Fear Is For Those That Don't Take Action

Final Paintings

Final Paintings

Leaving on Winter Break

For you, anything is possible.

After three intense weeks of producing The Power Within reading series, encouraging you to complete your final products and listening to your Socratic Dialogue of Learning (SDOL), I entered winter break wondering how to best support you next semester.

During SDOL, there were many great conversations around motivation, time-management, laziness, confidence and fear. I have my own perspective on each of these for two reasons: one, my personal experience with each of these topics in my own 38 years of life (yes, I was once 17 years old too); two, my observations of High Tech High students over the last five years (you are all unique but there are some obvious developmental characteristics of adolescents). So before I share why I strongly believe this final product, an acrylic painting, is perfect for this project, I want to share two observations I made during SDOL.

One SDOL group talked around a group member who felt most proud of herself for managing her time much better than in previous years. I was struck that for over 15 minutes everyone around her talked about how they struggled with time management but nobody listened to what she had just shared about her significant accomplishment. No one was being disrespectful, students were just not listening. I’ve observed that this happens often. You talk about struggling or feeling challenged but don’t ask for help. Asking for help can be direct, or indirect - like observing how others work through your challenge and then applying it to your life. In order for students to listen it took Max to ask the student to share exactly what did she did differently this semester to manage her time.

Another group was stumped by my interjection, “I don’t believe in laziness, so why do people choose not to do their work?” A circular conversation about motivation and laziness arose. Again no one really listened to a student when he said something along the lines of - I do anything but what I’m supposed to do because I’m afraid of failing and letting those around me down.

First semester of junior year, I hope students create habits of completing assignments to the best of their ability. I pry into your lives to find out why assignments were incomplete. I listen to all you do outside of school to support your and your families’ goals. I assess these factors to build a culture of “doing” and “creating” in our classroom.

So, yes I chose the final product for The Power Within to be an acrylic painting because I know how to do this well and can offer a level of expertise. But I also chose this final product because unless you have created something, anything, of your own imagination you don’t understand what goes into “doing” or taking action. Taking action is about facing your fears. It’s hard to understand the process of developing an idea and going through all the actions to complete high-quality work that shows complexity, craftsmanship and authenticity, unless you do it. It’s the fundamental premise of learning by doing. But it’s easy to feel like you’re failing or letting others down when you are afraid. Taking action is the opposite of fear.

When you admire and stand in awe of something created by a human you often ask yourself, “How did they do that?” I would hate that your next statement would be, “Well, I could never do something like that.” My hope is that after creating a painting of your own design, your perspective is such that you say, “I’m sure that if I understand the process I can do this, because for me anything is possible.”