This morning we considered two questions:

Where do the standards for good work come from?

Where should the standards for good work come from?

I asked the students to put percentages on their answers. Here are some of the best answers:

DO
JG:
15% comes from The Ancestors
25% comes from the teacher
10% comes from students
50% comes from the “Big Man” (The rich men and women who make the rules)

QG: 20%: your personal view on the work; do I think it matters?

SHOULD
ES:
10%:Hard working people: Just because somebody works hard doesn’t mean it is good work or should be used as a standard.

I grew up loving these commercials. I like the current Guardian version too.

Today we did “IBM presents…you be the adviser!” I came up with four situations I felt last week and help them try and generate positive feedback as if they were and adviser.

Situations:
“They have the same deliverables week after week and it’s not getting better.”

“Despite having minimal work, they evaluate their work as OUTSTANDING.”

“No work happens at home all week, but they work their butts off on Friday!”

“They work very hard but you can’t find their work because they didn’t share it!”

Terrific conversation followed. The advice they offered was outstanding and I’m going to carry these sheets around as a way of talking to students.

We did some free writing to begin the day Tuesday. After Monday’s discussion, I thought it would be worth talking about what it means to be creatively or productively “stuck” as well as the strategies one might use to address this feeling.

We passed papers and everybody read their favorite line. Some deep stuff here.

Patrick Sullivan on parenting, abuse, and doing what you love.

You know when you actually get good at sports? When you’re having fun and being creative. When you’re being a kid. When you don’t even realize you’re getting better, that’s when you’re getting better. If you’re not engaged in what you’re doing, it’s as helpful as taking the trash out. It’s just another chore.

Rewritten:

You know when you actually get good at ______? When you’re having fun and being creative. When you’re being a kid. When you don’t even realize you’re getting better, that’s when you’re getting better. If you’re not engaged in what you’re doing, it’s as helpful as taking the trash out. It’s just another chore.

Step one: On back of page, write about how your work will become a model for future students.

Step two: Reading this page from superhero Ron Berger.

Step three: discuss the importance of models, how we talk about models, and why we need to build models for future classes.

Favorite quotes:
“The big thing is figuring out what we need to do (to make our work a model).”

Based off Berger’s line — I want students to carry a pictures of quality work in their head — one student asked “If no one’s done it before, how do you create a picture in your head ?”

And “more people can picture things they can’t actually do.”

Some times I’ll pull a reading from the interwebs. In this case, I found an on-line site for IT professionals where they described how they manage the project process.

Step one: why do our projects go off the tracks?

Step two: reading this site. I pulled it down, erased the solutions part, so that students could try and generate their own ideas.

There was several places where we’re very different. We don’t have the hierarachy that most businesses have — there’s no leader, no designated project manager — there’s a kind of flatness in our classrooms that mirrors our school’s leadership structure. The student groups don’t have formal leaders, although most groups have one or two people they turn to. And sometimes we have the same problems that student groups have, i.e., when everybody is overwhelmed and doing fifty things, how do you hold each other accountable in gentle ways?

Cool conversation, though.

Too many books, too little time. At least it helps my kids:

Poking through physical artifacts (like books), as I did with those Beatles records, is archival and curatorial; it forces you to examine each object slowly, perhaps sample it and come across a serendipitous discovery.

Scrolling through file names on a device, on the other hand, is what we do all day long, often mindlessly, in our quest to find whatever it is we’re already looking for as rapidly as possible. To see “The Beatles” in a list of hundreds of artists in an iTunes database is not nearly as arresting as holding the album cover for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Link to full article:

Ware, Teddy. “Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves – The New York Times.” New York Times, December 7, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/fashion/our-bare-shelves-our-selves.html.

I’m always trying to find ways to force students to quickly and accurately summarize their current projects. It’s a skill that will serve them well no matter what they end up doing. It’s the kind of thing graduate students preparing for their oral exams do very well, the sixty second summary of a book’s argument and their thoughts about it, or the kind of thing that MBA students learn to do quickly — here’s my awesome idea so gimme money.

Here’s some of the better ones from the week:

JG: Bullying film
It’s helping misfits
this film is inspiring
film better than books.

DL: Food truck
This truck will be good
Team work will take us to top
My class is the best.

IB: Graphic Novel Project
I use pencil yeah
Draw on paper it look good
picture speak ten words.

AR: Mural Project
Art is passionate
these messages are crucial
push for artistry.

I also asked for the thousandth time how this week’s deliverable helps with the eventual final product. They are starting to understand why this matters.

Reading a find from used book store about how engineers think.

Used a page where Madhavan cites a checklist from George Heilheimer:

Students then had to reflect on which step was most difficult, which step represented something they had not thought of before, and how this process was different from the work we do here.   As much as possible, I try and couch the project process as being something that exists outside of our school, as something that real folks have struggled with, as something that every scholar/mechanic/actor/entrepreneur has to develop for themselves.

One of the great parts of the conversation was that students focused on number two — “how is it done today” — and were able to acknowledge that they still have much to learn.   The adolescent binary of simultaneously knowing everything while declaring their helplessness was on full display; I try and poke this as much as possible.

The other focus came with the “who cares” question;  HG correctly noted that “it is difficult to get someone to care about what you’re trying to do” and JJ also pointed out that “we have to think if we finish this project, what difference will it make ?”

1. Madhavan, Guruprasad. Applied Minds: How Engineers Think. New York?; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

I can’t stop laughing at this cartoon.

The second line is the best.