An important game

 This week, my mentor is out because she was exposed to someone else who tested positive for Covid. Nothing to be done about it, and it means it’s just me and the other new teacher running the class for most, perhaps all, of the week.

I could take the victim mindset and say poor me and oh how horrible and I’m worried and stressed. But one of the things I’ve been listening to has been reminding me that victim mindset vs. protagonist mindset is a choice. The second option is a bit harder to name, perhaps because it’s less frequent. But it basically means everything that happens is for my good alone. It also means, how my life feels is my choice. Or, I’m the author of my own story. Though I may not get to choose the events, since it’s non-fiction, I can choose the character choices of my character, and I can choose how I interpret events.

Is this a tragedy, woe is me? Or is this an opportunity to learn, to test myself against a challenge, succeed some, fail some, and learn from he experience, to grow stronger and better. I think the only reason to think the victim point of view is more accurate is if you believe that failure is a bad thing. Which I suppose is a common thing to think. But the growth mindset would say every failure is an opportunity for growth, and all great achievements are made out of failures placed like stepping stones along the path to eventual victory. Take your failure, analyze it, and learn how to not make the same mistake in the future, and viola, the mistake becomes a step towards mastery or success.

A nice framing story for this approach is a baby learning to walk. They try and try and try, and fall and fall and fall. They don’t get upset when they fall, or if so, for a very short period of time. It’s a game, a play. They haven’t yet been taught that falling down is anything wrong. What if we could live that way? A passion, a drive, to learn, but with a sense of play in the learning process, and no emotional baggage attached to ‘falling down.’

It sounds amazing, I’ve had the experience with improv dance and some writing classes with a particularly good poetry teacher, and it was some of the most joyful times of my life. Why not extend that to more of life?

After my Cutting Ties work around time management, it is not seeming like such a gargantuan problem, and I’m thinking that my next big goal might be something along those lines: living my life in that state of passion, curiosity, detachment, engagement, and play that I touched on in those moments with those excellent teachers. There are many obstacles to living this way in all aspect of my life. With my job, with my relationships to others, there is often a heavy-ness to it. What I’m doing seems ‘important’ and failing at it seems… well, like I’m doing something wrong, or bad. That’s the emotional and mental baggage that’s holding me back. But there is no solid and unchangeable reason that I can see, that would make it impossible to play life full out, like it’s a great game I’m trying to win, but also playing for fun, win or lose. It sounds fantastic, and also fantastically practical. I don’t think I’ve ever been more prolific than when I was in those states. It was, just like the toddlers, the optimal state to learn things in.

Oooh, and here’s a fun idea, what if I then learned how to take my students into that state? Sounds pretty great, I think.

Time to go, but first let’s see if I can find a quote from Baba about this that I love:

Life is a game, play it.

Life is a challenge, meet it.

Life is a dream, realize it.

Life is love, enjoy it.

-I Out

Short and Sweet. Less baggage, more comfort, makes travel a pleasure.

 I have approximately 3 minutes for this blog post. I’ve got a newsletter due in a day, and another document that needs to be emailed to a group tonight. Sometimes that’s how it is. I’ve notice there is less drama around time for me now. As always, it’s the meta emotions that really ruin your day. I’m having less of those. It makes it easier to iterate and keep going even when things don’t work out.

I really like the ideal of the scientist mindset, of just being curious. Failures are just data, and you can get curious about why they didn’t work. Data, not drama.

I think this is also a large part of my problems with teaching. There are a lot of meta emotions. I am invested in the outcomes, so when I fail it feels bad, so I avoid taking risks that I should be taking, simple, low stakes experiments that would help me practice and learn. And when I do take those risks, when it doesn’t work out, I feel bad, and it take a while to work up to trying again. Not an effective mindset for learning and growth, let alone enjoyment. I’ve mentioned something like this before, but it’s coming home stronger, as I see first hand again the difference beliefs and mindset make, via how much less stressful the time thing is, without all the baggage (or with less, in any case.)

OK, that’s time, see ya next week.

Love to all my friends and family

-Isaac

Thoughts on Learning and the Future

 OK, we’re at Monday again, except it’s Tuesday, because I got a three day weekend, thank you boss and indigenous people (I’m definitely a fan of that version over Columbus Day, given what I’ve read about the true history of Columbus.)

Anyhoo, hooray for 3 day weekends. It’s interesting to be thinking about what I want to do after my 3 year contract is up. I still don’t know how I’m going to feel at the end of it. Though I can predict where I’ll be if I continue my current trajectory, maybe. I’ll have learned some more about classroom management, but not everything. It will be easier, but still not natural.

I don’t enjoy being in a classroom that’s not settled and respectful like my mentor’s classroom is. It’s draining, exhausting. Which means, once she’s not there, either I need to be able to do that, or I need to know I’ll get there in a reasonable amount of time.

Trying to learn (via practice, of course, no other way) how to be good at classroom management is very difficult for me, in a way that… few? No? Other things have been. I’m not naturally good at it, so it involves a lot of failure. It also is not part of a structured curriculum, so I need to learn it on my own, setting my own goals, looking for my own feedback and mostly creating my own curriculum. And that is in addition to having a very demanding more than full time job. Which means there is very little time to actually actively focus on learning the skill. It’s why I daydream about making a teacher training school that actually works. Because I would really like to have that, for myself. Whether I actually want to make a school like that… unknown.

It seems the main way you find out what kind of work you like and are a good fit with, is by trying things out. It’s very hard to accurately predict that, you need the experience.

Anyways, as I try to glean info for future directions, I’m left with only a few clear things: 1) I don’t want to work as long on teaching. A 10 hour day is too long. 8 hours may be fine.

2) unless we make some really good friends here, I’m don’t think I want to stay in Austin. Friends are important to me. I miss them. Suzannah misses them even more.

Other things that are not as certain but I’m getting clearer on: I do really enjoy teaching people. That is deeply satisfying. I don’t really enjoy disciplining people. But I do want to work with people who are disciplined. That seems unfair to make others do that work though. Perhaps that is the price to pay. I also want to be more creative, and have time for deep focused work. That can’t happen if the whole day I have to keep an eye on some children.

OK, that’s all for today. Love to family and friends,

-I

Dracula, victory, 80% full.

 It’s Monday lunch break, you know what that means (unless I have other work I need to do then).

Blog time! Ever since my lightbulb moment about time management and my emotionally complex feelings around it, things have felt a little lighter. And my perspective has changed a bit. More possibility available to me.

This week’s likely going to be more intense than usual, since I’ll be on my own in the afternoon’s, due to being a little short-staffed. This is a frequent thing with Covid, since there is so much more need for staff. Drop off and pick up requires more staff. Online as well as in person classes requires more staff, keeping late dismissal kids in their separate bubbles requires more staff. So they’ve had to hire a bunch, and I suspect there is a high turnover with new staff.

So, there’s that. I’m trying to make a list of all the things I’m doing, so I can hopefully cut down on some of them. I read a little snippet of an article by Cal Newport about how knowledge workers get burnt out because they are almost always overworked: they don’t start saying no to things until they feel overwhelmed, but by then they’ve already got too much on their plate. He suggests saying no once they’ve got what feels like 80% full plate, because that will end up being totally full. The eating analogy is easy to make at this point, we’re already talking about plates. When you eat it takes a few minutes to register in your stomach the food you’ve eaten, so stopping when your 80% full is usually a good estimate to make sure you don’t feel stuffed and logy (it took me a while to find the right spelling for that. I thought logee or lowgi or something).

I guess I’m getting more comfortable with the idea that managing my time is to a large extent about not doing most things so I have time for the most important things, plus rest. And, even my ability to focus on what’s important and get it done seems improved.

Hopefully this trend continues. I’m also considering using the Fogg habit system to create some tiny habits around time and priority management to turn some basic useful tasks into permanent habits. So, good things on that front.

My other main front for improvement is as a teacher. Working on that, but no huge breakthroughs. Also, had a really cool dream last night, going on an epic adventure to defeat Dracula and his armies from ravaging the land. I don’t have time to go into the details, but it seemed very relevant in it’s metaphor and featured a cameo by my favorite teacher with a little bit of great wisdom. Basically, you can do this yourself, but can you protect your mind and thoughts from the enemy (thoughts). All habits and actions start as thoughts. That’s the lynch pin. Master your thoughts, your mind, master everything.

Gotta go, by for now!