Learning is Change

51: Our Weekly Child Care Rituals #LifeWideLearning16

While you have young kids, their care is pretty much all that matters. Between the time that they are born and when they are first enrolled in elementary school, there are approximately 1500 weekdays that aren’t holidays. Many of these days are spent in logistical turmoil for trying to figure out how to ensure a caring environment for your children while you are otherwise engaged.

I have stayed home with my children on many of these days, as has my wife. But, in the case of each of our children, we have made the decision to send them to a “school” prior to elementary school. For our older two, we chose an in-home day care, The Fisher Early Learning Center and very briefly Primrose of Littleton and A Children’s Learning Center and Preschool at the United Methodist Church. For our youngest, we have chosen a neighbor for in-home day care and Centennial Montessori. Soon, we will have to make yet another decision, as the school has made a policy change, expecting him to attend at least 4 days a week, and we aren’t ready for our two year old to make that commitment.

We have spent countless hours discussing and debating. We have tried to justify money for tuition and for the educational experiences at each institution. We have switched schedules and times for drop-off and pick up nearly every week for the last 9 years. I believe that we have done right by our children, but I know that many families are not so lucky to have these choices.

I also know that the sheer amount of time and effort it has taken us to find our cobbled together solutions could have been much better used in supporting a system of schools and child-care centers around us. If there were, let’s say, universal early childhood education and child care for working families, the massive amount of stress and financial hardship that faces families with young children every year could be eliminated.

So that is the law I would put on the books. More than JumpStart for certain socioeconomic levels and certain schools, we need to create opportunity for all families to support their kids through the first few years. We need to ensure that all kids start their educational adventure in the way that serves their needs as well as the needs of their parents to continue to earn a living.

And while this law would require a significant investment, it shouldn’t just be a public venture. If given the right incentives, many small and large businesses would be happy to contribute to early childhood education, as it would allow their employees to have far fewer “sick days” to cover for a lack of care. In addition to the societal good and the financial good, this law would have a huge benefit for individual family. They would have many more options that are of high quality rather than the vast amount of unaccredited care solutions that are in unsafe homes or makeshift schools and churches.

While I am close to the end of our family’s saga for finding ECE and child care for our children, I know so many others that are not. This is an enormous issue for the modern working family, and it is likely that legislation is the only way it will get better.

50: Ten Rules For My Mac-Based Workflow #LifeWideLearning16

I have tried the pomodoro technique and timeboxing. I have tried Kanban and Wunderlist. I have tried Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker. I tried each of these products and ideas all in an effort to be more organized and focused at work. Each of them has failed spectacularly to have their desired effect.

I blame their inherent complexity for this. Even Wunderlist, which is an incredibly simple tool, adds a layer of complexity to a rather simple process of working on one task and then moving to the next one. The multiple lists and different scopes of work, while helpful, ultimately prove daunting and are abandoned for simplicity and focused attention to a given task at hand.

And so, I do not have rules set up for task management. Instead, I have rules for attention management. After all, tasks are infinite and my attention is not. The following are the rules that focus my attention while doing work:

Note: Each of these assumes working primarily from a Macbook Pro.

  1. Any application that can be made full screen (and thus separated from the other applications), should be. Mission Control and trackpad gestures should be used extensively to switch between applications. Applications that should remain in the dock and open at all times are as follows:
    1. Chrome (each account having its own full screen space open)
    2. Polymail
    3. Tweetbot
    4. Messages
    5. Google Hangouts
    6. Reminders
    7. Calendar
    8. Snagit
    9. Byword
    10. WordPress
  2. Twitter should always be available via a single column of Tweetbot in a side-by-side full screen app with the primary browser window (creating a streaming sidebar of tweets). Live tweeting should be done often during meetings and as ideas arise.
  3. No notifications for email shall ever be used, as they distract so completely. Email shall only be checked after a task has been completed. Email shall never be the thing that stops creation from happening.
  4. Browser tabs will all be managed and cleaned up by utilizing the Tab Suspender extension (ensuring any tab not used for the last 15 minutes does not eat up CPU resources).
  5. Multiple times a day, OneTab will be used to clear out unnecessary clutter in each browser window. This should be done on each Chrome Persona/Person that are open.
  6. Pocket should be used whenever there is a webpage or blog post that requires extra time to read.
  7. Notes should be used whenever there is a PDF that requires more time to read. (This will then sync to mobile and then can be used with VoiceDream on my commute.)
  8. Reminders should be used whenever there is a website that requires additional time to digest, research, or understand as well as for informal task compilation.
  9. Bit.ly should be used for whenever a resource, website, or link must be shared (creating both an archive and a way to tweet directly from the browser).
  10. IFTTT should be used to capture each favorited/liked tweet, bit.ly bookmark, and important link within a hashtag in a Google Sheet.

Because of these rules, I am able to focus my attention and make the most of my time. It may seem obsessive or idiosyncratic, but it helps me keep sane.

Do you have these kinds of rules for your work, or do you approach your workflow differently?

49: The Rules of Enough #LifeWideLearning16

Doing my job used to mean arriving far before children arrived at school and staying far after for grading and guitar club. After that it meant setting up a half-dozen computers to edit HTML files in online courses for hours at a time. After that it meant traveling to conferences and standing in booths or facilitating sessions. After that, it meant making screencasts of wireframes of apps. After that, it meant meeting 6-10 times a day. All of those things are “doing my job”, but in each transition to a new role, I revised the rules for what was “enough.”

Enough effort, enough passion, enough change, enough capacity building, enough learning, or even just enough so that I feel good about my contribution to the world.

I revise my “rules of enough” every time I tackle a new body of work. I negotiate with myself for just how many hours I need to wake up before the children get out of bed. I try to parcel out the number of days in hotel rooms in another state it will require. I build up my resolve for making the change I want to see, ensuring I have enough in reserve for difficult arguments among would-be advocates.

Even thought they shift multiple times a year, my rules of enough are worth writing down. They provide a snapshot of my internal struggle with creating something that makes a difference.

The Rules of Enough:

  1. Wake up with enough time to do one thing you can be truly proud of each morning.
  2. Reply to enough email to sustain important conversations and for others to not assume you are dead.
  3. Communicate your work enough so that others can see their own entry points.
  4. Call enough meetings to build a coalition for change.
  5. Read enough blog posts, tweets, and white papers to stay informed and to inform others.
  6. Write enough to understand what you believe.
  7. Think out loud enough to understand what you have learned.
  8. Listen enough to understand what you don’t yet know.
  9. Play with your kids enough that they will have memories of their childhood with you.
  10. Stay awake with your wife enough to be truly together.

Those will change, maybe even tomorrow. But, for right now, those are the rules.

48: AR+ #LifeWideLearning16

Accelerated Reader is/was a reading program that allows students to take multiple choice quizzes on books that they have read. If a student does well on such a quiz, they are given a point total to be applied for a grade or a reward system. At my former middle school, we were required to use this reading program for consistency across the school. Even though the program promoted only plot-level knowledge of books, we used it to show just how many books were being read. Even though AR, as it was affectionately abbreviated, required teachers to police tests rather than discuss books.

I was not a fan.

I hated typing in the teacher password each and every time it was asked of me. I hated watching kids set their numerical goal for reading for the quarter based upon their tested reading level. Most of all, I hated the way in which kids would read books just for the points and not for the joy or value that the book could bring.

So, I would actively encourage many of my students to propose alternatives. I helped them to find books that didn’t have AR tests (yet), so that we could do book talks. I showed kids non-fiction books and magazines that would never easily fit into a 10 question quiz. These led to written reactions that students were proud of, or at least put more thought into than a few fleeting key presses needed to take an AR quiz.

All of these alternatives got to the point that I could no longer claim to be doing the Accelerated Reader program to the rest of the language arts teachers in the school. Instead, I shared that the students had helped to create AR+. It was my not so secret urging them to break the rules and test out alternatives wherever they could that made this happen. It was their interest in moving beyond point totals and compliance to start enjoying what they were reading again.

Some rules I just cannot abide, and when your students are interested in helping you to break them, learning is the direct result.

47: Dessert, Bedtime, Electronics, and Love. #LifeWideLearning16

I negotiate dessert. Not every night is a “dessert night” and not every action requires a reward. There are some days that we haven’t had dessert for a while and there are others that I am too tired to remember that I packed them a treat in their lunches. Losing dessert for multiple days also complicates the calculus. What happens when they lose dessert on a non-dessert night? Does that mean that that children must wait to lose dessert until the following night or should they be allowed to have it because they got lucky? It is a negotiation, even when it is only in my head.

I negotiate bedtime. Some nights we are engaged in a family activity until it is past the “normal range of bedtimes”. Some nights we put them to bed with huge amounts of extra time to read. On weekends we they watch a movie while my wife and I talk in the living room. On weekdays, we may have homework or projects that have to be done before going to bed. These are all negotiations, but they are mostly just us making peace with the fact that our routine must not get in the way of our lives.

I negotiate electronics. Our house gets incredibly messy sometimes. Toys on the floor. Clothes not put away. Art supplies strewn about. There are many times when the thing standing in the way of my children playing Minecraft are those miscellaneous items that seemingly never find their way home. So, the kids clean up. They scrub mirrors and use dustpans. They even, on occasion, will help one another to do this. And all the while, I am negotiating the terms of the cleaning. How many minutes for the bathroom? How many minutes for all of the trains and cars? The answers are generally 15 and 10, respectively.

I do not negotiate love. The one thing that I will never negotiate with my children is my love for them or their love for one another. I do not tolerate anyone saying that they hate one another. I do not abide a spiteful attitude. Moreover, I do not ever find myself loving them less. It is only ever a discussion of more. More time together, more effort to build our relationships, more of the working through the difficult problems that 2, 7, and 9 year olds have.

I love them, as a non-negotiable rule.

46: "He Copied Me!" #LifeWideLearning

Middle school children are always afraid of being “copied.” They loathe when their brilliant ideas is being taken, without asking, from one of their classmates. If even a whiff of plagiarism can be smelt, then swift justice must be dealt. And I was expected to adjudicate each case of copying and how egregious it was. I was expected to say, in each case, “Stop Copying.”

And yet, I didn’t.

I believe deeply in collaboration and the power of remixing and iterating upon ideas. Copying is the birth of the remix. Plagiarism is the start of a great collaboration. These were not popular opinions in my classroom (or with many other teachers in my building, come to think of it). But, they were non-negotiable for me.

I was not telling kids to look at each other’s papers or computer screens just because I didn’t care about original thought in my classroom. Rather, I was obsessed with folks finding answers and then pushing passed them. Copying answers is the easy part, but making them better is hard. When one child would find a great website resource for something they were researching, I would have ask them to share it with everyone. When another child would come up with a great thesis for an essay they were writing, I would ask them to tell others how they got there. This was all in an effort to create a community of copiers, a culture of taking each others’ ideas.

Many of my students were brilliant learners. They possessed incredible intellectual gifts, but many also exhibited an exclusivity of their own ideas that made for terrible community building. In order to create a community within the classroom, students must be able to see themselves as working on the same team rather than only looking for their own gains.

My non-negotiable stance for remixing ideas was only accepted after the students saw the benefits to not protecting their work so rigidly. They had to fight me and each other in the times where it seemed like someone else was unfairly taking what they had persevered to create. It also took a very real debate about remix culture for many of them to see just how useful building upon each other’s work could be in the real world.

It was not easy, but it was essential.

45: Not just one thing. #LifeWideLearning16

I have made dozens of mix tapes and cd’s for people that I love. I have written songs for them too. I have planned romantic dinners and I have traveled long distances, all under the guise of love. All of those things were true in that they really happened. But were any of them “true love” as we might remember it from The Princess Bride? No.

Because true love isn’t a romantic dreamscape that you can walk in and out of if just wish hard enough. True love is bigger than romance or adventurous outings. It is more than love letters and gifts on appropriate holidays.

True love is watching your wife give birth to your children and knowing that she is giving more to you in that moment than you thought possible.

True love is apologizing to your kids when you have done something wrong by them, no matter how insignificant.

True love is not knowing exactly how you are going to pay for a dinner, but going out anyway because you have to talk to the one other person that makes sense to you right now.

True love is sitting next to your wife and watching as she struggles for words after receiving a concussion in a high speed skiing accident.

True love is worrying about your child’s fever that just won’t go down no matter what you do.

True love is going out for something that your family needs at 2:13 in the morning.

True love is driving for hours to see your best friend for just a few minutes before they get on a flight.

True love is the first phone call after something amazing happens.

True love is the years’ worth of ongoing texts that tell the story of the mundane life you often lead.

True love is the unexpected happy hour.

These are the things that don’t quite measure up to the platonic ideal, but are nonetheless much more satisfying. That is what makes true love “a thing.” The fact that it isn’t one thing, but rather a series of amazing things that fulfill your waking hours with life. There are many alternatives to true love, and I do not begrudge anyone theirs. But, when given the option of romance or truth, I will always choose truth.