Finished reading yesterday and thought a lot about his distinction between authority and autonomy within a workshop. (Much joy at having a chapter called The Workshop).

This is the question we grapple with all the time. You want kids to become autonomous but you know that they’re not always ready. If you turn them loose too soon, you lose them, and it’s project-based learning going wrong. If you assume too much authority, it pretty quickly devolves into school and disengagement. We spend lots of time in PD discussing the nature of authority and how it’s earned; as teachers in a project-based school we have a number of our own projects that should serve as a model and as a source of authority.

I’m lazy, so I’m not typing this entire quote, but here it is:

I’ll use these two paragraphs in our opening week as try and figure out what rules the school sets, what expectations I have based on my authority as a teacher/project makes, and how they can begin to establish “legitimate authority in the flesh.”

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 54.

Reading The Craftsman. Great C. Wright Mills quote:

“The laborer with a sense of craft becomes engaged in the work in and for itself, the satisfaction of working are their own reward, the details of their daily labour are connected in the worker’s mind to the end product, the worker can control his or her own actions at work; skill develops within the work process; work is connected to the freedom to experiment; finally, finally, community and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence, and experiment in craft labor.”

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

I read to try and find ways to link all that I do together. I love a good thriller and if you add a bit of ancient religion, I’ll read them all.

This is a good quote about social work but really any non-profit work:

Stephen was clearly a good kid, but he had the egotism of youth. The world revolved around him, and consequently he believed that he had the power to change how it worked. And, in the way of the young, he had made another’s pain about himself, even if he did so for what seemed the best of reasons. Time and age would change him; if they didn’t, he wouldn’t be working in soup kitchens and shelters much longer. His frustrations would get the better of him and force him out. He’d blame others for it, but it would be his own fault.

John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 115.

From a terrific novel, Universal Harvester:

If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It’s true: I’ve met children who’ve been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense — that they don’t succumb to despair, that they don’t demand a space for their pain — it’s very true that children are resilient.

But resiliency only means that a thin retains it shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sampson to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described by scientists. It’s efficient, flexible, and probably transferrable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

John Darnielle, Universal Harvester (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017),137.

I enjoyed reading this book.

Two quotes:

118 “I also object to the “skills” portion of “noncognitive skills.” Determination, perseverance, and tenacity aren’t skills, like riding a bike, using a word processing program, or playing a G major scale on the violin. Determination, perseverance, and tenacity are capacities to be nourished, rather than skills to be acquired.

The distinction between skills and capacities is vital, because intellectual abilities and the drive to succeed are cultivated through entirely different processes.”

204 “I don’t harbor any delusions about the use of scientific evidence to inform policymaking, though. Policymakers and advocacy groups use science the way that drunks use lampposts –for support, not illumination. If the political will is absent, no amount of science, no matter how persuasive it is, is going to change the law.”

I also was fascinated by the discussion of “Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions.” This is what we do now in advisory, but not necessarily in a systematic way. I look at this blog over the past three years and most of the activities I’ve designed have been based on this idea (think of a goal, best thing that would result, obstacles, plan). (p.160 in Steinberg. Here’s the link to the study.)

Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).