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Archive for the ‘teaching’ Category
In Pursuit of Happiness. The Prequel.
March 16th, 2010
Warning: There are a lot of parenthesis in this blog post.
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Over and over again you hear this thing: ”Do what you love,” or, “Do what makes you happy,” or some variation on that theme. Which, I have to say, sounds like great advice except that it’s useless to me.
And if you’re like me (you are, I can tell) you have a pretty severe problem with that advice. The problem is that you don’t know what you would love to do. Or put another way:
We don’t know what makes us happy.
Does that sound ridiculous? Ok, kind of. But not when you think it through. Consider this scenario:
You are given enough money to make your ends meet for 6 months; no strings attached. That’s enough to quit your job and start fresh. What do you do?
(Or the similar, and all-to-common-these-days scenario: You just got laid off. You made decent money before and now you can choose to either use the clean slate to your advantage, or find another job just like the one you had before.)
Again, if you’re like me, that scenario is unnerving. Because, see, if I had 6 months to change my life, I’m pretty sure I’d end up doing something very close to what I’m doing now. Why? Because I’m skilled in it. Somewhere along the way (it all started with trying to make ends meet…) I got plunked into this profession (I’m a web developer, you can hire me), and I got pretty good at it over a number of years. And now, I’m so good (my mom says) that starting another trade/job/skill would seriously set me back. That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it?
But let’s put that aside for now. Say you knew what you wanted to do. There’s a lot of prep involved in making it happen. Seriously, dropping your day job to “do what you love” means you have to have enough money (prep: save for months) and enough skill (prep: training? schooling?) and in many cases, enough material (prep: buy a shop or some land, or a warehouse) to go out and have people PAY you to do it. That’s tough, right? Even moreso when the bulk of your day is spent earning the scratch to live on while you’re making all these fabulous plans.
I’m writing about this because it keeps coming up. In fact, I just watched this talk by Gary Vaynerchuk which was both inspiring and bullshit — both at the same time. In the talk, he says, “Look yourself in the mirror, and ask yourself, ‘What do I want to do everyday for the rest of my life?’”. Then later, “Whatever it is you need to do, do it.”
(dryly) Thanks for the advice.
Is it just me? Or is there a big fat hole there where the thing you’re passionate about is supposed to be?
“Figuring Out What You’d Love To Do With Your Days Until Forever 101″ really, really ought to be a class that we all have to take before we reach high school.
Figuring out what you want to do is a skill. I’m convinced.
But no one teaches us how to do that. “Do what makes you happy” only works when you know what makes you happy. If I could figure that part out, I assure you, I could find the will and the talent and the time to make it all happen.
And while I could name some things that make me happy, none of them are jobs, or even actions. So how do we unravel it? What if there’s nothing? What if there’s nothing I’d rather spend my days doing than what I’m doing now? That’d be a bummer.
There’s a prequel to the “Do What You Love” inspirational speeches we love to listen to, and that’s the “How To Identify The Thing You’d Love To Do” speech. I’d watch it, and then I’d make everyone I know watch it. Wouldn’t you?
I’ve written some things before about what we should be teaching students. This is it. This is the missing piece. Sadly, I don’t know how.
(Don’t worry, though, ’cause I’m on the job. I’ll have this prequel written, filmed, and posted in no time.)
Good Teacher
March 7th, 2010
I was a teacher, once, for a year, at a high school where I learned that:
- There are students who will succeed no matter what you do, how you teach, or how hard you work.
- There are students who will fail no matter what you do, how you teach, or how hard you work.
- These two facts do not let you off the hook, but they will make you feel pretty stupid when you forget them.
- Being a good [subject] teacher, does not necessarily produce students that are good at [subject].
In my case, teaching Interactive Game Design for 11th and 12th graders, you’d think that being a good teacher would produce good game designers. That makes sense, right? That’s what I was being paid to do…right? No. That’s stupid and too simple.
Honestly, we shouldn’t be aiming for that anyway.
It’d be nice to be able to throw this template down on every student and just say, “This is how we do it. This is what I’m teaching, this is how you will learn it, and this is where this class leaves off and another begins. By the time you have had n classes, you will know what I know.” But that, too, is too stupid and too simple. College can work that way, but high school can’t. Or shouldn’t, rather.
What a teacher has to swallow is much more complicated, and honestly, much more humbling. You see, for a handful of students, the teacher is completely irrelevant (academically). I was irrelevant. The school could have run tapes of Dora the Explorer all day and these students would have still been good students. They still would have had that hustle that others admire, and they would have understood Dora better than their peers come graduation day.
On the opposite end, no amount of personal attention, one-on-one tutorials, extra time, extra homework, verbal, written, or visual lessons was going to help that handful of students who refused to let it help them. Nothing was going to change that. For them, I was irrelevant too, just a different kind of irrelevant. An irritating itch they could do without.
The problem is in the expectations: I teach X. Students learn X. Eventually they will do X for a living.
The model is wrong. What we should be doing is getting the hell out of the way. Why do we keep telling our students what to be good at? Do we think they don’t already want to be good at something for themselves?
The truth is, students want to be good at something, 99% of them CAN be good at something, and good teachers let them. That’s what we should be taught to do, and that’s a lesson my students taught me.
Dispelling the Launch Myth
September 24th, 2009
I’m just going to lay it down in small words: “If you build it, they will come,” is a crock of shit.
To borrow a phrase, if I had a nickle for every time a website launch was delayed on account of the imperfections…
As a web programmer, I see a lot of projects come and go. We depend on the project manager’s ability to say, “We could spend more time polishing and adding features, but let’s get this in front of some eyes,” which is a hard thing to say, I’ll admit, because there are 10,000 things that could be better. If you happen to be the project manager, then that burden is on you.
And what makes it even harder is this strange voice in your head that says, in no uncertain terms, that as soon as you upload those files, all the world’s web traffic is going to come crashing down on your web server. We start to believe that Google will index those pages in their first five minutes of life rather than the week(s) we know it takes for everyone else’s sites to be crawled. We start to picture the angry emails about god-knows-what wrecking havoc in someone’s personal life because there are two instances where someone’s name is spelled wrong. What could be worse?
Yeah, but that’s not how it works. Uploading some files will probably not register with many people at all. In fact, it’s really anticlimactic when you’ve been cranking out an app or site for weeks and then the moment of truth…is quiet.
I know it’s really hard to picture a world where no one is paying attention to you, but don’t be fooled. That place is real and it’s called the Internet. I’m not talking about your Twitter account or your Facebook page. I’m talking about your new site. Your new application.
There will always be a sea of reasons to wait on a launch, and only one reason to go ahead and do it. (Hint: Progress.)
So you, programmer, in the back with the Redbull and Cheetos, I only have one thing to say to you: Quit being a pansy. It’s time to launch.
What Learning Actually Looks Like
August 21st, 2009
I mean, really. You stand in front of room all day, you use emphasis, you try to be funny, and you’ve got this range of faces looking back at you. There are moments you doubt yourself. Are you wasting their time? Are they resenting you? They’re judging you, for sure.
Student Priorities
Every teacher, tutor, trainer and presenter wants to know. How can you tell when the students are learning? What are the signs? Because once you’ve got the clue, you can do more of whatever is working.
Do they sit up straighter? Pipe up when you ask for feedback? Can you tell they’re learning when they scribble in their notebooks and turn in their homework when you ask for it?
Maybe.
More than anything, I think those things are indicators of being well behaved, not necessarily of ingesting information.
“So what the hell, irms? Are you saying we can’t tell when students are learning?” you rudely say to me. I think you can.
Learning looks like teaching.
Something inherent in a student’s brain understands how to give instruction where you can’t reach. Maybe you don’t remember what it’s like to not get it. Maybe you don’t see that they don’t understand. Maybe they’ve faked you out. Maybe you’ve simply used all the words you know to explain the concept and cannot, for the very life of you, find more.
People that know things are the ones that explain to people who don’t know things. i.e. The ones who have learned, teach the ones who have not yet learned.
Motivations are wildly different. The sharing of ‘how to’ between students is driven by all sorts of reasons. The smart kids want everyone else to get it so they can move on, the least brainy finally know something others don’t, still others are natural instructors, predisposed to dispensing information. The agendas are immaterial. The basic tell is the same: learners teach.
And you shouldn’t stop them from doing so lest you crush the only indicator you have for knowing what your students have learned from you, by overhearing them teach it to others.
Accidents & Inspiration
July 27th, 2009
…will lead you to your destination. — Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Long Way Home
I went to school on an academic scholarship, and I wish I could say that I got to do that on account of my incredible foresight, determination, and hard work. But that’s not at all what happened. Here’s how it went down:
When I was fairly young (7), I realized it felt really good to do well on my homework. When you’re seven, you don’t really think of things in terms of hard and not-hard. You think of things in terms of in-trouble versus not-in-trouble. I didn’t think about being smarter than everyone else, I just saw an easy way to not agitate the adults at home or at school, and that seemed just fine to me.
Compliments about being smart were nice, but really, I was just happy to be left alone. Being nerdy with schoolwork almost directly meant I couldn’t really be chummy with other people my age, so I figured I better get good at sports too. I wasn’t funny enough, or charming enough, or pretty enough to be recognized for those qualities, so sports it would be. Besides that, my dad seemed to appreciate all the “hard work” I was putting in and that made me feel pretty good too.
Doing well in work and play became a habit. Only during lectures by college spokespeople in high school did I ever think (or say) that I was working toward a long-term goal. My goal was to do good that day and not get in trouble the next. Those were my aspirations.
Once “getting A’s” became habitual, and being athletic was pretty well cemented, then the rest was just for show. Nothing required honest-to-god hard work, it just looked, from the outside, as though it did. What really mattered, was time. Everything required time. So I did as many things as would fit in a day since wearing out oneself isn’t a factor when you’re 16 years old.
At one point, I was taking 8 classes in a school that was structured for a maximum of 7, playing two sports concurrently and performing with two bands. I also worked and volunteered outside of school. Again, I never thought about things in terms of hard work — only time. Operating at full-tilt was my mode by default at this point, not effort. Habit, really. Certainly not out of drive.
I distinctly remember a teacher telling me I was his single source of inspiration in a very difficult (his first) year of teaching. I remember feeling flattered, but wondering what I was doing that was so damn hard. I knew I was being given too much credit. Getting in the Who’s Who of American High School Students book didn’t feel like the achievement it was supposed to be.
So I got good grades because they were easier than bad grades on the stay-out-of-my-hair-I’ll-stay-out-of-yours scale, and I was good at sports because they were fun and I liked the praise.
During our junior year, they ushered the entire class into the cafeteria to take the PSATs (Preliminary SATs). I scored very well on the test because it didn’t make sense to blow off a test that got me out of class all day. I did not seek this test out. My high school just told us to take it. I didn’t have a choice. (Apparently, most high schools advertise the dates and students sign up to sit the test.)
Months later, my school received a letter that said I should demonstrate my extra-curricular awesomeness, send in my transcripts and submit letters of recommendation to be considered for the National Merit Finalist Award. The councilor of the school, at the time, Mr. Cantu, did all this without my knowledge. Weeks after that, I was on the golden list. Thank you, Mr. Cantu.
Letters from colleges came by the dozens. My dad threatened to charge me rent on the post office box. Scholarship offers for sports, academia, and merit rolled in. Some large, some small. I chose the largest and moved to Ohio.
I lived there for 6 years and stumbled away with an engineering degree in 2004. (College stories are for another post, stay with me here.)
Engineering, specifically Computer Science & Engineering, was the third most difficult degree to complete at my school at that time. Law was first, followed by Pharmacy, and the school I went to was notorious for three of the most rigorous programs in those areas. So why did I choose it? Well first, when I chose it, I didn’t know those facts. Second, my brother laughed at me when I told him because he knew I didn’t know the first thing about computers and that made me just mad enough to do it out of spite. And third, I didn’t have anything else in mind, so this seemed good enough.
So what am I saying here? That I’m not smart? Or hard-working? Or ambitious? No. I think I’m all those things. Or, at least, now I am. But the lesson here is how I came to be those things.
Now I recognize my qualities and I can better myself because of them. But I wasn’t born reaching for the stars. It wasn’t until I realized I was on my way there anyway that I decided they were a destination.
If you’re still reading this, you should know that this is somewhat embarrassing to write. I’ve pretty much just admitted to God and everyone that my motives were never pure, my drive was misguided, and my intentions were shortsighted. I am not, nor was I ever, the level-headed kid with big goals and small pockets. I was not out to best by financial situation by getting a giant scholarship and then blowing the lid off expectations by majoring in something hard. Given the circumstances, I was just doing what seemed easiest at that time, and that’s embarrassing to say out loud.
But I think the lesson is too great to be eclipsed by my shame. It’s important to realize that the driving factors here were external. All along the way. I wanted people to think good things about me, I didn’t necessarily want to be that good.
Now that I’m older, in control, and very very wise, I’m always judging the people around me. Students and friends alike, wondering why they have no ambition. Why don’t they want to work harder and learn new things?
Which is why I had to write this.
My judgement is wrong. It’s a mistake. Afterall, it’s none of my doing that I have those traits now. Children and students, especially, should benefit from this revelation.
I think we should take a good long look at our best qualities and figure out how they got there. That way, when we are teaching the next generation, whether by example or in front of a classroom, we can faithfully make them better people…by fastening on to their best qualities and giving them no other choice.
How To Do Things You Don’t Know How To Do
May 31st, 2009
Everybody is asked, at one time or another, to do something they don’t know how to do. Some people come out with a product, or a presentation, or an idea that, quite simply, ROCKS YOUR FACE. Others fall flat on their own. And the question I want to ask is, “How do the good ones do it?”.
The other day I was looking at this thing online and my job (that day) was to improve the user’s experience when using that thing. I was hired to do this. I was asked to, “Please make it work more and cause fewer complaints.” So I set about the task of “fixing” it.
Along the way, and across many iterations, I realized that the routine had become mechanical. I was taking this thing and changing the pieces that didn’t seem right. I didn’t have a master plan for the final outcome, and the thought punched me in the face: I often don’t.
Great works of art, engineering, and business are architected; designed with an entire system in mind, with all the rules known beforehand, and the expectations for the final prodcut clear. I am rarely blamed for great things. Instead, what I produce most of the time simply works. Nothing more, nothing less, and people keep hiring me to do it, suckers.
But if you consistenly produce things that work and rarely produce something that doesn’t work, even if they aren’t breathtakingly great — the track record, itself, becomes impressive.
Take the Inverse
My take on learning to do things you don’t know how to do is simple: figure out what you shouldn’t do, and don’t.
As I was working on this job the other day, my “method” (if we can call it that) was to change something until I knew it wasn’t wrong. Then move on to the next thing and reevaluate. While the day would have gone faster if I’d done this particular work before, and I would have had a picture of what the product should look like at the end, I just didn’t have the experience. So I did the next best thing. I took the inverse of “make it work” and instead did “make it unbroken”. There is an important difference between the two.
If you don’t know how to create a great resume, keep working until it’s not awful. If you aren’t an artist and you have graphics to create, work until it’s not ugly. Writing a good business plan simply means writing one that isn’t bad.
The only real requirement here is that you should have the most basic set of rules to work within. For instance, if you’ve never created a resume you know at least the following:
- A resume is a document you turn in to represent your best qualities (usually to get a job).
- You have to talk about your experience, and
- Highlight the things you’be been recognized for.
Basic rules, right? So to proceed, I would look at some examples (if they were available) and then ponder what a resume shouldn’t be:
- Boring
- Ugly
- Shouldn’t have cuss words.
- Smudged…
And so on. Obviously you can break it down any way you like, but to get a decent, working resume, start with the basic rules and avoid the bad stuff. Again, nothing less and nothing more than working.
Multiply by n
This system of taking the inverse of the optimal solution (knowing what it should be), and revisiting it until it doesn’t suck is probably not how great things are built. Mozart, Galileo, Bobby Fisher, Pascal — those guys probably had a vision of their goal and moved toward it dodging obstacles along the way. The rest of us, if you adopt my thinking, do it over and over fixing tiny things to make it suck less until you have a final product of minimal suckage.
Sometimes, all we need to do is make a problem smaller in order to find a great solution.
Problems
There are is a hefty handful of problems with this method. It’s slow, it can be discouraging, and it’s certainly not as efficient as already knowing what you’re doing.
“…starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.” – Paul Graham
But really, if you want to learn how to do something you don’t know how to do, what better place to start than avoiding what you know you shouldn’t do? If you actively reevaluate your own work for “suckage” you’ll learn more about the process than if someone had taught it to you, and you’ll be at least twice as good the next time.
Advice Teachers Should Give
February 23rd, 2009
- You do not need to know what you want to do with your life. People will ask you this like you should have an answer, so you will probably answer with one of the usuals: I want to be a doctor/lawyer/teacher/etc. But what if you don’t, or what if you don’t know? Tell the truth. Tell them you’re still figuring out what you like.
- You probably won’t use your degree the way you think you will or as people think it should be used. These people don’t matter. They will not be paying you.
- If you want to be ahead of the game, learn to read and write better than everyone you know.
- You’re probably better off not choosing a path for your life. Instead, choose the best of the options currently available. Go for range, not domain.
- Hang out with the smart people. Not because they’re cool, and not because “you’ll be working for them one day”, but because being around smart people, makes you smarter. It’s the closest thing you can get to learning by osmosis.
- Never let anyone convince you that school of any kind is a waste of time. Change your major twelve times, I don’t care. Take classes that count for nothing, it doesn’t matter. The most valuable things you learn over the course of a class are rarely on the syllabus — or written anywhere, for that matter — so take as many as you like, and make it interesting.
- I can think of no advantages — not one — to graduating earlier than everyone else. Oh sure, you’ll be the youngest whatever in the history of whatever, but that’s only going to last a year at the most. Slow down. Learn something.
- You will have teachers that suck. Deal with it. Use them to figure out what you don’t want to be.
- If you already know what you want to do, then find a need you can fill while you’re doing it.
- Do something hard.
Number 10 may be the most important thing on the list. This is what will give you the edge in interviews, it is what will make other people talk about you, it will be the thing you are remembered for. Applications for schools, scholarships and jobs seem to be designed for answers that make you look like everyone else. Number 10 is your saving grace, and it will almost never happen inside a classroom.
The Thing About Teaching
January 22nd, 2009
…is that you’re aiming at a moving target.
And it’s hard to say who you’re serving in the first place. Is it the students? Their parents? The board? The principal?
Oh sure. Take the easy way out and say it’s the students. No Child Left Behind. All children have a right to learn. Blah blah blah.
There’s a very good argument out there that says that teachers are very much like prison wardens.
“And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.”
Forget about that though, think about the audience:
“The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010, did not exist in 2004:
We are preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist.
To use technologies that don’t exist.
To solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.“
embedded by Embedded Video
(Thanks Ryan, for sharing this video.)
It’s a moving target. We can’t keep up.
So. What does it take to be a good teacher? If you listen to Paul Graham the best teachers have three things in common:
- They have high standards. Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won’t respect the teachers who don’t call them on it.
- They liked students. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It’s hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can’t think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students.
- They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren’t really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.
Which comes down to:
- Inspire them to see the world the way you do.
- Teach them to teach themselves.
I happen to know one woman who is doing that:
“It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment a student realizes that a project is bigger than him, bigger than the school, so big that it envelops the world at large. When a student realizes that what he is doing makes a difference and affects those outside of class, he changes. He recognizes his personal and professional worth, develops passion for his work, and understands what he can contribute to a team. Those intangible qualities lead to the pivotal moment in the transformation of a student from an individual who simply completes a job to one who understands the connection between the project and the outside world.”
( photo credit: local photographer, Craig Kolhruss )
( full article: Cable in The Classroom, Feb. 2007 )
[ Notes: Just so everyone is clear, in the original text, where it says "my game design class", originally read, "the game design class". I have proof. ]