Last week I read Matthew B. Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. I had been tipped off that the book was a good one by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, and I indeed found it to be an enjoyable and applicable read.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that Crawford is only rewriting Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values in order to place it in the non-fiction section. Although Crawford does at one point refer directly to a passage from the philosophy-by-way-of-open-road classic and other philosophical references are shared, he also clearly rides in his own unique style as he lays out insights gathered and developed through wide ranging experiences beginning as a commune-living teenage electrician, on to a PhD and serving as the director of a prominent think-tank, to now running his own motorcycle repair shop (and note that I didn’t say just owning it; he actually fixes the motorcycles himself), and a number of other stops in between.
Now I can’t fix a car or anything around my apartment to safe my life, and the idea of riding a motorcycle terrifies me, but to say that Crawford’s writings pertained only to particular trades and tasks would be selling him and his book short. Themes of design, intentionality, education, head-heart-hand connections, environment, creativity, innovation, and more are all powerfully present.
In the book, Crawford consistently revisits the concept of “Thinking as Doing,” and in the chapter of the same title he writes,
“If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on your doing stuff in it.”
How true that is in the education field. So often we are paralyzed by the stacks of issues we face; the complexity of the challenges before us. I can remember so many moments when I would look out over a classroom full of students and think, “I’m not sure I can even teach 1, let alone 31!”
One thing that people who achieve high levels of excellence learn (you know, the people who look at that same group of 31 students that I just mentioned and think to themselves, “I got this.”)…whether they are teachers, administrators, students, parents, coaches, graphic designers, chemists, or CEO’s…is that in order to find out what works, in order to truly achieve and succeed, you’ve got to try stuff!
In classrooms and other environments as well, this is an often one of the most frantic and haphazard times of year. With grading periods ending, a big break coming, holiday programs and events, and dropping temperatures, we can find ourselves with odd chunks of time…. Not really enough time to do anything in too much depth, too much time to do nothing at all (come on teachers, I know from experience you can only stretch that video you’re planning on showing the last day…or last few days…out for so long!), and a whole bunch of nervous energy.
This is the perfect opportunity to try stuff!
If you’ve been thinking that creating a rap would be a fun way to help your students remember what you’ve been studying in Math, try it out! Mr. McGowan at Amityville Memorial HS in New York did!
Been wanting to try your hand at starting a student-driven blog? Check out what Mrs. Yollis’ third graders are doing in California!
Maybe you’ve been wanting to try out a Power2Achieve Foundations lesson, but just haven’t found the time to do so. There’s no better time than now to give it a shot!
It’s the same outside of the classroom as well. Here at IEE, even amidst the crush of deadlines, trainings, and travel, we’re setting aside blocks of time to develop and discuss prototypes in order to set course for what 2011 will bring. Books, regional conferences, video projects…All of them? Some? None? We’ll never know until we try.
So challenge yourself to put some of the thinking you’ve been doing this year into action over the next three weeks by trying something new. Sometimes the things you try will work beautifully, sometimes they’ll go terribly, and most often they’ll be somewhere in between.
Without doing, you’ll never be able to rethink, Rework, and develop real strategies & solutions for the challenges you face. And if things don’t go quite the way you wished they would have on your first try, remember that the truly great ones know that failure can fuel the fire that lights the path to progress and achievement.
(And if along the way you’re looking for a great read, check out Shop Class As Soul Craft. Really good stuff.)
