Category: Post-A-Day

Are You Adulting or Growing Up?

Adorable Handsome Black Boy Child in Baggy Business Suit laughing and walking over white background.

I’m glad childhood is a thing. For the longest time it wasn’t. When people aren’t expected to live very long, it seems inappropriate to demarcate a certain part of a lifespan as protected. Then, starting in the 17th century, folks in the “western” world were living longer and John Locke gave us childhood. We haven’t Locke(d) back. Sorry.

From childhood grew adolescence. (Thanks, Piaget.)

Now, setting aside for the moment the newish idea of late adolescence, we have childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. While puberty provides an (awkward) transition from childhood to adolescence that coincides with the rituals of many cultures, the transition from adolescence to adulthood lacks such an obvious physiological transition.

Enter, adulting.

My first adulting was early – filing my 1040-EZ form on my own. It was followed by setting up appointments with my academic advisor, finding a roommate to join me as we ventured out of the dorms in college, and a host of other small steps toward being the version of me who could stand on his own.

Adulting isn’t the same as growing up. Growing up carries with it the implicit sense of being a mature person. Adulting, on the other hand, gives the sense of dipping one’s toe in adulthood without taking on all the responsibilities the full transition would entail. Adulting sounds like a costume or set of clothes you can take off Mr. Rogers-style when you’re finished with whatever adult task needed tending to.

Whenever I put on a suit for my day gig, I get a serious sense of adulting. I’m putting on the costume without fully feeling I’ve become all the worst characters in movies like Baby Boom, Joe Versus the Volcano, or The Hudsucker Proxy. Those folks put on the costume and couldn’t remember who they’d been before.

Adulting is a putting on, while growing up is a shedding. It’s what I saw time and again as my students were thrust into life events that pulled away from them the childish pieces of their identity, forcing them to deal with death, divorce, poverty, and any number of the darker aspects of adulting.

I’m pretty grown now. Life has happened, and I’m a week away from another birthday that will raise expectations one more year beyond my shoe size. Still, I’ve got a beach ball and a collection of legos at work. I brought an assortment of crayons to the office from my last trip. I’m still not adulting full-time.

Teachers, Not Gods

If your ratio is golden, do different math. If your bullets are silver, put down the gun.

These terms in education should have us worrying about the medicine men who come to town hocking their wares and schemes for how improving X will make all the difference. For the longest time, you couldn’t walk into a conversation about education in America without hearing someone say teachers were the biggest classroom factor on student achievement.

Fix teachers, the argument went, and you’d have fixed learning. The research showed a persistent positive impact on a student’s achievement if that student had a highly-effective teacher three years in a row. A cottage industry sprang up and schools were required to document the “highly-effective” status of their teachers.

While I don’t argue with the findings of the research, I do argue against the assumed implications of that research or the suggestion that a highly-effective teacher is the deciding factor of student success. Focusing on a single factor and holding it above all others will always be ill-advised.

This 2013 study showed the effective of poverty on cognitive load. In essence, people in poverty are navigating being poor and that puts extra stress on their capacity to learn the facts of the Crimean War.

If we are following the belief in the highly-effective teacher, though, we set the poverty aside. We call on our teachers to teach through the poverty (and asking students to learn through it) rather than acknowledging and addressing the pervasive effects of poverty on the system.

The greater the effects of poverty, the more highly-effective the teachers need be. As we have set all of our hopes on the highly-effective teacher, it matters less and less as research shows the effects of childhood trauma, hunger, impediments to accessibility, poor infrastructure, racism, and the like. In the end, our super teachers are called upon to be so highly effective as to negate and reverse the effects of any manner of negative variables impacting student learning.

This, wasn’t where we started. It’s not what the research was suggesting. No one said, “Fix the teachers and you’ll be good to go.” Instead, the implications were more refined. Give teachers the skills, knowledge, and supports to be effective at their practice, and they’ll be good at their practice. Those skills, knowledge, and supports mean ensuring the students in a teacher’s care are well-fed, have access to the right social services, are presented with the best learning resources, and a list of other factors we know to impact learning.

More broadly, this means actively working against poverty rather than asking teachers to teach against poverty. It means ending childhood violence rather than asking teachers to teach through childhood violence. It means committing to make better communities rather than simply expecting teachers to be better teachers.

The golden ratio or silver bullet are useless once we begin to acknowledge that schools, teachers, and students exist in an of a world. Asking them to learn and teach despite that world or as though they are not a part of it is myopic and cruel.

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.

Staring Because I Cannot Begin to Speak

stare down.

Otherwise not a violent person, I want to punch the three people two tables away.

They are teachers. They have been enjoying happy hour for the last 90 minutes, letting fly with all they are thinking about their schools, their classrooms, and their students.

What they think about learning and teaching is different – dramatically different – from what I think. They have mentioned “those kids”. They have talked about urban education in a way that makes my skin crawl. “A private school without private school prices,” one just said.

These are the moments I can’t turn away from. I stare in a state of vacillating anger, shock, and worry.

I’m not going to walk over and talk to these folks. It’s not that I always hold my tongue (Diana can attest to this). It’s that I don’t think I have it in me to listen as closely as I want to in this moment.

So I stare in the same way you might stare at a Dalí painting, wondering how you both saw the same world and clearly interpreted what you saw differently.

These are the things at which I stare, those that depart so sharply and swiftly from my own experiences and beliefs that I must hold my tongue as I attempt to weave what I am seeing an hearing into a useable framework.

Staring, for me, doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. It means I have more to say inspired more by emotion than thoughtfulness that I’ve got to pause and weave. It doesn’t always work. It won’t likely work today. This other table and I are going to have to agree to disagree at a distance.

Maybe the next time I stare, I’ll have the patience to speak.

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.

How Not to Build the Systems You Hate

framing hammer collection 2007

Quite a bit, I get to work with schools and districts as they work to think through their strategic plans. Visions and mission statements are set. They are quickly complemented by action items and assignments of responsibility. An excitement, a fervor start to pass over those assembled. This is it! They are finally moving!

And then I stop things.

Anyone who has begun this work has done so because the status quo is no longer acceptable. They have become frustrated because so much of what is being done is justified by the way the system has operated in the past. They’ve always done it that way. Over and over again, folks are upset by the sturdiness of the system. Banging and clawing at it, they’ve gotten me in the room after a prolonged fight.

So, I ask, “Where is the timeline for review?”

Stares.

We are in the room because of frustration over a lack of reconsideration of priorities. There has been no institutional process for reflecting on whether things are going well. More often than not, the newly proposed system (no matter how forward-thinking) is equally devoid of review.

As much as they may recognize the need for student reflection, for professional pause to consider their practice, they have not thought to include it in their new plans for their schools and districts.

It’s possible they see their new mission, vision, and the lot as perfect. I don’t think that’s it. More likely, they are excited by he possibility of change. The immediate future overrides the later possible.

And that’s why I stop things.

Without planning a process for review, they have doomed themselves to repeat the past. They have cemented the status quo. Without intending to, they have built a structure against which future members of the community will hit their heads.

They have made the arbitrary.

That’s the key for anyone building something new. You are creating something of value to you with deep theoretical roots planted in the soil of today.

This is how the systems you’re fighting against were begun.

Build something better.

This doesn’t mean anticipating the future. As anyone with a platform and technological megaphone will tell you, we can’t anticipate the future. Instead, it means anticipating the future will need something else – something specific to the time.

In any system, the arbitrary is the most unfair. It is the thing to which people point and say, “Well, it’s always been that way.” It is the immovable that most needs moving.

So, we stop things and look at the system they have designed and start asking where it makes sense for future community members to be called upon to examine the status quo for cracks in the foundation.

What makes sense today will be the status quo of tomorrow. It will come replete with the seemingly arbitrary trapping of “we’ve always done it this way”, and that is reason enough to guard against it.

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 Goodbye for Every Room

On my most frustrating days, it will be this…

For my closest friends…

To those to whom I will always owe and apology…

In the crowded rooms in which I’ve always hoped to be heard…

To my siblings…

To my parents and family…

To my students…
student sign offAnd, inveriably to myself…

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.

Check out this hella wicked awesome jawn, y’all

Language

In first grade, my mom and I moved to Kentucky. While only for a year, my grandparents’ worst fear was realized. I came back with a tiny drawl, an ability to pronounce Louisville like a local, and a proclivity for “y’all”. In adulthood, I’ve lived in some linguistically diverse places. As a result, I’m somewhere between a colloquial mutt and a carpetbagger of words.

From my northern California connection, you’re likely to hear “hella“. It only took a year in Boston for me to see the beautiful malleability of “wicked” (see also “wicked awesome”). Four years in Florida brought “y’all” back into my life. Nowhere and no word has proven so utilitarian as Philadelphia’s “jawn” (see also “jawnski”).

These words act as aural tattoos of where I’ve been and are constant reminders of what it meant to be in and of a place. This is to speak nothing of the international words I’ve collected. “Jambo,” “ubuntu,” and “inshallah” from Kenya, South Africa, and Pakistan respectively are only a few of the terms I encountered amongst other people and recognized the value of beyond what America could provide.

More than usefulness, these words are also markers of how I define citizenship in ways that are perhaps different than my parents who have not traveled out of the country or my grandparents who have lived in relatively similar locations throughout their lives. If language is culture, my travels have made me a part of a culture different and connected to the one from which I come.

This is where tools like urbandictionary and Language Log are the most helpful. All that’s necessary is an Internet connection and we can sort through the cultures and micro-cultures of those whom we may never meet. Even if we are not participating, we can have a window into how words and their meanings shape the actions and beliefs of others. These tools represent a museum of the now, sharing the nouns, verbs, and clauses that separate and connect us.

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 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.