Education | The Direction of Intention

Know Your Oral From Your Aural

Posted on November 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

626. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Once I was hired as an artist in residence at a school. Prior to starting I had an interview with the principal to discuss his vision for my residency. He proudly told me that the school’s focus was “aural language.” When I asked him what that meant to him and how they were currently executing the theme he stared at me; he had no idea. For ease, I asked the first part of the question again, “What does aural language mean to you?” He stuttered and began to sweat. Finally, he said, “You know, the spoken word.” Ah. I was gob smacked on two counts: first, he was champion of a school wide theme and hadn’t yet sorted his oral from his aural. Second, it was late in the school year and I can only imagine given his response that I was the first person to ask if he knew what he was championing. That month during my residency every single teacher told me the school’s theme and none had the vaguest idea why it was the theme or what they were supposed to do with it. It became our joke. They’d ask, “What are we doing today?” and I’d look very serious and respond, “Why, aural language, of course.”

I think about this man and those teachers every time I walk into a school and see how invested and driven we’ve become by “the standards.” My-Favorite-Beth showed me a photo of a white board chocked full of numbers that looked like complex equations for string theory but were in fact the scrawls made by teachers trying to identify which standard they were going to teach (note-that-should-raise-your-red-flag: despite the best efforts of My-Favorite-Beth, they were not capable of discussing teaching children, they were only capable of discussing teaching standards. I imagine the standards will soon exit the school well informed but the children will certainly yawn and ask again, “So, why did we do that?”). As Sir Ken Robinson said, “No one wants standards to drop but we need to ask, ‘Standards of what?’” Is it oral or aural, rural or laurel, clap-clap-shimmy-shimmy-shake, if-it-was-good-enough-for-me-it-is-good-enough-for-you, why are we doing it? No body knows but at least we’re all on the same page.

This is what I’ve decided. I want to bag the word “school” entirely – and that includes all of the synonyms as well. Maybe if we called it something else we might jiggle loose our dreams and move beyond our current educational energy eddy. Melissa, my nominee for teacher of the year, said, “It should all be about engagement. Everything else follows from there.” Yes. Here’s my short hand: we’ll know we’re on the right track when we are more interested in problem creation than we are with problem solving. This thing formerly known as school should be more pursuit than regurgitation, more question than answer, more alive than dead. And, we’ll know how to distinguish between those things when we start asking ourselves the question the kids have been asking for years, “Why are we doing this?”

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Diverge

Posted on November 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

611. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Earlier today I laughed when an artist friend said to me, “I felt like an alien when I was a kid. And then I grew up and my friends started taking drugs; they finally saw the world the way I saw it! It was great!” Being an artist can feel like living in a perpetual altered state.

Artists often have to walk far down the road of their lives before realizing that their greatest gift is their divergent point of view; it is not what they do, it is how they see. It is a great day in their lives when they realize that they need not bend their view to match “the norm,” they simply need to give themselves permission to see what they see. They need only grant themselves permission to want what they want and express what they perceive; they go so far as to let go of the notion of a norm. Until then they think they are aliens, deficient or are somehow broken; they travel through life thinking, “Either this place is insane or I am?” No matter how you toss that coin, you will not come up a winner.

The first phase of my graduate program was called divergence. We were encouraged to deviate from our path: to pursue something that either scared us or challenged our fundamental assumptions. It was a brilliant educational design and unusual for a university program. Throughout the process I pondered why intentional divergence wasn’t the organizing principle behind all levels of education. A student must diverge to converge; a student must not-know en route to knowing. Divergence requires stepping into unknown territory. Wandering beyond the boundaries is the only way to understand the usefulness or uselessness of the boundaries. Step into the bog, get lost, run from noises that may be nothing or just might be a tiger. How will you ever know if you will fly or fall until you leave the nest? Of this you can be certain, diverge and you will return to the nest knowing more than when you left or, more likely, you will know more than when you left AND have no need to return. No matter how you toss that coin, you will come up a winner.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Creativity, Education, Emergence, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: divergence | 2 Comments »

Put The Buggy In The Barn

Posted on November 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

608. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I’m reading a book about brain science and how it applies or might impact education. I’m finding the science and discoveries about the brain amazing and yet the application and translation to education is frustrating and sometimes mindboggling.

Marshal McLuhan wrote that we make sense of new technology through the eyes of the past. So, for instance when automobiles first came on the scene we referred to them as horseless carriages. I make sense of my smart phone as if it were simply a telephone and it is so much more than that; I do not know what to call this thing that I carry in my pocket, this thing that has more computing power than the Apollo space crafts. I am squeezing a new miracle into an old idea; I do not understand the power and capacity I already possess.

That is precisely what the authors of my book are doing (and that we are perpetuating in our national non-conversation about education) when applying their ideas to teaching and learning; they are squeezing miraculous insights into an antiquated system. They are addressing the relationship of teacher to student, content-deliverer to receiver, assuming a factory model system in which students are passive and clumped according to age groups in a room filled with rows of desks. They are not challenging the faulty assumptions that their science is revealing. They are attempting to help teachers navigate a standardized test driven system when all of their findings indicate that a standardized test driven system impedes learning.

What prevents us from challenging our assumptions, from actually creating something designed for the times in which we live? That is a rhetorical question. Our challenge is not to improve teaching or to raise standards. Our challenge is to put the buggy in the barn and buy a car. No amount of discussion, testing, debate, or application of new science will make the horse drawn carriage work better in the 21st century. The intention behind the book is to positively impact with the latest science processes of learning, yet it defines learning from a century old idea.

Jill put the question to Seth Godin and he responded with something like this: education will change when the entire community engages in a conversation about the purpose of education (not a direct quote). What is this thing we call education? What is its purpose? If it is, as I hear in our national dialogue and political rhetoric, to make better workers, then we are already lost. Actually, “to make a better workforce” is a perfect statement of a lowest common denominator system expressing its lowest common denominator intention. Design to the minimum, aim for the minimum, and we will hit the minimum every time, no brain science necessary.

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Seek

Posted on November 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

605. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Master David Miller just sent his update-my-life newsletter and at the bottom he included this quote:

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those that find it.” Andre Gide

I cheered and clapped my flippers! As someone who has done an insane amount of seeking in his life I was gratified to know that other seekers have also found nothing. And, more to the point, “not-finding” is in fact, the point of seeking.

The great thing about science is that there is always another question. Math is a language we’ve invented or discovered (a chicken and egg debate above my pay grade) that is used to describe our universe; no answers there! Math is also nice for balancing your checkbook or keeping track of how many widgets were sold; it’s a great a way of notating music. Math is the language of pursuit. Chase math down the path and it will lead you to strings and quantums and bubbles…more and more questions. History is never about answers though we pretend that there is a definitive narrative as if we only have one brain and a single set of eyes. At the heart of every seeker is an artist asking, “I wonder what would happen if…?” Mystery upon mystery, question upon question: why then have we constructed an education system dedicated to reducing everything to an answer?

Given my steadfast belief that education is about seeking and not about finding – or put another way – education is about asking questions and not about having answers, I propose a simple step that could revolutionize education in America (note – I wrote “step” and not “solution” as to seek a solution is to reinforce the notion of finding a truth): remove the emphasis on the answer and reinforce the quest. That’s it. A local simplicity to leverage change in a complex system.

This is how I’d do it: first grade would start at night around a campfire with the entire community present, the children closest to the fire. Some old grizzled elder would tell the story of a quest, an ancestor that faced monumental odds and severe hardship and returned to the community with a scroll of questions stolen from a cave guarded by monsters. And since that day every member of the community has been in pursuit of the truth within the questions. All the adults would nod – an impossible task and the community now needs fresh eyes for the questions. And then the elder would give each child a copy of the scroll and ask them for their help. The next day, a teacher would ask, “Where should we start?” The next evening, a parent would ask, “What did you discover?”

Since we are so dedicated to our need to test I wave the white flag of compromise and suggests that the scroll given to the children is the one-and-only standardized test the children will ever receive. It is given on the first night of their new life in school, not with an expectation of answers but as a launch pad for the greater test of their capacity to pursue. Of course, the questions would be designed so that there was no single answer possible, each question would lead to more complex questions; and isn’t that a great definition of “truth?” It’s a treasure hunt. It’s life training. And they, like us, would need each and every member of the community to fulfill their unfulfillable quest.

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See The Dalai Lama

Posted on November 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

602. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Standing in Trader Joe’s waiting to check out with my groceries, I watched the courageous moms wrangle their rambunctious kids while shopping, corralling chaos while trying to pay. Moms in Trader Joe’s have endless patience. They know how to make a grocery store fun. I was third in line so I had some time to watch and that’s when the thought occurred to me: what if we treated all kids, every single child, like they were the return of the Dalai Lama.

I mean no disrespect as I recognize that the Dalai Lamas are believed to be the manifestation of The Bodhisattva of Compassion. When the previous Dalia Lama passes, there commences a search for the reincarnated spirit: a child is identified, recognized and raised as the special spirit reborn to continue their service to humanity.

I do not know where these thoughts come from: what are the odds of thoughts of courageous moms in Trader Joe’s and the Dalai Lama colliding in my mind? Astronomical. But they did.

Isn’t the little being running around in too cute shoes, pulling peanuts off of shelves, a special spirit come to serve humanity? I want to see that notion, that intention, as the design principle driving what we do in the schools. I do not want to see a factory milling children for a lifetime of work in factories. I am sick to death of the conversation about standards; could we have a lower common denominator?

The teachers that I know and love want the same thing that I want; they recognize that each little spirit entering their classroom world is special, unique beyond measure. And yet their hands are bound, they are threatened and paid by the board foot of standard produced. Recently my dear friend Robert watched his son work through an endless sequence of worksheets. Robert said, “I can’t help but wonder if this is good for him, if this learning by rote is the best we can do?” His question was rhetorical. He, like the rest of the nation, already knows the answer. Treat them like lumber and they will act like lumber. I work with many organizations and a common complaint is, “Why are our new hires so incapable of thinking for themselves?” There is no mystery here, only a monumental case of denial.

Who might they become if we held them as exceptional, attended to their spiritual growth (note: I’m not talking about religion), and taught them that their lives mattered to the health and well being of a world that needed their strongest offer. What if they knew, as the Dalai Lama knows, that they carry a flame that reaches back generations and how they conduct their lives will send ripples through many generations to come?

It seems so simple and begins with recognition.

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Choose To Be Powerful

Posted on October 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

585. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued for 584]

This is what I wrote in my journal about strings to pluck when telling the students the Polar Bear King story. These were my 3 lessons about power as told through the story:

1. Power is something you can learn. And, because it is something you learn it is something anyone can create. Power is not something that happens to you; you choose it. You create it.

2. You can only create power with others. No one is powerful alone. Personal power comes from how you are with others. How are you within your circumstance?

3. It matters how you enter a space, just as it matters how you enter you life each day. You have the capacity to intend. How you come in, why you come in, determines what you do within the space. So, for instance, if you enter the classroom expecting the teacher to control you then you have already given away your power; you will wrangle for control all day and only feel the illusion of power when you think you have won control. The first confusion is to mistake control for power. Power is not control, control over others is not power. Enter the space in control of yourself. Decide to enter your day, each and every day, as a powerful person.

It’s so simple.

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Create A Receiving Space

Posted on October 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

584. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

A week ago I went to several classrooms and told the Polar Bear King story. I intended to do an experiment: tell the story but approach it from many different access points, perhaps tell it through movement, engage the kids in a poetry exploration, etc. I bailed on my intention and simply told the story – or in most cases, only told a part of the story. I left the kids hanging, wondering what would happen next. In the morning, prior to going into the schools, I sorted my thoughts; I wrote what was important and why I wanted to tell this particular story. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“Long ago people knew that things like reading and writing and arithmetic were important things to learn but they knew something that we’ve forgotten: if the next generation does not know how to be powerful (personally and collectively), if each child does not know the difference between power and control, then all the other stuff is meaningless.

People taught this, and other things, through stories. They knew that to tell a story was an act of power. They would not simply begin telling a story, they would first transform their space to a place where power might be given and received. Sometimes that meant going to a special place, sometimes it meant creating a central fire or rearranging the existing space.”

Before telling the story to the classes, I asked the students to create a space – and enter the space – so that they were ready to receive a story. They knew just what to do; it is in our dna. They moved desks and chairs, they created inclusive spaces, they got under desks and tables; they made themselves comfortable. And then they listened. They gave their attention so that they might receive the story.

Each time I enter a school I think, “This is madness.” It is a forced march to content delivery, a test factory. As John would say, “We are a penny wise and a pound foolish.” Yet, in the midst of all the madness, the kids know how to create a space to receive – and their first action, in each classroom, was to blow apart the rows, get on the floor, and challenge me to bring something real to them. [to be continued]

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Look To The Little Things

Posted on October 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

582. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Megan-the-Brilliant and I talked late one night about the little things in life; we both agreed that they are the most significant things, those little moments that we almost always miss. She told me of being stunned into silence by the yellow leaves falling in a perfect circle beneath a tree. No other tree in the park was shedding its leaves. This single tree was ringed by a brilliant yellow circle of it’s leaves and in the morning light, it was electric. The next morning, on our way to the airport, she took me to see it. I gave her an assignment: I asked her to go to the tree the following morning, take off her shoes, and walk in the circle of leaves. I am waiting for a full report.

Sometimes the small things surprise you: you discover the circle of leaves. Sometimes you create the small things: you drive to the circle in the early morning light, take off your shoes, and walk through the brilliant leaves. I am practicing moving though my life looking for the small surprises. It makes me move slower, to expect the surprises. I am never disappointed as each day, everywhere I look, I see the little miracles, the kindnesses, the generosities, the electric trees, the mesquite smell in the air.

I am also practicing creating the small memories. Last week I stepped into the river. I climbed a fallen eagle tree and peered into an abandoned nest. I threw bark in the water to make a splash. I ate slowly my chili and smelled a warm, freshly baked cinnamon roll. I splashed paint with a little blonde miracle. I sat before a fire late into the night, drank wine and talked of small things.

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Win Again

Posted on October 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

576. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“It’s all good,” is a statement that you might find printed on a shirt and it also serves as shorthand for a way of seeing; some days everything I hear seems like a philosophical paradigm. Harry had me howling with laughter when he told me that, each morning when he opens his eyes to a new day, he thinks, “I win again!” The mere fact that he gets another day of life makes him a winner. Of course, I laughed because he speculated what it must feel like to open your eyes each day and think, “I win again,” when you believe that you are a “born loser.” The best you can do is neutral. It’s all in the expectation.

“Why does this always happen to me?” is a statement of philosophy I often hear. On planes I encounter statements like, “There’s never enough bag space,” and, “I hope this thing gets off the ground.” Lately, my personal favorite statement of philosophy is, “This is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.” Every single cup is the best. I just heard, “Buckle up, cowboy. It’s going to be a rough ride!” Now how’s that for a great statement!

I was recently allowed to work with a group of young teachers-in-training (side note: who in their right mind allowed me near a group of teachers in training?); they are constantly reinforced in the notion that they must “manage the classroom.” This is shorthand for the philosophy that “kids need to be controlled” which is itself shorthand for the philosophy that “kids are incapable of controlling themselves.” I asked the group if they liked being controlled when they were kids and you will not be surprised to learn that they did not like being controlled. What is the sense, I asked them, of learning how to control others if what they want as teachers is to empower others? Isn’t that what we want? To develop the most empowered, dynamic, pursuers of life possible? Powerful people are powerful because they are capable of controlling the only thing that they can control: themselves. Powerful people are not powerful because they are attempting to control others (that is by definition not power, that is control). Here’s a great ancient philosophy for teachers: “Teach them to fish,” or, said another way, “Curiosity may have killed the cat but it set the child free.” It is all in the expectation and the expectation reveals itself in the stuff we print on shirts.

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: philosphy | 1 Comment »

Take Your Seat

Posted on October 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

575. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Avery was upset. He plays clarinet in the middle school band. There is a hierarchy of placement when you play in a band: musicians occupy chairs according to a ranking, so, for instance, the first violin occupies the first chair and all other violinists compete to get to the first chair. Avery moved from fourth chair to the third; the person he displaced challenged him in an attempt to regain the third chair. It is a competition system – or, in the words of James Carse, a finite game. In a finite game someone must win and someone must lose. Finite games are worse than useless for an artist. Artistry is about mastery, not about winning.

Competition can support mastery and it takes an excellent teacher to facilitate this process. Avery was upset because he didn’t know why he was moved forward. After the challenge, when he was moved again to the fourth seat, he had no idea why. There was a challenge, they competed, someone won and someone lost. The band director offered no feedback. It seemed arbitrary and Avery was left wondering what he could “do” to “win” the next challenge. His focus was not on being a better player. His energy was not dedicated to learning his instrument or to making music with others. His band teacher was reinforcing separation through competition and not artistic collaboration through mastery. The arts are about joining and communal experience; artistic fulfillment cannot be reached through separation.

I shared with Avery a piece of advice that a great theatre teacher once shared with me. He told me that I had to master my craft so that I could be “director-proof.” What he meant by that was that there were many directors and teachers in the world who would work to pit me against my fellows as a way of getting a result. I might attain the result but it would cost me my artistry because I would now be focused on an outcome and not on a relationship. My teacher knew that to keep an artistic fire burning the artist must know within him or herself whether their work was good or not; any external measure was useless.

Great actors audition every day and only seldom get cast. Their artistry dies if they are playing a finite game, if they are playing to win or afraid of losing. Mastery is an infinite game that is meant to make the artist a better and better artist. A great community of artists knows how to push and support each other in mastery; there is no such thing as losing if your intention is to become better and better at playing.

Filed under: Art, Education, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

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