Google Champion Reflections
I ventured out to California by myself for a few days in San Francisco to see the sites (Alcatraz, Sonoma, Ghiardelli Square, Baseball game, etc.) and had a fun packed few days away from what has already been a very busy school year (a huge thank you and shout out to my administrator colleagues for supporting this including my wonderful superintendent). I knew it was high risk for me to take a full week away during the school year but I could not have invested my time and money in a more inspiring event.
After the symposium, I stayed one night in a hotel by the San Francisco airport where the waterfront outside had a walkway that you could view planes coming and going from all over the world. I found myself sitting here soon after I checked in reflecting on the symposium and an older lady asked to take the seat next to me. We started talking as we were watching the planes and she was a local whose son worked for the airline, she shared with me her life story and how she got to San Francisco, why she stayed there and how she loved coming to watch the planes so she made time to do this everyday. Her son had found an app and downloaded it on her phone so she could track where all the planes were covering from, as we sat there talking she proceeded to share with me planes coming and going from all over the world (it was something I had never thought about before)! I met many people like this during the course of my week travelling alone. I would not have met them or spoken with them to such length had I been travelling with others. It reminded me of the uniqueness of everyone's story and pathway. How our goal in education needs to be honoring people's different backgrounds that bring them to us and then modeling and preparing students for a world with jobs that don't exist yet.
In San Francisco, I encountered self driving cars! The Jetson's of my childhood were on the streets of San Francisco. I became obsessed with getting a picture of one of them (I did not succeed in this venture but we often learn the most from our failures). I would not have gotten in one but the challenge succeeded in intriguing my wondering of the future of education and what we are doing today to support this? How are we preparing students for a world of self driving cars? Drones that deliver Amazon packages (yes, they had a trial for this too in San Francisco).
I was scared about a week prior to the trip and seriously contemplated what I was doing in taking this time away from work, and mostly by the talk of the increasing and scary homeless population. It did not help when I landed and my Uber driver to the hotel told me tales about the crime rates and how it was best not to rent a car because this is one of the hottest items in San Fran. So, I proceeded to spend lots of money on getting Ubers to anywhere I felt safe going and avoided spaces where I did not feel safe. I also became intrigued by how this happened. How did so many people continue to live this way? What connections are they missing to support a better life for themselves? Why had their education led to this outcome for them?
Prior to the symposium we were supposed to have read a report by none other than Google itself on the future of education. The symposium was largely centered around our group developing our vision for the future of education. My group pretty quickly came to a consensus that it's not all about thinking about what's outside the box but coming from what is inside the box, the soul of every human we encounter in education. The necessity of understanding this relationship between teacher and student, administrator and teacher, etc. before diving into the important work of teaching and learning which is only possible when one is available to learn. For me, this tied into the homeless issue mentioned above and many other encounters I have every day especially in working with freshman (which I seem to be doing a lot of this school year between my work with seniors that I have known for 3 years already). My group used the design thinking approach to develop our presentation and had several iterations of what we eventually presented to all attendee's at the symposium. We stayed true to ourselves in our presentation of doing this through a pre recorded presentation of the gifts that come to us everyday and how our job is to nourish and grow them as humans first. Every group took a very different and unique approach and that was only some of the power in that room. The true power of the symposium as I walked away and reflected on it, on that walk outside watching planes, was about the human connection and common cause that bonded us Google Champions to one another. A belief that education needs a revolution that starts from within and looks different than our current schools do today.
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