Category: Post-A-Day

Want to be irreplaceable? Be funny.

Einstein Bikes

Humorists and comedians have always been the smartest people in the world. Being funny, making people laugh, getting them to understand the absurdity of life without bringing them to tears because of its abject cruelty takes a nuanced intellect. It must  hold both the pure factual knowledge valued in commerce and scientific endeavors as well as the emotional capacity for deep empathy necessary for understanding what’s happening in the minds of audience members.

From there, our best jesters must present to audiences and readers a factually-correct story that mines a shared emotional reaction across lived experiences in a way that brings laughter and sometimes joy.

Machines will someday take over the sciences. They’ll see all the emperical data and analyze them toward whatever ends bring balance to a given equation. In a similar way, given enough if/then statements, machines will likely become our counselors. Analyzing the case histories of enough patients and a complex linguistic algorithm, they’ll be our therapists if not our friends.

The intersection of these two worlds, where our funniest people have always found their most profound material, will remain the last stronghold of humanity. Siri will respond to my request for a joke with a joke, but Siri does not understand why a joke is a joke. It is similarly incapable of understanding how to tailor a joke to my particular sense of humor, intellect, and experiences. Siri can’t read a room.

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.

Practicing the Practice of Practice

Yoga

Last year was a year of running and a year of writing for formal publication. In a twelve month span, I ran more than 1,100 miles. Similarly, I co-wrote prepared for publication three different texts. If I wasn’t reading/writing/editing/revising, then it felt I was running or recovering from a run (and getting ready for something to do with writing).

At the end of the year, I had publications and miles. I also dreaded sitting down to write or putting on my shoes to head out for a run. I’d forgotten what it meant to have myself as an audience and I had a right IT band threatening revolt.

The resolution for this year was simple – practice better practice.

For my life and for my teaching, that means listening to what’s necessary, what’s out of balance and making whatever moves best bring balance and meet the most pressing needs.

This has meant more yoga in my life this year. Learning and refining my goal-setting practice from last year, means I don’t hold myself to daily yoga sessions. Instead, I do what I did this afternoon and say, “Some yoga would be nice here.”

That’s best practice – knowing what’s needed in the moment and adjusting to meet those needs.

I haven’t headed out for a run yet in 2016. I’m listening to that IT band and trusting it will tell me when we’re ready.

Writing is getting a similar treatment. These blog posts back and forth with you come from daily questions, and I listen to my brain before I sit down to write. If it’s still full from the day or worn out, then I allow myself to write today’s post tomorrow (or the day after that). The standard is writing, the practice is knowing when I have something to say.

That’s best practice – knowing what’s needed in the moment and adjusting to meet those needs.

This past week, I was in Orlando for FETC. I was part of no fewer than 4 conference presentations over the course of two days. In each one, I paid attention to the audience who had decided what was going on in our room was more worthy of their time than what was going on in other rooms.

As such, I tried to adjust the planned presentations to offer room for questions, discussion, and exploration. Tellingly, the reaction was often silence. Conferences are still conferences, as it turns out – our worst versions of school. I worry the practice we’re utilizing in these spaces is one of subjugation of the assembled audience to the belief that whoever’s wearing the presenter’s badge will decide the needs of the room. When given the chance at self-determination of their learning, the audience doesn’t know what to do.

I most worry this is how we’re running classrooms.

 

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’d Build a Constellation of Philanthropies

milky way

While I know some things about some things, everyone seems to think starting their own philanthropy is the answer. I think about it differently.

Instead of having a multitude of smart, dedicated people working on the same problem from a million different places, what might happen if that multitude of people (and perspectives) was asked to work together to consider a problem? A charitable DARPA.

Instead of starting a philanthropy, I’d try to use that sum of money to entice existing, similarly-aligned philanthropies to join forces and work to solve a given problem together.

Homelessness, unemployment, hunger, education, nutrition – all pieces of poverty – I’d find the leading organizations and minds and say, “I’ll fund a coalition if you choose to work together.” As the work progressed, we’d keep our doors open to other organizations that felt common cause while holding different views as to the solutions.

As I’d argue is endemic to our culture when people disagree, it has become too difficult to take our toys and go play somewhere else. This isn’t conducive to a rich debate, collaborative effort, or deep exchange of ideas. We don’t need more philanthropies, we need more efficient philanthropies.

How Hyperlinks Have Changed Me as a Reader and Writer

An Image of 20 open tabs on my web browser

When I was in college, learning as an English Studies major, we were just beginning to have conversations about “hypertextuality” and what it’s implications might be for reading and writing. If everything could be connected to everything else to which it was referring, how might that change the load for readers?

Decades into the transformation, I’ve got my initial findings ready to report. It means a ton.

First, the reader’s perspective. Reading hyperlinked texts has created a continuous cavalcade of texts populating my browser windows across devices, apps, and windows. It hasn’t made reading more difficult, but it has made the act of learning from my reading more complex. I recently finished reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. It was a rare work of fiction to make it into my reading diet these days. Then, yesterday, I dove into Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. I should say that I’m reading both of these books through the Kindle app on my tablet. When I’m traveling, this lightens the load of my carry-on.

It took me a while to realize the experiential difference between the two texts. For Station Eleven, I got to read all the way through without any need of clicking. Mandel didn’t embed a single hyperlink in the book. I read it linearly as I do most works of fiction or when I’m reading a printed book. The cognitive demand was focusing on the story, the characters and how things were progressing as I moved through the book. If you haven’t read the book, it’s important to know Mandel packs the structure of the story with a great deal of complexity. Readers need to track multiple storylines across diverse geographies while also keeping track of a non-linear chronology. From a teacherly perspective, it’s advanced stuff.

Still, moving to Soulcraft was jarring. Crawford’s book is rife with endnotes and references to studies and other works that support the thesis he proposes. Because I was reading digitally, those endnotes were lit in blue on my screen, asking (daring me?) to click through and read those endnotes.

This exemplifies the biggest change I’ve experienced as a reader in a hypertextual world. I have to be active in my choices of how I navigate through what I’m reading while also actively engaging with the content of what I’m reading. My brain must do more if I’m to take advantage of the full experience.

Admittedly, the most clicking through I do when reading in the Kindle app or any of its brethren is using the dictionary function or highlighting a passage to keep or share. In online reading, though, it’s a different story. The image above is a screenshot of the window in which I’ve been writing this post. That’s twenty tabs. Some of them have been waiting for my attention for more than a month.

Hypertextuality hasn’t meant I’m reading more. I’ve always been hungry for words. It’s meant that I’ve more reading anxiously waiting for my attention. The ease of “Open Link in New Tab” driven by the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) on important thinking means I’m never at a loss for material and often overcome by choices when it’s time to read. This is why those tabs have been left open so long.

The hyperlink has given me immediate access to more information and diversions, required me to think about what I want to read while I’m thinking about what I am reading. Basically, the Internet is a choose your own adventure book.

Now, as a writer. Hyperlinks have simplified the words I feel like I need to put on a page or a screen. I just did it in the previous paragraph. I wanted to make a choose your own adventure reference and realized not everyone would know what I was talking about. Rather than using the space to explain it, I got link to the Wikipedia entry and move on. Fewer words.

Plus, using tools like citebite and the highly extension, I’m able to pull in text I want to reference or share it out to posts I want to make on social media. I start to write alongside an author. I’m changing a text as I read it. I’m co-authoring. Sure, I write here on the blog. And I am a writer on other people’s blogs. I’m commenting in-line on Medium posts (which I just realized I could do here on my WordPress install). Basically, the hyperlink has made everything I type a web.

From a design perspective, it’s also allowed me to hide that web by embedding links within text. Whenever possible in email, because I want them to look clean and reduce the amount of text on a page, I embed my links. More often than I’d expect, this results in people responding with something like, “Looks like you forgot to include the link you mentioned. Could you send it?” Then, I do. I paste the ugly, naked URL in a reply email and mention nothing about the fact they missed it in my initial missive, because of all the cognitive demands I know they are experiencing just keeping up with reading in a hypertextual society.

So, where does that leave me? As a writer, I’m clearly seeing more of a benefit from living in a hypertextual society. There’s less of a demand on what I need to explain as I’m writing, and I’m able to make references to lesser known cultural touchstones or academic works while suggesting my readers do the work of building background knowledge. As a reader, I’m learning to manage my experience and make active choices about which rabbit holes I choose to jump into. I’m raising my awareness of the fact that being exhausted with something I’m reading doesn’t necessarily mean I’m exhausted with the content, but perhaps with the process. Luckily, I can always choose to walk away from a text. Even better, my writer self can empathize with my reader self and try to create an experience that’s respectful to you.

(Final open tab count at posting, 25 26.)

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.

Just Get Better

Thermometer 20oC

Tonight, a new improv team I coach had their first show. While I understand the difference between coaching and teaching, today’s question made me flash on a recent email I’d sent as an introduction to the team letting them know I’d be their coach. I made the following three commitments:

  • For each show and rehearsal, I will push you to be better improvisers at the end than you were at the beginning.
  • I will give you direct, concrete feedback.
  • I will help you set and work toward personal improv goals.

It was surprising, 4 years out of the classroom, to look at my commitments and realize they were the same things I would tell new students at back to school night.
“I’ll be your English teacher,” I’d say.
Student would sheepishly look at the floor and either student or parent would admit to the student not being a reader or writer or both.
“I’ll help you with that,” I replied.
That became the goal. At the end of the year, I didn’t need my students to consider majoring in English or start envisioning themselves as English teachers. I wanted them to want to claim the titles of reader and writer because they’d felt themselves get better, and because they saw the two activities as parts of who they were.
If they grew up to be engineers, tremendous – so long as they grew up to be engineers who read and wrote. If they grew up to be waiters and waitresses, good on ’em – so long as they were servers who read and wrote.
I am hard-pressed to think of a vocation or profession where my mind wouldn’t be put more at ease when I heard it was a position filled by a person who identified as a reader and writer.
This is how I always have and always will measure my success as an educator. At the end of the day, do you see yourself as closer to or further from identifying as a person who practices whatever I’m charged with teaching you?

The Rudder of Those Around Me

The B flat trumpet is a "she"...

My grandfather is kept alive now by an electrical impulse sent to his heart to make sure it keeps beating. The arthritis that has twisted his hands and feet makes walking and the simplest of tasks both painful and frustrating. At Christmas, I told him the same story three times within ten minutes because he asked me the same question three times.

I did my best to tell the story in the same voice each time because he is the man who taught me how to fly fish, to shoot an arrow, and to appreciate jazz.

He taught me how to drive a tractor and laughed at my great-grandmother when she saw 8yo me alone on the mower and called to let him and my grandmother know I was too young.

When my car caught fire on a bridge and my lack of credit necessitated a co-signer on a loan to buy a new one, he didn’t hesitate the sign the loan or take the opportunity to lead an in-depth explanation of credit history and interest rates.

While he isn’t perfect, my grandfather is as fine a man as I think I’ll ever know, and his body is tired.

In these moments, when the people who have been people for as long as I have been in the world are too close to leaving it, I am my most rudderless.

The character lesson of finding out who I am without my grandfather is one I dread learning.

Still, though, there are moments.

Over Thanksgiving, I stopped at my grandparents’ house. I brought with me a second-hand trumpet I’d picked up, and told my grandfather I was there for a lesson. My grandmother went to the basement and came up with a flugelhorn case. My grandfather opened it, took out the horn, and began our lesson at the kitchen table.

Those same gnarled fingers found each valve exactly as they have for the past six decades of performing in jazz bands, brass bands, and municipal bands. Though it meant pressing with the third knuckle rather than the fingertip, he showed me how far I have left to go to travel in his footsteps.

How could I not laugh when he explained his inability to hit the high notes like he used to was due to a lack of practice rather than allowing himself the out of old age?

Well over an hour into our lesson, it was my grandmother serving me a grilled cheese sandwich, not my grandfather’s energy that resulted in our horns being returned to their cases.

He’s still here, and his presence is a reminder of who I am and how I’ve gotten that way.

I Leave

NYC - JFK Airport: TWA Flight Center - Departure Board

A friend commented the other day that there’s a sadness sometimes in me. I’m always making sure, she said, that everyone will be okay when I leave and that I’m always getting ready to leave.

It’s true.

As an adult, I’ve lived in six states. I’ve moved away from my family and at least five families of friends I’d cobbled together. Each move has been my choice. Each time, I was moving toward something new or bigger – school, a job. And, I was moving away.

As a result, I’ve got friends across the country with whom I talk less than I’d like and to whom I’ve basically said, “If you want to be my friend, these are my terms.” I am fortunate enough that I’ve met some tremendous people who have chosen to love me enough to care through my leaving.

Some haven’t, and I don’t know that I’ve blamed them. This is what happens in life, people leave.

My most well-worn callouses are metaphorical. They are worn by the friction that occurs when a person leaves and rubs against whatever was as he heads toward whatever’s next.

I’ve been thinking about that sadness ever since my friend mentioned it. I’m not sure if it comes from the leaving or the unshakeable belief that everyone will leave. Maybe it’s both.

In some ways it’s an ideal mindset for a teacher. Each Fall, I’m entrusted with a new group of students for whom I care as deeply as any teacher can until the year ends and they leave. Then, a new group.

It’s not a great perspective in other relationships. Dating can be difficult when you realize you’re in love and, at the same time, wondering which of you will leave first.

The difference between the guy who left Illinois and Florida and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Florida, though, I hope, is that I can see it now. I can name the leaving. That forces me to understand it’s a choice, not an inescapable eventuality.

A Zac’s Guide to Procrastination

Procrastination - A1

I like the way you phrased today’s question, “favorite way to procrastinate” is a whole other animal than “most often used.”

There’s an implied choice here, that I don’t don’t know I bring to my procrastination game. It has me wondering if other people do. Do other people procrastinate consciously? Are they willfully delaying the inevitable? Am I doing it wrong?

More often than not, when I’ve procrastinated, I’ve taken myself too far down to the wire to reflect on how I got there or whether it was worth it or if I was doing something I enjoyed while avoiding doing the thing I should have been doing.

Sometimes, as exhibited by the above, I write long and winding sentences as a procrastination tool.

Other times, like when I should have been grading and commenting on student work one winter while living in Philly, I decided it was time I really dedicated the weeks necessary to finally watching all of the Stargate SG-1 series on Netflix. Spoiler alert: Every major world religion or mythology is based on an alien race.

I also procrastinate by doing the thing. While Chris and I were writing the book, I would sit down in front of my computer screen to write and stare at the cursor in a game of man-versus-machine chicken. After enough time had passed, I’d give myself credit for trying long enough, and move on to doing something else. The cursor, it turns out, always waits.

I expected to type that my favorite procrastination is running. I write about it enough here that it just made sense. That’s not why I run. I run to get things done. When a deadline looms, I go for a run to figure things out in my head, to plan for the doing, or to work through whatever problems I’m supposed to be solving. To use running as a means to procrastinate would feel disloyal or like an abuse.

I suppose I haven’t really answered the question. I’ll get back to you on it.

I’m Not Everyone’s Lorax

Lorax

I should say speaking up and acting anytime someone uses ableist language, but it wouldn’t be true. I should say diving into the question of why even subtle racism is racism or why privilege – white, male or otherwise – isn’t simply a made up term and should be examined. I should say those things and a thousand more are the are triggers of acts in the world so blatantly wrong, that I can’t keep silent.

Most of the time, I can and I do have the conversation or make the challenge. And sometimes I don’t, because becoming the person I want to be takes time, the fight can be exhausting, and I’m sometimes unsure of whether another conversation about why we should consider a word other than “crazy” will make a difference.

So, it’s the absolute nature of this question that keeps all of the above off the table as possible answers. I act more often than not, and not all the time.

Except for kids. I speak up for kids. In public places, in semi-public ways, I’ll speak up for kids.

Sometimes, it will be asking, “Is everything okay?” when an adult has clearly reached a frayed end of patience and needs someone to say, “Hey, is this who you want to be to this child?”

Sometimes it’s talking to teachers about what might be the detrimental effects of automatic deductions for late homework.

Sometimes it’s making a tough phone call when I’m worried about self-harm, or making sure there’s a safe, warm, dry bed in the event that home doesn’t look like home anymore.

I speak up and act in the face of the blatantly wrong treatment of the youngest people in our care as a society because I can and because of those who spoke up and acted for me in moments when I needed it.

This isn’t to say I believe children are without agency or the power of self-advocacy. I know full well they often have the most important voices. There are times, though, when those voices shouldn’t be expected to have to speak up or when my own voice can be heard a little better.

While I know I’m not always the person I wish I were for all the kinds of people about whom I care, I find no problem acting on behalf of kids.

You Can Keep Your Jetpacks

DSC_0435

One of my favorite elements of how Steven Johnson frames the telling of his book The Invention of Air is the historical context. Not to give too much away, but Johnson tells the history of two seminal discoveries in world history, not through the lens of the Great Man Theory, but as the timeline of events leading up to those discoveries.

“Things were moving this direction,” Johnson implies, “so this fellow interacted with the key timelines at the right time for these discoveries to unfold.”

As much as I’ve taken anything away from my reading of that book, I’ve taken away this frame for looking at discoveries and inventions. What must be true in the world and other events for this one event to occur?

Johnson also offers perspective on where those events led, showing readers what was made possible because these other things had happened.

All of this is to say my answer is reliable, publicly-available teleportation.

Hear me out.

If we get to a place where humankind all over the world has access to teleportation on a regular basis, then what else needed to happen? What other problems, much more urgent than realizing the promise of Star Trek, were likely to have been solved as well? Seeing the halting or reversing the effects of climate change and the thing itself would be grand, but we’ll likely be in an awful spot by the time we accomplish that.

So, I want to live to see the thing we most likely accomplish in our spare time after we’ve averted the majority of the impending apocalypses we’ve got cooking.

Publicly, and commonly used teleportation also means we’ve worked our way past what will undoubtably be the initial military implications of such technology. I want to see the world after we’ve figured out other folks are as likely to beam in to blow us up if we decide to do the same to them.

A world where we can teleport is also a world where we are no longer cut off from those with whom we were promised we’d be more connected because we could reach them virtually. Emailing, videoconferencing, and chatting – it turns out – don’t offer the same gateway to empathy that can be established when we are able to share the same air with another person – someone who would otherwise be foreign.

I’m not of the mindset that a world of teleporters is a utopia. It would will, I’d wager, be closer than we are today.

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.