Tag: west wing

I Am Sam

I know a whole bunch of stuff, until I don’t. As the title of this space implies, I love learning as much about as many subjects as possible. Smart is good. And still, I find myself in rooms and conversations where I am outpaced by those who showed up to the party long before I did and are much better versed in the ideas and thinking around a certain subject. While I still unintentionally find myself faking a fund of knowledge I’m totally lacking, I’ve gotten better over the years at remaining quiet, reading the room, and asking good questions.

I try to see the whole board. For many reasons – some intentional and some out of my control – I’ve been able to work for people who are not only amazingly good at the work they do, but willing to take the time to help me understand how to see what we are building together in a larger context. From building schools, to serving an entire district, to writing policy for a nation, I’ve had the chance to work with leaders who pause to ask if we are seeing the whole board and have taken the time to help me see it when I’ve needed help focusing.

I sign my name. More importantly, I work as hard as I can to make sure my name is attached to messages taking up for those who don’t have the same privilege I experience on a daily basis and working to make sure that privilege isn’t unique to people who look or grew up like me.

I have unexpected friends. While I interact regularly with a fair number of people with whom I see eye to eye, my days are just as likely to be populated by conversations with people I think are wholly wrong and whom I call friends. While I’m sure I’d be happy if they one day conceded that our conversations had changed their mind on a topic of contention, I also value the argument. Connecting and conversing with people with whom I disagree helps me to remember why I might have started holding a belief in the first place while gaining an understanding of why other people might think or believe differently.

I made a promise to a widow. I’ve never loved a job as much as I loved teaching. Each year brought a new group of individuals into my care, and each day brought a new set of unexpected experiences. I was entrusted with the sustaining the greatest of public goods. I had the good fortune to teach with and at some of the best teachers and schools, respectively. And my informal education on educating was at least as important and informative as my formal one. Then, after agreeing with so many of my colleagues for so long about frustrations with the absence of teacher voice in so many decisions directly impacting our classrooms and students, I left to join that other fray. While I love what I’ve gotten to do since leaving the classroom and the experiences it has afforded me, nothing has been or will ever be as amazing as what I got to do in the classroom.

Things I Know 179 of 365: Not all systems need disrupting

We’re flying in a Lockheed Eagle Series L-1011. Came off the line twenty months ago. Carries a Sim-5 transponder tracking system. And you’re telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?

– Richard Schiff as Toby Zigler in The West Wing

I think the man across the aisle from me wants our plane to crash. Just before takeoff, when the flight attendants were announcing the need to power down all electronic devices, I saw him select a playlist on his iPhone and slip the phone into his pocket.

A few hours into our flight and he’s still sitting across from me, still listening to his music…and we’re still in the air.

My phone is off, in my pocket.

It will stay there because I have been told that is where it should be.

Thirty minutes later, we’re still in the air, and guy-across-from-me is still listening to music on his phone.

It strikes me as counter to my nature that I don’t follow the evidence and have my phone out during the takeoff and touchdown.

I admit it seems highly unlikely that my phone, my Kindle or my iPod would take down this 757. If that were the case, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to have them on the plane in the first place.

But I don’t know.

And that’s the key.

I don’t understand the system. Aviation, engineering, electronics – all these are outside the areas of my expertise.

In this system, I have an amazing amount at stake. I am thoroughly invested and committed to its success.

Entire sub-systems and interactions are beyond my understanding. Thus, I keep my mouth shut. If I decided to study aeronautics, become familiar with everything involved in the process of moving a plane from one side of the country to another, then would I have a space to speak up.

When my life and the lives of others are on the line, it’s probably best not to disrupt a system I do not understand.

Things I Know 75 of 365: Today I ran nowhere in particular – for an hour

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

– John Hope Franklin

Today, for my run, I put 60 minutes on the clock and ran wherever for an hour. I did the same thing yesterday.

Pace and distance didn’t matter; I was worried about the run. Both days, I ran routes I’d hesitate to call straightforward. Yesterday’s, in particular, included more staircases than I’d ever knowingly include in a route were I planning for distance.

Yesterday, though, I came to some staircases and understood they would be part of the run.

I wasn’t trying to solve the problem of how far or how fast. I knew I would be running and let that happen.

This is the same reason I like Star Trek. No matter what problems they faced episodically, the missions of the crew from any iteration of the Enterprise was to boldly go where no one had gone before.

I wasn’t exactly hitting warp 9 on my runs, but I felt kindred.

This is the same reason I asked the instructor of my newest grad school module if I could forgo coming up with a problem statement for my course project and focus on trying new stuff. My instructor told me to message him separately after explaining we needed measurable goal lest my work appear to be innovation for innovation’s sake.

It was all I could do in that moment not to reply, “I’m a fan of that.” Instead, I told him I was worried about getting lost in a deficit ideology about education. I wanted to try something new.

When I was younger, I called it play.

I didn’t sit with my toys in front of me and think, “Now, what’s the problem I’m trying to solve here?”

Sure, kid life must have been full of its fair share of dilemmas, but I didn’t play for the purpose of solving them. I played to play.

I’ve no doubt I was able to solve many of those problems because of play – because of the time away from my problems that playing involved and because playing in a non-problematized world let me develop skills without worrying about transference or application.

In one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing, Rob Lowe’s character Sam Seaborn is explaining to Chief of Staff’s daughter why it was important for the government to send a probe to Mars.

“Why?” she asks.

His answer is why I decided to run nowhere in particular and what I’d like to guide my course work:

‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.

I want to solve the problems in my classroom. I want to improve my teaching. I also want to remain passionate about ideas and where they can lead. I want always and forever to have the freedom to ask, “What’s next?”