Tag Archives: change

Just Say Yes!

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What happens when you just say yes?

I have no idea.  That’s the fun part.  Try it and see.

I’d like to rent bikes and ride from our place to the Pacific Ocean.

Okay. Let’s do it.

Four hours later, we’d researched a nearby bike rental shop, bike-hut-foundationrented two bikes, ridden them from the East to the West side of San Francisco, stopped at the De Young Museum for food on the way back, and make it back to the bike rental shop before it closed.

Offer accepted. Fun had. Risk was low.

 

Want to move to SF, leave your old life behind, and start a business?

Whoa!  Uh . . . sure . . . well . . . uh . . . I’m terrified.

One year later, we found an apartment in downtown SF, gained enough traction to open a company office, built an incredible company team, and gained amazing partners in the education space.

Offer accepted. Risk muscle growing. Risk high.

risk

Lots of offers that sit between the two poles of low and high risk . . . working hard to keep accepting ‘em.

Change

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Our speakers this morning talked a lot about change.  I liked this quote from our program director, Stephen Sacca: “To effect change, you must be willing to change.”  I looked around me at my fellow classmates and soon-to-be cohort members and thought about the courage we all have to be uprooting our lives for 13 months, starting this June.  At my table alone this morning, I sat next to business people and engineers from Brazil, Saudi Arabia, China, and Michigan (a former White House Fellow).  It was a humbling experience.

Tools for (Re)construction

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I’ve been following the exchange between Will Richardson and those who’ve commented on his recent blog post, A Parent 2.0′s Back to School Dilemma.  Will’s astute assessment of the current state of schools and schooling has fired up many of his readers and rightly so.

As a parent or guardian, what do you do when your expectations for schooling are at odds with the reality of the experience for your child?

My initial reaction, and it may be naive, is to take advantage of social networking tools to drive the changes we seek.  If public schools are everyone’s schools, then why not refashion them using the tools we value?  The world of politics, of business, of marketing, and of fundraising and development are taking full advantage of the power of these tools.  Why shouldn’t educators, families, parents and guardians be doing the same?

Why can’t we pool our local, regional, national, and global learning resources to transform schooling?  At the least, what about organizing a day or week of “We’re Keeping our Kids Home Today” to communicate our commitment to the changes we seek?  At the most, why not use these tools to create the collective learning spaces (virtual and real) that we want for our young people?

We want our schools to change.  We are our schools.  We fund them, and we populate them.  We must enact the changes we seek.

Freire and Illich say it much better than I ever could . . .