I hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend!
I spent a lot of time with my family in various ways – a campfire, a birthday dinners, a cookout and more. Last week I helped my mom complete her move to Cincinnati. This week, my mother-in-law’s [age redacted] birthday party was the first chance our family had to get together inside without a mask since quarantine.
My daughter noted later, “It felt surprisingly normal.”
That seemed like a pretty good assessment of the night, and our transition back into whatever comes after pandemic.
This week I joined the Literati virtual book club for creative people, entitled “Read Like an Artist.” I’ve been bouncing between books on leadership, religion, biography, and popular literature the past few years. Having a focused reading topic was enticing, and I’m looking forward to the arrival of the first book “How To Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. In anticipation, I went to her website JennyOdell.com. There I found many interesting things, including this collection of her writings and an introduction to the Bureau of Suspended Objects – a museum dedicated to remembering things that their owners decided were no longer worth owning.
One of the items I came across was research she did for the Museum of Capitalism. (Remember capitalism?) This PDF version explores the provenance of the “free watch” featured in so many ads across the web and in newspapers and magazines around the world. Where did it come from? How much did it cost to make? Is it free? Is there a company behind this watch or not? These and more questions were answered here.
It was a fascinating dive!
This week I finished up an article I started a year ago. Last year, before my regular client base increased, I was working other jobs to supplement my income. One of them was for a large national bank that contracted to handle certain transactions for clients. The work was both fascinating and mundane. It involved processing large amounts of money and needing the most detailed background checks I’ve ever had, but many days it was drudgery, with employees repeating the same actions hundreds of times, or entering data for six or seven hours at a stretch.
Though I’d never worked a job like this before, something about it seemed familiar. One day when the supervisor shouted at the group to stop talking because people were trying to concentrate, it hit me. As a principal, and before that as a teacher, and before that as a student, I had seen teachers do essentially this same thing. They would often interrupt the whole class in order to address the talking of a handful of students, or sometimes even one student.
I realized I was working in a factory. And all too often our classrooms prepared us for this work. Interestingly, as a teacher, while I worked in a classroom, my environment was very different from my students’.
I hope you will read some of the similarities I found between working in a factory and the typical US classroom. And I hope you will consider supporting some of the changes we need to make as a society to change our schools for the better.
As a teacher and later as a principal, I worked to reduce the similarities between a factory and a classroom. I even co-wrote a book to help teachers find ways to respond to students as human beings rather than employees or, worse, products.
If you found this week’s newsletter or my article interesting, I hope you will recommend it to a friend or family member.
And if you know someone who needs something written or edited, I hope you’ll direct them to my website.