Balance Like a Pirate : Going beyond Work-life Balance to Ignite Passion and Thrive as an Educator

Given to me by an emerging friend, at exactly the right time.

Important Distinctions:

“When we talk about personal balance, we are referencing everything that really makes you who you are - what are the “titles” outside of your job, and how do you cultivate them” (pg xxi)?

“Positional balance . . . Whatever you do that earns income or provides you financial stability . . .” (pg xxi).

“Professional balance is just that - how are you continuing to learn, grow, and enhance your knowledge and understanding of your role” (pg xxi)?

Passions: What I would do for free (pg xxii).

Favorite Quotes:

“We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience” (pg 35).

“We take care of our phones better than our bodies. We know when our battery is depleted” (pg 36).

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering” - Ben Okri (pg 43).

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” - Winston Churchill (pg 51).

“Many of you have likely reached a point in your life where you do not want it all, but you do want a rich life, full of deep interactions, long-lasting memories, and opportunities fot follow your personal and professional calling” (pg 60).

“I never lose - I either win or learn” - Nelson Mandela (pg 63).

“Many educators believe in “servant leadership” as a pillar philosophy and recoil at the idea of selfishness. We believe that self-care is not selfish, and in fact, being healthy allows us to be more selfless” (pg 66).

“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves, We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence” (pg 74).

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” (pg 75).

“Never stop learning, because life never stops teaching. A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows she has none” - Marilyn Monroe, (pg 81).

“To succeed with deep work, you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli” (pg 96).

“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you” - Maya Angelou (pg 105).

“Each person has special talents - the things you enjoy doing when they are away from school. Making intentional time to cultivate your dream and following through with courage and discipline is important not only for you, but for the students you serve. So don’t hide it from your students! You strive to find out as much as you can about their passions, but how often do you share your passions with them?” - “Identity Day”, a school day devoted to students AND teachers sharing on thing they are passionate about (pg 106)

“Each time i pulled off the work “Band-aid” just to relax and enjoy life, I returned to work rejuvenated and with a clear mind, able to be more productive and focused” (pg 112).

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading” - Lau Tzu (pg 115).

“The longer you wait to do something you should do now, the greater the odds that you will never actually do it” - The Law of Diminishing Intent (pg 124).

For more one . . .

Education : Reading Log

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, by Tony Wagner

“If we are to remain globally competitive in today’s world, we need to produce more than just a few entrepreneurs and innovators. We need to develop the creative and enterprising capacities of all our students” (pg 4).

“the greatest innovations of the 21st century will be those that have helped to address human needs more than those that had created the most profit” (pg 6).

“Innovation may then be defined as the process of having original ideas and insights that have value, and then implementing them so that they are accepted and used by significant numbers of people” (pg 8).

“Incremental innovation is about significantly improving existing products, processes, or services. Disruptive or transformative innovation on the other hand, is about creating a new or fundamentally different product or service that disrupts existing markets and displaces formerly dominant technologies” (pg 10).

Seven Survival Skills of Innovators:

1. Critical thinking and problem solving

2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence

3. Agility and adaptability

4. Initiative and entrepreneurship

5. Accessing and analyzing information

6. Effective oral and written communication

7. Curiosity and imagination

Tim Brown’s Five Characteristics of “Design Thinkers”

1. Empathy

2. Integrative thinking

3. Optimism

4. Experimentalism

5. Collaborators

Leader: “someone who will take control of the situation verses waiting to be led.” The ask, “How can I make things better?” (pg 15).

Innovators have the following qualities:

1. Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questions and a desire to understand more deeply

2. Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that very different from your own

3. Associative or integrative thinking

4. a bias toward action and experimentation (pg 16)

“If you look at 4-year olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6.5 years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more then provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they’re grown up and are in corporate settings, they have laready had the curiosity drummed out of them. 80% of executives spend less then 20% of their time on discovering new ideas . . . The problem is that school sometimes treat {curiosity} as a bad habit . . . like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged” (pg 17).

“It’s a lot easier to name the things that stifle innovation like rigid bureaucratic structures, isolation, and a high-stress work enviornment” (pg 23).

“Expertise and creative thinking are an individual’s raw materials - his or her natural resources, if you will. But a third factor - motivation - determines what people will actually do” (pg 25)

Intrinsic motivation, play, passion, and purpose: Whether - and to what extent - parents, teachers, mentors, and employers encourage these qualities make an enormous difference in the lives of young innovators” (pg 26).

“A child has to get bored before he can figure out how to get himself out of the boredom, and a lot of that happens out of door” (pg 36).

Empowerment: “students can go out and apply what they’ve learned to the problems that they’ve never seen before with the parts that they’ve never used before” (pg 50).

“The most important aspect of being in an innovative environment is not being afraid to fail” (pg 67).

“So often in school, the what-if question is eliminated, but that’s the source of true creativity and innovation” (pg 97).

“Our education system does not encourage risk-taking and penalizes failure, and too many parents and teachers believe that a “safe” and lucrative career in business or law or medicine is what young people should strive for - rather than something to do with ‘changing the world’” (pg 113).

“Without a reason - without passion and purpose - many disadvantaged young people simply can’t tolerate the tedium of school. Passion and purpose are what give them hope, a clear focus, and a reason to acquire the skills and the knowledge they will need to succeed” (pg 128).

“What you know is far less important that what you can do with what you know. The interest in and ability to create new knowledge to solve new problems is the single most important skill that all students must master today. All successful innovators have mastered the ability to learn on their own ‘in the moment’ and then apply that knowledge in new ways” (pg 142).

Traditional classrooms are all about instructor control. You tell students what’s important to learn and why and then you evaluate them. I’ve come to realize a lot of responsibility and choices can and should be turned over to the learner” (pg 163).

For more one . . .

Education : Reading Log : Creativity

How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough

“GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact they they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropout” (pg xviii).

“Those traits - an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan - also turned out to be valuable in college, in the workplace, and in life generally . . . GED holders are wise guys who lack the ability to think ahead, persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments” (pg xix).

“You can’t expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what’s happening in the community” (pg 5).

“The key channel through which early adversity causes damage to developing bodies and brains is stress (pg 12).

Quantifying Character:

1. Grit

2. self-control

3. zest

4. social intelligence

5. gratitude

6. optimism

7. curiosity

“The best way for a young person to build character is for him to attempt something where there is a real and serious possibility of failure . . . and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything” (pg 85, 86).

“Habit and character are essentially the same thing . . . It’s not like some kids are good and some kids are bad. Some kids have good habits and some kids have bad habits. Kids understand it when you put it that way, because they know habits might be hard to change, but they’re not impossible to change. William James says our nervous systems are like a sheet of paper. You fold it over and over and over again, and pretty soon it has a crease . . . When your students leave, you want to make sure they have the kind of creases that will lead them to success later on” (pg 94).

“Two of the most important executive functions are cognitive flexibility and cognitive self-control. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to see alternative solutions to problems, to think outside the box, to negotiate unfamiliar situations. Cognitive self-control is the ability to inhibit an instinctive or habitual response and substitute a more effective, less obvious one” (pg 114).

“Non-cognitive skills like resilience and resourcefulness and grit are highly predictive of success in college” (pg 168).