Myth of the Moonshot

There are milestone events that change the fabric of our world. Moments in time that grab our collective essence and refocus us on the great possibilities of who we are and who we can be. Some of these milestones are positive, generations of people can remember where they were on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon or November 11, 1982 when the Space Shuttle Columbia took off for the stars. We remember tragic milestones, the death of Kennedy, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the fall of the World Trade Center. We also remember when we heard about events that both positively and negatively changed our world, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As outsiders, because we experienced these events as a moment in time, we assume that the greatness that occurred came into being as instantaneously and effortlessly as the moment itself. Unfortunately, life's greatest achievements don't occur because of short bursts of high energy work but rather long journeys of incremental improvement.

On May 25th, 1961, three and a half years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, President John F. Kennedy set forth the goal for the United States to put a man on the moon. The speech, given before a joint-session of congress, was intended to provide both broad goals for the country and give details on how to strengthen an economy recovering from recession. Fifty years later, the same needs and goals apply to our society. We imagine, due to the length of history and personal experience, that only a couple of years later, an astronaut landed on the moon. Unfortunately, that's not true. It was eight years and 6 Apollo missions later. It came at great cost, the initial projected costs in 1961 7 billion dollars. The actual cost of the Apollo program in 1973 was 25.4 billion dollars ($170 billion in 2005 dollars). The Manhattan Project, began in 1939 and employed 130,000 people over the course of its journey. Six years later the work produced 2 nuclear bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. The project cost nearly 2 billion dollars ($26 billion in 2013 dollars). Each program that aimed to take great leaps forward was neither inexpensive nor instantaneous.

In our lives, we constantly look for "moonshots" opportunities to make gigantic leaps forward, rushing through the work and the challenge and reaching some great target on the horizon. This happens to us as individuals whether it is hoping to drop great amounts of weight, win the lottery, make dramatic improvements our job, or fantastic gains in an athletic event. It also happens to us as a society with initiatives such as No Child Left Behind, Race for the Top, and the War on Poverty.  What we learn from these "moonshot" experiences more often than not is that there is no gigantic leap, improvement is gradual and incremental in nature. Effective change occurs in an evolutionary not revolutionary manner. It is important to dream big but in order to make the dreams become reality, the journey is one of inch by inch improvement.

When we take on our daily journeys and work to improve as people, as parents, as teachers, and as leaders, it is not by making giant leaps forward. Improvement occurs in manageable steps. When the goals are small, attainable, and incremental, we grow. With each step of growth, we move closer and over time those moonshots happen and we didn't even notice. When we see the step in front of us, we can move our feet. One step at a time, moment by moment, we change, we evolve, we become a little more perfect than before. If we show those steps to our children instead of the great leaps, they too will achieve.

The most amazing thing is that we live in one of the most revolutionary time periods. The Internet has taken down many of the barriers between countries and people. Computers more powerful than ones that once took up whole buildings of college campuses can now be found in our pocket. How many of us remember where we were when we first saw the World Wide Web, our first email, our first smartphone. Just like all moonshots, the evolution of these has been evolutionary also. As we think about what we want to be, what we want our children to be, lets remember how far we have come, inch by inch, in the few short years since the iPhone first appeared on the stage on January 29, 2007. It has come far and so have we.

Holding on to Our Heroes

Teachers and administrators join the education profession because they want to make a difference in the lives of children. In college these individuals are surrounded by future business leaders, stock traders, scientists, doctors, and lawyers. They choose a path that does not provide fiscal fortune but rather huge internal gain. Educators opt in because of the aha moment, that child's smile as they get it, the celebration of achievement, the light bulb moment of discovery. Teachers select this career for the personal gain of changing lives. Relationships that start in the moment and often last a life time.

In the first year, they discover what the job really is. It's more than setting up activities, running reading groups, and comforting the crying child. In that initial go around they learn that preparation time isn't the 3-5 hours a week embedded in their schedule but the 3 hours a night in addition prepping materials, grading assessments, emailing parents, it's the Saturday or Sunday afternoon making copies, rewriting materials, stapling projects together. In that first year our teachers discover the challenges of classroom management, the office politics of any working environment, and they discovery the world of educational acronyms. Teachers learn about: IDEA, IEP, 504, PLOP, ISAT, IRT, MDC, NCLB, RTTT, NAEP, PISA, and many other points of jargon. Their world spins and they remark, "I just want to help kids learn." 

The McKinsey Study in 2010 noted that 14% of teachers leave the profession after their first year. Nearly half (46%) leave after five years. It notes challenges that face the profession from a macroscopic profession including relative wage level decrease compared to other valued professions, lack of high achieving professionals entering the profession, and lack of governmental prestige placed on those entering the field. Other studies focus, on teacher burnout, testing pressures, and working conditions. In the several years since these studies have come out, as a profession, we have increased rather than decreased these pressures. Since 2010, schools have brought through another round of "more rigorous" standards and testing with CCSS, NGSS, PARCC, and SmarterBalance. We have gone through a period surfing the ripples of the 2008 recession with reductions of wage increases, reductions of staff, balance tightening, and reductions of retirement benefits. We have doubled down on data and assessment by focusing on both growth and achievement. At schools throughout the nation we are staring carefully at the precipice whether we break our profession or find a way to save it.

Leadership matters more than ever; administrative leadership, teacher leadership, and legislative leadership. In this world in which everyone worries about increasing standards and increasing rigor, leadership needs to build bridges between the past and the future. For generations our teachers and students have done great things. When assessment factors in SES (socio-economic status),  schools in the United States outperform the best-fit line compared to schools across the world on PISA.* More interesting in looking at PISA was how few developed countries have more families in poverty than the United States. Reading through the Common Core State Standards can at times feel like you are reading the diagnostic manual for your computer's CPU. It is filled with technical words, carefully crafted language that is word-smithed to provide an exacting meaning by the authors but language that leaves parents and practitioners in the dust. Leadership needs to connect the best practices of our past with our growth towards the future. We need to identify those growth steps we have made in our classrooms and clarify the next step as not a moonshot but rather an evolutionary development. The phrase "Race to the Top (RTTT)" implies a need to react quickly. An anticipation that we are not there and if we do not expend great energy in a quick fashion it will pass us by. "Race to the Top" ignores that after any sprint the athlete is exhausted. They move fast, react swiftly, and then stagger afterwards. This is not the vision of teaching we should desire, but rather that of the tortoise beating the hare. The methodical journey down a path that leads to ongoing success. 

Teachers join this profession to become difference makers. They seek work environments in which they can improve the lives of children. As leaders, we need to look at each new initiative and identify how much of this is based in the best practices that we do, what in the initiative is absolutely necessary, what components fit within what we believe is morally right and viable for our students, and what time and resources will it take to implement it well. Governmental leaders may be in a race, but if we want teachers and educational professionals to be in it for the long run, we need to take the multitudes of acronyms and right size the pace for our staff, students, and community. Our teachers can only be heroes if we create the space for it. 

*Please note, I believe there are enormous challenges with international assessment and PISA, but it was nice to be able to cherry pick a statistic. 

Parenting in a 1:1 World

The 80's were a wonderful time. We were recovering oil crises of the 70's, elected an actor to be president, and embracing the brat pack.  Parenting was easy then too. Each night I would dutifully come home, hang my coat on a hanger, sit down at the table, quietly do my homework, set the table, have a quiet conversation with the family, kiss my mom good night and get ready for the next day. Come on now, my mom probably fell out of her chair reading that wishing that I would have just done one of those things. Parenting in the 80's was hard. Parents no longer could let their children play outside without being afraid that they would be kidnapped. AIDS was new to everyone and there was great fear of how it could be transmitted and who could get it. The great verbal battle between the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States continued, as the US went everywhere to halt the spread of communism. There were real fears of nuclear war. Households began to have multiple televisions, more cars than drivers, three-way calling and call waiting became things, and those portable music players boom boxes and walkmen showed up everywhere. Parenting wasn't easy then. It wasn't easy in the 60's, the 40's, or the 20's. Think about it, try being a parent in the time of Prohibition. Parenting is hard, that is why so many family comedies resonate with us.

Douglas Adams in his book, A Salmon of Doubt, states three rules of technology:

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

The more I read that, the more that I find it to be true. There was a time in my life in which I could learn every technology. That time has passed. Even the most tech-saavy of us need at times to seed to the next generation to learn the nuances of these new tools and toys. However, just because I don't know every aspect of the technology, I can learn enough to parent my children with it. Here are some simple guidelines that we use in our household to parent with technology. Interestingly enough, they are very similar to those our parents used before us as they dealt with the issues of their time:

1) There are limits to everything in life. So we set a timer.

As a child of the 80's I can remember my parents and my uncle complaining of how much my cousins and I watched the "idiot box." It wasn't that there was high quality programming on, after all it was an event when we went over and watched the first Wrestlemania at their house. However, we would just as easily watch that as Jeopardy, Anne of Green Gables, and Thundercats. Eventually my Aunt and my parents set time limits for all of us regarding watching television. They were the generation to allow televisions to go into the bedroom and if we messed up, they were the generation to walk in and angrily take that television right out of the bedroom. In fact, focal point of the American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on media, children, and screen time is focused on this phenomena of consumption media and has very little to do with children using computers and tablets in school. 

As we learned from our parents, we let our children know, that they have a set amount of time that they can use their tablets for entertainment purposes. We set timers. Frequently they comply. At times, we need to use the Find My Phone iPhone App to mark it as a lost phone and set a passcode on it. We have some great videos on the District 58 Parent Tech Support page to how to do this.

2) Device usage comes with supervision.

One of my great memories of the 80's was the movie Footloose. Great music, a young Kevin Bacon doing gymnastics as he rebelled against society. We learned that dancing could be evil. In the movie we see the townspeople have raided the library and are burning those items that are filling their children's heads with corruption. Media of all types have exposed the consumer to new ideas. Some healthy and some questionable. The obligation for both schools and parents has always been to teach our children how to handle ideas and content that we question. This is no different then when the Elvis and the Beatles influenced the world as it is now. The content is easier to access and we continue to need to help our children to learn to make good choices. The only way to do that is for us to be around when they encounter the media. Children should use their devices in a supervised family area. The same as they would with television. There is no need for children to sit in their room and play on their tablet, it is only for adult convenience do families allow it. At times, even with the best filters, children will hit inappropriate content, the same as they would trouncing through the library and flipping channels with the remote control, the trick is teaching children how to handle and move on when they find content that is inappropriate. This is what we need to teach as both adults and teachers.

3) The device is mine, you are simply borrowing it.

Before we drove the car for the first time, mom and dad explained the rules to the game. The Goldbergs did a terrific take on this in their episode, "Call Me When You Get There." If we didn't follow the rules, we were not allowed to drive. Well, sort of, we were not allowed to go drive where we wanted to go. We were still required to go to the store to pick up groceries we needed for dinner or drive to the pool to pick up our brothers from practice. We just weren't allowed to go driving where we wanted to go. The technique is the same today as it was then. Children are allowed to use their devices until its a problem. When it becomes a problem, they lose the privilege to use it for entertainment but still can use it for their classwork. When the work is complete, they put the device away. After a while, children earn back the privilege to use it for entertainment again.

4) Children don't have credit cards.

I remember when I got my first credit card. I was entering college. I had been lectured to several times regarding the dangers of credit cards before I was ever allowed to touch it. Even though credit cards usage is more widespread now, the same rules apply. Children and teens don't belong having credit cards. As such, please do not share your iTunes or Google Play account passwords with them. Make the child come to you to enter the password and approve the purchase. Furthermore, you paid for the app, you can decide if it is on or off the device. In the restrictions section of the device, set the password requirements to immediate when using the store functions. This will require children to have a parent enter the password to download or re-download apps. It seems like a pain, but truly can keep the balance of device control in the hand of the parent. Furthermore, I recommend turning off in-app purchases. Just like coins at the arcade, in-app purchases can create big costs really fast. There are a lot of good free and inexpensive apps, children don't need a daily roll of quarters at this arcade.

Parenting is hard. It always has been and always will be. It is the balance of loving our children and giving them a safe guided path through the world. While the tools and toys have changed, the core challenges have not. By setting similar boundaries that our parents did, we can guide our young padawans to grow up and become successful jedis.