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What teachers know

March 11, 2010

Today’s grad­u­ates face a new breed of chal­lenges as they enter the work­force. They will con­front messier, intractable prob­lems such as cli­mate change, global ter­ror­ism, antibi­otic resis­tant dis­eases and per­sis­tent mar­ket weak­ness. The same tech­nolo­gies that empow­ered them as learn­ers at the same time also mul­ti­plied the poten­tial for global havoc.

And this has changed the def­i­n­i­tion of an appro­pri­ate education.

Teach­ers know this

Teach­ers appre­ci­ate that han­dling the new, intractable prob­lems requires a new skill set. They require empathiz­ing, imag­i­na­tive cit­i­zens –in touch with their own cre­ative impulses, con­fi­dent indi­vid­u­als who can imag­ine totally new solu­tions. Teach­ers want to facil­i­tate their stu­dents’ growth as artists. But teach­ers know some­thing else as well.

Tomorrow’s man­agers must also be lit­er­ate and numer­ate. As well as being cre­ative lead­ers, reach­ing out and find­ing fresh answers to the prob­lems of the future, they need to know every­thing we grad­u­ated know­ing. And they need to be firmer in their foun­da­tions than we were. The stakes are higher for them and the com­pe­ti­tion for jobs is more fierce.

Inside most class­rooms today you find teach­ers tak­ing an iter­a­tive approach, bal­anc­ing the advan­tages of con­stancy and rou­tine with their neces­sity for exper­i­men­ta­tion and adap­ta­tion. You find teach­ers who are doing the best they can with the resources they have. The demands on teach­ers have never been greater. And they know it.

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Would you rather get paid to do nothing?

Or would you pre­fer to have an impor­tant, chal­leng­ing job?

Tim­o­thy Fer­ris (in The 4 Hour Work Week) basi­cally advo­cates the no-work option. What could be bet­ter than doing noth­ing all day and still get­ting paid? Per­son­ally I wouldn’t refuse being paid to laze around the pool of the lux­iou­ri­ous Can­dado Plaza Hotel (which is how and where I read the 4HWW). I know if I found myself retired I would want to go to a place like that and at least take 6 months to gatehr my thoughts.

However, retired peo­ple, those who actu­ally have the option of laz­ing around as much as they want to, say they’d rather be work­ing. (Well, 78% of New Zealand retirees say that any­way.) They say they would pre­fer to work, as long as they job allowed them to work with more flexibly.

I find this just a lit­tle bit sur­pris­ing. I can under­stand want­ing to make your­self use­ful, but why not take on a non-job or two instead? I’m look­ing for­ward to retire­ment as a time to build com­mu­nityindulge my cre­ativ­ity and maybe catch up on my life list. Not to go back to work.

Gretchen Rubin over at the Hap­pi­ness Project got some insight on this from Amer­i­can Jus­tice San­dra Day O’Connor. O’Connor says that the secret of hap­pi­ness is sim­ply this: Work extremely hard at some­thing worth doing. That’s it. It’s not rela­tion­ships. It’s not peace of mind. Do good work and the good life will fol­low. I’m not sure I agree entirely. State­ments like that remind me of the episode of Cheers where one of them sagely explains what life is all about, “the mean­ing of life my friends: com­fort­able shoes.” Comfortable shoes are good, but maybe there is just a lit­tle more to life.

But I still can’t com­pletely fig­ure out why New Zealand retirees don’t want to stay retired. A recent 60 Min­utes news show dis­cussed the fact that Mil­len­ni­als (Gen­er­a­tion Y) make excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult employ­ees. They are a new breed, say the com­men­ta­tors. They refuse to work if they don’t under­stand the pur­pose of the work. They won’t do busy work, even when work­ing for min­i­mum wage. They need to be nego­ti­ated with. The show, clearly appeal­ing more to the over-40 crowd, pre­sented this as entirely unrea­son­able. Where do these young peo­ple get the nerve to try to work on their own terms?!

No one wants to waste their lives doing mean­ing­less work.

It seems that the answer is not about work­ing hard or not; it’s the rea­son for the work that matters.

Maybe it’s not actu­ally free­dom that we long for at the sum­mit of our careers. For most of us it’s not really about money either. The real chal­lenge is about find­ing work that we feel is mean­ing­ful, so we don’t waste our time  –in retire­ment, and even before we retire.

So the ques­tion becomes: how can we find or cre­ate some mean­ing­ful work?

A good place to start is to try to lead a tribe, try to gather around you peo­ple who have sim­i­lar inter­ests and work with them toward some­thing worth­while. Or, if you’re more of a lone wolf, get stuck into your own cre­ative prac­tice. We should all make sure that, by the time we reach retire­ment, we are seri­ously involved in work we find exhil­a­rat­ing and important.

(Image care of Rebel Shoots).

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The Rebirth of Craft

May 12, 2009

chocolate1

The Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion smoth­ered the trades. Qual­ity it seemed could never com­pete with the effi­ciency and rea­son­able prices of the assem­bly line. Bad news for artists, bad news for entre­pre­neurs and eventually/inevitably it would be bad news for con­sumers as well.

Sur­pris­ingly, even in the lows of this heavy reces­sion, sal­va­tion of these sim­ple ways has found an unlikely (if by now a pre­dictable) cham­pion: the internet.

The web has dra­mat­i­cally low­ered busi­ness entry-barriers, to the point that you can cre­ate a rea­son­able hobby busi­ness in 20 min­utes a week. Sites like Etsy and Dawanda (com­par­i­son info here) take care of the busi­ness side. You need only worry about the craft and then the mar­ket­ing. My friend Kathryn has set up a sweet lit­tle greet­ing cards busi­ness while she works full-time as a nurse and as she pre­pares for a new baby!

Qual­ity and artistry are fight­ing back.

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