Learning is Change

Community Rules

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I joined Twitter in March of 2007. In the five thousand four hundred and forty-six days since then, I have tweeted nearly 19,000 times. That is a lot of words to put out into the world. The question you might ask yourself is, “Why?”

What is it about Twitter that continues to hold my attention? Why have I invested so much of my precious time on this earth in writing a few words or sharing a few links with a seemingly indifferent internet populous?

Even though much of Twitter is wholly uninteresting, hateful, or even toxic, I can honestly say that the reason I keep coming back to the service after all of these years is the community that I find there. I can say this without a hint of irony about the same Twitter that empowered much of this country’s worst instincts. I can say this because I mean something very specific by Community.

For me, Community is not a hashtag to be thrown around or painted with a broad brush. A community serves a function.

A community:

  1. Provides value to its members (although not the same value for each member).
    • I laugh frequently after reading what others have posted. I am inspired and I am angry. I am moved to action. I read and learn about new ideas. I get outside of my own little bubble of the world. The value I derive on one day is not the same as any other day. My value is not universal. It is personal.
  2. Is made up of a diverse and ever-changing group of people.
    • I have mass-unfollowed everyone a half-dozen times over the last 14 years. Each time, I build a new group of individuals, sometimes political, sometimes personal, and sometimes professional. With as many types of people there are in the world, I have yet to find the end to the variation. It is incredible.
  3. Receives contributions from its members based upon their varied lived experience and cultural backgrounds.
    • I want to learn from others who are different than me. Collectively, we know far more than we could ever know individually. I will likely never live in Paris nor will I ever know what it means to grow up Black in a Southern state. On Twitter, I can learn from both experiences. And that is the contribution they give to the community: the gravity of their own lives.
  4. Has a common language that is always adding new words, memes, and touchstone moments.
    • We didn’t always have retweets, hashtags, or @ mentions. We didn’t always know how to thread conversations together. These things have grown up because we needed a reason for them to exist. Their reason is community, and that shared understanding of the platform helps to build deeper connections.
  5. Has a shared self-selected purpose, even if that purpose only lasts for the duration of a single afternoon.
    • Many of us use twitter to comment on the world around us. When we are in a shared moment (a major world event, a political movement, etc.), we can engage in the same conversation. We amplify and build upon one another’s voices. This is a shared purpose, even if it is just a 3 hour football game.
  6. Contributes to a larger public conversation.
    • One of the most important aspects of Twitter is that Tweets (for the most part) are publicly available and publicly searchable. It is the opposite of Facebook groups and pages because those spaces let anyone hide behind the garden walls. When people share on Twitter, they are speaking in public. And, that let’s us learn from anyone.

And yet, the same things that make this Twitter community so strong are the things that make it amorphous and often unfulfilling. The concept that “anyone can tweet” presents a challenge for maintaining long-running conversations or building deeper bonds within a community. Ideas can be co-opted or hijacked in an instant, and until now, Twitter has lacked the tools to fight against the base instincts of an internet mob.

But, that may be changing.

Yesterday, I was invited to take part in the Twitter Communities beta. This means that I can now have a space (exactly one, actually) with a set of community rules and a shared understanding for what should happen there. These are the ones that I came up with:

While these may change over time as the community grows, these were my first instincts for how to create a space that is only the best of what Twitter has to offer. And when I finally created the “Regular Progress” community, it felt like I was getting back what it felt like to scream into the void in 2007 and have a dozen or so strangers respond.

I wonder if you might like to join me there. Maybe you too would like to help “Chronicle the Regular Progress we are all making, whether that is in parenting, politics, or personal growth.”

We aren’t just going to share #wins, but also what we have learned from our losses. We are going to be real, whole, human beings in this space, and I would love for you to take part. And I hope, after spending some time there and sharing your progress, you will come to believe what I do about Twitter: Community Rules.

Our dishwasher is broken, and I like it that way.

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I just finished cleaning up the last of the detritus from our Super Bowl Festivities last night. We had a neighbor family over for “the big game” and the experience did not disappoint. We enjoyed wings, brats, little smokies, sautéed carrots, cucumber sandwiches, and all manner of terrible snack food (including an enormous bag of movie theater popcorn that one of our children’s friends had procured from the local AMC). All of those foods (and the people who ate them) required 77 bowls, plates, serving containers, utensils, and various other cooking implements. I know this because I washed all of them by hand this morning.

It is a ritual I complete every morning. And more or less, my counter looks like this when I’m done:

You see, our dishwasher is broken. It stopped working over a year ago, and I don’t anticipate getting it fixed any time soon. It isn’t because I’m overly cheap or because I think that I can fix it myself (I’m not and I can’t). Rather, my dishwasher will remain broken because I like doing the dishes, by hand.

There are very few visible accomplishments in my day. Most of the progress I make, is nearly imperceptible. Whether that is a deeper relationship with my oldest child or the dozens of applications that I review for role at Minerva University, there is no physical manifestation of the work I am doing. The dishes are different.

When I do the dishes, I know when I have scrubbed each one enough to consider it clean. I can see the food residue coming off as a result of my (not so) steady hands. I am making a difference in the clutter of my kitchen, ensuring that each of these dishes will find their way back home in the course of the day. I am responsible for them, and I love making good on the promise I make to myself each day, knowing that I will complete this task and have something to (literally) show for it.

I also wash dishes by hand because I know the outcome. Unlike most of the other actions I take in a day, doing the dishes is a known quantity. When I ask my children to clean up their room, I am often surprised by the result. Going to the grocery store has a million possibilities and I know that I will be influenced by a thousand different advertising decisions that others have made to ensure I buy their product. There are no such competing priorities or mysterious options when I turn to a sink of dirty dishes. Each dish passes through my hands going from one state to another. It is transformed in the time I take with it, which is not something I can say for every email I send or errand I run. I am not typically changed by the experience. But, these dishes are. They are clean. And, I know this because I am the one that is doing it. I am the one ushering them to a new state, ready to fulfill their purpose once again.

Washing dishes by hand, also affords me one more thing that I so desperately need: time with myself while not looking at a screen. Because the dishes require a certain level of care and attention, I am forced to look away from the shiny object in my pocket. Because I have to cover my hands in soap and water, there is no room for electronic devices in the mix. It is, with the possible exception of cooking and eating food with my family, one of the only times in my day where I don’t even have that option. It is glorious. For 30-60 minutes of every morning, I have removed the ever-present visual stimulus. My thoughts are my own as I work to remove the bit of ketchup on the plate or milk from the bottom of the glass.

And sometimes, during the best dish washing sessions, I can even be inspired. I have listened to books that have made me change the way I think about oppression and societal hierarchy. I have listened to podcasts that have brought me out of the doldrums I was feeling or made me cry for the sheer beauty of collective humanity. I have also listened to my own thoughts and had important realizations about my marriage and my own happiness.

Washing the dishes by hand is a “life hack.” It gives me far more than clean cups and plates. It gives me a better day, every day.

I’m not a good neighbor.

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My house, and more importantly my driveway, face to the south. This means that at no time during the day, does my house throw shade onto my driveway or the sidewalk in front of my house. While this may not seem like a big deal, it is.

I live in Colorado, and when it snows, it is incredible. These huge fluffy flakes come down and start to accumulate almost immediately. They create a effortless blanket on my miniature lawn, my postage stamp driveway, and my too small sidewalk (mostly it just functions as a curb to designate the difference between the road and the driveway). It covers everything, elegant and undisturbed.

But, this is where the magic of the south facing house comes in. Because of our altitude and the number of sunny days in suburban Denver, the sun will start to sublimate the snow from the moment it rises. So long as I don’t drive over it or walk through it, the snow is most often gone from my driveway by 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. This includes snowfalls of more than 6 inches in an evening and sunny days where the temperature is below freezing.

It is an incredible gift that I take full advantage of. Often, I have boasted that I have never shoveled my driveway in the 13 years that I have lived here. This may sound crazy to those of you who live on the east coast or in a “snow belt” like I did growing up where the cold weather would pick up moisture from the lake and “dump” huge piles upon your house.

And yet, there are those who are not content to let me hold on to this little bit of magical grace. On the rare occurrence that it is not a sunny day after a large storm, the snow does not disappear and we are left with the white blanket for multiple days. And sometimes, as people walk through the snow, those footprints will turn to ice.

One such occurrence was last week, when it took 5 whole days for the snow on my driveway to melt. During this time period, I patiently waited for the sun to work its magic, but it was too cold and the sun was too often playing peekaboo with the clouds.

It was during this time that I received a letter, presumably from one of my neighbors:

This letter certainly had the desired effect. I dutifully got out my shovel (a yard shovel, because I don’t own a snow shovel, as I am really committed to the bit about the magical sun) and got the icy-snow off of the sidewalk that measures less than two feet across. It took less than 10 minutes.

The issue is that I don’t really know how to feel about this letter.

This neighbor is not being mean. They did not accuse me of trying to make them fall or of targeting them specifically. They were simply asking me to be a “good neighbor.”

But then my brain started doing somersaults when I turned to think about this neighborhood and what it takes to be a “good neighbor.” To be a good neighbor here, you have to do the following:

Being a “good neighbor” can mean a lot of things, but it requires that you live in a “neighborhood.”

It requires that you respect the difference among you. It takes an understanding of what might be going on for an individual who, for whatever reason, chooses to not shovel their driveway. It may be that they are physically unable. It may be that they find the numerous trails 100 yards outside of our tiny neighborhood to be far superior to the small sidewalks within it. It may be that they have been having a hard week and would prefer to let inessential things go.

And yet, it may all just be a fiction that I am telling myself in order to get out of contributing in such a small way to others. Why should I make my own issues with the neighborhood into everyone else’s. Perhaps I should just suck it up and shovel the sidewalk.

I’ll let you judge for yourself.

This is what my driveway looked like this morning at 8:29:

This is what it looked like at 2:50 this afternoon:

Why would you want to interrupt this magic?

Am I a Bank now?

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I set up my first bank account with Wells Fargo when I arrived for college in Colorado during the fall in 2001. It was in the local Safeway branch that was within walking distance from The University of Denver. It was convenient-ish to go down the street and get money out for the weekend. What really got the hooks in, though, was when I met my wife. She too had a Wells Fargo account and we just ended up merging all of the finances.

We opened business accounts and savings accounts. We took out a loan to pay for our badly needed new windows. We used these accounts for incredibly boring reasons and to do impressively mundane things like paying our mortgage and paying off student debt.

But, yesterday we quit doing even that. I went into a branch near my house and closed down every account that we had with Wells Fargo. After 21 years, we no longer have a need for them.

And, as I received the “close out” checks and signed the digital paperwork, I used my phone as my Digital ID (which is one of the more incredible things about Colorado). I then deposited those checks with my phone into our last checking account in existence (at Key). Then I went to get a coffee, using my watch to pay for it.

While I sipped that coffee, I read that Apple is enabling anyone to become a merchant and to receive payment just by tapping their phones together. For a while now, you have been able to send and receive money on your phone. Services like Venmo, Cash App, or Apple Pay Cash have become absolutely pervasive. So much so, that it seems odd in any situation that requires a “routing number” or a even a physical card.

So, am I a Bank now?

The things I used to need Wells Fargo for when I was 18 hardly seem to matter. Cash is almost nonexistent in my life, such that ATMs feel like a novelty. I have not written a check in years and I’m pretty sure my kids will never write one. All of my bills are paid online (even if I hate the little fees that some folks still think are appropriate). I pay people back with Venmo. I pay for services with Cash App. My phone provides more functionality and a higher level of service than a bank branch, and there are no minimum balances to worry about or weird transfer setups that are required in order to have a specific type of account that gives better interest rates. (This was an actual process we had to do for years at Wells Fargo, in which we had to create a monthly recurring $100 transfer back and forth between two business accounts.)

I still do very boring things with my money. I buy groceries. I pay off debt. I try to make good decisions about my credit. But, I have opened my very last bank account. And if I wanted to, I could manage everything from my phone (including getting paid with direct deposit.) I am convinced this is a good thing. It is progress for me, and for the rest of us for whom going into a bank is an incredible hassle. It is better to have the tools for commerce at my fingertips.

Just this week, I donated to political candidates who are advocating for equity via text. I gave money to a student who wrote something I found essential. I paid for a digital gaming service that gave my children a weekend of joy. This was all from my phone and without any friction whatsoever. These too are boring things to do with money, but I’m pretty sure they are fundamentally changing our relationship to our devices, to corporations, and to each other. Hopefully for the better.

[Caveat: All of the above is coming from a incredible place of privilege. I am well aware that many parts of the country still rely upon cash. I also know that being “unbanked” is a huge issue for folks who cannot establish credit or get loans. I am attempting to comment on the current state of my own personal banking needs and these observations are likely not widely representative of all generations, races, or socioeconomic levels. However, I believe that these advances in technology and practice have the potential to provide banking, credit development, and other services in a far more democratized fashion than previous eras. I hope this is leading us to a better and more equatable place with money, but I have certainly been wrong before.]

From Mastery to Inquiry

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I have often considered Mastery to be the thing to which all students should strive. I have thought of it as the pinnacle of achievement in any area of my life. After all, the spectrum of knowledge moves from naïveté to Mastery, right? You should want to be a master of your domain, whether that is engineering, film-making, poetry, or cuisine.

And yet, I now find the concept of Mastery to be severely lacking.

Why should we strive to master concepts or disciplines in the same way that others might master human beings (you know, slavery)? Why should we encourage children to pursue mastery when that word implies a singular feat, a destination to be reached by competing with and dominating others. There is no final state of learning. You will never become the master of math or reading (or basketball, for that matter). You can only continue on your path, one distinct from every other.

And it isn’t just the word, its definition, or its origin that I am struggling with. When you look up all of the other words you might replace it with, you realize just how gendered and fraught the whole endeavor is:

We should not seek to be “Big Daddy’s” of our learning or the “owner” of all knowledge. As educators and leaders, it is not for us to be the opposite of our “pupils.” We are on the same journey, and it isn’t triangle shaped with the “Archetypes” at the top and everyone else who is striving to climb a fictional ladder to be installed as the final “champion” of education.

I believe we are experiencing the golden age of learning. We have access to everything we need to authentically make progress in any pursuit we like. This is happening every day with Youtube mechanics, Wikipedia scholars, and Medium storytellers and journalists. We just lack the words to adequately describe the process of moving from a lack of knowledge to a significant amount of expertise and understanding.

Furthermore, we lack the language to differentiate between those “doing their own research” and those who are applying the scientific methods (or other rigorous frameworks to establish objectivity and validity). If we claim “expertise” or “mastery,” we are claiming a high ground, no matter how rocky the footing is. If we continue to build our educational systems (including those employed within organizations in the guise of Professional Development) based upon those who have developed Mastery, we are setting ourselves up to be disappointed. We will never get there. We will always find ourselves fighting against hierarchy and gatekeeping because our language makes it so.

If there is one Master, then the rest of us are servants. At least until we can be Masters ourselves. This dichotomous language doesn’t serve us well. So, I would like to propose a change.

Inquiry is the new Mastery.

If we frame the spectrum from Naïveté to Inquiry, there is no final state. Inquiry goes on forever. Inquirers thirst for information and can always find more. While Masters dictate truth, Inquirers make meaning from the world around them. Inquiry serves us far better in a world where there are far too many sources to ever know the whole story. The authentic quest for learning is is the goal, not Mastery of some fictional ideal.

Better yet, Inquiry is actually possible, whereas Mastery is always out of our reach. Even the most incredibly talented individuals experience “imposter syndrome,” but no one is ever done learning. Orienting our systems toward inquiry and becoming better at learning over time is the best tool we have for combating misinformation and skepticism for well-established research methods.

So, whenever you find yourself advocating for Mastery, please take a pause. It is likely that you want Inquiry. You want to be a passionate inquirer, an experienced inquirer, an open inquirer. You want others to inquire with you, as teammates, colleagues, or friends. You don’t want to be Masters over them. You want them to go on the voyage with you.

By changing our language we may just be able to start inviting others into our world, not as subjects which must pay fealty, but as inquiry companions. To get us started, maybe we should all post the universal sign to indicate our movement away from Mastery: Inquire Within.

Parents vs. Teachers?

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I am not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point in the last 50 years, teachers became “Other.” They became people who come from outside of the community in which they teach. Teachers became antagonists in a war for our nation’s soul. They became masters of indoctrination as well as robots doing the bidding of boogeyman unions.

They were no longer civil servants who spent a great deal of money to join a profession with very little monetary upside. Teaching was no longer a vocation to which people heed the call but rather a dead-end job of last resort. Teachers were not kind. They did not care for, or even teach, your children. Rather, they were a liability, a parasite leaching off of the perfection of your kids for a paycheck. 

At least that is what you would think if you only read the Facebook comments.

In particular, the comments that were so well highlighted by Nick Covington, an History teacher from Iowa, in a debate about whether to put cameras in every classroom of a school for the expressed reason of “seeing what our children are being taught.”

This thread struck such a chord with me because it seems so foreign and such a drastic departure from the discourse that I was a part of as a teacher in the first decade of this century. And yet, it follows directly from the rhetoric of fear that has been pervasive in many other areas of our lives, from politics to healthcare. 

I felt so strongly, that I felt compelled to respond. Not to poke fun at the outlandishness, but rather to delve into what is really being asked for and seeing if these words can stand on their own when they are taken out of the toxic cesspool that are Facebook parent groups:

This is the clearest indication that many parents do not know how to navigate the publicly available curriculum of their schools. The information about which books are being taught, which textbooks are being purchased, and which teaching resources are being utilized is not a secret. In fact, the vast majority of these decisions are made at a district level and are available via open records requests. The need for cameras is entirely misplaced, given the wealth of opportunity that is afforded to parents for engaging with the transparent way that public schools have to make purchases and provide records.

This seems like an innocent enough statement, as we have come to believe in the proliferation of “body cams” for police officers as a true asset for public awareness and accountability of bad actors among them. And yet, this would require us to see students as (potential) criminals, and I find it hard to believe that parents want their students to be thought of in that way.

The issue is that Cameras do not discriminate. They will pick up hate speech from everyone. They pick up the vulnerable moments of kindness from all. They will pick up the mistakes of every single fifth grader who hasn’t figured out the boundaries of acceptable behavior. They will pick up the machinations of an ill-informed teen who is bullying a classmate for their differences (politically, socioeconomically, racially). It is a statement of belief that all behavior should be policed. And the results of that are that all children will be prosecuted for their transgressions, not just the adults that you think are “doing harm.” And yes, that includes your children. Read this statement another way, “If your children have nothing to hide, they will hide nothing.” When your kids are the ones under suspicion, how much do you want cameras in the classroom?

It is obvious from this statement that this individual does not trust teachers, but what is less obvious is she also do not trust her children (or the children of the other parents in this Facebook group). If she trusted her children, she would not worry about multiple viewpoints in the classroom. She would know that her children would be able to critically evaluate “woken, leftist or progressive beliefs” and reject them as inferior ideologies. Instead, she sees her hold on her children’s minds as so tenuous that even the mention of equity in a classroom will somehow turn them away from an “america first” perspective.

So, I have to wonder, is this belief system so fragile, so uneasy and ill-conceived, that it will all crumble if it is presented with an opposing viewpoint? If “progressive beliefs” are that powerful and persuasive, it is a marvel that any other viewpoints have survived in the face of them.

As for the respect argument, I would love to probe into what it would take to “earn” this woman’s respect. Does she want each of her children’s teachers to share lesson plans with her for approval? Does she want the teachers to take a loyalty oath to her way of thinking? Or, perhaps it would be better for the teachers to simply have the vague threat of being fired perpetually hang over them because of cameras in the classroom. That would certainly earn her respect, right?

Or, is it rather, that she is afraid that her children will learn to think for themselves and question the things that she has taught in her home? She would certainly see that as disrespectful! And that kind of disrespect is something that she will not stand for. Her children are her own. They are not independent thinkers. They are not capable of making their own decisions. They do not deserve respect. Oh wait…

My only response to such thinking is this:

Surveillance is not inevitable.

It is a choice that we make each day. It is a stance that we take in our public and private spaces as to whether or not we actually want all of our lives to be recorded and available to others to parse through and find objection with. We do not need to “suck it up and deal with it.” We should fight the invasion of our privacy, and think critically about any time that we invite surveillance into our lives (Ring doorbells, etc.). We should question the need for more data and inform others whenever data is being collected because it isn’t just what is being done today with these recordings. Today they exist as simple video files on a hard drive somewhere. But, what would happen if you had trillions of video files that could be used to train machine learning in order to “spot suspicious behavior” or “determine intent” before actions occur? This is not about what these cameras are capable of in this moment, it is what these cameras allow for in the future.

We are definitely at a crossroads in our discourse about the education of our children. From clandestine board meetings to remove employees with a lifetime of service to debates about whether or not our history can be taught in our schools, this is not an easy time for teachers to care deeply for our kids. These are important conversations, and ones we should be having. But, let’s do it in the open. Let’s not hide behind private Facebook groups where we can whip each other up into a frenzy. Let us have good-faith arguments about our educational standards and the scope and sequence of our curricula. But, let’s root it in the agency that kids have over their own lives. They are the ultimate beneficiaries (or casualties) of our decisions, so let’s make sure they are rooted in the hard-fought history of the last 50 years and not just the last 50 months.

Also, don’t put cameras in classrooms, please! It is a terrible idea.

Fascism isn’t cool… for long.

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Teenagers are a construct that has propelled popular culture forward for 100 years. But, prior to the end of the first World War, they mostly didn’t exist. It wasn’t that somehow people skipped from age 12 to 20, but rather that there was no pause between childhood and adulthood before the advent of child labor laws and the progressive political movements that supported them. In 1900, children (10-15) made up nearly twenty percent of the work force. A generation later, this was seen as an affront to the family and to the normal progress of young people.

In 2014, Director Matt Wolf made a film from the perspective of these individuals who had magically been transformed into “Teenagers.” He did so by looking at existing archival footage (and the stories that surround them) of Teenagers in The United States, England, and Germany:

Within these vignettes of newly minted “Teens,” the movie explores the rise of political and social power for students around the world. It shows how seductive night life was (thus, flappers) and how much the Nazi’s (and to a lesser extent, the communists) relied upon the zeal of young people to affirm their ambitions. As the youth started to see themselves as the inevitable future of the world, it was clear that they wanted to be a part of something big. And Fascism was about the biggest and newest thing you could find in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

In the beginning, Fascism was a form of rebellion. It was going against the established world order. Fascists were the underdog class, trying to come to power. Their ideas were not yet mainstream, and for a generation of kids for whom rebellion was a rite of passage, fascism felt like a logical extension.

One such German teenager describes her plight this way, “parents complained about the unemployment and poverty, but they didn’t do a think. [I] wanted action. So, [I] joined the Hitler youth. My mother expected to be unquestioning and obedient, like the maids. But, I rebelled. I wanted to be different – to escape from my narrow childish life… to be allowed to belong to a community which embraced the whole youth of the nation.”

And yet, once the fascists (Adults) were in power and the kids fully realized what fascism meant, once they saw the hate and the death that came along with imposing a racial and ideological hierarchy, teenagers no longer flocked to it. Their culture-setting rebellion shifted to asking for more freedom and more opportunities for expression.

So much so that by 1945, the teenagers of that era wrote their own “Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” which states that Teenagers should have the following:

  • The right to let childhood be forgotten
  • The right to a “Say” about his own life.
  • The right to make mistakes to find out for himself.
  • The right to have rules explained, not imposed.
  • The right to have fun and companions.
  • The right to question ideas.
  • The right to be at the romantic age.
  • The right to a fair chance and opportunity.
  • The right to struggle toward his own philosophy of life.
  • The right to professional help whenever necessary.

These statements (in particular the right to question ideas and struggle toward your own philosophy) is how I know that Fascism will never truly be “cool,” at least not for very long. While hatred and bigotry may be interesting for a season, it is the teenage propensity to question ideas and construct their own theories about the world that will never let it become the dominant philosophy.

So long as we never return to putting children to work in large numbers, there will always be a class of people with enough time and attention to rebel against the current political “prevailing wisdom.” And if we should ever again find ourselves on the brink of war, we should turn to the youth of the world (the ones who will actually fight that war) and they will help pull us back from the precipice.

While it is emphatically true that children are the future, it is the teenagers who are the arbiters of what that future will actually be. And somehow, the fleeting interests of youth are a lot more reassuring than the entrenched opinions of the old right now.

Asking Forgiveness

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I ran across an incredibly insightful tweet this week, one that I could not ignore or get out of my head since I saw it:

“Forgiveness is not a hot tub time machine. Forgiveness brings about a new reality.”

We cannot go back in time to before we caused others trauma. We cannot undo what is already done. We are still the same person who made the mistake. We don’t get a do-over, and we do not get to cover it up as if nothing happened.

And when I ask for forgiveness, I am not asking for those impossibilities to occur. Instead, I am asking for those who I have wronged to co-create a future in which we are both equal stakeholders. When that forgiveness is granted, the new reality that I am presented with is infinitely better than the one that came before.

It feels simple. And yet, it is so incredibly hard. To ask. And to forgive.

Which is why it was some kind of beautiful coincidence that I was also introduced to a simple way to facilitate such a conversation this week. Via a LunchClub meeting (a free networking service that I have used to meet over 90 incredible human beings during the pandemic), I was introduced to Victoria Yeung. Through her Canadian consulting firm, Nonsequitur, she and her co-founder have built out a series of notecards that are “fill-in-the-blank” versions of apologies:

Along with their incredible Apology Guide workflow, this kind of simplified version of asking for forgiveness makes me think that there is hope for us all to bring about a new reality, together. So, how might we use this process? How might we bring about new Political realities? Or, new Marital realities? Or, new realities for religious tolerance? Or, perhaps, just a new reality for the divided neighborhoods and communities we inhabit in 2022.

MAGA could apologize for assuming that only their votes should count. Leftists could apologize for impugning hard working police that are trying to bring about social justice from within a racist system. Christians could apologize for demonizing all other religions. Average Israelis could apologize to average Palestinians for their oppressive policies.

I fully recognize that it isn’t that simple, and that having a notecard doesn’t guarantee that forgiveness happens. And yet, when faced with the alternative, a world in which we only move further apart from one another, forgiveness is the only way forward. I wish that we would choose it more often.

Why I left Public Education (and then came back).

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In November of 2010, I became the first ever Online Community Manager for Edmodo. I was the 13th employee at a startup that was barely two years old. It was my first remote position, and also my first role outside of public education. This is how I framed it to those I left behind in the Douglas County School District:

In the past 7 years in Douglas County, both as a Teacher and as the Online Learning and Technology Resource Specialist I have been supported and fulfilled in my work. In fact, I can’t imagine a better way to have started my working life. From a very young age I wanted to be a teacher, and I always said that I would only leave the classroom in order to create change on a larger scale. Once I was in a district position created to do just that, I promised I would only leave Douglas County if my vision for online communities led me to something that was bigger than any district. I believe that I have found that thing. 

It was certainly “bigger” than my role in a school district or in the classroom. It is true that in my role at Edmodo, I worked with thousands of teachers across hundreds of schools. I brought “the good news” about social learning networks and hybrid learning pedagogies to schools that had never experienced it. In other words, it was an exciting time to be an “Influencer” at a company on the forefront of educational innovation.

I stayed less than a year.

Now, this happened for a lot of reasons. I struggled in a remote position at a time where the best tools for team communication were group Skype chats. I chafed in a role with an overly “attentive” supervisor. The health insurance situation at a startup is rough, and my COBRA plan for keeping Kaiser as my family’s insurance provider capped out at 12-16 months. But, none of that really mattered in the end. I left Edmodo because I wasn’t happy.

I wasn’t happy because my theory of change was intensely flawed. I believed that by increasing the scale in which I was creating change was directly proportional to my own sense of purpose and happiness. I believed that by reaching thousands of teachers (and through their classrooms, tens of thousands of students), I would be serving a greater purpose. I would be introducing new learning modalities and opportunities for collaboration that I had experienced in my own classroom, but there was something lost in the pursuit of that goal.

Scale is a seductive myth.

It is a myth because the things I learned in my own classroom, cobbling together a set of tools that worked for my students specifically was not the same as learning from a single platform that is ready-made for ”digital education.” It is seductive because you can talk yourself into the idea that by getting everyone on board with Edmodo, Google Classroom, Moodle, Schoology, Canvas, Blackboard, or any number of other tools, you are doing something fundamentally “Good for Kids.”

“Creating change on a larger scale” is only possible if you don’t care what kind of change you are creating. And, I did care about the kind of change I was making, and not all of that change was for the better. The change I made in creating Edmodo’s first online “Help Center” was to ensure that teachers became advocates for a product instead of a practice. The change I made in getting whole schools and districts to move their classrooms into Edmodo was to help create an environment where the classroom is never missing from the students’ lives, whether that classroom is a positive and supportive place or not.

The purpose of my work is not generic. It is not to build better general purpose tools or to make learning better in the abstract. The purpose of my work is to learn as much as I can in the time that I have, and to make the spaces I inhabit a more connected, equitable, and inclusive place for others to do their learning. As it turns out, there is no single product or organization who does that. But in 2010, I didn’t know that yet.

In 2010, I believed that change was sufficient. I believed that if we only got enough people to move away from worksheets and paper-based textbooks and move toward online communities all of our education systems would get magically better. Hint: they did not. That is why I left. It is why I have yet to join another company or organization who believes they are going to “transform education at scale” without first doing the deep work of understanding the impact that the transformation will have on others.

And that is also why I took a good long look at another educator who just this week has made the decision to leave a prominent role in public education in order to “make pedagogy a conversation that defies its usual container” (if that quote doesn’t make sense to you, I highly recommend reading Sean’s full post). He is making his own decisions for his own reasons. I cannot judge him, as I have made very similar decisions for very similar reasons.

And yet, it is my sincere hope that the kind of change that Sean Michael Morris ends up creating at Course Hero is the kind of specific change that he actually believes in. I deeply enjoyed (most of) the people I worked with at Edmodo. I loved being able to see into dozens of classrooms a day and talk with teachers from around the world. I am even proud of the work I did to empower teachers and students to be better collaborators and creators in their classrooms. But, I do not believe in Edmodo any more than I believe in Apple. And, I absolutely do not believe in indiscriminate change.

If, as is suspected from at least a few “opinion havers” online, Sean’s role at Course Hero does not align with the values he has written about for years (student ownership of learning, skepticism for surveillance edtech, etc.), I fully expect him to move on just as I did from Edmodo. I expect that he will take everything that he learns from Course Hero and become even better at advocating for the kind of change that I know he deeply believes in and passionately fights for.

Full Disclosure: I was directly responsible for choosing Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel to keynote the leadership strand for the Innovative Education Colorado Annual Conference in 2019. I did this because I read An Urgency of Teachers, and I wanted others to know of their work in writing such an essential book for modern educators.

Safe

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Art Credit: Oliver Wilkoff (Paint and Marker on Canvas)

Feeling safe is a privilege. Not everyone does.

I don’t fear for my life in the way that many Ukrainians are just waiting for Russia to rein down upon them. I don’t worry about domestic abuse or being tracked by a jealous spouse. I don’t fear others around me as I walk or run down the streets of my neighborhood. I am not even a little concerned that my windows will get smashed out of my car while it is parked.

In fact, I have almost nothing to fear from others in my safe little existence. And so, what are my responsibilities to others as I traverse the world unmolested?

Late last week I heard a quote that traces back to Lilla Watson (an aboriginal/human rights activist from Australia in the 1970s and 80s) that resonated deeply and presents an answer to this question:

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I believe that my liberation is not the same as my relative safety. I am not free, until others can feel the kind of safety I feel as I walk into a mall as a white man. I am not fully liberated until others are not tracked and policed with black-box technology. And, my responsibility to others is to ensure that my safety doesn’t make other people less safe.

By retreating from the city-center of Denver, I am taking my resources and my attention away from the spaces where safety is not assured. But, I can also bring those issues (of scarcity, of institutional racism, of poverty-induced crime, and of mental health needs) to my own environment. I can speak about and amplify the voices of those who are working to create the kind of safety I feel.

And, get this, I am willing to feel less safe. Because my feelings, at the end of the day, do not matter. I am not less safe for having a more diverse world. I am not less safe because traditionally excluded individuals becomes more included in circles of power and influence. I am not less safe when more of the population has access to the basic rights of health care, education, and a economic opportunity.

And conversely, I am not willing to feel more safe by ignoring the oppression of others (or, actively working toward it). My safety is bound up with the safety of those who do not already have it. And, yours is too.