Every educational organization falls in love with developing standards for processes or products at one time or another. We fuss over learning outcomes (like mental products) that can be documented and measured across classes, instructors, programs, and institutions. Standardization is a reductionist approach to the craft of education at the core. The push always comes with the best of intentions; the good intentions tends to block out examination of the costs of standardized learning. The comm...

reposted from the day after Election Day, 2016 As a country we have elected a tax cheat and business fraud, a classic con artist, to be our president. He’s inexperienced, ill-informed, and not a nice person. It’s not likely to go well. But he is our next President. Two things I need you to know. First, you do not have to be like him to be happy and do well in this world. It would be better if our political leaders were people we wish we could aspire to be, but this will not be one of those tim...

Growing up in southern California means spending a lot of time being driven around. It means sitting at four-way stops a lot, hanging for the opportunity to make a right turn. Every so often, while sitting for an eternity at a stop as a flood of cars moved past, my dad would say, “Here comes everybody and their brother!” The absurdity of this comment! Doesn’t ‘everybody’ include the brothers? Why are brothers singled out? I was waiting to make a turn the other day and I said, “here comes everybo...

"You can't stop progress!" -- Muriel's Wedding, 1994 Passing other people feels like progress. There's so little certainty about what our meaningful advances truly are--at work, at school, with family--that it's easier to judge ourselves using relative speed. Who has accomplished what, and by when? Am I behind, or lapping my peers? But relative speed is an illusion. The arc of our lives is unpredictable, making the meaning in our lives unknowable until time has lapped us. Live for now; leave ...

Father of two, master of neither If we are privileged enough to see it happen, fathers become moot, with a new task to gracefully accepting it. Beyond letting go, it is abandoning control; accepting that the children seem to have figured out themselves just fine. Children subsume us. They overcome us en route to becoming more than us. ...

The quantity of the elevators in big city hotels is both impressive and an obstacle to navigate. Will I find several pods of elevators spread around the lobby or lobbies? Do the banks of elevators on each wall go to the same set of floors, since some won’t? Which elevators require a room key to open? Which elevators will let you on but take you only to some of the floors? At a conference in a hotel in downtown Chicago, the attendees used the east and west banks of elevator doors in the largest ...

When I started college teaching, overhead projectors were the popular way to show slides. Email was around but course management systems like Blackboard hadn’t come into place yet. I used to ask students to assign themselves a code name and I would post their grades by printing out my Excel spreadsheet, sorted by code name, and taping it to my adjunct office door. I had folders and folders and folders of overhead transparencies. (“Overhead transparencies” are plastic, clear sheets made speciall...