Between a Practical and an Enriching Education

November 24, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The cultivation of your mind & spirit and your preparation for a job are always in tension in higher education.

With a crippling recession and the rising cost of a college degree, there seems to be a higher emphasis than ever on vocational training. But even with more internships and technical apptitude, the last half-decade of graduates are still struggling to break into the job market. Indeed, liberal arts champions are noting that narrow training for specialized jobs is leaving those students who don’t manage to land one largely unqualified to do anything else.

Broad. Specific. Enriching. Practical. Critical thinking. Hands-on learning. The best education is equal parts creativity and application, learning how to identify a problem and then trying to solve it, discovering unexpected abilities at school while refining developing ones on the job.

It is unusual for one educator to draw so much of his energy from these tensions, but that’s what Sebastian Thrun seems to be doing.

Thrun is the co-founder of Udacity, one of the young companies that is beginning to turn the bricks & mortar approach to higher education on its head. Massive open on-line courses (or MOOCs) are the vehicle. In a post a few weeks back, I discussed one of the recent directions they have taken: a collaboration between national employers like UPS and companies like Thrun’s to jointly develop “niche certification programs” that will give students an affordable shot at an available job and employers a qualified applicant pool for unfilled positions.

This could be just another way for enterprising employers to cultivate a roster of applicants for cherry picking. But from another perspective, it could be more of a win-win. As observers like Andrew Kelly have noted, most of those taking MOOCs today are either in traditional degree programs or have gotten their degrees already. Because these certificate programs are building on the broad base of a more traditional education, the too-narrowly-focused student becomes less of a concern.

For his part, Thrun seems to be motivated instead of discouraged by the vocational detour MOOC providers like his are taking.

His vision, and that of other innovators in on-line education, was to bring practical as well as enriching learning opportunities to everyone who was too poor or too busy working to pursue a traditional degree—a potentially transformative global vision. Unfortunately, very few of those sigining up for a MOOC actually complete the course today, even with “really good” teachers, regular mentoring and the promise of low-cost college credit. But the apparent fact that the market for the first wave of MOOCs is smaller than Thrun (and others) expected is only causing him to double down on his efforts to meet the broader need that’s out there.

Why is that? I think it’s because the animating principle is Thrun’s own curiosity, his own appetite for learning.

We pursue most vigorously what we embody, or as Thrun prefers to describe it, what he wants for his son.

I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education.

Instead of four years in college, what Thrun envisions is an on-going shuttle between theory and practice, discovery and pursuit, critical detachment and engagement—exactly what he is doing to unlock the full potential of MOOCs.

It is an education that is supple enough to nurture your basic qualities of mind while also helping you to develop skills that will help you keep up with the accelerating pace of workforce change (what fellow entrepreneur and Linked-in founder Reed Hoffman calls “the continuous start-up of you”).

Watching Sebastian Thrun as a teacher, an innovator and a father is to catch a glimpse of what this vision of lifelong learning could look like for you and me.

Finishing School

October 29, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Maxine Powell died last week after a long career. For almost 60 years, she pursued the kind of work that almost no one is doing today. Powell taught grooming, poise, and the “social graces” to Motown artists before they went out into the spotlight.

How to stand. How to speak and dress. How to keep your cool with reporters and fans. How to make the best impression you could in every part of your life. It was guidance designed to make her students hold their heads up high and feel proud of themselves, so that pride always “came through.”

Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, the Supremes: Powell called them her “diamonds in the rough and her training — along with tough love — aimed to polish their posture, diction, stage presence and sense of self-worth.” That’s how we met most of them. Shiny and unforgettable.

Back then Motown was playing on the same New Haven station (WAVZ) that brought the Beatles and Stones, Dylan and Hendrix to my transistor radio—and what a soundscape it was. You’d hear them, and then try to catch their acts on Ed Sullivan, the Smothers Brothers or American Bandstand. That’s how I saw Motown for the first time: clean cut, all matching suits and steps, smiling harmonies and rhythms that conjure an era big enough for several soundtracks.

For Motown, it was no longer step & fetch it, but stepping out.

Today, we live in an era with lots of marketing but little finishing. We’re often satisfied with surface impressions, what the Temptations were doing their best to get beyond in Beauty’s Only Skin Deep. Powell, of course, was right there with them, reaching through the perfect hair and clothes for the bedrock below.

My friends ask, what do I see in you 

But it goes deeper than the eye can view.

A half-century later, you’d never dare to tell anyone how to walk or talk, or how to behave—not even those you supposedly love. It’s freedom and preoccupation with personal autonomy that we’re left with.

Only I get to make decisions in my space.

There’s not much of a role for a Maxine Powell anymore, or for a love like that. Most of us are on our own when it comes to our finishing today.

The Job of Sorcerer’s Apprentice

July 2, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Some of the most necessary & satisfying work can be helping everybody else’s work to go smoothly. At its best, it’s nearly invisible. As orchestration, it can be akin to wizardry.

This time last year, I met two people clearly thriving on this sort of work. One was a “volunteer,” in the middle of helping an event with a thousand moving parts to go smoothly. The other does it full time. For each of them, you could feel just how much their chosen work fit.

I caught mid-stream magic being performed by Geo Geller at the #140edu Conference, a gathering of wired educators that was held last summer at the 92^nd Street Y in New York. A minister with nearly all portfolios, Geo was tracking down speakers, adjusting the lights and air, helping with taxis and luggage, coordinating with the Y’s staff, and untangling technology, that is, managing by wandering around. It was hot and I was decompressing from my time up, so for me it was some jokes, Geos’ finding me the T-shirt that came with the gig, and finally, just watching him work.

I met Dave “Pics” Bradley the night before the conference. Dave’s a hall monitor at a high school in Toronto. His day begins with tweets about the weather or the day’s schedule and ends with pictures he took of the school day in motion.

In his daily walkabouts, Dave sees first hand what teachers and administrators miss in the capillary action between classes and scheduled appointments: plots foiled, celebrations captured, bullies interrupted. Or it’s a friendly word on a lonely day from a friendly guy with a big hat and a camera. How essential is the job he’s doing? Check out what the Toronto Star thinks, along with Dave’s interview & video clip.

MAYBE IT'S THE BEARDS — MAYBE IT’S THE BEARDS

There can be a lot of satisfaction in work that makes everything else that’s going on…work. Here’s to Geo, Dave and all the other magicians who are actually doing it.

It’s a position that every workplace should want.

It’s a hat you might consider trying on.

The Pause That Refreshes

May 26, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Energy and work have a complicated relationship. When we’re firing on all cylinders, we’re burning energy but creating it too—with no net waste in a productive cycle. But sustaining a focused hum also requires giving your mind a break and letting it drift for a few precious minutes or hours. Concentration can be recharged by allowing yourself to get lost in a different rhythm.

Close your eyes to pick out the sounds or smells: how composer John Cage found the music in New York City, how you can catch a whiff of perfume or of the clean from someone’s morning shower. You also let the wave float you back to shore by opening your eyes really wide and drinking in the natural world.

My neighbor, Leigh Marsh, has been a veterinarian for almost 60 years, still working until ten or eleven most nights, although a concession of sorts is his setting out a bit later than he used to most mornings. Leigh’s veterinary practice began in a prosperous part of town, and stayed when all the money got up and went. He’s there for the dogs, cats and people who keep them, and thrives on the community that he helps to preserve. Whenever I ask Leigh “How are you?” he says: “Great, as long as I can keep working.”

He wouldn’t call it hard work, but it is.

He’d tell you he doesn’t have a secret, but he does.

I was in my front yard yesterday when I noticed Leigh and Jane (his daughter in for a visit) scanning the ribbon of grass between the street and the sidewalk in front of his house. They walked back & forth, fully engaged, with heads bowed. Maybe a lost earring, I thought. They went inside eventually, but Leigh was out again soon, scouring that strip of ground. “Do you need another pair of eyes?” I called, walking over. Barely looking up he said: “There are four and even five and six-leaf clovers here,” giving those he’d already found a quick wave to demonstrate the truth of it. “And this here is a particularly good patch.”

Psychologists have known for over a century that there are two kinds of attention: the directed attention we use when we’re concentrating, and the involuntary attention that requires no mental effort at all. A recent article in the Atlantic traces the distinction to William James, who said it is “[s]trange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.” that attract our attention involuntarily.

It’s attraction that comes with a slew of salutary benefits.

In a recent study, portable EKGs traced the brainwaves of people walking in heavily trafficked urban areas, in parks and in the spaces in-between to see if there were discernible differences. In an interview after the study, lead researcher Jenny Roe noted that the walkers became “mentally quieter” in more natural places. “Natural environments still engage” the brain, she said, but the attention demanded “is effortless.” Environments like these “hold our attention while at the same time allowing scope for reflection.” They elevate our abilities to sense and to wander while putting our minds at ease.

Of course, psychologists also couldn’t resist naming “the replenishing part” of involuntary attention. According to Adam Alter in the Atlantic piece, they gave it the appropriately poetic acronym ART, for attention restoration theory. Here it is in a nutshell:

[U]rban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to “look here!” before telling us to instead “look over there!” These demands are draining — and they’re also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.

In this, the man-made, urban environment is synonymous with the workplace.

Getting lost in nature for a few moments relieves the workplace stresses too. The harder we work the more we need to get lost in it, and all the other strange and moving, bright and pretty things that can take us away for awhile and return us to the tasks at hand refreshed.

In other words, it’s knowing when to stop and pick the clover.

Habits of Living

April 21, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To have been thrust, as we’ve been over the past seven days, onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Boston, is to be reminded of the web of interconnections that make up a community. We all have that web, which we’ve taken from our earliest memories and experiences into the work we do and the lives we live. It’s the web we find ourselves leaning back into and relying upon during a week like this.

These “ways of seeing the world” or “habits of living” put startling events into a meaningful context so that we can begin to understand them. They tell us when we can count on the authorities trying to protect us. They bring us out to the street to applaud and cheer them because of our relief and their success.

These ways of seeing the world shaped our initial reactions to the carnage that turned a finish line into a triage unit. “Repugnance” a word that Leon Kass has used to describe this kind of disregard for life and community, springs from “a sort of deep moral intuition.” What is acceptable as well as what offends us at the most basic levels, comes from how we saw our parents and cousins, neighbors and teachers respond to what they thought the world should and shouldn’t look like all those years ago. We learned from what we saw them do.

It is where conscience and character first come alive.

So I paid attention to novelist Denis Lehane (who wrote so beautifully about Boston in Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone) when he spoke about how he was trapped at home while the streets outside his home were a blur of sirens and mobilzations. He talked about trying to protect his 4-year old daughter who was alarmed every time she heard the “pop, pop, pop” from that endlessly replayed gun battle from the night before. So while the storyteller in Lehane needed to know what was happening, he kept turning off the screens and squawk boxes to protect her. One of his habits of living was to guard his child from the realities of the world while he still could, despite all the things he so desperately needed to know.

These habits were evident in those who went from on-lookers of the Boston Marathon to rushing towards the explosions to see if they could help. They were evident in the cups of coffee and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches thrust into the hands of responders who hadn’t taken a minute to think about how tired and hungry they were.

These habits were evident in the capabilities that were shared at the most critical moments (“he needs a tourniquet”) or from the journalism teacher who found himself tweeting in the middle of the Watertown shootout and later said “I kept stopping myself, because the world just didn’t need to know about that.” These habits are about discretion and propriety too.

All of us are embarrassed by the smallness of the towns where we grew up, of the communities that looked out for us, or over our shoulders, back then. When we leave our nests thinking we’ve escaped, we bring the ways of making sense of the world and the role we need to play in it along with us. They help us to reach back to our most basic decencies in times that are troubling as well as in all those other times. These habits of living give rise to the responsibilities we all share for the world we inhabit.

As the cameras rolled past the row houses of Watertown, with all their green trash cans out and the trees beginning to bud, we found ourselves thrust into a web of mutual responsibilities. It is where what’s best and truest about life can usually be found.