Category: Post-A-Day

Is Youtube Recommending Me to Me?

Screenshot of My Youtube Homepage

Let’s start in that top row. Youtube’s algorithms are moving in the right direction. I started this year with a yoga binge, and it’s not showing any signs of stopping. My musical tastes tend to follow the weather patterns. So, deep in the heart of winter, I’m likely to ask Sufjan to keep me company while I’m reading or writing. In those moments of sunshine (internally or climactically), watching the Tricia Miranda-choreographed video to Missy Elliot’s “WTF” is a definite bright spot. Youtube knows I’m going to watch this again because I’ve already watched it so many times.

In the recommended row, we jump all over the place. Yoga, sure. Stephen Colbert, Ze Frank, Lip Sync Battle, and Lianna LaHavas all make sense as well. I can only guess the Kimmel recommendation was inspired by Colbert. Similarly, the Tina Fey suggestions likely came from my searching for her cold open appearance on last week’s SNL. “Stop searching for your passion,” though? No real idea.

But that wasn’t the question. What do they say about me as a person? I appreciate talented, funny, thoughtful women who make unexpected choices. And, to a lesser extent, men who talk into cameras. They point to the idea that I like to laugh, and I enjoy music. When the two of them can happen together, all the better.

Interestingly, when you asked, I started to worry a bit. I’v enever thought about whether the person I am when I drop into a Youtube hole is the same person I am on Twitter, Instagram, or here. Those places are all productive. Even when I’m liking or retweeting, I’m they are making public acts of expression. They don’t let you know what tweets made me smile or think, but that I decided I didn’t want to share.

Youtube, on the other hand, is still a place of consumption for me. While I’ve a few videos posted there and on other sites, I’m more often searching than uploading. I was worried the questioner and the talker might not be the same person. They were.

What Kind of Man am I.

Smash Binary Gender

Sometimes, in my day job, I have meetings with a lot of men in suits.

Yesterday afternoon was one such time. Seated around a rectangular configuration of tables were about 25 people, mostly men. Each of those men was in a suit. I was as well. While their suits were almost uniformly black, with a few charcoal greys thrown in for good measure, mine was just a shade lighter than navy blue.

My shirt was pink. My socks were lime green. My tie was a bow and had little British bulldogs on it. My hair was more unkempt than kempt, and mine was the only eyebrow ring in the room. All of this was a departure from the other men in the room.

When it was my turn to present to the group, I started with a warm hello and smiled quickly at everyone around the rectangle. I smiled more in that meeting than any other room. When I had something to say, I raised my hand and asked if it was okay if I added a few points. As I added a few points, I connected them to the things the other people in the room had already shared.

The other men in the room didn’t greet one another beyond initial 1-on-1 greetings before we’d taken our seats, and smiles were infrequent occurrences. When the other men wanted to speak, they did. No one else raised their hands, and none of them asked if it was okay to add on.

Being a professional man is boring, and it’s serious work, and it’s uncomfortable clothes. I express my gender by playing and pushing at the ends of that tedious monologue of manhood. When it comes to speaking in a group, I don’t assume people want to hear what I have to say, and I try to make sure my words honor those ideas that have been expressed before me.

I get that this doesn’t pin down my gender expression. I don’t know that I can (or that I’m interested in pinning such a thing). I do hope it points out that in putting on my clothes and interacting with other people, I am aware of the otherness I’m feeling in a room. I’m similar, but not the same.

While I don’t identify as genderqueer, I recognize that smiling more than most, asking how people are feeling, and other small acts might have the impact of queering my gender role. That’s fine by me. Looking around the table yesterday and so many others I’ve sat at, I couldn’t help but think it looked like a lot of work to be that kind of man.

The Extent to Which I Don’t Want to Talk about ‘Scaling’

Scales of Justice - Frankfurt Version

I hate it when people ask how we can start doing something “at scale.” There’s a physical, visceral, almost-dry heaving reaction that ripples through my body. I hear questions of scale and begin to think about Ford’s assembly line, Old Navy commercials, and genetically-engineered corn.

Solving hunger in Pittsburgh is different than solving hunger in Puerto Rico. Both of those are different than solving hunger in Peoria.

I don’t want scale, I want equity, and I want fairness. While scale can make both of those possible, we often conflate taking something to scale as establishing equity.

For instance, a district that claims has taken its 1:1 student-to-device ratio to scale has ensured depth of scale. They have scale at the surface. Everyone has a device, and I can point to the places where the usage of those devices is almost assuredly maintaining inequity if not exacerbating it.

If we must talk of scale, though, and I sense that we must, let’s at least add some nuance to our thinking and our conversations.

For me, this comes in one of the best lessons I ever learned in a classroom when Professor Archon Fung explained the following six sizes of social change. Here are his six ways of thinking about scale:

  • number of people affected
  • geographic spread across jurisdictions
  • critical mass in population segment
  • size of impact on individuals affected
  • scope and durability of individual impact
  • sustainability of effort over time
  • total individuals and assets engaged

This is a 3-D model for thinking about scale, and hopefully, you start to see how the best efforts are able to move to scale along each of these factors. Teach a person to fish, and you’ve fed them for life. Teach all people to fish, and you’ve fed all of them for as long as the fish hold out. Teach a population to responsibly manage aquacultures while identifying other sources of food, and you’ve built a world that can eat and has something to live for.

Scale is more complicated than, “Did we get everyone?” It should be, because everyone is complicated.

The Easiest Thing We Learn from the Classroom May Be the Thing We Teach Worst

This is funny on so many levels.

Whatever your training was or has been in a classroom space, that’s the easiest skill to transfer to other spaces. If we are doing it decently, our classrooms offer spaces for the free exchange of ideas. If we’re doing it a little better, those ideas are new to many of the people in the room. If we’re operating in the top percentiles, those ideas are being pushed, pulled, and resisted in ways that leave everyone thinking, feeling heard, and knowing they were cared for.

Executing that last one is difficult. What’s easy is the transference of whatever habits of conversation are the mode for a learning space into other spaces as well.

You’ve maybe in meetings with folks who answer every suggestion with why it won’t work, why you’re wrong, and why the whole effort is doomed from the start. Rome is burning, they’ll tell you. This is Rome, the’ll claim. While there’s surely a mode of conversation these people experienced within their homes that could align with what you’re experiencing, we’ve seen enough of the power of school to know that it is a path that could have shifted long before they became professional buzzkills.

Teaching in FL, this was one of the key components of setting the best expectations of what we would collectively establish as our classroom culture. We’d talk to each other in ways that recognized the human foibles of the other people and took the stance that all ideas were worth our examination. (When working with 8th graders, I may have phrased it differently, but that was the underlying concept.)

At SLA, it was built into two of the school’s three rules – respect others & respect that this is a place of learning. If those are the guidelines and you begin to build practices around it, buzz kills in training can start to explore social career paths. Over the years, many students walked through the door suspect of the kinds of things we were asking them to do at SLA. They were suspect of working with other students, and for many, it was the first time they were asked to interact in interdependent ways with people from backgrounds different from their own.

And that was the work. That’s what it means to focus on citizenship. We’re in an election year, so it bears repeating. The little things we do like helping students think about how they talk to and about one another and how they discuss new and different ideas matter in ways that can corrode or build up a community or a republic more deeply than an economic policy that runs afoul.

How we talk to one another, now, as adults, was the easiest thing of our classroom experiences to pull forward into adulthood, and it can be one of the most difficult things to change once we’re here.

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 Exhaling Answers

Nancy Dwyer

I’m not one for answers. Giving them, anyway. I dig the search for answers, and I’m happy to help you on your way to whatever answers you’ve deemed worthy of your time. I’m not the person to whom you should turn if you’re expecting answers to questions that aren’t in my unique locus of control.

But I sure do inhale the loose ends, the un-networked nodes, the ideas in the ether that aren’t tremendously useful to me in the moment, but represent the potential of usefulness down the road.

I breath these ideas in and let them fire the respiratory flow of possibilities.

Then, in front of a classroom – in a conference presentation, on an email chain, or a chance meeting – I exhale these loose ends in hopes of creating a more complete atmosphere of answers to your questions. It turns out I’ve been carrying these loose ends to help you tie and tidy up your questions.

I’m the fellow who’s spent hours reading research reports, opening tab after tab on his browser window, shaking every hand at the party and cataloging them all in my head for that one question you ask when I’m on a panel. Often, far too often, the other folks will dodge your question. They’ll give you philosophical answers that start with, “That’s a good question,” with the subtext of, “And I’m going to answer a completely different one right now.”

That’s when I’m ready to exhale and say, “I don’t know if this will be helpful, but here are four specific places you should look to help you down your path.” I can’t promise they’ll get you everywhere you want to be, but they will get you closer than you are now.” It’s also my way of acknowledging I don’t know the answer, but I can hopefully connect you with someone who does.

In the classroom or working with a group of educators in professional development, my exhale may seem foul. Not because of me, but because of what’s come before. People are often conditioned for the yes or the no. They’re expecting the, “That’s wrong, and here’s what’s right.”

That’s not how I breath. My telling you doesn’t teach you. It might give you something new to tell others, but I’m dubious of someone who answers any question with, “Because Zac told me.” You’re ideas need something stronger than hearsay as their foundation.

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 #LifeWideLearning

So – Get to Work

Institutional Elephants

Starting down the rabbit hole.

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.

Invincible-ish

Invincible

Times I get close:
– The final stretch of a marathon, when I realize there is more in me than I’d thought 26 miles ago.
– In a classroom when students are responsible for calling on one another in conversation, the class ends, and I have to make them leave so I don’t have to explain myself to their next teachers.
– When my sisters tell me (in whatever way) that I’m a good big brother.
– Riding across the country with my little brother and we were listening to the first season of Serial. The conversation turned to who we’d call if we found ourselves in a similar situation, and he said me.
– An improv show where more than 60% of the material lands.
– Any time an airplane I’m on lands.
– When The Verve’s “Freshmen” comes on the radio and I get to sing along.
– When someone pushes against a thing I believe deeply in my core, and my brain is there to have my back and together we defend my position while leaving the door open for change.
– The Grand Canyon.
– Having to do algebra in my head and realizing I still can.

And, mostly, I don’t feel invincible. Instead, I attempt to be prepared to take on what gets thrown my way as best I can.

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.

Diagnosing the Teaching of Adults and Children

Vitamins

So many ways to think about the differences between teaching children and teaching adults. Let’s frame it up a bit first. For starters, let’s put both of our groups in a traditional setting. The schools in which they learn and teach have 7.5 hours of classes, desks are in rows, grades are delineated by age. For the adults, there’s someone in charge of meetings if not scheduling PD. These happen once a month or once every two weeks. At a district level, trainings are offered by a PD department. These are staffed by teachers in one of two categories – they were either exemplary teachers and were pulled out of the classroom in a move to create economies of scale with their practice, or they are ineffective and were pulled out of the classroom so as not to cause too much damage.

There’s our system. It might be your system with a few different creaks and cracks in the floorboards.

Now, back to the question of the difference between teaching the adults and the children in this system. For the children, instruction is most likely a collection of linear timelines of facts and skills separated by artificial disciplines. While not completely dependent upon rote memorization of facts and procedures from the earliest days of public education, students are expected to await the topics and information teachers have scheduled. A student might happen into a unit or lesson of study that ignites his interest or curiosity, but this is left to chance and requires a great deal of social capital and individual agency to pursue outside of the regular schedule of study.

Reading this from the outside, this can seem a horrible way to pass your time. From the inside, though, many of our students don’t know any different. And those who try to demand something different often find themselves breaking against the system. They become examples for the others of why the status quo is preferable to something else, no matter how much they might enjoy that something else.

Teaching these students means moving along the well-worn path of covering content and using discipline or classroom management to control them when they stray from that path. While the schools we’re discussing may accept creativity in practice, they do not encourage it outright and certainly do not require it.

It is easy to imagine the same is true of teaching the adults in this system as is true of teaching the children. Almost.

These adults find themselves as caretakers of a system in which they were once the children. Here, let me point out, they are rewarded for being caretakers of the system rather than of the people in the system. So long as things move smoothly throughout the year, they may remain.

Teaching the adults means reinforcing that smooth movement. To keep their attention, it often means re-packaging old efforts and presenting them as a new advancement. The more veteran teachers can sense the repetition. They’ve likely taught through several cycles.

The key difference in teaching the adults here is their increased agency – personally if not professionally. Should they find the system so distasteful or unsatisfying that they no longer wish to be in it, they can move on. Whether top or bottom performers, when they leave, they allow the system to move closer to stasis. The status quo remains.

Unlike the children in the system, it is no longer necessary to prepare lessons across multiple disciplines for the adults. They’ve become specialists in specific content.

Teachers are allowed to shrug off math as English teachers, and disdain history as science teachers. This makes the dosage of professional development easier as well.

The needs of the adults as they have been shaped by the system require only content-specific reinforcement. They have no need for understanding or presenting how their respective content interacts with and is interdependent upon colleagues across the hall.

Teaching the adults means presenting information in ways that make it seem new and exciting without the requirement of a well-balanced intellectual diet. When adults leave, similar to when children are asked to leave, it is because they don’t fit the system, not because the system could not fit them.

Obviously, the above is a bleak perspective. In writing it, I attempted to be more pragmatic than pessimistic. Sometimes the two intersect. If the question is “How should teaching these two groups be different?” Then the answers are going to be specific to the individuals and cultures within schools and districts. As Chris and I suss out in our book, it means realizing asking the right questions is key. To beginning to make the system framed above a more humanistic one, the following three questions are the place to start:

  1. How do we honor and care for the humanity of each of the adults and children in our care?
  2. How do we make our learning spaces places where children choose to be, and where they make the education they need?
  3. How do we ensure each adult has a balanced learning diet, and the same opportunities to explore new curiosities that we hope they create for children in their classes?

If we take an informed, participatory citizenry as the goal of public education, and decision reflects that goal, then these three questions can help us create the schools we need.

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.

my busking options

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.

My Urban Panic Button

Oregon Dairy Princess Mary Ann Cantrall, 1969-70

One of the most stressful aspects of urban living for me has been the urban piece. I grew up surrounded by prairie and fields and those country roads John Denver was always singing about.

It’s not my fear of unpreparedness for a possible apocalypse (though this Salon piece didn’t help), and it’s not the ill health effects (and thanks Daily Mail for this pick-me-up).

The most difficult aspect of urban dwelling for me is the lack of rural. With so many people and so little green, city living makes attempts at quieting my mind feel sometimes fruitless.

At times, I’ve wished for an app on my phone that acts as an urban panic button. It wouldn’t call the police or alert other emergency personnel. It would quickly plot the route to the most green space with the fewest people. Successes versions would allow for amentities like hammockability or privileging green over people or vice versa.

While I’ve found quiet spots in D.C. since arrving a year and a half ago, they aren’t the same as the easy access to which I’d become accustomed in Florida, Illinois, or Colorado. Many of them are the size of postage stamps and act as post cards from true open green spaces as though they were passing the message, “wish you were here.”

So do I.

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.