The Many Titles of Educators

It’s been a great week at SXSW 2023! I had a great session presenting, met Hank Green, had knowing what an “ekphrasis” is come in handy in conversation, saw a magic show and discovered parallels between magic and education, reconnected with someone who taught me over half a decade ago, solve puzzles with deaf participants in Japan over Zoom, and just generally speaking had an amazing time connecting and learning from and with other passionate educators.

Now this is going to sound a bit like my last post, but what’s really been sticking with me is how I’ve gotten to learn from so many educators that don’t just come from a teaching background. I’ve learned from coaches, magicians, game makers, neuroscientists, YouTubers, parents turned school founder, social entrepreneurs, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I have also loved learning from and with teachers while at this conference — a science teacher from Atlanta, an ESL teacher from Chicago, a social studies teacher from Arizona, etc. — but that was to be expected.

I would love to see a learning community where these two groups weren’t so siloed (the “teachers” vs everyone else). Both have different values to bring to the table, but I hypothesize the value would increase if they worked in tandem.

What if you had a learning community where everyone was always partnered when facilitating sessions? Just as a quick example:

• A math teacher and a magician
• A science teacher and a coach
• A language teacher and a restaurant owner
• A social studies teacher and a philanthropist
• An english teacher and an architect
• A music teacher and a neuroscientist

The possibilities are limitless.

Associative thinking is such a key part of how our brain learns. I can only imagine what would happen if we thought about our lead learning facilitators with an associative mindset; pairing different expertise to create unique experiences with easy applications to real world challenges. What I imagine though seems pretty great.

Where Imagination Meets Logic

Life is full of moments, and everyone has their own specific moment. A moment in your head where logic and imagination meet and combine perfectly, and you just feel completely in control. A moment of deep, random thought that inspirers curious realizations. A moment when time itself seems to be moving slower to allow you to full observe and take advantage of every little moment.

For me, this is what I call an “Anya Moment”. (This was before the age of the nickname Pinya which is why it isn’t called a “Pinya Moment”.)

Anya Moments take different forms and can be to myself or to others. Sometimes they are rants, sometimes just overly excited realizations, and sometimes they are just a list of questions that may or may not relate to each other and can range in level of sophistication. I still haven’t quite figured out what makes something an Anya Moment, all I know is that when it happens I can feel the difference in my state of mine, and usually it’s recognizable by others.

After an Anya Moment I tend to get into some weird in between state where I’m just trying to process whatever just happened. Then eventually I will snap out of it. What really stinks sometimes is how I’m a night person. Therefore, I often have Anya Moments late at night, and sometimes they can keep me awake for a while when trying to get to sleep.

Sometimes they happen during the day though. Today felt like one big Anya Moment. There were just so many things that I felt were blog worthy conversations. This is why I decided to explain an Anya Moment. Here is a short glance at a few of the things I thought today:

1) The Click Point

The click point is simply when something makes sense. Today Amy was talking about her click moment with math. It was when she realized that math=money. She never considered herself to be a math person, and she still doesn’t, but she uses it all the time. When she was working at a jewelry place, after about 2 weeks she was thinking in base 8 because that is apparently how gold works. This is when she had her click moment that math was present and helping her because it made sense. For any teacher, the goal is to make click moments for students. However, not everyone has their click moment at the same time, or the same way. It just goes to show that people learn things different ways, and to make click moments a teacher has to present the knowledge in different ways.

2) Life is a Sales Pitch

“Sales jobs” can have a negative connotation to it sometimes, but everything is about selling. Any business you go into, you have to sell the idea of your product being the best. Amy told me a quote from my grandpa that I too love, “I’m okay with people manipulating other people. That’s what humans do. They want things to go their way because they believe it’s right.  In the animal kingdom they just kill each other.”

3) The questions

Why do dogs eat 2 times a day, but we eat 3 times a day?

Do paradoxes exists naturally or only due to man made words?

What if scientists are wrong and there isn’t anything else out there in space? What if we are in a “black box”  that gives the allusion of there being a bigger space? What would society due to discover this information?

The Anya Moments of the day… who knows what will happen tomorrow.

Imagination into Action

One thing I really love about my family is how when we have an idea we like to say, “why not?”

While Kylie was in the hospital she watched a bunch of episodes of Cake Boss on Netflix. Since the show’s main bakery is in Hoboken, New Jersey, my grandma was like, “why don’t we go visit the store?” So we did.

I didn’t really like most of the stuff there because I’m not a big sweets person, but I had fun going!

Along the way we saw this sign:

I thought it was fitting.

I was just imagining what my day could have been like if we didn’t decide to go and do something completely random. It would not have been even close to as awesome. Plus one of the busses we took was across from the Aladdin theater, and we got tickets!!!!! If we wouldn’t have gone to that bus stop, we wouldn’t be getting to see the show.

Great things happen when you decide to put your imagination into action.