Learning Is Embarrassment

Learning is growth. It brings vitality to life and is one of the reasons childhood is so magical. Kids are constantly learning and if they make a mistake, often it is easily overcome. "Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough," according to author Alain de Botton (Kleon 2014, 197). the embarrassment does not have to be public. It is embarrassing when one learns the actual lyrics to a song, rather than some nonsense that they originally thought it was. After a while, one may forget their previous understanding of it, but the key was not to be satisfied with what was thought to be known. Being open to new experiences and learning is a vital link to growth.

Kleon, Austin. Show Your Work! :10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. Workman, 2014.

Wearables and Individuality

"Wearables." Whether it is an Apple watch, fitbit or even a cellphone, we are generating data that we hand over to corporations every day and we do so willingly. Granted, our willingness to use a new app or device clouds our thinking in terms of all that we are giving away. Everytime we download a new app it asks for invasive permissions which usually include location, photos, contacts, searches among other sensitive bits of information. We can use our fingerprint or our face as a way to open our phones, both of which will be painful, difficult and costly to change. As Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 intimates, the government will not demand people give away their information. People will happily give it away through their own choice.

Yuval Noah Hariri likens it to when the Europeans swindled Africans an Native Americans out of "entire countries...for colorful beads and cheap trinkets" (Harari 2018, 79). The problem is, now that we have started to do it, how do we stop? For me to have reduced costs for my health insurance, the insurance company requires biometric data exams once per year. They have an app that tracks my location which is used to tabulate "points" when I walk into a fitness center and stay for at least 30 minutes. Throughout the year I am required to earn a set number of points to keep my lower cost health insurance. Who does this information belong to? It seems like it should belong to the individual, but it is being given to a corporation who can store it and use it for a variety of purposes of their own choosing.

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Think! Learn! Change!

 "Think Big! Do Something Awesome! Change the World!" This collection of statements came out of frustration years ago with a class of juniors who said “How can you expect us to choose anything we want to learn about and research it? We have never done that before!” I was stunned.  While they may not have been the hardest working group, I thought giving them the option to learn about anything they wanted would fire them up rather than lock them up.  This has become a mantra with which we begin each Genius Hour session. It is easily chanted or repeated as a class, but each part has to be undertaken with equal vigor. There were semesters or years where we missed the mark because students focused on the third part and felt they had to raise money rather than doing something they are truly interested in doing. They may learn about a topic, but most of their time was spent in doing the logistics of an event. It doesn't come off quite as pithy, but using Tim O'Reilly's lines "Work on stuff that matters," and "Create more value than you capture" could create more of the vision we are seeking for what has become one of our signature events (Ferris 221). "Think Big" stands on its own, because we want students to challenge themselves to do something beyond what they may have done before. Thinking big is about giving themselves confidence in their capabilities--and maybe even swagger.

"Do Something Awesome" was not a self evident statement. Doing something awesome could mean playing a video game that is awesome, watching a video that is awesome or hang out with friends, which may be awesome as well. The revised phrase should be "Learn Something Important" In the past, we have begun the semester saying those words, but lately haven't directly defined what we mean by each sentence. The whole goal behind Genius Hour is to pursue a topic that has always been intriguing but has never been a priority, or maybe it has been and they want to delve deeper. It may be a problem that exists in the world that the student wants to solve, or something else. Once a topic is identified, the first charge is to learn as much about it as possible. That will involve reading, experiencing it first hand and interacting with experts among other things. They should be able to explain why it is important and to whom it is important. That will lead to the third part, which recently has been the stickiest.

Where they become most confused is with "Change the World." "Change the World" does not mean raising money. It means take what you have learned out into the world and do something that matters. That is where they can "create more value than (they) capture." Taking their learning and giving it to the world in a way where it will benefit others at a magnitude greater than 1 is the goal. If, after doing the learning, a person is twice as good at something, the good they do for others or the learning they give to others should be greater than twice as much. That may mean it benefits one  person. It may mean benefiting many more. It does not mean benefiting 7 billion people, but it may. Making others' lives better is not directly correlated with a dollar amount.

Genius Hour, Think Big, Do Something Awesome, Change the World, Learn Something Important, Arete Academy

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Elasticity

 The world is generally moving away from a rigid fixture of job title and job skills. The norm is becoming where a person's skills are valued, but their experience in different fields may yield even more than if that one person stayed in their "lane." Daniel Pink refers to the "elasticity" of skills and how they must include being able to convince others to join your vision Pink 2012, 36). This idea of elasticity was thrust upon the world in the last year. People who have been working at their jobs for 30 years suddenly had to revamp everything while they worked from home, many of whom are still working from home and will be for the foreseeable future. They will have to undergo a second bout of discomfort when they go back to working in the office. This idea that going back to what was previously done will make a second upheaval in people’s lives seems to have escaped many in the education world, be they teachers, administrators, parents or students. 

Now is the time to embrace change and take advantage of the learnings that we have (or should have had) over the last year regarding what is important, what we should keep and what we should get rid of. 

Pink, Daniel. To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 

2012.

Overcome Obstacles

 In general, to find success, people need to become comfortable being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable means there is a chance for failure. It is the mind saying "This may not work." The idea that failure may happen should be encouraged, especially in school. If "life is the obstacles," according to Janna Lavin, Tow Professor of Physics at Barnard College of Columbia University, and "our role is to get better at navigating" them, then school is a perfect place to practice failure (Ferriss 52). The key in learning from failure is to reflect on it. In their book Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and David Evans have created a unique matrix for doing just that. Their strategy is to categorize your failures into one of three categories, screw up, weakness, growth opportunity. It all comes together in the reflection on the type of failure. Is this something that can be applied to future situations?

Burnett, William, and David J. Evans. Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works for You. Vintage Books, 2018.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Mission One

 It is easy to get caught up in checking social media, email and other busywork and it feels like we are really getting stuff done. Being able to identify those times and refocus is a challenge. Ishita Gupta says that "every day is a new chance to choose" (Godin 2010, 206). Adam Robinson, Chess master and investor asks himself the question, "Am I rehearsing my best self?" If the answer is no, then how does one reset? Robinson breaks it down to a granular level when he identified there are 86,400 seconds in a day and every one of them can be used to reset our actions and attentions and recover to become our best selves (Ferriss 192). One way to do that is to create a personal mission statement to check actions against. That mission statement should be flexible enough to be used in school, at work, and with friends and family.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Maps for Artists

 There is no map for being an artist. Once a person creates a map to be an artist or a leader, others who follow it are no longer artists, or leaders. They are following a prescribed path, or painting by numbers. Bringing the artistry into anything requires forging one's own path. Whether it is writing, painting, or science, the artists figure out what to do next. They are not told.

Think about the games calling on players to choose a card and do what it says. Candyland is a perfect example. There is no thought involved (other than deciding to take the shortcut). The player picks a card and does what it says. Yay! I got two yellows!

Education is flush with this type of activity. Rubrics are one of the major reasons this is the case. A rubric does not require a person to push themselves to their limit of creativity. It limits thinking and the impetus for ultimate success. In a world teeming with wicked problems that can only be solved with original thinking and new solutions, instead of schools embracing diversity, we embrace common assessment, to the detriment of student and teachers by ignoring some of their most ardent interests and areas of expertise.

Godin, Seth. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Portfolio, 2010.