Serenity

We do so much ranting and raving. I just want to jot down some happy thoughts.

the weather was absolutely beautiful this weekend. the leaves are starting to change. i love to feel them crunch under my feet as i run down the sidewalk. fall smells fill the air. pumpkins and mums on porches. i went to the folk festival this weekend. nice music, great dancing, good friends. i have a lot of good people in my life. yesterday i ran 22 miles. it felt great. i’m ready for the marathon on november 15th. i think maybe i can do it in 4 hours. my grandma thinks i’m crazy. “new tattoo, running a marathon; what’s next?” there are crazier things out there. the other day i found a chair in the alley before work. i brought it inside, washed the cushions. it’s perfect! my parents might come visit from connecticut in a few weeks. the cereal i like was on sale at the grocery store. i finished my midterm exam today, and it’s not due until wednesday. did i mention the weather was beautiful this weekend?

In reading Schein this week, I felt really connected to the text because it triggered so many examples in my mind. The first two chapters about culture and leadership really made me think about my own workplace. I can describe the culture there on so many levels. Schein posed the question of whether there is a culture within occupations, and I believe there is. People have told me many times that I am “such a teacher,” so there must be some broad culture of teachers in general. Then of course every school has its own culture, and within that there are many sub-cultures. I found myself thinking about the different grade levels in my school, and how each grade level team really has its own culture. There is a certain dynamic within each team, and an understanding among team members. One could even say that each team has its own “personality.”

I also thought about the culture within each classroom. All of the 4th grade students are learning the same curriculum, and each teacher is essentially covering the same materials, using similar rules, and following similar procedures. Yet each classroom really has its own culture. For certain subjects, the students switch classes and mix with different teachers. One teacher and I switch rooms for science and social studies. Our students remain in their seats, and she and I trade rooms, so I teach social studies to her kids while she teaches science to mine. It’s an efficient system, but it has its drawbacks. My greatest complaint about the system is having to face the different culture of her classroom. I really dislike working with her class. It’s not that they are “bad kids”, nor is she by any means a “bad teacher.” But her classroom has a certain feeling that I just don’t like. They do things differently there, and it’s not the way I like to do things.

Chapter 4, about the creation of culture within groups and organizations, made me think of a few things. Aside being total de ja vu from the groups and teams course, it also made me think about my new secondary job at the teambuilding facility. Groups show up for a program, often as strangers, and then they go through all the stages of forming a culture that Schein describes, and it happens all in one day. They have their initial assumptions, leaders emerge, they share experience, they are united by challenges, and they begin to feel that they don’t just know each other, but are actually a good group. The ropes course is a perfect example of the forming of groups and cultures. Perhaps Dr. Carter should explore that as a case study for the Groups and Teams class!

I don’t have a clear path to follow in this post, so I will allow my mind to wander wherever it wants.

I think Dixon’s points about developing managers are excellent. It wouldn’t do any good for my principal to go take a class on how a school should be run and then come back to work and try to implement everything he learned. Instead, he should sit down with the faculty within the school and discuss issues about how certain things are going and how we could best improve them. We would learn together about how to change the organization, and it would all result directly from real situations. We need to develop together as a faculty, and the principal should be able to admit that he is not the expert with all the answers. It should be up to all of us as a whole to identify the problems and work toward creating solutions together.

I like the Cook article. I’ll admit my brain is a bit fried and I began the article mostly by skimming. When I reached the part about the flutes, however, my mind began to focus a little more. For some reason I found that part interesting. I think it is a very clear, concrete example of organizational learning. Each person works on one aspect of making a flute. All parts together create a flute. You can’t have the whole without each part. It’s all very cut and dry, and I just like it. I’ve always been interested in how things are made. Even when I was little, I liked when Sesame Street or Mister Rogers showed little clips about things being made in a factory or a workshop. My favorite was when they showed the crayon factory. As an adult, I like the show ‘How It’s Made.’ It’s pretty much a more complex version of the same thing- just explaining how things are what they are. So the flute company interested me because I could picture a little workshop where everybody does a part to create a whole.

Could I possibly use that example for my case study assignment instead of Hubble or WHO? I’d like to pick that apart and relate it to Dixon’s descriptions of the parts of organizational learning. Otherwise I’m feeling a little confused about the assignment. Maybe it’s just the causal relationship occurring in my brain- two classes and a new grade level and a major change in my relationship are all happening at once. This leads to confusion, stress, and emotional roller coasters. These things combining leads me to a general sense of apathy or detachment toward certain tasks, like doing research and writing papers. This might make me seem like a slacker or a poor student, which hopefully some of you would agree is not really like me. But I’m being honest, and that’s how I’m feeling right now. Detached.

So somehow the concrete simplicity of making flutes eases my mind… because it just makes sense. Right now I need something that makes sense. I don’t want to worry about what lessons I’ll be teaching next and how the curriculum will fit the quarterly time-frame. I don’t want to dwell on what love is and how you know when you’ve found it and why love isn’t enough to make someone stay and how it will all work out in the future. I just want to sit there in that flute shop, where each move makes sense, each person knows their role, and everyone knows what the end result should be. We start with a piece of wood, apply some tools, and end with a flute. No metaphors. No abstractions. Just a flute. Simple.

In reading Dixon tonight, I had one of those sudden moments of “whoa, I just remembered something I had completely forgotten about!” I was reading Chapter 6, the description of the 4 Quadrants of the organizational learning cycle. Quadrant 4 is about measuring results to capture lessons learned. Dixon gives the example of the U.S. Army using After Action Reports, AARs, to reflect on what has taken place and what they learned from the experience. When I read that, I found myself thinking, “AAR- why does that sound so familiar?” and then- Ah-ha!- it all came back to me! So here’s the memory:

After I graduated from college in 2004, I spend 4 months living in Germany, where I completed my student teaching on a US Army base. I lived in a little Bavarian village, and I rode to the base every day for work. So essentially I lived in Germany and worked in America. The base where I worked was a major training area for the Army, so soldiers from bases all around would come in for training. I lived at a hotel in the village, and soldiers would always come and go, staying there for a few days while they trained and then going back to their native bases. Living alone in a foreign country, I was quite social. I would take my schoolwork to the little restaurants in the village and grade papers or write lesson plans while I ate dinner. Often I would make friends with soldiers who were visiting, and we would enjoy meals together for the few days they were in town. As a student teacher, I naturally put a lot of effort into my lesson plans, and actually filled in Hunter-model lesson plan templates that I had created for every lesson. (Wouldn’t I be an incredible teacher if I had the time to do that every day now!) So anyway, in one of my conversations with some visiting soldiers, they mentioned that they completed AARs after their training exercises so they could reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned. I really liked the idea, so I began incorporating AARs into my lesson plan model. After each lesson that I conducted in school, I would fill out my After-Action Report about what worked, what didn’t, and how the lesson could be improved. It was really effective!

That was a long story to make a simple point- strategies used in one organization can carry over into totally different organizations and still be very effective!

kent’s blog this week was a bit of a rant. now it’s my turn. i’m going to stray from the dixon discussion to express my feelings about technology right now.

so my new classroom is all set up. i have my old-fashioned overhead projector, which yes, i DO use often. but i don’t yet have my 5 MacBook laptops for the students to use. today i received an email from our computer contact person asking everyone to let them know if we’re missing anything in our classrooms. i replied, “yes, i don’t have my classroom computers. it’s like an old one-room school house in here!” …a one-room schoolhouse that happens to have a teacher laptop, dvd player, and a projector with a screen that plays dvds, cable tv, and anything on the internet through my computer… “and my printer doesn’t have a cord, so i can’t print anything from my room.” …..though i can connect wirelessly to any printer in the building, including the room right next door to mine…

somehow no matter how much we have, it’s never enough. the more technology we have, the more we need, no matter how pointless it is. my phone died the other day, so i stopped at the store and got a new one. it’s pink. that does not make any difference in the quality of my phonecalls. but it looks cute, and it was there. so why not? it also has a built-in MP3 player. i truly don’t see myself downloading music and listening to it on my phone. i just want a phone for making phonecalls. but a friend just tried to send me a photo via text message and the thing is driving me crazy because i can’t open it for some reason. ergh! oh, and this morning my alarm failed to go off so i woke up late. see, i had to use the alarm clock feature on my pink phone because my regular alarm clock radio doesn’t work. why? i don’t know. i moved to a new place, and it doesn’t work now.

i hadn’t finished reading the dixon chapter and doing my wiki and blog work, so i was going to do it all tonight when i got home from class. (try to get ahead in one thing, and fall behind in something else.) i have to read dixon online because the textbook hasn’t come in yet. it was a chilly evening, and i was in the mood to get cozy. so i put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt, got all cozy with pillows on the floor and my laptop on the coffee table. i would have put on some nice background music. my roommate and i decided to splurge and pay for a better cable plan just so we could get the music channels. oh, but they don’t work. so there i was all cozy anyway, ready to read. and guess what? i couldn’t connect to my wireless! no good reason, just can’t. thought maybe it was my computer, but no. the other laptop across the room wouldn’t work either.

so i change into slightly more presentable clothes and drive to the coffee house, where i am now having a hazlenut latte. all i wanted to do was get online so i could write on my blog about how much technology is driving me crazy. and the blog wanted me to reset my password. so i entered my email address and it said it would send it to me. so i opened my email and followed the link they gave me to reset my password. it asked for my email so they could mail me the new password. so i open the email and it gives me a link…. circles!!! i had to stop and take a deep breath and tell myself, “don’t hit the computer. don’t hit the computer…”

The last line of the smallpox article really got me- they completely eradicated smallpox from Earth. That’s just crazy. Imagine being part of the organization that worked so hard to develop these vaccinations, and in the end their work was so good that there is no more smallpox…at all….anywhere on Earth?! That’s really impressive.

I think my organization learns pretty actively. We are constantly sharing ideas with each other and developing new methods for doing things. Most of the organizations described in Dixon’s case studies use the idea of making employees responsible and giving them power to make decisions. In trying to relate that to my own work, I think we do that a good amount. There are definitely those things that we have to do a certain way according to the county system, but I feel that grade levels are pretty autonomous within my school itself.

I must say, this semester feels different than others. For the first time, I feel like I can really relate what I’m learning to what I do for a living. In the past few years, it seems like I’ve been in constant transition, and always feeling like I was somewhat out of place. I was teaching elementary school, but learning about adult learning and HRD, and the two fields were not connecting. I felt like I my job was sort of passing the time until I figure out what it is I really want to do with my life. But this semester I’ve come to be content with my current position and really embrace being a teacher. I’ve come to realize that my position is really important and meaningful, and I should be proud of what I do. In this course and my other one this semester, I can actually relate what I’m learning to what I’m doing, and it’s nice to find those connections. Everything feels more meaningful.

Wow, the first class was a bit overwhelming!  I consider myself  a very techno-savvy person, but my head was spinning after the introduction to blackboard and blogs and wikis- oh my!  What frustrated me the most was not being able to get the blog site to work when I tried it in class.  Normally in a situation like that, I am able to pick up on new concepts quickly, and I am generally pretty good at getting these things up and running.  But when I was struggling and feeling behind everyone, that was very disheartening.  I was also concerned because I had been having trouble with my internet at home.  I’ve just moved in to my new apartment, everything was in disarray because I was in the middle of painting, I go back to work on Monday after having the summer off, two classes are starting at once, our initial readings are all in the book that I have not been able to get yet, my roommate had friends coming to town for the weekend, and my boyfriend is about to move halfway across the country.  Thursday was just one of those nights when I felt the weight of it all coming down on me. 

Things work out though, if we take them one step at a time.  I got the blog to work.  I finished painting and put everything together around the house (and it looks awesome!).  Just one step at a time, and I’m breathing…

Welcome to my blog!