Education | The Direction of Intention

Walk Toward The Vanishing Point

Posted on January 17, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

The other day in Melissa’s class, the students were drawing pictures. They were learning about perspective. Most were drawing according to single point perspective: all lines meet at a single spot called the vanishing point. In the drawings, roads and train tracks ran toward the horizon, telephone poles and barns all followed the lines disappearing into a single point.

The lesson will continue for a long time. Now that the students have drawn lines to a single point they will begin exploring the greater implications of perspective. They will discover for themselves that things look radically different according to where you stand. They will learn that you can never occupy another person’s perspective so you will never be able to see what they see (imagine the implications); they will discover that perspective is personal and as varied at there are people on the planet. The possibilities of an exploration in perspective go on and on. We forget that at one point in history artists were mathematicians. Artists were scientists. There wasn’t the separation or the story that we tell today. Imagine the implications for education if we weren’t so blinded by subject separations and so singly prejudiced against the arts. Music is math, after all. Color is either chemistry or optics depending on whether you are mixing paint or light.

The next day, we met with other teachers, each sharing their experiences in the classroom. Beth (an amazing educator) listened to Melissa’s story and said, “I love the term, ‘vanishing point!’ There’s a whole world happening beyond that point and we just can’t see it.” She was lost in thought for a moment and then exclaimed, “Beyond the vanishing point anything is possible!”

Beth deals in possibilities. She is one of the few people I’ve known who recognizes that we actually live at the vanishing point though most of us pretend that we know what’s going to happen. Beth courts the vanishing point. She plays with it. She tries things just to see what will happen. Hang out with Beth and you will jump in puddles, race through tall grass, and take a turn down a road just to see where it leads. She knows that when you walk toward the vanishing point you walk into possibilities. Beth knows that life is vital in the direction of the vanishing point; the foreground of the picture is the present; it is where we currently stand. Beth knows it is the deepest human impulse to say to your self, “I wonder what’s over that hill?” And then follow the impulse. Beth knows this greatest of human impulses is at the heart of great education. Beth knows like Melissa knows, it is so simple and so possible when they are allowed to walk with their students toward the vanishing point instead of being forced to turn away from the horizon and pretend that there is something standardized about learning.

Filed under: Art, Education, Perspective, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: art, learning, perspective, power, teaching, vanishing point, vitality | 2 Comments »

Change Your Song

Posted on January 13, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

675. 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 is funny to me the confluence of thought-rivers meeting in my life. For instance, Lexi recently introduced me to the Pete The Cat series of children’s books. When Pete’s white shoes turn red from treading in strawberries, is Pete upset? Goodness, no! He simply changes his happy song from “I love my white shoes” to “I love my red shoes.” A very complex thought delivered through a children’s book simplicity; motivational speakers the world over try to convey the same message with startlingly less finesse.

Just as Pete The Cat flowed into my day, Skip and I are in the midst of collaborating on a series of support mechanisms for entrepreneurs. For me, the heart of the series lives in my passion wheelhouse: change your story, change your world. This thought is a simplicity that gets lost in the adult world’s need for complexity. More than once in my consulting life I’ve heard, “But it can’t be that simple!” Translation: that is something I can do so I can either embrace it or insist that it is not possible. Often in the world of adults, complexity is equated with value. If it is simple, it is suspect (note: this is why our education and health care systems are in advanced states of collapse). Our attachment to complexity is often protection against owning our responsibility for change we know is necessary.

And, because Pete The Cat met Skip in the playing fields of my mind, my work with Skip is now finding children’s book simplicity. I heard the adult in me (admittedly a very small, some would say, stunted part of me) just exclaim, “It can’t be that simple!” The voice of Pete The Cat followed immediately saying, “Oh, but it is. It is so simple. Change your song, celebrate your world!”

Filed under: Business, Education, Perspective, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: collaboration, complexity, simple, simplicity | Leave a comment »

Thank Melissa

Posted on January 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Avalon disappeared into the mists of time. It is there, or so we are told, but it is out of reach to we mere mortals. In the age of reason the mystery retreated to the other side of the veil. I thought of that as this afternoon we drove through fields shrouded in fog towards a rural elementary school. We were visiting Melissa’s classroom; a place alive with magic and excitement and the vitality that is present wherever true learning is taking place. If magic survives beyond the veil then Melissa’s classroom is a portal to that sacred place.

Tom once told me, “You will know when you are doing important work by the size of the tide that rises against you.” Melissa is doing important work and is standing tall despite the towering wave that crashes over her (and every teacher in the nation) everyday when she asks, “Why are we doing this? What does this test or this shabby curriculum have to do with learning?” She asks and others turn away. She is the voice in the crowd that says, “This emperor has no clothes!” And like the child in the story, the truth-teller is shunned initially, hushed by the adults who are too afraid to say, “We know. We see it, too.”

There are plenty of teachers and administrators and parents and business leaders that see it, too. There are many conversations about fixing things. There are endless strategies and punitive measures to raise standards though no one is certain what standards we are raising (hint: test scores have nothing to do with learning; neither do lists or rankings or any other from of measurement). On the surface we are expert at finger pointing and assigning blame and still the emperor prances naked through the streets.

And beneath it all is Melissa and scores of educators like her that know the system as dictated to them is doing the opposite of what it professes. So, she wades into the muck everyday and ignites imaginations and encourages her students to explore, pursue, experiment and make messes. Her students make choices (they control themselves because she teaches them to be powerful): they are engaged in a quest of discovery. Her students are excited to come to school because what they do is real; unlike most of the adults who should be lobbying for their betterment, they are very clear and vocal about what has merit and what has little or no value.

Filed under: Education, Gratitude, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: discovery, education, experiment, imagination, learning, pursuit, standards, teaching, vitaltiy | 1 Comment »

Make No Sense

Posted on December 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

646. 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 in Hutchinson, Kansas at the Ramada Inn. In the center courtyard of the Ramada is a swimming pool with an astronaut theme: there are mock lunar modules in the center of the pool. Over in the corner is a mural of the moon complete with 3 dimensional astronauts skipping across the lunar surface. It’s late at night and my room looks out on the moon pool so the effect is more bizarre than it might seem in the light of day. I’d wake my inner sociologist for a look but he’d snarl, “You woke me for a peak at Americana!” and then I’d be in hot water for the next few days. Did I mention there is a hot tub in the lunar landscape? I turns out that Hutchinson is the home of a most amazing museum of the cosmos. There is usually sense to be made and sometimes sense-making reveals a beautiful treasure.

When I try to make sense of education in this nation I hear Doug Durham’s voice echoing in my mind. I used to stomp into Doug’s office when the world seemed particularly cruel to students and shout, “But it doesn’t make any sense!” Doug would swivel his big bear body in his big swivel chair and say, “The trouble with you is that you want it to make sense. Stop trying to make sense of it and you’ll be happier.” I didn’t like that response the first time or the twentieth time I heard him say it – but he was right. Stop trying to make sense of the nonsense and you’ll be happier. Call the nonsense what it is, nonsense.

I understand the governor of Nebraska created a list ranking every school in the state, all 240 schools ordered from first to last according to a performance criteria. You’ll not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no point to the list; it is nonsense though very many people, mostly non-educators, take it very seriously. It is as arbitrary as the test scores that drive the notion of ranking schools. Actually, if you squint at the list and you will see that the schools with the most funding are generally at the top of the governor’s list and those with the least money are generally at the bottom. If it was a list of funding inequity it would have meaning but instead it pretends to be a list of performance and so ignores the obvious.

I woke up my inner sociologist when I heard about the governor’s list and he was quite curt with me. He sneered, “You woke me up for this? Are you kidding! There’s no mystery here! This list makes perfect sense!” he snarled. “When in the history of western civilization has a privileged NOT stacked the deck against the rest of society and called it high performance?” He huffed as he rolled over saying, “Idealist!”

And now I’m in Hutchinson, Kansas. There is an amazing and inspirational history of the race to the moon told here in Hutchinson. There is also the most inspirational educator I’ve ever met.

All the while, a governor makes a list and checks it twice, to be poor is to be naughty and to be privileged is to be nice. And I’m enjoying this moment in the Ramada Inn precisely because there is some sense to be made of an astronaut standing in the corner by the swimming pool and none to be made of the governor’s notorious list. Won’t it be a lovely day when instead of list making we put our minds to creating great learning with the same verve that we used when once upon a time we made it our task to put a human being on the moon?

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: learning, nonsense, sense | 1 Comment »

Witness

Posted on December 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Sometimes I think the greatest power of a teacher is nothing more complicated than the power to witness. What is it to be present with a person and to see them? See their curiosity. See their desire to be seen. See their need to pursue. To hold space for another person’s discovery is to offer them a great gift; to behold their encounter with the unknown gives them an ally, a companion. What could be more potent than to ask, “What did you find?”

My greatest teachers never answered my “how” questions. They’d shrug their shoulders and responded to my question with another question. They helped me to keep looking. They fed my curiosity. They would not allow me to orient according to their perspective but required me to develop my own perspective. They required me to orient from myself, to seek guidance from my inner compass, not theirs.

They taught me an important lesson that I am only now beginning to understand. Learning is not about knowing anything. That is worth repeating: learning is about not knowing. Learning is an endless engagement with mystery and has little to do with expertise or fact or certainty. There is always another layer. There is always another question. Learning is how you address yourself to the mystery and particularly the mystery of yourself. Ultimately, the most important thing you discover is yourself. There is always another tier to uncover.

They taught me to practice “not knowing” and, in fact, they helped to understand that “knowing” is a kind of defense against being seen. Having to know the answers and needing to be right are types of armor; it is the need of a right answer that keeps us separate. As someone recently said to me, “thinking that we know cheats us.” It shuts off the pursuit. It blunts the discovery.

The capacity to see begins with being seen.

Filed under: Education, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

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?”

Filed under: Education, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Filed under: Education, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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