Tag: growth

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.

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.

134/365 What Keeps our Ideal from becoming Real in Education

The ideal is not necessarily ideal if we want to get things done.

Digging through the files I’ve been squirreling away to read “one day” I finished Laura Valentini’s article “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory” yesterday.

While much of it invited re-reading a time or two to really dig into the intense philosophical text, I got enough practical understanding to move the furniture in my brain around a little bit.

I’ll outline the basics as I understand them here, and let others who understand these things better than I chime in with clarifications.

The paradox Valentini describes is akin to letting the great be the enemy of the good. The problem of basing our goals or understandings of the world on the ideal comes in the application to the real world. The ideal is not the real world.

The imagining ignore the reality.

Then, as I understand Valentini, the application of plans to move toward the ideal runs the risk of nullifying the ideal because we didn’t think about the real world in our imagining.

The good, becomes the enemy of the great.

Another way to think about this.

A. I have a plan for an ideal school.
B. I build the structure necessary for the school.
C. The people who populate the school are not ideal.
D. I treat those people as though they are ideal and have ideal abilities.
E. Frustration sets in because people are not who I imagined them to be.
F. The school fails because we did not take into account the non-ideal nature of people, thereby nullifying my image of the ideal school.

While Valentini is talking about ideals of social justice, the argument travels nicely to systems like schools.

If we imagine the ideal school and take into account that people and extant systems are not perfect and ideal, then we can move the pieces of practice necessary to help all actors increase their ability to create the ideal.

In social justice terms, Valentini refers to the application of affirmative action toward the ideal of social justice as a recognition that people do not act without prejudice even after discrimination has been outlawed. The ideal vision holds while the system is adjusted in recognition of the unideal actors.

In the school scenario, the example would be the teachers and other school leaders who imagine all that needs to be done is working harder and longer hours to make up for their shortcomings in making their school the ideal.

This amounts to working much harder to fall short and not build the envisioned school.

Instead, other steps must be taken. Practically, this could include adjusting the school’s schedule, teacher course loads, course materials, training in new practices, etc. Whatever it takes to adjust for the unideal reality can keep the ideal vision from fading away. It might also include things like focusing first on whether or not all students have access to proper medical care, questioning the dietary needs of students and what the school can do to help, connecting students to adult mentors, etc.

The ideal need not die in education because the system isn’t build to bridge the gap between the ideal and reality. It can remain a viable possibility if we realize the needs of the system and move them toward the capacity of the ideal.

131/365 Trust the Start

My new job has me thinking quite a bit about the flow of systems. For the majority of my career, I’ve been at one end of the educational system – in the classroom – working directly with students and other teachers to make learning and formal education better.

Now, I find myself somewhere in the middle of the system. I’m not in charge of anything, per se, at either end of the system. I support teachers and students and I support the leadership of the district. Sometimes (not often) that support looks drastically different.

I’ve found myself realizing and hoping for a specific string of trust to be enacted and embodied by the district.

It starts like this – Trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning.

From there, direct interactions should be set up in such a way to give them support they need to do what they feel they need to do to help kids. This would be at the principal level. From there, outside the schools, intermediate district personnel should move to support principals based on the assumption that they trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning.

If I believe that’s what principals believe, I’m going to be better at my job.

The same assumption is what I hope for those to whom I report. As I move through schools, help teachers and administrators learn and consider new practices, I hope that those in charge of me assume that I trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students growth and learning.

I want others to assume it in the system, and I want those others to assume that I believe it as well.

If we all operate from this believe, if we all trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning, a foundation is established on which we can build, improve and design pathways to even greater capacity.

Assuming teachers are doing all they can is not assuming that they are doing the absolute best, it is assuming that they are doing their absolute best in the moment, and that it can always be augmented.

If I work with a group of teachers to build capacity around some new tool or practice, approaching our time together from the assumption that they are doing all they can will result in conversations much more replete with respect, listening, and care than conversations based on the assumption they are slacking, skating, or faking their way through the school year.

I want the best for anyone who endeavors to add to the learning, understanding, and choices of students. The best way I can think of to support and work alongside these folks is to trust they are doing the best they can and move from there.

130/365 Three Rules I Like for Living

Keep your word to yourself and others…Be trustworthy with yourself.
Whenever you’re offered water, say “yes.” We’re human beings wherever we go…Be who you are, no matter where you are.

I’ve been experimenting with listening to podcasts as I run and commute to work lately. One I’ve subscribed to, which is in the review stage, is Bulletproof Executive Radio. I’m not yet certain if I’m going to keep it in the mix, but the words above from Guest Michael Fishman struck me as good ones this evening as I was finishing up my run.

What would be your three rules for living a better life?

21/365 Name the Metaphor

In between presentations at IETA today, I was parched. I haven’t had to speak for 3 hours straight in quite a while.

Wandering the hallways of Boise State University’s Student Union, I found the fountain pictured below.Dual Fountain

It struck me that this could fit any number of metaphors for American education. The one I stuck with:

We’ve designed a system that will allow you to get what you need and take it with you to last for a long time before needing to refuel. It’s better on the system and more sustainable. That system also has a component that requires you to be present to take advantage of it, wastes resources as you use it and can be a breeding ground for the opposite effects of its intent. Rather than working to push the system to evolve toward the former purpose, we’re throwing all of our resources into supporting both approaches at the same time, never fully committing to requiring users to do the better thing.

What metaphor does the image inspire in you?

Things I Know 313 of 365: I was a bit of a jerk

In cleaning out my box.net contents I found a folder containing my slidedecks from the first day of school of my fourth year of teaching. All was well and good until I found the class rules slide below.

Day 1 Per 3

Who wrote those two rules? When was I Severus Snape? The thing is, I had a decent idea what I was doing when I made this slide. I’d been in the classroom 3 years and came out of a decent teacher prep experience. The kids I’d taught the year before had taken the school from 47 to 81 percent passing the state writing exam. I had strong relationships with my colleagues, kids and their families. I’d headed up a partner student screenwriting program between our school and the local film festival.

Yet, there I was declaring war on cell phones and gum as though it somehow secured my power as teacher overlord.

Not only that, these were the first two rules I posted. Somehow gum chewing and the sight of a cell phone presented clear and present danger in relation to learning.

This list shows me what I told my students I valued on that first day of school, and it reminds me of how much what I said I believed stood in contrast with the beliefs I enacted as a teacher.

We do that, we get better at what we do, at being people with kids. If I had to guess, I’d say this authoritarian stance was a remnant of teaching students who were quite close to me in age and appearance. It was a stab at drawing a line between who I was and who they were. While I needed that line then, in the years that followed, I worked hard to erase it. I realized the way to teach was to connect, to become a person who mattered that asked students to do work that mattered.

It was a difficult lesson.

One I’m still learning. I’m grateful to younger me for sticking this slidedeck in the cloud time capsule to remind me how I’ve grown.