Satisficing isn’t my word. It’s Nobel winner Herbert Simon’s. It means, “Doing something at the good-enough level, not the optimal level.” Few skills are as critical to the well-lived teacher’s life. Here’s why. On paper, teaching is an impossible job. So is administration. Doing education by the book in the twenty-first century is hopelessly Byzantine. […]
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The Best Question for Helping You Simplify Lessons, Curricula, Policies, or Procedures
The question is pretty… well [looks up synonym for simple] basic: What would this look like if it had to be simple? If this lesson I’m planning had to be simple — as few moving parts as possible, as few things that could go wrong as possible, as few needless confusion points as possible — […]
A Few Helpful Ideas for Resting as an Educator
The late USC philosopher Dallas Willard used to describe the body like a battery pack for the soul. For about a year, that definition didn’t make much sense to me. But lately, it has started to click and has been helping me think better about rest in my life as a husband, father, teacher, and […]
The Case for Lumpiness
All right: finite creatures, only 24 hours in a day, only 4,000 weeks or so in a life. Got it. We’ve looked at DECIDE, CONSTRAIN, OBSESS — now today, a riff on the discipline of ELIMINATION. (You may already be noticing that the disciplines overlap one another. Quite right. There’s really not a ton to […]
Let’s Pick Some Sled Dogs
During a five-year period in the 2010s, researcher Morten Hansen conducted one of the most comprehensive surveys of worker performance ever. He found 5,000 managers and employees, from all types of professions, and he analyzed their work habits, tracked how many hours they worked each week, and followed their performance. The highest performers, it turned […]