Step one: Write down 4-5 reasons why people start to feel like not doing things.

Step two: Trade papers with your neighbor. Rate each reason from 1 (totally unreasonable) to 5 (eminently reasonable).

The discussion that followed was pretty powerful.

This document catches much of our conversation:

This document is good too:

Our circle activities this week are designed to explore the idea of how we learn to do things we don’t want to do.

Q: How do we deal with it when we don’t feel like doing things?

We had a great opening conversation yesterday especially when someone declared immediately:

“See, that’s why I can’t wait to be an adult. Adults never have to do anything they don’t want to do.”

Yep, that’s why we do this work: puncturing that illusion early. I would love to hear This American Life talk to strangers about all the things they had to do over the course of the day that they didn’t want to do.

That being said, part of our goal and it’s certainly a goal of mine, is to help our fellow human beings figure out how to structure a life where nearly everything you do has a purpose and that the things you don’t want to do (say making a real lunch for your children every morning at 6:00 AM) support objectives that are important to you (having healthy children).

It’s shocking how much time there is in a quarter. Just shocking.

In trying to fill this out, students struggled mightily to envision how this time might be used. Some of this emerged from unwillingness to think about how many hours ought to be spent gathering background information, i.e., reading closely. Some of this emerges from the choices made about the actual project. You can’t spend 125 hours building a bookshelf. Some of this emerged from project ideas where kids struggled to identify different academic components. There’s good academic work in building a youtube channel but it’s not readily identifiable.