Building Empathy

I was getting gas and really struggled with these new pumps. I saw the little image of how to insert the card but it just wasn't making sense. After two tries the pump locked me out! I was perplexed. My primary role is all things technology, how could this pump defeat me?

This tiny little lesson made me think of how many of our teachers and students experience this level of frustration daily from the tech they use. Time is short and the pressure is high. When things don't go right it is much easier to just turn around and do it the way it has always been done.

At the gas station I almost paid cash, I almost sent my kids in with my card to pay but I pressed on. It was only a matter of time before I figured it out.

This gets me thinking about the times when we offered some Appy Hours before and after school. This allowed the teachers time to meet up at a local St. Louis Bread Company and talk about the latest apps they were using. A low to no stress environment that allowed for the conversation to wander from apps to lessons to their own children.

These learning opportunities might just be what some need to explore new areas and bring something back to the classroom.

Is it ever good enough?

Was reading about all the websites that were down the other day. It appears someone at Amazon typed in in incorrect letter or symbol which resulted in many websites inaccessible.

I looked up AWS and it appears they have a 99% up time. 99% of the time everything is perfect. I wish I had that level of amazingness.

Reminds me a little of that awards show. Someone made a small error and they are now fired.

Both of these were human errors. As far as I know no one lost a life. Maybe some were disappointed in not winning or accessing some website.

Certain elements of the media were all over these mistakes. How do we keep pushing our teachers and students if the general public seems to celebrate the negative sides of failure?

I'm confident that Amazon will create a new solution to prevent this mistake from happening again. They will learn from the mistake. I think that is what we need to report on and investigate.

Someone told me it wasn't how many times you fall down, you just need to keep getting up.

False Starts

Saw this at the gym and it really spoke to me. How many false starts am I allowed?

I travel to two pre-K, five elementary, two middle and one high school building. While I don't visit every building ever day I am sometimes stretched mentally and physically. When I say sometimes I really mean always.

The other day I was in an elementary classroom to talk about Skype and breakout. Skype wouldn't install, I knew the issue but was semi-powerless to solve it. I was able to get it resolved before I left but that took time away from what we really wanted to do. We could not really move forward without getting Skype running which killed the momentum of the project. 

Then I mistakenly locked a lock for breakout and it may be permanently locked.

All good intentions aside, sometimes I feel I can only get so far in the tiny amount of plan time teachers are afforded. 

Some days all I seem to be able to do is get things half accomplished.That eats at me.

The Strumbellas have me thinking.

I have only been on one concert guest list in my whole life and I totally regret not getting a picture of it that night.

This past summer the Strumbellas came to play to a sold out crowd in St. Louis. As I watched them play my mind drifted to how often they must play each of these songs. Once the band leaves St. Louis they were headed somewhere east to do it all over again. That pace goes on for months. How do they keep it fresh every time? Each city, each person in the crowd expects to see a show full of energy and excitement.

Piles of money and the love of what you do can only carry you so far, how do they prevent burnout?

My thoughts eventually drifted to myself and the teachers around me. I know we can all look either in the mirror or into the eyes of the people we work with and see those telltale signs of burnout.

These ideas bring me to today. I read something, or maybe it was a video, that talked about the career plateau. It stated that within the first five years teachers stop growing, they get good at delivering the content and stop improving. While I am not sure that is totally accurate I can see how initiative fatigue can really drag people down.

 There are a few teacher who come to mind that seem to buck that trend. I wonder if it is because they will try new things often in the classroom. They will publicly share what they are doing, what went well and when it is a total disaster.

I wonder if that is the key to helping curb burnout. Try new things. Take risks. I assume what the musicians do is play off the audience, use their energy to power them through the set. I know that when I work with a group of energetic teachers you can help but feed off of that.

I don't know if the novelty of new things will help but it appears to be a step in the right direction.

My daughter at the show. If you don't Instagram it did it really happen?

Finding the balance - is now a good time to get out of the way?

I spend many of my days helping teachers. Most of the time we are focused on educational technology. Today we took a risk and tried an experiment.

This was session seven of seven, we will not meet again until next year. I'm pretty confident that the group does not need any new ideas, they have been idead to death. we give them ideas, the buildings and teams give them ideas, they read about ideas online. Idea overload.

We built a session that mirrored the 20% time/genius hour idea. They had time to figure out what to work on, shared that idea verbally and then they got to work.

Sometimes I struggle with figuring out when to help and when to let the struggle happen. 

The picture above is a great example of learning to back off and let ideas flow. One teacher is helping the other with creating a pretty great project using Google Sites. While I could jump in I think I would kill the conversation and flow of ideas. 

I know I struggled with this in the classroom. I heard someone say that the kids should do most of the talking, they are the ones who should go home exhausted. That is sometimes hard to do because if I am not talking am I doing my job?

The secondary pain is time. While many PD opportunities just load content and ideas they don't leave time to think and create. Finding that balance, thinking/creation time, is very difficult. When is it too much or not enough?

What makes a family?

Once a week for two and a half years I spent with a small cohort of people. Some I can't recall their names and the faces are fading from memory but others remain intact. It is like a few of those people became like family and when you see them it is like reuniting with that long lost cousin. 

Today was one of those reunions. My friend Mel stopped by to just say hello. She dropped off this bottle of water and some cookies. I'm pretty sure this water got us through some of those super long nights sitting in classrooms after spending all day in classrooms.

I sometimes wonder why I ever went back to school. 

45 things to remember.

Life can be stressful. Picking the kids up and shuttling them off to random practices. Rushing home to eat dinner, do homework and ushering them bed is never easy on the best days. Yesterday was one of those stressful days that things just didn't go right. The day did not end on a good note. I'm sure you can relate. 

Today I keep finding these little pieces of paper. Some were stuffed into my laptop bag, others taped to various parts of my lunch. Forty-five of these with unique memories written on each one. Some written by my wife, memories going back to our undergrad years and others by the kids with things that happened a few weeks back.

One memory to represent each year I have been alive. While the day will bring presents and cakes (you just can't celebrate with one cake!) these bits of paper are especially important to me.

While it is super easy to get bogged down on the day to day, making memories is what I should be focused on. 

Someone once told me that dirty dishes in the sink and crumbs on the floor are a sign of what is actually important, spending time with the people in your life. I'm not sure this is exactly how it went but you can pick up on the overall meaning.

How many memories will you make today?