Learning is Change

21: Fair-Mongering #LifeWideLearning16

My kids are fair-mongers. They see the whole world as a great injustice being put upon them. The indignity of an earlier bedtime than their parents. The inequality of no dessert for one child who has “lost it”. The sheer tyranny of different amounts of time for playing on an iPad vs. a computer. They will scream, “That’s not fair.” And they will be right.

The only retort to those proclamations from children is a cliche. “Life’s not fair” can probably be heard from parents’ mouths the world over. The problem is, though, that life should be. Every child knows it, and so does every Parent.

I want there to be fairness for my children when they go out to compete, whether it is in sport or in the workforce. I want there to be a set of rules that they could follow in order to become the best versions of themselves that they can be. I want them to reach success ethically and through a process that doesn’t privilege them or discredit them. But, that isn’t really all that possible.

My kids are smart.They are able bodied. They look (mostly) white. Two of them are male. They do not want for food or shelter. They have access to the world’s information at the tap of a finger. They have almost everything going for them in a way that can’t possibly be construed as “playing fair.”

So, should I ask them not to use their privilege to get ahead? Should I tell them to hold themselves back when they are so capable and their path is so easy in comparison to others? Or, should I teach them to use their privilege to fight for fairness and to dedicate their lives to creating equity for all?

At the end of the day, playing fair isn’t about not cheating. It is about playing the game as it could be played. It is about seeing the rules as they should be written, rather than as they are.

The point of playing fair is social justice. My kids have an instinct for what fairness means, but I need to take that and make sure that they understand just how warped fairness becomes when it is not about the number of cookies or the minutes of quiet time. I want them to be able to look at the inequity in schools or within the workforce and say the exact same thing that they do when I ask them to put back the three dozen animal crackers they have just filched from the pantry.

“That’s not fair.”

20: Expanding my horizons, every five minutes. #LifeWideLearning16

No matter how beautifully designed computers get or how intuitive and visually pleasing our software is, there is an amazing sameness to almost everything that happens on a laptop or desktop machine. There are text files and there are spreadsheets. There are webpages and there are design programs. The visual language of the computer has mostly coalesced at this point, and the slow progression toward a single understanding of what a “share button” looks like has been a great thing for ease of use and communicating to one another without a huge cognitive load.

But, I open no fewer than 100 website tabs a day and I stare at my computer screen for multiple hours straight. I need something in all of the monotony to inspire me, to engage my spirit and not just my intellect. So, I choose to leverage all of the advancements in computing power to change my outlook every time I open up a new tab or glance back at my desktop to grab a file.

I use The Google Art Project and FreshBackMac to expand my horizons every five minutes or so. They both bring in new art from around the world to both my browser and to my desktop background. I look forward to opening a new tab or dragging files around my computer now. I look forward to collecting my favorites and building a collection of art even as the sameness of writing emails bears down upon me. I get geeked every time I recognize an artist or discover a new type of visual communication. It takes me out of my computer and places me into a gallery or a museum. And best of all, it comes to me automatically, almost as a gift for doing my work.

I’m know there are more transformational things happening in technology right now. I could be geeked about driverless cars or virtual reality, but at this moment I’m not. Right now, I’m geeked out about art and the way in which I have so much of it in my life right now.

Always something new, always something different.

19: The Games We Play #LifeWideLearning16

Secrets are weird.

They come from this space of your childhood where you thought that there were huge troves of information that were being kept from you by everyone. Your friends, your playground enemies, and even your parents knew more about the world than you did and you were determined to get that information from them, no matter what. You wanted not only to know their secrets, but also to have secrets of your own. You wanted to keep an inner circle of people who you could tell the most intimate details of your incredibly boring life that no one else would know.

But, any time you had something you thought was juicy, something that was an actual piece of news. Like the time Joe liked the taste of salt more than sugar in the tastebud science experiment or the time that Justin was taken out of the advanced math class because he didn’t do his homework. These were your secrets, and you held them in for a while 2 minutes while you were trying to figure out who to tell to score you the most points in a strange game of poker where all of the chips just keep getting passed around the table and no one ever wins.

In the end, no secret was a secret for very long. And all of those things that you thought your parents were hiding turned out to be just as boring as your secrets. Their lives really weren’t that interesting either.

And now that you are the adult, you are still trying to make believe that your secrets are important. You are trying to make believe that the world will fundamentally change if you let them out. So you make up new games and the secrets become like a perverse form of mousetrap or a marble labyrinth, where sharing a single secret sets off a chain reaction or drops you into some deep abyss that you can never get past.

These games are silly. They don’t make us better people or make our bonds stronger. Yet, we pretend they do. We pretend because the alternative is to be utterly transparent and to share all of ourselves with others. And we could never do that because it would make the games into farce and would change the rules for how we could interact. No longer would we have to tiptoe around certain subjects. No longer would we have power over one another because we knew what the other didn’t.

If we eliminated secrets, you wouldn’t be able to gossip anymore. And what kind of world would that be?

18: Mixed-race by Definition #LifeWideLearning16

My wife’s father is a black man, originally from New Orleans. Because of this, she grew up not knowing which bubble to fill in on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Her teachers told her to choose the one she thought best represented her. My wife felt as though she was betraying her dad if she bubbled in white and betraying her mom if she bubbled in black. Both represented her.

My children do not have this similar struggle. Even though they are also mixed-race by definition, it is in such a way that two of them appear to have a year-round tan and one somehow turned out with blond hair and fair skin (recessive genes, clearly). They do not feel the connection to black culture that my wife does or the struggle to integrate two sides of themselves.

Before kids, we used to celebrate MLK day with lots of our friends, usually up in the mountains. We would take the 3-day-weekend and make it about skiing, eating, and drinking up in a condo that we all paid for. While the skiing and drinking were non-specific and could be done any time, the eating was our little way of celebrating.

Kara makes some of the best homemade mac and cheese you can imagine. Her collard greens, fried okra, and gumbo are delicious. And when she pulls together a MLK day feast, you want to be there and have your fill. It feels like thanksgiving, but with less food that feels like an obligation and more food that feels like you want to hoard it all to yourself because it just that good. And while we would stuff our faces, we would all spend a little bit of time contemplating Martin Luther King Jr. and the ways in which he and the movement he represents have influenced our every day lives.

We haven’t eaten like that on MLK day for a while. We haven’t taken the moment to think deeply about what that food means to Kara or to the entire culture of people from which it came. We haven’t discussed the struggle of the Black Lives Matter protests or how it fits into the broader fabric of human rights that King was such an integral part of. Instead, we are relying upon our kids’ school to help them contextualize the “day off”. Their teachers are doing a good job of sharing the deep discrimination of the civil rights movement era, but they will never be able to connect the dots to their own blackness or to their mother’s.

That will be up to us, and I hope that we do it soon. I hope that we again sit around the dinner table and fill our plates with food that makes us think and makes us tell stories or ask questions. I hope that we teach our children to dig in to the rich history of civil disobedience and injustice and that it becomes a part of them in a way that they can carry forward and share with others.

17: To feign a made up mind. #LifeWideLearning16

I left my wife home with my one and a half year old when she was incredibly sick. She was in pain and I left her because I had something that I “couldn’t miss” at work. I wanted to find someone to take care of him, but we didn’t have anyone to turn to on such short notice. And I knew it wasn’t going to end well. I knew that I would be breaking her trust. I knew that there would be consequences within our relationship because of it. But, my mind was made up, and there wasn’t anything left to do but walk out the door.

That is the problem with making up your mind. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for other people. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for feedback or reflection. It is absolute and unwavering.

I try not to make up my mind all that much because of this.

It isn’t that I don’t have opinions, and it certainly isn’t that I don’t speak my mind. I am nothing if not pedantic and steadfast. However, I am absolutely never so confident in my ideas as to not listen to what others have to say. I listen because I want my ideas to be better. I want to collaborate with others, even those who oppose me.

So, my mind is only ever made up for a few short hours. Until I consider a new perspective and get a bigger picture of what lies ahead. Or, until I act and have more information to influence my next made up mind.

I think that is why I don’t really understand stubbornness, at least not fully. When can you be so sure of yourself that you can’t see nuance? When do you know the situation so fully that only one option can be considered the right one?

I don’t know a lot of things. In fact, given the vast array of information that Siri or Google knows, I know almost nothing. And that comforts me. It means that I don’t have to feign a made up mind. It means that I don’t have to be resolute all of the time. It means that I get to listen to others and see what makes sense, constantly weighing ideas and changing based upon new evidence.

I am not a made up mind. I am a cupped ear.

16: They want what they want. #LifeWideLearning16

My children know what they want.

They want to have a snack. They want to play Minecraft. They want to have a playdate. They want to play with a particular toy. They want to go to the Library. They want to have dessert. They want to fight with one another. They want to play legos for 3 hours. They want to get out the door. They want to do everything in their power to avoid brushing their teeth.

They are really just a series of wants at this particular point, and that has a severe influence of what they think is important. They do not want to go to sleep, so it is not important to them. They do not want to clean their rooms, so it is not important to them. Most adults we would look at in the opposite way, though. As in, “driving is not important to her, so she wants to bike everywhere.” But with kids, it starts with the want and then you derive importance from that.

If I go by this metric, my three children want these things above all else right now, and so that means that these things are most important to them:

  • Isabelle (9 Year Old Girl): Reading
  • Tobias (7 Year Old Boy): Physical activity involving a ball
  • Arlo (vey nearly 2 year old): Toy Trains

These are the most important things in their lives right now because they want them more than any other. Isabelle does not put down a book, even to eat breakfast. Tobias will ask for me to play catch with him even if we only have 3 minutes before we leave the house or go to bed. Arlo must play with trains, even as he goes potty. Trains are his iPhone in the bathroom.

I trust that they will want other things at some point and that other things will be “the most important in life”, but for now this question has a simple answer. I could make believe that family or love is more important, but that would just be me wishing that about them. It does not bother me that this is where they are. In fact, it makes me happy that my children haven’t yet reached the complexity of adolescence or adulthood. I want them to love Reading and Trains and Playing with Balls for as long as possible.

15: Not Yet #LifeWideLearning16

There are two types of learning:

  1. Things that I have not yet considered.
  2. Things that I have not yet done.

Learning is held within the words “not yet”. Once the learning occurs, the “not yet” dissolves into the recesses of your brain, and something else takes its place. It starts in the back of your head, a sense of deep surprise and excitement. A new idea that wasn’t there before is now crowding out everything else, trying to find just the right spot to settle in. And when it does, the learning becomes a definitive statement of a “thing that I have considered or done.”

As you might imagine, I believe that all learning causes change (see the title of this blog). Whether in your head or in your body, the things you consider or act upon, fundamentally change you every day. The fact that you can now think through a complex process of student and teacher interaction means that you have changed in your ability to make those interactions positive. The fact that you have now run a marathon means that you have changed what is possible for your own body. But, there is only so much change, so much learning that you can accomplish on your own. There are only so many things that you can consider or do unmediated or unencouraged by others.

That is why it is so valuable to surround yourself with people who ask you to consider things or do things that you would never do on your own. They should also know what you have learned before and what changes you have made in your past. Knowing this, they are far more likely to present you with learning that builds upon what has come before rather than drastic changes that are incongruent.

My favorite kind of learning comes in conversation.

It generally comes from someone that I am deeply connected to, someone that genuinely wants to create something with me. Most times, it comes as a question that forms in my head and cannot immediately be answered. It makes me pause, going silent in the conversation so that I register the learning as it finds its way through the synapses to its final resting place. But even there, the question lingers, it creates a vacuum around it for all of the thoughts that will will soon be answers as I try to put words back into the conversation. And as those words come from my mouth, the question explodes and fills that empty space like a mushroom cloud.

And that is what I am looking for: Mushroom Cloud Moments. I strive for at least one per day, but sometimes a single conversation will create a half dozen. It is then that I really need the other person to help me process all of the change happening in my brain. They are both responsible for the learning and the aftermath of it. This makes the best kinds of learning into a collaborative process between the instigator (the other person) and the integrator (the person doing the learning). By instigating a huge learning experience, it is then important for the learner to integrate that learning into their other experiences. I have found that if this doesn’t happen, I let go of the new learning in favor of what I already knew or believed. When that happens, it feels like a part of my brain falls out of my ear and sublimates when it hits the floor.

I know I am learning when I feel the change in my own brain and when I have someone there to confirm it and help me to understand and contextualize it.

14: The "ba, ba, ba" of a new idea. #LifeWideLearning16

I fidget, relentlessly. I have two rings that do not stay on my fingers for more than 20 minutes at a time. I run my fingers through my hair and rub my beard stubble. I tap on seemingly everything. I crack my knuckles loudly. Whether on my laptop or on the desk, it is a rhythm that syncopates my thoughts. And then there is the clacking on the keys. I do not simply let press them down. I hammer them into action, as if it was the hardest manual typewriter in the world. I need to hear the clack, clack, clack to know that something is being created in each moment.

It is the verbal expression of work, though, that is the most noticeable. The “ba, ba, ba” of an new idea or the half hummed lyric of a song that gets me to remember which task I was on. In its most pronounced form, I will actually sing what I am doing or the words I am writing. I hope this is endearing because I really don’t know how else to work.

I have “lost” my rings to the floor in more meetings and classrooms than I care to count. I have come back to consciousness from a tapping episode only to realize that I was the only one who needed those taps to keep on going. I have cracked my knuckles at times of pure silence, trusting that the interruption made for a nice transition to discussion and debate. These are the noises of work, the sounds of thinking and building and collaborating. Or, at least they are for me.

 

13: The Trackball and the Touch Screen #LifeWideLearning16

My first smartphone was a blackberry. It was the kind with the little trackball in the middle and a physical keyboard that was an absolute joy to type on. In 2008, I would use this marvel of modern technology to catch up on the crashing economy or the presidential race. I would refresh the atrocious Associated Press app on that little square screen as often as I could just to pick up what was happening on Super Tuesday or with the Lehman Brothers liquidation. Those two events are inextricably linked for me. The hope of a new type of leader and the absolute terror of the markets bottoming out.

The trackball gave way to the touch screen. The crash gave way to the recovery. The presidential race gave way to actual policy. And I followed each.

Today, I am desperately listening to every political podcast that I can get my earbuds on, hoping to hear something that gives me the same kind of hope. I am watching the jobs numbers roll in week after week, showing what I already know: we are better off now than we were at the bottom. And I access both through my ever-present glowing screen.

 

No one has to convince me that his policies have worked or that my life has steadily improved every year that Obama has been in office, just like no one has to convince me that my iPhone 6 is far superior to my Blackberry Pearl.

But, what I would like to hear is what comes next. How will we keep building on the gains we have seen in the last few years and not slip back into the abyss that was 2008? How will we convince others that it is worth pushing forward and being bold about climate change, education funding, internet privacy, human rights, and lasting peace? How will we use this moment to launch the next generation of activists and protestors who build on the last 7 years of hard won fights.

So, what do I want from Obama? I want him to make the case for learning deeply from his years in office and then moving forward. I want him to convince us (all of us) to reinvest in our country and double down on hope and change.