The Carrot

Are We There Yet?

Wow. Just returned from an eye-popping, heart-opening, brain-enhancing, soul-piercing, possibility-propelling experience at Landmark Forum in Chicago. Someone I met at the Forum told me that a Chicago newspaper recently asked readers to share their most extraordinary real or imagined life experiences. A trip to the moon was #1. Landmark Forum was second.

I can see why. Their tagline is "Live a Life You Love" and they mean business. Barry, our leader for the weekend, never let any of us off the hook when we tried to make up excuses, reasons, stories, etc. to dodge our own personal responsibility to live a life we love. Not only was he a tough coach, he also showed up with just the right measure of George Carlin and a loveable 10th-grade math teacher who could make the most complex quadratic equation crystal clear with just a sentence or two.

In a recent Fast Company piece called The Frankenleader Fad to expose the inauthenticities of so many folks we dub "leaders," Marcus Buckingham writes that "the core characteristics of leadership are self-assurance and authenticity. The best way to achieve those qualities ... isn't by developing what you lack, but by amplifying the areas where you are most true to your best self."

And the way to be true to yourself according to Landmark? Confront your inauthenticities every chance you get and invent new possibilities from there.

By the end of my session, what became clear for me, was that as far as I believe I've come in my own life, in so many other ways, I haven't started the damn engine yet.

Driving back from Chicago to St. Paul, I saw these words appear on an empty page in my journal next to me:

Confined to our steel-belted, hemi-heavin’,
window-tinted, air-conditioned,
leather-appointed, GPS-positive,
Meaning-making machines,
We press on the gas,
Pull out to pass,
With the nerve to ask:
“Are we there yet?”

Are you kidding,
We haven’t even left yet.

And in that second,
We are free to embrace the velocity of now
With each turn of the tire at 80 miles an hour.

Tip if you go: Bring a well-padded seat cushion. Because probably like a trip to the moon, the ride gets bumpy in spots!

Tags: Landmark Leadership Management

Back to School in the Eye of the Storm

If you're an educator, you know exactly what you're working for right now.

In the aftermath of Katrina, a recent NY Times article describes what experts said could become "the largest student resettlement in the nation's history," the "twin challenges" of being there for displaced students while upholding the standards of No Child Left Behind and an unfolding K-12 situation "unprecedented in American education."

To help now, go to the Department of Education's special website, What Schools Need, created to drive private donations straight to the schools that need them the most.

Crazy times for educators already burdened with issues such as too much adminstrivia, challenging classroom management issues, standardized testing, not enough teaching time in the day, maintaining energy and perspective in the classroom, society's minimalist view of the teaching profession, and flat out not enough money to get the job done – school budget or take-home pay. Teacher morale is strained, to say the least. But it's often in such weird and worrisome times that one's calling is crystallized.

Of course Katrina has intensified these issues beyond belief for school districts directly impacted by this natural disaster. But when we take ChartHouse Learning's FISH! For Schools into so many and such different districts such as Brooklyn NY, Sumner WA, North Little Rock AR, New London OH, Hampton VA, Mission SD and Los Angeles CA, we hear teachers and students alike struggling with the same stormy issues:

"Mandates and standards are eating up real teaching time."

"I'm afraid of becoming an old lazy-fart teacher just doing the bare minimum."

"I want to have cool, interesting and meaningful relationships with all my students."

It's like our entire K-12 education system is caught in the eye of its own terrible hurricane.

Given that this is the most incredible start of the school year for so many, this quote by Nel Noddings reverberates with more power than ever:

"We should want more from our educational efforts than adequate academic achievement, and we will not achieve even that meager success unless our children believe that they themselves are cared for and learn to care for others."

Describing thousands of displaced students pouring into Texas schools, president of the Texas Counseling Association, Sadie Woodward, said, "These kiddos are going to need support for a very long time."

True enough. But let's also support the educators (bus drivers, cooks, custodians and other staff, too!) who are supporting the kids. Going way beyond the call of duty in times like these is probably the real reason so many of them got into teaching in the first place.

tags: teaching education curriculum