I built this slide for my Satire class today. My students “got it” right away and started making connections between the work we’re doing in class and the work that so many of them want to be doing in the world.

It’s not everyday, in the random course of one’s reading, that a quote from a Pitchfork review of Bill Callahan’s music (mentioned a few days ago on this blog) connects to an article in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. Such, such were my joys.

First, from Mike Powell’s review of Bill Callahan’s new album:

If anything, Callahan often seems like he’s following his songs instead of leading them, carefully and open to all paths, the way a birder follows the call from wherever it comes. (He is a meditator, no surprise.) Even ”Ry Cooder,” a tribute to the roots-rock musician and possibly the dumbest song Callahan has written in 27 years is alive with punchlines, zig-zags, and little surprises a stricter sort of attention would miss. 

Second, from Karl E. Weick on William James:

William James is famous for this sentence: ‘If my reader can succeed in abstracting from all conceptual interpretation and lapse back into his immediate sensible life at this very moment, he will find it to be what someone has called a big, blooming buzzing, confusion, as free from contradiction in its “much-atoneceness” as it is all alive and evidently there’. . . . What is less well known is that a few sentences later he makes the more crucial point that ‘The intellectual life of man consists in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes’. We do not realize how much we ignore, but we realize it when projects are interrupted and structures break down. What we then see are failed substitutions that previously concealed ambiguity that was always there.

Source: “Ambiguity as Grasp: The Reworking of Sense,” by Karl E. Weick

We opened our school this week, and we’ve been working, daily, on debugging all the new programs that we’re running. People have to walk different paths (than usual) in the hallways, keep their classroom doors open instead of closed, and connect remote students to in-person students through miraculous though sometimes clunky technology. And that’s just in the first 15 minutes of any given day . . .

Yesterday, my lunch order got mixed up, so I missed a critical meal and spent the day feeling crankier and crankier as my blood sugar dropped. I went home, raided the fridge, and recovered. But I was still sore about the mistake.

Then my phone buzzed and I saw . . . a photo of my lunch. It was delivered, accidentally, to the wrong campus, about a mile away from mine. A colleague there, a second grade teacher, picked it up at the end of the day, took it home, took a picture of it, and fed it to her son.

The next morning, we were still laughing — over email — about the case of the missing lunch. She offered me some encouragement in the form of self deprecation: “I am taking things super slow in class . . . today, my one goal is to name our class fish.”

As I was building slides for my own class, a Satire elective for juniors and seniors, I found myself counting minutes and stacking content. “Could I fit in the Stephen Colbert video and the Twain quote . . . and the tour of the student LMS . . . while working in some written reflection time, and . . .”

I stopped and thought about the fish in my colleague’s classroom. About the collective brainpower it would take to develop a list of names, whittle it down, negotiate, compromise, agree, and heal any bruised feelings along the way. About what it might mean for a task to be essential these days.

Easy to say and explain? Yes.

Requiring complex cognitive processing? Yes.

Bolstered by collaboration? Yes.

I built this slide, with an assist from unsplash.com, and dropped it into my deck. Every ten slides. Repeat.

I’ll explain that title later if evolves beyond the mere start of something . . .

One of the best moments of my summer: thinking broadly about my upcoming class after weeks of reading. Will spend the day putting things in order, selecting, figuring out ways to unlock creativity and thinking in students, and planning paths for engagement. #hybridjournal pic.twitter.com/mmAtf5IvFm

— Stephen J. Valentine (@sjvalentine) September 6, 2020

I guess all lives can be said to unfold in parallel to the evolution of a few great songwriters. One of those, for mine, has been Bill Callahan. I’m getting to know his new album — Gold Record — and I really appreciated this backhanded insult from Mike Powell’s review.

If anything, Callahan often seems like he’s following his songs instead of leading them, carefully and open to all paths, the way a birder follows the call from wherever it comes. (He is a meditator, no surprise.) Even ”Ry Cooder,” a tribute to the roots-rock musician and possibly the dumbest song Callahan has written in 27 years is alive with punchlines, zig-zags, and little surprises a stricter sort of attention would miss. 

Schools love meetings even as many school people say they hate them. Partially, this contradictory state results from the good hearted, collaborative nature of many teachers. They like to tackle problems together, in the same room. Partially it’s a result of status games. If you’re in the important meeting, you must be important. Partially, it’s just an inherited default — you meet because, when you were a newer teacher or administrator, your mentors and predecessors met. They shared agendas and minutes and rules written by a guy named Robert. These pioneers and their descendants seldom, if ever, asked if meetings were the best way to solve the problems to which they were being applied as cures. 

Interestingly, then, the mode that schools love, hate, and have failed to fully interrogate for usefulness has come into question during the COVID-era. Whether we are remote or hybrid or full-capacity, we simply can’t meet the way we used to, the way we’d like to, the way we complain about, the way we know. 

In a meeting where senior admins at my school were discussing our typical after-school meetings — and how we would or would not hold them — it occurred to us that we needed to set some new ground rules. 

The first one was simple. We’re clearing our school buildings by 3:30 to allow for deep cleaning, so we can’t have meetings on-campus after school. If people need to meet after school, they must do so remotely, and at a time that allows a commuting and pick-up-the-kids-if-need-be buffer. 

Some colleagues will love this. They can end their on-site responsibilities for the day, drive home, get comfortable, and join a remote meeting. But the first problem borne of this solution is that, once colleagues with children are home, their attention is often, appropriately, consumed by the needs of their children. Those parents and caregivers should have a choice to “dial in” to meetings; they should have a choice to participate asynchronously; they should have a choice to not participate if it means that they have to “catch up” at odd hours; and they should not always have to choose between participation and their childcare responsibilities. 

Conundrums abound, and that’s putting it nicely.

I decided to call a meeting of my own to try to generate some additional solutions to our original problem — to meet or not to meet, and when. It was a simple meeting, comprised of a brief agenda, engagement by people whose collective energy and intelligence ensured an outcome better than one I could generate on my own, and finally, a set of notes. (Another way of saying this is: I tweeted a question at a group of smart, generous educators. Then I went on with my day. A few days later, once the responses died down, I pulled together the notes. They are presented as they were written and shared on Twitter. I mention that only because some of the words are clipped to fit Twitter’s character limit.)

Agenda:

What are after-school meetings looking like at thoughtful schools this year? Business-as-usual or rethought completely?

Notes:

@emilymccarren wrote first:

Rethought! Weekly q&a / office hours for pop in (some folks just come and hang). Weekly full faculty meetings are asynchronous modules in LMS. Group discussions, shared creation, can hear from everyone… (about 1 hr of engagement over the week). Will never go back!

@cinehead responded next:

We now have 2 hours of collaboration time built into our new block schedule each week! It takes place on our #SEL day that also includes office hours for Ss.

@wmstribling amplified some prior ideas and underlined our considerations with an important concern:

In our division, still working on details. Timely question as we just discussed this today. Don’t think we’ll have after school meetings and am loving these ideas! Open office hours a possibility with Q/A time. Wary of the load/duties of staffulty…

@ejhudson added some analysis and additional thoughts:

Emily’s model is a great one. Allows for personalized, on-demand learning for both educators and students. And: Online “hubs” for teachers to share great examples of curriculum/online strategies. Slack (or the like). Synch time for peer-based tackling of problems of practice.

@NicoleFurlonge added a better question than the one with which we started:

Fewer meetings. Ask the question: Do you need humans to come together to unpack these issues? If not, share info via email instead of meeting.

Shortly after, she added some additional suggestions:

Also opp to make room for mtgs as adult community bldg spaces. Suggestions: listening salons, storytelling sessions, talent shares. Share Ts practices. Lastly: ask for feedback on the mtg agenda to inform design of next mtg towards creating a culture of co-creation & feedback.

I (@sjvalentine) shared with the group a meeting innovation I’ve been using lately, though I admit it was a bit off topic because it is meant to disassemble a traditional meeting from the inside rather than rethink traditional meeting structures.

@crottymark chimed in next, looking more deeply into the future as he often does:

As I’ve been seeing all these, I see the possibility of the traditional weekly staff meetings morphing into ongoing, asynchronous growth experiences. Much more momentum and thus progress!

@NicoleFurlonge returned to the concept of listening salons, tying the mode to the essential functions of joy and community:

I’ve been hosting #listeningsalons for the past few months for different groups. Such an enjoyable and powerful space in which to build community through #listening.

I invited @reshanrichards to the meeting, but he declined, which is also a kind of meeting innovation. (It’s only effective in high trust environments, so apply with caution.) I know him well enough to know what he was thinking: 

“I’ve already written down and distributed my thoughts on meetings, so I don’t need to attend the meeting that you’ve called. I have nothing new or different to add except that good documentation can often preclude the need for a meeting.”

You can find his documentation — and mine — re. meetings here and here. It turns out, in the pre-COVID days, we had a lot to say about meeting structures and modes and purposes. In the post-COVID days, maybe we’ll be able to say less. 

I’m adding this text, as a linked Google Doc, to my first big meeting of the year tomorrow. If it works, I’ll probably use it in other meetings and possibly even in my classes.

Hedge Against Bad Guesses

I’ve learned this summer that an agenda is a best guess by (and sometimes “single story” told by) a hopefully well intentioned leader.  

Sure, leaders have things that we need to accomplish, but we also have to ensure that we have “guessed right” with as many of our meeting agendas as possible. 

If today’s meeting isn’t the meeting that you thought you would be attending or that you hoped you would be attending or that you really needed to be attending, please let me know below.  If I handed you the agenda-writing duties, what would you have planned?  If I made a left turn, mid-meeting, and you felt I should have made a right turn, tell me what was left undiscussed or undiscovered.  Write below the line what needs more time, more turning over, perhaps its own agenda item in the future.  Don’t be shy or overly polite — even if we can’t get to it right away, anything you add will help me to calibrate my attention, my guessing, and the bets I make with our time.    

In order to get off the schneid, which is a glorious thing, especially in baseball, you first have to be on the schneid.

I like to remind myself of this whenever things are overly messy, opaque, mistake-laden, chaotic, sluggish, or just plain unlucky. All that is great in us, when it finally breaks through, will be amplified by this backdrop.

From the incomparable Matt Levine in today’s Money Stuff: Avoid the sleeping point.

If there is one simple lesson from this case, and from virtually every other piece of financial news, it is that if people are doing something for you and charging you zero for it then they’re making money somewhere else, and you should probably figure out where that is.

Compare to the equally incomparable Burton G. Malkiel in A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Move toward the sleeping point.

We would all like to double our capital overnight, but how many of us can afford to see half our capital disintegrate just as quickly? J.P. Morgan once had a friend who was so worried about his stock holdings that he could not sleep at night. The friend asked, “What should I do about my stocks?” Morgan replied, “Sell down to the sleeping point.”

May you remain appropriately awake and asleep this weekend and forevermore.

Source: https://www.dragcity.com/news/2020-07-13-35