Game Time, Grit, Harvard Business Review.

 Back in the winter of 2019, I bought a Harvard Business Review Special Issue on “How to learn faster and better.” Mainly because of one article in it, about how to acquire “deep smarts.” Or, in other words, how to gain the expertise of experts/masters. I bought it specifically because I wanted to use it with my mentor teacher. I thought it would be useful for a lot of things, but I had her in mind. I may have bought it in the airport while traveling to do my practice teaching with her. I tried to apply it then, I think, but as I recall, it wasn’t very effective. I was just observing, and there wasn’t time for much else.

Well, now my time has begun. Last week, I started teaching in her classroom, and she immediately started moving responsibilities on to me, bit by bit. Beginning the training process. It was exactly what I wanted and hoped for and expected from her. Very thoughtful mentoring and support and role-modeling. It also was what I thought it would be, in terms of the difficulty of trying to parse what it was she was doing that made the classroom work so well.

I’d been meaning to start keeping a “learning to teach” journal, but now more than every I really need to prioritize that. I need to be recording my progress, what is working for successfully transferring her skills, and trying to capture and parse what those skills are, and how she does them. The article it to help me ask the right questions, look for the right things.

It is game time. Now, perhaps more so than any other time that I’m here during my contract, I need to be doing everything I can to learn, absorb, capture, what this awesome teacher does. And to try and learn how to do it myself. It’s kind of a second job, in addition to the main job, but it’s super important to me. First, so I can learn to be the kind of teacher, do the kind of teaching, that feels worthwhile to do. Second, so I can hopefully, maybe, learn how to become that kind of teacher, so I can help other people like me who are interested in becoming something like that, but don’t know how.

I’m watching the survival show “Alone” with Suzannah, and it is reminding me fondly of my time with the Tracker School. And inspiring me: there are a lot of hardcore, dedicated, gritty people on the show, and seeing them be gritty inspires me to be that way too. It’s a truism that’s scientifically validated, that you become like the kind of people  you associate with the most. I may not have a ready supply of super gritty, passionate, ultra successful people, or totally dedicated spiritual aspirants (especially during COVID) but I can always get that company through books and other media, if nothing else.

I’m going to end this earlier than I need to, because I want to spend as much time as I can, in my learning to teach journal. I’ve already missed a week, and that first week had so much happening. Even the first day, my mentor really set the tone and expectations. I wonder if I should finish reading the article first?

Anyhoo, that’s it for today. Take care!

-IO