Tag: 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?

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.

What’s On the Walls of My Classroom?



In many of the classrooms I inhabited as a student, you’d find the requisite posters of inspiration or quick reference of whatever content was specific to that room – grammar and punctuation, formulas and functions, etc. Later, in high school, Mrs. Henning-Buhr’s room was an amalgam of markers of student expression over the years.

When she found out she had a painter in class, a mural would appear. Projects hung what I’m sure was dangerously from the light fixtures. Echoing the mark I’m sure the courses were taking on us, she invited us to leave our mark on the room.

For my first years as a teacher, all of the above was how I envisioned my classroom. Quotations, student work, the odd mural, painting one side of a drop ceiling tile (because you could turn it over and hide it if you ever had to leave that classroom behind).

The vision shifted when I attended a presentation on occupational therapy. A subject I’d had no prior exposure to, OT principles made me believe everything I put on my walls was a thing a student had to filter out when I was asking for focus on whatever the lesson of the day or moment might be. I was challenging my students to get to what I was trying to teach before I’d even started teaching it.

In the weeks after the presentation, everything came off my walls. I even asked a volunteer parent to sew curtains to put on tension rods covering the distraction of books on my book shelves. I went all in.

The walls of my classroom stayed that way until I realized they shouldn’t exist. The Museum on the Seam’s Coexistence exhibit came through the district in which I was teaching, and we able to get a field trip approved to take all of my students. Stepping off the bus, I gave my camera to a student and said, “Document this.”

Set up in a park down by the local bay, the exhibit was a collection of billboard size artistic interpretations of the theme matched with quotations from historical figures relevant to the art.

Students roved the park taking notes–or not. We ate lunch, enjoyed the park, and loaded the buses at the end of the day to head back to school.

Think of the curtains I would have needed to keep them focused on exactly what I’d determined was important that day.

The conversations following the field trip were rich, and I’m still fascinated and impressed by the roll of film shot by that one student to whom I’d handed the camera.

That trip best sums up the walls of the classroom within my head. It allows the freedom to go out and experience the world and invites pieces of the world otherwise unobtainable into the setting. It recognizes a classroom without walls doesn’t mean a classroom without limits, and that experiences should provoke students to question what’s on the other side of those limits.

I’m Glad I Waited to Teach

Calendar Card - January

Teaching.

Just like you, I knew in 8th grade I wanted to be a teacher. It was where I started to realize the power of words and the effect playing with those words, studying them, and using them thoughtfully could build or destroy.

If you’d asked me then, I would have said something like, “Because I like English class.” Subtext.

Not knowing what a “good” teacher preparation program looked like as a high school senior, I trusted the promotional materials I’d received from Illinois State University, and handed them four years of my future.

For all of the grumbling and complaining I did along the way, I’m so very glad I did. And I’m glad it took time.

While everyone around me seemed to be lamenting the fact none of the required general education courses aligned with their intended majors, I thought it was fantastic. I learned that geology wasn’t for me and that chemistry might be (something my HS experience had eliminated as a possibility time and again). Those courses afforded me the opportunity to take courses on Islamic art and culture, and the theater of the Civil War. Both offered me perspectives I’d never anticipated and to which I’ve turned more frequently than expected in the years since.

As courses in my major began, I was deep into elements of English I’d never considered before and asked to participate in what seemed like onerous hours of classroom observations and a multitude of mini lessons.

Plan, justify, teach, reflect, repeat.

It was a pattern, but not a monotony. That reflection–public and private–is where I started to play with nascent ideas and justify why views on quality learning and teaching were different from my peers’.

From lab schools to local schools to my student placement teaching, it all felt as though my university was purposefully getting in the way of me being a teacher.

They were.

They were getting in the way of me being a teacher who found himself in the deep end with no experiences, mentors, or theoretical framework on which he could rely. They were getting in the way of me thinking the kids I went to school with growing up were going to be the same as the kids I taught in Florida or Philadelphia in the years ahead.

I was sure I was ready to teach as soon as I thought I was done learning. Luckily, those who’d come the way before were there to show me knowing I was never done with one was the ultimate preparation for the other.

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 Wish for Fatherhood

Hand of Dad

More often than not, I find myself wishing for fatherhood. In asking the question, Ben offered up birthday cakes, shooting starts, or lucky pennies. When confronted with these totems of wishing and even in their absence, my wish is consistently the same.

When I was little, pre-literate; I was sitting outside my mom’s office while she finished the last meeting of her day. Everyone else had gone home for the night, so when she and her colleague exited the office, the only person they saw was me sitting with a telephone book open to the yellow pages.

“What are you doing, Zachary?” she asked.

As the story has been shared over the years, I looked up and explained I was searching for an adoption agency that delivered. I was certain, I told my mom, that if I could get a younger sibling delivered in under 30 minutes, she’d be incapable of sending it back.

This same drive fuels my wishing to be a dad. I realize I know none of the stress, sleep deprivation, and millions of other ways my life would be altered were I to suddenly find myself a single dad. And, as much as that should probably keep me from wishing for it, it’ll be what I quietly whisper to myself when confronted with the next birthday cake, shooting star, lucky penny, or stray moment.

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 Most Valuable Chair-less Lesson

Overturned chair

The most valuable learning away from a chair and desk? Running – particularly my first marathon – has been the most valuable learning I’ve experienced. I might include whatever learning has happened at a chair/desk.

I wasn’t a runner when I started. I wasn’t anything that included physical activity, really. Whatever intrinsic joy I might have found in sports and other elements of P.E. in school were subsumed by the social pressures–real and imagined–I felt to know how to do things like layups, bunting, etc. I decided early on that excercise and sports weren’t for me. And that was how things were until I turned 21 and decided I didn’t want the most momentous thing that happened in my life that year to be the ability to legally consume alcohol.

My first steps as a runner were June 1. Two miles. I wanted to die. Oct. 12 of that year, I completed the Chicago marathon.

Running that race, I realized the marathon wasn’t going to be the event that made me a runner. It would make me a marathoner, sure, but I was a runner as soon as I made the commitment to take those first steps in June, as soon as I’d said, “This is a thing I’m going to do.”

Up to that point, I’d seen sports as things you had to have pre-provided knowledge and experience with in order to understand and participate. I’d missed the athletic boat early on, and figured that was my chance. I’d have to be happy with other things I had learned.

While I shy away from an absolute such as, “It’s never to late to become X,” one of the best lessons I’ve learned from running is the importance the decision to do or be a thing in helping you to become that thing. I wasn’t a runner because I’d decided I wasn’t or couldn’t be.

Now, when I let life dictate the terms of how I spend my time and find myself at the far end of a run-less stretch of weeks, I don’t start to doubt my identity as a runner. I’ve been a runner since an exhausting midwestern June 2-miler, and most of the time, that’s enough to get me out the door.

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.