Catching up on my summer magazine reading, I just read the July 2015 editor’s comment from Wired Magazine. Mastering the Work-Life Mix, by Scott Dadich, showed a perspective on an aspect of the current work environment that I had been grappling with for a while. To paraphrase, after being given a promotion during a lunch meeting, Dadich was told by his boss that;

His boss was challenging the idea of separating work life from personal life. Many cringe at the thought of work-life overlap, but Dadich notes that the overlap is one of the main differences between a career and a job. A career often requires stretching beyond the 8 hour workday. Agonizing over keeping our current work and personal selves separate is not only stressful, but unattainable. And this blurring between our different roles is only likely to become more pronounced with new technologies allowing us to become more available and productive.

And it goes both ways. Of course we need time to re-charge, escape, and re-invent ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that we only do that on holiday. Work can also be a time to explore options that benefit ourselves more than the organization for whom we work. Taking the time to connect, play, network, rest, and challenge ourselves is often encouraged while at the place of employment. The only metric being that the tasks get completed.

The best organizations know this, however, many of us spend far too long trying to define the work life balance and the truth is, there is no easy and complete definition. We all have to manage our time on our own by being as flexible as we can. Using the phrase Work-Life Mix might help us acknowledge that need for flexibility.

Note: I wrote this post on a weekend return flight from a conference - the mix in action.

The usual comments about buffets - excessive, fattening, wasteful - though true, really don’t get to the heart of why buffets should be on their way out. They are mass produced troughs that, ironically, satisfy neither the consumer nor the producer. The consumer thinks, isn’t this great, I can choose whatever I want. Then, after a gorge, they realize that the food really didn’t satisfy and only succeeded in making him feel sick.

For the producers - the chefs, bakers, even the wait staff - they end up feeling they are more responsible for the volume of food rather than the quality. By making it for everyone, they make if for no one. A very lonely experience, I would think. Instead of making a steak cooked to someone’s preferred specifications, they are producing meat that is most likely to be palatable to the largest audience. And audience it is. People look at the options and simply choose based on a quick visual inspection.

Lastly, there is the waste. Every night in a city like Bangkok, where there are dozen of hotels offering full all-you-can-eat buffets, the excess on display is mind boggling. Rarely have I seen an item on the menu out of stock. On the contrary, there ALWAYS seems to be more. The only thing stopping the stream of food is not supply, but time. The restaurant closes, or the buffet hours end, and the food is hauled off, presumably, to the dump.

Waste is part of the ecological cycle. There are organisms that rely on the waste of other organisms to survive. But in the case of buffets, I fail to see how this deliberate display of excess can be beneficial to anyone other than those hungry teenage boys whose insatiable appetites would have them go out for pizza after 2+ hours at an all you can eat buffet.

I think we need to re-assess the need for this type of consumption. Who does the buffet really satisfy? Does quantity really have to be the metric we use to measure food? Is this just a reflection of a greater issue of conspicuous consumption?

Image credit - CC - Jeremy Brooks via Compfight

For the last few years I have been looking long and hard at the words convenient and convenience. Something about those words made me uncomfortable. I recently looked it up and, besides being interpreted by the British as being a toilet, these are the two definitions that confirmed my understanding:

Convenience - noun (Google)

• the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty. "the museum has a cafeteria for your convenience" (Google search)

Convenient - adjective (Merriam Webster)

• allowing you to do something easily or without trouble
• located in a place that is nearby and easy to get to
• giving you a reason to do something that you want to do

Here is the reason I have been struggling with these words. Basically, the idea of convenience is looked upon as a positive thing, but I am learning more and more that convenience should be seen with some trepidation; if it is convenient, there is likely to be a cost.

Recently, due to a medical issue, I was in a situation where I was losing weight as my ability to swallow was limited and painful. The doctor recommended using Ensure shakes 6 to 7 times a day to put on, or at least maintain, my weight. Ensure is very easy to make,  just add water to the powder, stir, and consume. The homemade alternative involves a process taking at least 5 to 7 minutes in preparation and cleanup. Ensure is definitely convenient, but at what cost? A look at the ingredients provides a clue. Ensure's top 5 ingredients are: hydrolyzed corn starch, vegetable oil, calcium cassinate, sucrose, and vitamins and minerals. The tagline for Ensure's website are Nutritional Products for Your Health.

Really? 


flickr photo by Carol Green http://flickr.com/photos/carol_green/3530943331 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Examples of the use or idea of convenience are everywhere in our modern lives: owning a motorized vehicle, fast food, and, of course, convenience stores. But what are their costs? Driving a car gets you from A to B quickly, but you are more likely to become unfit, pollute the air, and miss the benefits of seeing things slowly. And this says nothing of traffic. Fast food is convenient, but again, at what cost. Nutrition and cooking skills are just two things that come to mind. And finally, convenience stores - take a look at what they house and, if they are open 24 hours, what about the store's employees? 

My thinking is that we need to re-evaluate the meaning of the word convenience. If something is easy or 'without trouble', is that always a positive thing? Unless there is a symbiotic relationship, we should be very skeptical about something being convenient.

What are your thoughts on the idea of convenience? Is convenience just a product, or a goal, of society to make things easier? Do we need to balance those things that are convenient with those that we need to put some effort or work towards? Can you think of some other examples of a misleading convenience? Or, conversely, where does convenience really deliver a positive result?

Many people have heard me say recently that I believe the Holy Grail to education is turning it around to make the students, not the teachers, responsible for their own learning. I feel this way on so many levels: attendance, assessment, grade level assignments, mastery instead of just passing, self directed learning, to name but a few, but now there is an(other) excellent article in Wired Magazine (October 2013) that provides an example in one of the world’s poorest classrooms. The article, How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses by Joshua Davis, describes how Sergio Juárez Correa changed his teaching methods to allow the students living next to a dump in the Mexican – US border town of Matamoros to direct their own learning. His method? Pose a question and then get out of the way. The results were astounding. All the students improved on standardized tests by considerable margins, while the top 10 got into the 99.99th percentile for Mexico and one little girl got the top score in the country. flickr photo by Digital Explorer http://flickr.com/photos/aeroworks/97338266 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

I highly recommend reading the article to get a sense of the teacher’s changed methodology (based on many other educators’  philosophies including, most recently, Sugata Mitra of the ‘hole in the wall computer‘ fame), but I really wonder if others have the guts to change their teaching approach so radically. It is easy to think that Sergio Juárez Correa really had little to lose given the community he was serving, but his courage is admirable.

I have battled over the issue of letting students determine what they learn a great deal recently as I learn more and more about the dissatisfaction with the current education model. Almost daily I am reading about how our methods and practices are outdated and teaching students for a passed century and not the current one. And I get it. Why do we start our school day at 7:30am when most teenagers do not really function until 9 or 10am at the earliest? Why do we base our schedule on equal blocks of time for each subject when the time should fluctuate as we need more time in one and less in another? Why do we teach a prescribed curriculum based on content an authority deems important rather than finding out students’ passions? Why do we keep students in groups based on their age rather than their capabilities? Is our resistance to change entirely based on tradition? Perhaps there are reasons why many students are disenchanted with their current education.

​So how do we change this? Most of us have been brought up, trained and are committed to the system we find ourselves in. Have we painted ourselves into the proverbial corner? Who has the guts to set the curriculum aside and ask the students, “what do you want to learn?” How can we set up a system that encourages students to think more deeply about problems and issues that concern them? I must admit, as proud as I am of the Digital Connections (DCo) course I helped get started in our school, it is only a small step towards students engaging in independent learning. DCo allows students to choose from a set of activities, and even allows students to create their own activities (with approval), but it still does not go as far as ‘What do you want to learn?’  Steve Crane via Compfight

Perhaps one of my biggest fears is that if I give students the option to do what they like, they will just do nothing, and, honestly, that would reflect badly upon me as their teacher. I know, I know, there is the voice that says a good teacher would motivate students to want to learn what they want to learn about. But I feel like I am bucking the trend of current education and that given the chance, students would just take the opportunity to dodge around having to do anything in my experimental class because they just need a break from the rigors of ‘school’. Maybe that is OK, too.

Which brings me around to the statement which opened this post. If students were held accountable for their own learning, the motivation to complete the work would be their own, not their teachers’. I would love the opportunity to be able to offer up tough questions and then just get out of the way. When we get to this point, I believe students will not only surprise us, but love learning as well.

What do you think? Are you on board with trying to change what we call education? Are small steps a better approach, or do we need to have a radical and sweeping transformation? Would your community openly accept the method that was used in the Matamoros classroom?