Iron and Steel Man

 Perhaps a joke the universe is telling to me, my last post about the new normal has been proven wrong. I'm not writing this over my lunch break. I'm writing it after working all Sunday, preparing online class material for the online classes I'll be teaching this week. (And the volunteer, human values and spirituality  based class I've been co-teaching every weekend for a few years.)

One of our students tested positive for covid, so we all went online for the rest of the week and for this coming week. If all continues without further developments, we'll be back to in-person starting a week from now. And yes, I've been tested and came back negative. Though my heart rate was so low they thought something was wrong with me and called me back in. (Nothing was wrong. I just have a really slow heart rate. Probably a mixture of jogging every day and meditating and genetics.)

I love the weekend class I teach because it gives me a chance to review all the important ideas I know and practice them at a deeper level. For example, today I was talking about growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. I shared a video by Carol Dweck, and some nice quotes, and it reminded me how important it is to take that approach to life. It's much more calming, and at the same time, more adventurous. It makes it more fun to take risks, and do stuff I'm not good at. Which, as a still new teacher, is a lot. I feel like I'm continually off balance, and have been for years, but I think that itself is my training; can I be balanced and relaxed in the imbalance? It the intense activity?

And can I be happy, even when I don't feel like I'm doing a great job at something. That's certainly an identity and ego thing if every I saw one. We're all so afraid of being bad at something, we don't even try. Or we just dip our toe in, and then quickly pull it out like it's been bitten, just because we're not immediately good at it. It's an illness particularly endemic to really smart and talented people, who got everything at school easily right away. They never learned how to struggle and grow from bad to good. Though I suppose it's also endemic to many who had learning challenges at school as well. They didn't start out good at it, they were told they weren't good at it, and the believed it and left it at that. Too bad for all of them and us. If I didn't feel bad about doing something poorly, it would be a lot easier to be happy most of the time. If I could just be happy about the effortful process.

OK, time for... maybe not bed, but something non-screen related. I need to wind down before bed, and computer stuff is usually not soothing. Good night!

Oh, let me share some of the stuff I mentioned:

the mindset talk: 

https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en#t-608548

The quote:

"... you must have enthusiasm and courage. When defeat and disappointment stare you in the face, you must not give way to weakness or despondency. Never condemn yourself as inferior or useless; analyze the defeat and find out the reasons in order to avoid it the next time. Develop muscles of iron and nerves of steel."

The New Normal

No this has nothing to do with covid, aside from context that right now covid is going on. I'm just talking about the fact that I'm writing this blog post during the few minutes free time I have during lunch break, and that appears to be the new routine for these posts.

I'm keeping on. The other elementary class is out for 2 days because one of the assistant teachers found out they were exposed to someone with covid, so everyone's getting tested and we're letting the classroom sit to 'disinfect it' (given the 72 hour or so life of covid on surfaces)

In the meantime, I'm trying to tighten the reins on my students getting more productive work done. It's amazing the variability in how easy or difficult that is. one student is actively antagonistic about being told to do work and it's like wrestling with an angry oiled cat. Another is respectful and listens to the instructions on what to work on without complaint. As a new teacher, I would of course prefer all the students were like the latter, or even better, already knew how to work with focus, but also because I'm a new teacher, it's particularly important to have more challenging cases, so I can learn how to deal with them. I've gotten to chat with my mentor a bit recently so I've got some ideas and strategies, but they're all easier said than done. There's a lot of implicit understanding and skill that I don't have yet, and so I'm often left at a loss for what to do next, or what to do in response to what a student says. I'll just keep pushing for now, trying to learn from my missteps as well as successes. 

I recently had the thought that there is probably more efficient and less efficient strategies for learning how to teach. The thought came to me as I was trying to put my magnetic "bucky balls" away. A set of small magnetic balls that have a storage case for them in a perfect 6x6x6 cube (though maddeningly, I'm missing about 6 of then, so it will never be a perfect cube again. Doesn't really matter though, since I'm using some of them for magnets on my whiteboard.)

I tried to get at least part of the cube constructed, and it was difficult to the point of impossibility. Then I looked up some youtube video's for how to do it, and found an easy way, and then, while looking up some other cool shapes I could make to store the extra balls, found an even easier way. Trying to get the balls all lined up using my method was near impossible, requiring super finicky fine motor skills. Trying the second way was much easier, though still a little finicky, and trying the third way was both fun and much easier, using the properties of the magnetic balls to their natural advantage. It still took work, and especially the last part was a little delicate, but it was easier to get to that last part.

In the same way, I think there is perhaps something like a mindset or approach, that would make the whole process less of tiring struggle to learn, though still challenging. I'd like to find that.

OK, I'm out of time, so that's it!

A Clean Desk, A mostly empty inbox

 Ha-ha! Final Post, catching up to current. Those last two were during lunch break, this one is in the evening, right before bed.

As I start to get close to current with my organizational systems, I am finally faced with the wonderful problem to have, of actually some time to spend on things, other than basic treading-water life-support.

I'm not planning on worrying to much about that though, as my main task for the foreseeable future is to maintain the order I've created and turn that maintenance into a habit. Slow, steady creation of good habits is something I would consider one of my super-powers. Though it was not granted by a radioactive spider bite or good genetic luck, but by a very conscious process of figuring out what skills I needed to learn first, in order to improve myself. The first skill I developed was finding good teachers of whatever it was I wanted to learn, and the second was actually taking the action necessary to learn, and part of that was acquiring the knowledge and practice of creating good habits.

You see, I think I have below-average willpower, through genetics or circumstance (how much of each I don't know and it is irrelevant). And so I needed to figure out how I could compensate for that (or acquire more of it) a big part of the answer is learning how to  create good habits.

So, in any case, my office looks and feels nice right now, and I have sufficient physical and mental space to begin structuring some good organizational habits and systems, which will hopefully end up giving me even more energy and time. I can already tell it's going to take some trial and error and adjusting and figuring out what works, but the luxury of actually being able to do that, after months and months of scrabbling to get to that place, is rewarding. I'm sure many people would have assumed, somewhere through the months of working on it whenever I had a free day or vacation time, that they would never get to the promised land, and would have given up. But I've done this journey enough times now to know that if you keep at it, you do eventually get where you're going. Perhaps that is a superpower of it's own. I suppose it would be a type of faith.

I'm also making more of an effort to stay in touch with my mentor, who was the whole reason I picked up and moved to this new state, hundreds of miles from home. She's great, wise, and encouraging, and is super generous with her time, so my number one job is just to try and make use of that, since that's what will give me the chance to become a truly great teacher. I don't know how people get to that point without a good mentor they can get advice from. I suppose some are just geniuses? I don't know. (But am intensely curious, as one of my dreams is cracking the code for how to train people to become great teachers.)

OK, the end. It's time for bed, or at least some other task. It's marvelous to be sitting at my clean desk, and have the space to actually think about what the best thing to do next is, rather than feeling tugged like a fish on a hook towards the next immediate thing that's captured my attention.

Love, good-bye, and woohoo, on getting to this point. I suspect my getting so far behind on blog posts is related to getting to this point. I perhaps put as many things on hold as I could, so I could build up the momentum to get to this point. And now I get to catch up, in a more relaxed and focused atmosphere.

Random happenings

 I have a few more minutes, so maybe I can catch up on my posts. This will be more of a ‘current events’ one.

It’s raining. There was blood in the garage where our cats spend the night. Hopefully caught a mouse, worried they hurt each other. The big mean cats still occasionally bullying them. One of them has a grey patch. A while ago one of them crawled onto my shoulder while I was on the couch and started licking my head/hair, for a good 5 minutes. I allowed it, because it was really cute and odd, and Suzannah got a video of it, and then I took a shower.

Three-day weekend was much appreciated, my office is finally looking nice and feeling very functonal.

I’m starting to teach some more lessons, which is fun. Teaching the lessons is the fun part for me, the discipline is the part that I find challenging and exhausting. Probably true for the vast majority of teachers.

We have a badminton set but haven’t used it yet.

OK, time to go!

-Isaac

Ladders and walls, focus and joy, lunch breaks and work.

 With this, I remain two posts behind rather than falling further behind. It seems like I need a three day weekend to make any forward progress, otherwise the weekend is just recuperating from the week and taking care of basic upkeep tasks. But I did have a three day weekend, and I did get some things done. My office is looking pretty nice and feeling pretty organized. This is a huge relief. Having a messy space leads to more distractions and inefficiency, as various things that are lying around call to me to do something about them, even though they’re not really important, and finding what I want is harder, and tasks, todo’s, meetings, etc, get lost in the shuffle from one place to another.

I sat down yesterday and asked myself where I wanted to be going. This exercise is born from something I read, I think the quote goes something like, “there is nothing more useless than doing efficiently that which should not be done in the first place.” And the analogy of putting a ladder against a wall and climbing for a while, only to realize once you’ve gotten to the top, that it was the wrong wall you were climbing. So, before you put in a whole bunch of effort, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re climbing the wall you actually want to be climbing. It didn’t take long, but it was helpful. Just as in general keeping your goals fresh in your mind is helpful. You need direction, and a compass, to keep you on track, if you want to get somewhere specific. And if you don’t have a specific location in mind, then either random circumstances or someone else is going to determine where you end up. And the process of getting there is not a one time check-in on your goals, it’s like an airplane navigating, where fairly often the course is measured and small adjustments made so that they are staying on course.

I am typing this during my lunch break. It’s one of the few opportunities I have to do something like this. The weekends, where I have larger stretches of time, are for bigger projects that require that extra time. But lunch is good for doing some quick computer work, since I’ve been trained to eat quickly from my previous teaching job where I only had about a half hour to eat lunch. Having a full hour feels luxurious, but also much appreciated. It really does help give me a breather in the middle of this demanding job, allows me to catch my breath.

I’m continuing to work on focus, and continuing to get better at it, and thus more efficient. But there are still plenty of mistakes that I’m making. There was a time back in my teens, when I tried really hard to be perfect, do things perfectly, and I managed it for a little, but they circumstances made it difficult and I stopped, and I got really depressed. I think I decided then that I just couldn’t do it, that I’d never be able to be really productive and focused and stick to a good routine or any super disciplined behavior. I think that belief is still deep in my subconscious, but now that I realize it, I need to turn to myself and say, “no, you can change, and just because you forget, or give in during a moment of weakness, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Pick yourself up, learn what you can from the mistake, and try again, and if you don’t give up, certainly you will succeed in the end.”

Also, I realized I need to prioritize joy in my life. It’s an essential element of my ultimate goal, enlightenment, and of all the aspects of that, I think that one may be where I am doing the worst. That was something that came out of my “climb the right ladder” introspection.

OK, that’s definitely all for today. The artificial time limit that my lunch break imposes has the added benefit of keeping me from spending to long on these.

Love to you, friends and family,

-Isaac

Snow day, Focus

 I am 3 posts behind, but this post will make it only 2 behind. I am currently, as I said I would do, focusing all my efforts on, well, focus. To be more specific, acquiring the habit of focus, prioritization, efficiency, and ease, for an over-all "get-it-done-ness" quality. And working on removing the negative habitual thought that is the flip side of the coin, "I don't have enough time." There's a bit of other stuff going on as well, but that is the brunt of it. 

Perhaps it is the extra emphasis on that which is pushing back some things, like these blog posts.

Several years ago, I got a bunch of advice, and one part of that advice was to practice a mental exercise to strengthen my focus muscle. I think this was very good intuitive advice, as strengthening that is improving my productivity and the quality of the work I'm doing as well. And I'd say improving my peace of mind as well.

To some degree, getting things done efficiently is about knowing what not to do, or what not to spend much time on, and focusing helps me determine what those things are, much quicker and more consistently. And perhaps most important, focusing helps me stay on task, which means things take much less time, because there aren't a bunch of mostly useless side tracks that I take on the way to completion.

This is still very much a work in progress, but it is a work that is happening, not just being theorized. That feels good. Also getting a snow day yesterday was awesome.

That's all I've got time for, for now. See ya!

The feeling of impending doom, realism, optimism, positive focus.

Still behind by... two posts I think? School starts up again tomorrow, and after feeling bad about it and how I spent a good chunk of my last day, I've accomplished a huge amount in the remaining time. Something about the feeling of impending doom really clarifies what's important and facilitates focus.

I took a real break for most of this vacation, and it felt really good. Really good. But that means coming back to work does not feel so great. I was exhausted and overwhelmed to the point where there was no energy to try and improve things, it was just staying afloat, that was all I could manage. And now it looks like things are going to get even more intense, more responsibilities. Perhaps more time. I'm definitely in the "I want to curl up in a ball and hide from everything" mindset that is perhaps not so uncommon among newish teachers coming back from a break (or in general).

That is not an option though, which is perhaps the only way for people to get beyond such uncomfortable things. We need situations and outside accountabilities to get us to do something uncomfortable for long enough to get over the discomfort. Otherwise we stay away from such things in the same way simple single cell organisms stay away from environments that are poisonous to them.

It's hard for me to muster the optimism that I'll do better this semester, as I am a bit of a cynic (what I call a realist) and I was already at or beyond my limit last semester. But perhaps what I did was good enough, and more of that will be ok. I'd like to say, "I'll do better this time! If I just believe hard enough, I'll make that a reality!" but no matter how many self-help books I get quoted at me about that, it just smacks of lying to myself. For the outcomes to change, the inputs need to change, and I'm unsure what I could be doing better, with the time resources and energy available to me.

I will set goals at least, and try to keep those front and center in my awareness, a positive focus, and work on any self-defeating beliefs that aren't true (but don't get picked on as much as the positive affirmations because they've already wiggled past my discerning mind when I wasn't looking and set up shop.)