The Direction of Intention

395.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Saul is a great teacher. I meet him in the Dance Underground every Saturday morning to attend his beginners Tai Chi class. He is one of those amazing people who is near 70 years old but looks and moves like someone a quarter century younger than he is. He is filled with the laughter of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to give. I would call him a master and he would tell me to shut up.

He teaches through story. While clarifying a move he’ll stop mid stream and tell a long winding story that usually begins with a foible and ends with a question. Sometimes he gets lost in the maze of his story and re-enters the movement with a shrug and a chuckle yet I have gained something in the journey. Today he stopped mid-cycle and said simply, “Power demonstrations interrupt learning.” When he saw our confused looks he laughed in recognition that the first half of his story was told in his head so he filled us in saying, “I once worked with a teacher that would do impossible feats to show how much better he was than his students. It was impressive but discouraged his students. It took me a long time to realize that this was a demonstration of power for power’s sake. The teacher needed the students to know his superiority. That is not teaching. That interrupts learning.”

I loved the phrase, “power demonstrations interrupt learning,” and repeated it a hundred times so I would remember it after class. It made me wonder how much of our education system is about learning and how much is about power demonstration. The excellent teachers I know and work with are empowering their students. Their focus is not on what they know but on how they serve the bigger questions of their students. The system in which they work is nothing if not a power demonstration – a system designed to control the batches of kid-lumber moving through the mill. I once worked with a group of vice-principals that gave each other high-fives when they successfully expelled a student. That is a power demonstration, an ugly ship sailing without a map or a star to guide them.

Recently I had an email exchange with the executive director of an arts organization. We are collaborating on a grant and the guidelines require us to squeeze our art outreach program into the language of state standards. She wrote, “I loathe these standards, I don’t believe in them and hate that my own children have to learn in a system driven by them.” I hear parents, teachers and administrators use the word “loathe’ a lot in reference to the standards and tests they spawn. I told her how ubiquitous the word loathe is in the education community and wrote back asking, “Then why are we participating by squeezing our big expansive arts program into the minimal lowest common denominator thinking of the standards?” She replied, “Because we have to play the game.” “Do we?” I asked. “If we want to grant money we do.” That’s the rub, isn’t it? If the schools want the funding they must dance the power demonstration dance regardless of its impact on learning.

Repeat this phrase100 times so you remember it after class: power demonstrations interrupt learning.

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377.
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 day is fiercely cold. The wind is howling out of the north. “Gusts of up to 55 miles an hour!” warned the weather woman. I was amused imagining her to be Chicken Little, squawking at the camera “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” I wear multiple layers of clothes and coats to keep me warm.

I live on a peninsula and I walk the point almost everyday. The difference in temperature can be dramatic from the north to the south side. As I round the point I wonder whether I should have mocked the weather woman; the wind has no respect for my multiple layers and I begin to shiver. I bet that she is inside her bunker nice and warm.

And then I see the divers. Wading into the already cold waters of The Puget Sound a hearty school of newbie divers join together in neck deep water and await the instructions from their dive master. The water is choppy with the wind and beats the divers like a schoolyard bully. They stand together against the thrumming and on a cue I do not see, disappear beneath the surface.

I am thunderstruck at the marvel of the human impulse “to know.” I am a diver and I remember my first dive (in the very warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean). What is under the water? What does it feel like to dive? What is over the next hill? What will happen if I try this spice with that vegetable? How many people threw themselves over a cliff to test their flying machine before Orville and Wilbur found an answer to their question? And, although we occupy a good deal of our thought space with stories of obstacles, we wade into the cold water on a freezing day anyway. Just because we want to know.

Yesterday in a workshop, one of the professors re-imagining education asked, “How can we motivate students to learn?” I thought to myself, “How could we stop them if we learned to get out of the way?”

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376.
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 often say to people, “We are living in extraordinary times.” I said it again today as if for the first time. I spent the day with a group of amazing university educators. They are asking themselves enormous questions like, “How do we reinvent the university for the 21st century?” or “What is the role of the university in the 21st century?” The internet is changing everything. What is the function of a degree if most of us will have 7 careers before we retire? What is the role of a teacher? A campus? What does it mean to learn? What is our responsibility as educators in a political climate that is dedicated to stifling learning tamping down systems change?

I heard terms like “social learning” and “collaborative learning” and we oldsters shared a laugh when we recognized that in our college years sharing your work was considered cheating. I heard deep yearning; despite the recent blame-game assault on teachers you will not find people more dedicated and passionate. They want their students to follow their bliss and fulfill their potential. Teachers deal in possibility and revelation. Teachers deal in challenge, reaching beyond the known, discovery in the geography of thought. They want their students to be intrinsically motivated and not driven by abstractions (like tests).

All around the room we taped images to large 4 x 8 pieces of paper. Our images were our conversation. We diverged into “What if….” We dreamed and let go our attachments and assumptions. We pried open our fingers and released our notions of “what should be” so that “what might be” had space to breathe and show itself. And what might be was breathtaking in its scope.

This conversation has been bubbling under ground for years. The pain is finally too great and the bubbles are at last finding their way through the resistant surface. The new narrative showed its face today and I stand in awe of the amazing, gifted, dreamers who brought me to utter, “We are living in extraordinary times.” And we are living it with extraordinary people. Just take a look around.

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250.
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 had a huge revelation last week helped along by two experiences.

On a walk around the park, Megan and I bumped into Amy who had a new iphone. Amy was delighted and a bit mystified by her phone. She showed us how she could ask the phone (Siri) any question and the phone responded: Siri, a lovely female voice, gave her the answer. “So what,” you might say, “Everyone will have one soon, it’s the newest, latest, best-est, craze.” Yes. This technology is incredible and already ubiquitous; and it is not going away. In fact this technology, like all technologies is doing more than impacting us, this technology is changing us. What is it to have a device in your pocket that can answer most questions that pop into your noggin the very moment the question pops in?

Megan is in college, all of her classes are on-line, her connection to peers and teachers is virtual, she does research through Google, the entire experience is about access through technology UNTIL it is time to test what students have learned. The test is about the knowledge retained or contained in the noggin of the student even though the student, up to the moment of the test, has never needed to contain/retain or be the source of information anytime during the process.

The concept of “student” has for centuries been defined as a receiver (container) of information; we know how much knowledge has successfully made it into the container by testing the memory of the student. Memory has high value in the student-as-container paradigm. The role of “teacher” has for centuries been to pour the information into the student’s head. Teacher as source made sense until recently.

These roles and definitions have bugged me for a long time; I knew it was old world thinking but couldn’t put my finger on why or what the new world notion is or could be. Megan and Amy helped me see it. We live in the age of interconnectivity. The internet is greatest connector ever invented. The web is the greatest source of information in the history of humanity and anyone can plug into it. In fact, to work and live in the modern era you NEED to plug into it. Knowing how to access information and determine if it is relevant, substantial and useful is now the most necessary skill to master. Student’s can’t be passive receivers and no longer need to be containers. Mostly, they don’t require a teacher to pour information into their heads; they need a teacher who can guide their pursuit and help them learn to discern substance from blather. The teacher can no longer be the source (they can be a source). Student-as-container is the old paradigm; student as the “pursuer” of information is here to stay. The way we educate needs to catch up to the realities of life in this century.

As an educator said to me last year, “The kids are going around us. We’re standing in the way.”

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245.
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 1978 and I am miserable in high school. I have learned to jump through the hoops to get my requisite “A” yet the closer I get to graduation the more untenable the hoop jumping becomes. I do not yet know there is another way and although I am at the top of my class I am considering dropping out. And then I sign up for a class in comparative religions taught by a most unusual man. His name is Robert Place and unlike most of my teachers he seems to love his job. Everyday he enters the room whistling and I am always surprised by what we do. Actually, to be clear, I am surprised because we do more than listen to him and take notes; we explore, we question, we challenge, we reach, and are encouraged to think for ourselves. I work harder in his class than I have ever worked in a class because I am more than a mere receiver of information; I am engaged with questions that matter to me and for the first time in my path through education I believe that what I have to say matters. In fact, in Bob Place’s class, what I have to say seems to be just as important as anything he has to say. What we say together is never an end result – an answer – it always leads to a new question and a necessary action. It leads to a powerful engagement. My classmates and I are bonded in our pursuit; we become powerful together.

I am thrilled and I suddenly understand what learning is all about: it is the quality of the pursuit, not the rightness of the answer. I tell him of my insight and he winks and says, “It’s a funny thing, that is also what life is about.”

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242.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There is a simple image that I love from the book, Brain Rules: a researcher places a toy just outside the reach of a very young child and then places a plastic rake nearby. The child wants the toy and soon recognizes that the rake is useful in reaching the toy. Once the toy is acquired, explored, and scrutinized the child tosses the toy away so it can reach again with the rake. The toy is repeatedly raked within reach and just as quickly the toy is hurtled farther away.

The fascination is not with the toy, the thing, but with the challenge, the process. Left to his or her devices, the child will create greater and greater challenges; they will seek limits so they can expand beyond them. It is in their nature. It is in your nature. It is in our nature. Curiosity, exploration of the unknown, and mastery of greater and greater challenges is what we are designed to do. Boredom is unnatural and an acquired taste.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, we make education so convoluted and disturbingly difficult. We educators have designed and continue to support a system that is about the toy (the attainment of the “A”). What’s more, we teach students that we are the rake; the “A” is reached through us by performing what is expected for us – they look to us to see if they’ve reached the toy or not. Contain the curiosity, prescribe the exploration, eliminate the unknown; define the hoop and teach the student to jump through it – and call that learning. Is it any wonder our dropout rates are astronomical? You’ll find the kids in the park repeatedly falling off their skateboards – breaking bones if necessary – until the new trick is mastered.

Hoop jumping is controllable; true learning has nothing to do with control and everything to do with focus directed at an intention. It only takes a toy and a rake and the capacity to understand the difference between the two.

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231.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

While I was waiting for Steven Pinker to bury me in data I listened closely to a conversation happening in the row behind me. I’m a notorious snoop. I love listening to people talk – not so much for what they say but what they don’t say or, even better, what they are not saying.

Two elderly women sat next to each other and started to chat. They discovered that they were both retired teachers (which is what caught my attention). They began to compare notes about their careers, specifically their pet-peeves (we really do sort to the negative. Don’t ask me why. Someday I’d like to ease-drop on a conversation that begins something like this, “Oh, you’re a teacher, too! I had the most amazing kids all my life, let me tell you how fortunate I was to live this life….”).

Here’s the phrase that caught me (I wrote this on my program so I wouldn’t forget): “You can’t really do anything to help them (the students); the good kids will get it, the bad kids will ask why do we need to learn this. I never understood why they just couldn’t shut up and learn.”

Imagine: me hyperventilating, rubbing my forehead to stave off the stroke that was seizing me. I bend forward and put my head on the chair in front of me. The people seated next to me freeze, uncertain if they should call for help or call for help (if you know what I mean).

I’ve never heard a better encapsulation of what’s awry in the public schools: teacher as content deliverer, student as open mouth eating whatever worm comes their way. Test and repeat (this is a comment on the system, not on the amazing teachers dying under the weight of the stupidity).

With my head safely resting on the seat in front of me, my row-mates frozen, looking for escape routes, pretending that I wasn’t there, I closed my eyes and had great appreciation for Tom. He once told me that when interviewing teachers he’d ask a trick question. He’d ask them to tell him a story of the bad kid, the worse student they ever taught; if they told him a story he knew they were no good as teachers and wouldn’t hire them.

My cheers go out to the kids who are asking of the world, “Why do we have to learn this?” It is the only question worth asking. It takes a lot of power to speak the truth to an adult. If the adults don’t have an answer, perhaps they should take a cue from the kids and ask the only question that matters, “Why are we doing this?” Within this question is the key that unlocks the door to true power.

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221.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Clare said, “I wouldn’t be a good teacher,” and I challenged her about that. She was taking an encaustic painting class and one of her classmates was very needy of attention. “If you don’t respond to her story she’ll tell it again and again until you do and it drives me nuts!” Clare declared.

“That should drive you nuts so why wouldn’t you be a good teacher?” I asked.

“A teacher has to put up with that or pretend that stuff is okay.” She huffed. “I couldn’t do it.”

“What makes you think a teacher has to be an enabler of neediness? Isn’t a teacher’s job to support students to fulfill their potential? It isn’t a matter of putting up with it or not putting up with it – it’s not a fixed condition, inevitable, or a character flaw. It is someone who doesn’t yet see them self as powerful.” Clare looked at me like I was a Martian. “You might be a great teacher because it drives you nuts. You just need a different idea of what makes a great teacher.”

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