”

While I compulsively searched every used bookstore I encountered for more copies to add to my stock, one version, a small, light green edition stayed on my shelves with my notes in the margins. While not the, this was my first edition. We’d been on the journey together. We’d conversed about the importance of making your choice and being content.

Then, I gave it away. At a moment of realizing someone else needed it more than I did, I handed that edition off, hoping the combination of Johnson’s words and my margin notes might offer more than a clean copy could.

I miss that book. Since handing it over, I’ve not found another edition of Rasselas. We haven’t spent this much time apart since we met in college. Until we meet again, I’m trying my best to remember the lessons we learned together.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Can You Take a Compliment?

After last night’s improv show, I was sitting in the lobby of the theater as the last few audience members were leaving. “Great show,” a few of them said, “That was really funny, and I had no idea where it was going.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Last night was one of the rare occasions I was in agreement with them. It had been a fun show. The group was listening, playing around the fringes of chaos, and still paying attention to when we needed to calm a scene or “rest the game”. While far from perfect, it was a good show. I could agree with those audience members.

This is different than many shows where the quality to which we aspire and what actually ends up happening on stage are significantly different. After these shows, inexplicably, audience members still offer what feels like genuine positive feedback on the performance. These are the hardest “good shows” to hear.

Internally, I think, “Were we at the same show?” and begin to tick off the myriad moves I should have made and didn’t. I map the imperfect listening and the lines I thought would land, but flopped when they made it to the audience.

Externally, I say, “Thank you.”

Time was that I would say thank you and keep internally accounting for all of my flaws in the show. After almost two decades of performing improv, I’m getting better at realizing mine isn’t the only valid perspective on a show.

For everything I would or could have done better, the audience members who honestly compliment a show I think went down the tubes can recount a moment that made them laugh, surprised them, or pulled them more closely to a world that didn’t exist before the show started and will never exist again.

And that’s the lesson. Were they to pick at the flaws of a show (while socially awkward), I’d be right there with them. “When you went to do X, but the other person did Y, it looked like you all didn’t know what to do next,” would bring me into the conversation fully.

Acknowledging what we did right, though, is a more difficult pill to swallow. It means not only seeing the world from another person’s perspective, it means seeing me from another person’s perspective and deciding to like what I see. This is not easy.

Yet, it’s exactly what I asked high school students to do when I implemented High Grade Compliments. The thing I was prepared for in helping my students formulate specific, positive comments for their peers was the mining and speaking their thinking. Seeing the good in another person and speaking that good to them are two different things.

Remarkably, they took to this quickly. They’d been paying attention to what they appreciated in their classmates all along, it seems. What they struggled with – to the development of deep blushing, nervous smiles, and an inability to hold eye contact – was hearing someone else call out how they made our classroom a better place.

It’s why I added coaching on the receiving of compliments to the process. The rule was simple, “Really listen to what they are saying and then say, ‘Thank you’.”

School, life, and any number of outside forces had tuned them in to hearing criticism from others and even accepting it. And while critique has its place in the building of better ideas and examining beliefs, it shouldn’t be our default when people start to talk about us or our work. Living in the belief that the world wants you to know what’s wrong with what you’ve built doesn’t lend itself well to inspiring the building of new things.

It was the teaching of this lesson to assembled adolescents that shifted my practice in improv. Urging others to be open to what their peers might appreciate about themselves meant I needed to shift my listening as well.

Now, when shows don’t go as well as they did last night and an audience member’s opinion of a performance is more positive than my internal damning, my thank you is internally followed by, “…for making me take the time to realize there was more good there than I was willing to see.”

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

The Search (and Price) of Intelligent Algorithms

Search

Sometimes, when I want to know what it’s like not to be me, I’ll jump into incognito mode on Chrome and search for something, anything – just to see what a newborn baby might find on his first search.

If there’s a notable difference, it’s that I’m searching alone. None of the content from my friends (as Google knows them) is present. None of the recommendations take into effect what past me has gone searching for. I’m asking a question of the entire web, not the web as Google curates it for me.

Still, Google lets me search. It doesn’t require I feed its data monster with my specific personal information. I am free to wander the Internet as anonymously as possible for anyone with a static IP address.

When I turn to sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, though, doors are closed. While Google will let me get by only paying with the what of my searching, these sites raise the price – they want to know who.

All of this rests on the idea that computer algorithms are strong in their ability to furnish me with answers. The more they know about the questions I’m asking, the better their ability to anticipate and queue up answers most relevant to me. That’s Me, specifically, not someone like me. Insomuch as is possible for a machine, these lines of code are personalizing the answers for which I’m searching in my learning.

But these algorithms are doing more than that. They are deciding what I don’t see. They are narrowing the Internet I experience. Because search engines and other sites that track my behavior online track what they take to be my habits, the options I see when I go looking for information are the answers I’m anticipated to need or want. And, there’s a trade off. I often find what I’m looking for, but I hardly ever stumble upon something randomly interesting. Imagine traveling the world an avoiding all the places you hadn’t seen or heard about before.

These are the answers algorithms provide.

What’s more, while these lines of code are narrowing the world and people I experience online, they’re failing to help me ask better questions. When I’m led to ask questions online, it’s because of breadcrumbs left by other people on the chance I might want to make a turn. Think of a Wikipedia entry as an example. A well written page includes loads of links to what a computer might read as randomly selected. Even when able to identify parts of speech, it is the human element that decides Prince Adam deserves a link on the entry for Skeletor while leaving Keldor as plain text.

Algorithms suck at curiosity. They don’t anticipate it well, and they rarely engender it in users. Any program that ushers a user through a series of pre-conceived questions is avoiding actual questioning. To keep the travel metaphor going, these experiences are like riding It’s a Small World rather than actually traveling to each of the countries depicted. And, no matter how well such applications anticipate your reaction to a given set of stimuli, whatever is put in front of you next isn’t computer generated, it was programmed by someone who decided where your unknowing should go next.

While the secret soup that makes search engines and other sites pull up the answers to my questions is imperfectly good, I have to remember that it comes at the cost of my information (anonymous or not) and experiencing the world in a way someone like me is “supposed” to see it. This is more limited than I know.

For however good these systems are at finding my answers, they are nowhere near as capable of helping me generate questions as a conversation with a friend or reading a thoughtful editorial. While they are able to learn, they are certainly not curious.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

I’m Falling Behind My Questions

Racin' Snails 2

I long ago gave up on examining all the information available to me. I’m slowly coming to accept I haven’t the time or focus to examine all the information that interests me either. The piles of books littering my home and office along with the dozens of articles I’ve currently got open across multiple devices are evidence I might be more curious than I have time for.

When I started talking with and coaching educators on building a conceptual framework for managing information flow as they started to utilize digital tools, my advice was to focus on those topics about which they were most interested. Now, that reasoning only stands to serve intensely acurious individuals.

Every question I can pose has a corresponding rabbit whole waiting for me to jump. Each of those books and open articles is a map of where I intend to jump – later. I don’t know that later will ever come. Not for all of them.

I will never have time to read and consider the answers to all of my questions. They are too many and the sources of information more multitudinous still.

Faced with the question of how to deal with an overflow of information now, my answer is to focus on the answers you need in the moment, and decide if free time is worth dedicating to new information or reflecting on the learning you’ve already done.

Given the effect of a full cognitive load, the answer might be none of the above. Folks might opt to zone out and let information settle. As much as I love learning and swoon over inquiry, the infinite information stream also calls for quietly doing nothing of consequence so that I can better appreciate the consequences of those answers I decide are worth chasing.

I know all of this, and yet I still pick up more books for which I can’t conceive finding the time or open yet another collection of interesting browser tabs. Because, maybe, I’ll get around to it as soon as I’ve read everything else.

The Purpose of Writing

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed. Frank Bidhart

When I was in university and going through some things, I wrote poetry. Not the poetry you’re thinking of – stream of consciousness poetry. Pages full of word after word poetry. My professor, to her credit, saw that those words and how they poured out of me were about more than whatever assignments she’d been giving. Whatever grades I earned in that class, they were about my ability to analyze the works of others and certainly nothing to do with what I’d created.

Whenever I’ve been in love, I’ve written poetry to the object of my affection. Hours have been spent agonizing over stanzas, couplets, and figurative language. In a few instances, those relationships inspired poetry from others. I got to come to an understanding of what I meant to another person in verse.

Throughout high school, I wrote a regular column for the local paper’s youth section. Some pieces were ridiculous attempts to replicate the humor I’d found in the columns of adult voices. Others worked to build a bridge between my high school experience and that of other students and adults who were reading. The ones I loved most started with a mindset of, “What if I try this?” Having that space and that audience made a huge difference in my sense of identity in high school.

I don’t remember much about college, but I remember working at the paper. I remember starting out as a reporter and scrapping for stories. I remember writing my first column and taking that job as seriously as I’d taken anything. I remember becoming editor-in-chief and feeling the responsibility of informing a campus. I remember telling my editors and reporters, “If every student on this campus can’t see themselves somewhere in each issue, then we’re not doing our job.” Different than my high school writing, this was writing with a responsibility I’d never felt before.

Now, my day gig gives me the opportunity to work with practitioners and experts from across the country to form guidance and material that pushes people to shift their thinking about how they form systems and processes of learning. I am asked on a regular basis to provide content that will inform policy and messaging at levels I’d never imagined being a part of. Getting things right has only mattered this much once before.

Writing project descriptions as a teacher was the most difficult writing I’ve ever done. Several years in, the biggest learning I did was asking students who’d had my classes before to read my plans and tell me where I’d screwed up. That writing wasn’t just to explain a thing to other people, but to help them move toward experiences that built on their understanding of the world. Getting things wrong meant they didn’t get to where I knew they could. Getting things right meant they completed projects beyond my imagining. I was writing for the approval of my students and their advancement. What could matter more?

I think you mean, “What are the purposes of writing?” No teacher could have anticipated the things that lead me to write so far in life, and I’ve learned I shouldn’t assume to know what will inspire me to put words to screen or page down the road.

What is the purpose of writing? All of them.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Coalition

2013 NYC Marathon

When I was a kid, I would take my assignments to my mom before I turned them in to my teachers. Somewhere around middle school, my reaction to her feedback shifted. I would get angry at her, argue with her feedback, and end the exchange with something akin to “Fine. Whatever.”

Eventually, she shifted tactics. I would bring her an assignment, ask her to review it, and then she would ask a simple question. “Do you want me to read this as you mom who is proud of everything you do, or do you want me to read this as your mom whose job it is to challenge you and help you grow?” When she first started positing this question, my answer was as you might expect, “I want the mom who is proud of me.”

As I started to understand the choice, I started to shift my answer. After working through a particularly troubling assignment, I realized it was challenging mom whose eyes and mind I needed on my work. I needed someone to help me see in the tall grass.

These two versions of my mom and the spectrum that runs between them represent the people in my coalition. In working to improve learning systems, I gravitate toward people who are doing the same work and are passionate about moving toward goals in the same way.

When I get to make a move, these are the people who see themselves in that move and offer some version of a high five. “We did it,” they seem to say. Proud mom.

At the same time, I am pulled to people who look at those moves and say, “Why that way? How could you have done that better?” They see a move and instantly begin to think about how I or we or they can make the next move better. Challenging mom.

Then there are all the coalition members who care about issues parallel to the issues to which I am devoting myself. If I am thinking about the role of a system of education and schools in helping people, I realize the need for other coalition members who are thinking specifically about institutional poverty and racism, healthcare for all, and eliminating food deserts. I see the intersection of my work with theirs, and they see the intersection of their work with mine. Sometimes we work together. Sometimes we must negotiate priorities and the distribution of limited resources.

Finally, there are the members of the loyal opposition. Often committed to the same purposes and goals, these are the people who answer plans and actions with, “Really?” Their skepticism comes from a place of care. If there is a limited number of moves to solve the puzzle, these are the allies who ask, “Are you sure you want to do that?” each time we reach for a piece.

Somewhere in this milieu a coalition is formed by a mixture of proud and challenging moms, parallel advocates, and the loyal opposition.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Queer Teacher

I never felt comfortable being queer and a teacher. From student teaching in Illinois to my first years in Florida to working at SLA – while vastly different in their levels of acceptance, none of them felt completely safe. None of them got to see all of who I was.

As much as I’m sure this was informed by growing up in a largely intolerant small, rural school, it wasn’t all that. It wasn’t all baggage. It was also knowing I needed to check when moving from one place to another to find out if I was part of a protected class in my new location. When I first got hired to work in Sarasota, my mom wrote an email with many exclamation marks saying she’d checked and that the county had banned discriminatory employment practices based on sexual orientation.

While I’d had no intention of walking into my principal’s office to say, “Here are the scope and sequence guidelines you asked for, and I’m gay,” it was good to know I couldn’t be summarily dismissed if she found out I’d been dating a guy.

Pause and think about that. By writing this post and outing myself here, I am eliminating the possibility of teaching in 28 states should some industrious principal start to google. Can you say the same about talking publicly about whom you date or marry? If so and you live on the LGBTQ spectrum, it’s not likely we will ever talk about it online. My sexual orientation isn’t listed in my Twitter profile or a part of my about.me listing. It’s not there because I don’t want possible intolerance to get in the way of a free exchange of ideas in the spaces I love. The thing is, though, if you’re straight, it’s only a free exchange of ideas for you, because I give up a part of who I am to connect with you.

I resent that in the same way I resent having to out myself to people when they assume I’m straight and ask if I have a girlfriend. Sometimes, the answer is simply “no” and I let the pitch fly by because I don’t want to have the conversation that starts with, “Oh, you don’t seem gay.” I reply “no” in those moments when my response would be, “You don’t seem like a heteronormative cliché, so we’ve both learned something today.”

In the vein of learning, I would love to have learned who among my teachers growing up identified as LGBTQ. More than that, it would have meant the world to me to hear a teacher say aloud that he or she was an ally, was accepting, wanted to be there for me if I needed to talk. Your safe space stickers on your doors or ally triangles were nice, and I needed to hear you say it out loud. I needed to hear you say something positive about people who were gay so that I, at the very least, knew you knew we existed.

I tried to do this in my classrooms. From talking about Ryan White so that kids knew HIV/AIDS weren’t synonymous with being queer, to choosing books that had gay characters who weren’t merely tokens or getting their heads bashed in for coming out – I tried to build an inclusive space.

I didn’t come out, though. I’m sorry for that. To any former students who could have benefited from me saying it explicitly, I am sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry I let my resentment toward other people’s assumptions and my fear of repercussions keep me from being the role model I wanted to be. Hopefully, this post can still be some small help.

That’s why I’m writing this now, because straight people need help. So, let’s review some things straight people can do to be better people (cause most of you sure have the straight thing down).

Assume someone in the room is LGBTQ. This is different than assuming not everyone is straight.

Use inclusive language. Instead of asking a student if they are going to a social function with what someone of what you perceive to be of the opposite gender, ask if they’re planning on going with anyone or going at all.

Mention LGBTQ people in positive ways. Part of what took me so long to get right with being queer was having Matthew Shepherd as my main touchstone of what it meant to be gay. Think about the lesson implicit in a story about a person whose life came to mean something to people only after he’d been tied to a fence post, beaten, and left to freeze to death.

Call on your unions to champion equity. As I said, 28 states still allow for the dismissal of teachers based on sexuality. If their membership called for it, the teachers unions could at least make this part of the conversation in election cycles.

Out yourself. Give yourself a week of outing yourself as straight when you meet new people or in conversations with people you’ve known for a while but haven’t told you’re straight. If we have to do it, you should at least learn how awkward and annoying it feels.

Know that knowing one LGBTQ person isn’t knowing all or even many. I write this as one queer man, not on behalf of all. In the same way I don’t make assumptions about all members of group X when I meet them, don’t take meeting me or anyone else as having learned what there is to know about someone different from you.

Some people who have known me for a while might have read this post and be surprised or even hurt that we haven’t had this conversation before or that I didn’t explicitly come out to you. I suppose you’re going to have to work through that.

I Hate Little Buts

Cigarettes - I hate cigarettes, but it's so good. :)


One of the first rules of improv – the most important rule of improv – is to embody a sense of “Yes, and…” Chris and I wrote about it in our book, and this post served as the early draft of that chapter. Sit in a conversation with me for any decent span of time, and you’ll hear me say it. Sit a little longer, and you’ll hear me say it again. I can’t stop myself.

What you won’t know is how often I hear it in my head while I listen to others speak. A colleague in a brainstorming session in the office may respond to someone else’s idea, “Yes that’s a possibility, but here’s why it won’t work…” My brain, fills in the but with an and and begins to imagine where that brainstorm could have gone. It also wonders how the person with that initial idea heard the response. Did she hear what linguists say is actually happening when a but is deployed and process the response as actually not agreeing with her idea?

My Pavlovian response to the little buts sometimes gets me in trouble when I’m faced with a big but. A few weeks ago, when editing a piece of writing from a colleague, I went on a replacing rampage and suggested the removal of every but he’d used throughout the draft. Having satisfied my compulsion, I sent the draft back.

A day later, the next draft arrived in my inbox. All of the little but-to-and revisions had been accepted. Midway through the piece, a comment, “These ideas don’t go together. If I use and here, people are going to think I support the bad policy I mention first, and the more appropriate policy I pose after the but.” He was right. In my flurry of ands, I’d obsessed with form and ignored function.

The answer is moderation. Each of the other edits I’d made set a tone of unity of ideas. The new ands pulled concepts together and tore at false dichotomies. That last but, the one that stayed, wasn’t little. It was deployed to draw attention to why a common misconception needn’t be so in readers’ minds.

This is the danger of Pavlovian responses. We hear the bell ring, but nothing is in the dog bowl. In my instance, I’d become so accustomed to the frequent mindless use of language that I began mindlessly dismissing what they were saying. Not everything is a little but. Some buts are big and necessary. As is the case with so many words, when used without thought, buts used without thought can also start to be buts used without meaning.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Careful Where You Aim Your Mouth

022/365 Don't be swearing now!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not great at cursing. I’m probably better at it now than I was a few years ago. Maybe it means I’m smarter. No matter my prowess, I don’t enjoy swearing. I don’t want to either.

Maybe it’s because of how the words taste in my mouth that my opinion shifts when I meet people who enjoy that taste. This is similar to the involuntary opinions that form when I find out someone has a firearms collection. Sure, they could be keeping them around as a reminder of days gone by, and that doesn’t stop me from readying myself for when they decide to take aim at me.

All that said, I don’t know that there’s a word, phrase, or name I could never tolerate on its own. I’ve seen and performed enough comedy to know how a demeaning, demoralizing vulgarity in one person’s mouth can be a humanizing signal that we’re all in this together when expertly deployed.

Considering whether this is true, I’ve spent the last 15 minutes alone in my home reciting all of the worst words I can imagine. While many of them felt foreign as I said them, not one felt intolerable. Then, my dog jumped onto the couch beside me, and I started speaking profanities at her. I had to stop.

Words become weapons when directed at someone else rather than spoken into the ether. In my case, this applies to dogs as well. That’s where my tolerance ends. Yell the C-word straight toward the sky on the National Mall and I’ll walk on by. Turn a poisonous, “Stupid” at your 7 year old in a grocery store, and I’ll probably enter your conversation.

Words, like bullets, are all potential on their own. Load them and aim them at the defenseless, though, and you’ve made it my problem.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.