Yesterday I photographed my 100th wedding.

Fourteen years ago I photographed a friend’s wedding and my cousin saw the photos. He asked me to take his wedding pictures and with two wedding under my belt, I had an album to show around. I never advertised, and got all my referrals from weddings I photographed and by word of mouth. My first paid wedding probably resulted in about one-third of all my weddings… a hint of what a network can do for you! In 2005 I had to say ‘No’ to six weddings as a result of going to Oregon and working on my Masters Paper… and things really fell off after that. Now I basically photograph friends and their friends so this was my second of two weddings this year.

This has always been a hobby, so I give my clients their negatives, and my prices have always been reasonable. I don’t know if I could have done this any other way and felt good about it, and I don’t think this could ever have been a career for me. I still enjoy photographing weddings, but I’m happy that I’m down to just a couple every year now.

So what have I learned after 100 weddings?

• Be prepared: Rain? I bring two umbrellas (one black and one white). Camera fails? I have a back-up. Above and beyond extra batteries & film, phone on vibrate (or off), extra lenses, camera manual, and business cards, I also had a clearly explained plan for the photos…

• Be Explicit: I always meet my customers before the wedding and make sure that they knew exactly what their time with me will look like, how long it will take, and what they can do to help me. I also make sure that the plan met their needs as well as mine…

• Listen: It is their wedding and their memories, not mine. I once took the family photos and all my ‘money’ shots of the bride and groom in 30 minutes. They told me the timeline needed to stay tight. I told them what they needed to do to help me make it happen. I would have loved at least 20 more minutes, but I listened and realized the strict timeline was important to them. 

• Deliver: Better yet, under-promise and over-deliver. One thing I have always done is give the bride and groom a few 5×7’s as my gift to them. By doing this, our last interaction would be a generous offering from me, and I got to highlight what I thought was my best work.

• Be assertive: This is different than ‘bossy’ and requires confidence. With a plan in place, I could take 50+ different combinations of family member photos in less than 20 minutes… and have the family feel like I ran a ‘tight ship’ rather than a ‘dictatorship’. 

• Be brief: I didn’t go to all of the receptions for my 100 weddings, but I went to enough to learn the value of this lesson! If you are going to speak for longer than 3 minutes, either be entertaining, heartfelt or captivating. I’ve heard some amazing speeches and I’ve heard some that have made fingernails on a chalkboard seem like a symphony by comparison.  

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So there are my lessons learned: Be Prepared, Be Specific, Listen, Deliver, Be Assertive, and Be Brief.

I could rewrite this post and apply these lessons to the classroom, or better yet I’ll just plant that seed with you and see what blossoms.

Yesterday I had coffee with Heidi Hass Gable, our new District Parent Advisory Council (DPAC) President, and blogger at “I was thinking…“. I suggested to her that she watch Lost Generation while we were discussing some well thought out ideas she shared with me about nothing less than the purpose of education. Here is the video: 

This morning I thought about a post that I wrote, which keeps coming back to mind. 

School 2.0 Participant’s Manifesto

This post looks at the responsibility of the learner to be an active and engaged participant in the class and in the learning process. 

What excites me about web2.0 tools is not the tools themselves, but the ability of these tools to actively engage students in their learning. Students are often far more capable of leading their own learning than we give them credit for. Should students come up with their own manifesto? Or a class manifesto? 

Also, it is important to remember that the adults in the building are participants too! What are we going to do this year to model and share our learning journey with our students? 

The answers will vary from staff member to staff member… there is no cookie-cutter answer. However, regardless of the path we choose, we owe it to our students to have high expectations. 

With the start of the school year coming next Tuesday, I am excited about the possibilities before me. Many wonderful opportunities await myself, my staff, and our students. I believe that if we enter our schools as active, engaged learners, then we can have great expectations, and we can create an environment where we meet those expectations too!

Sometimes it is better to beg for forgiveness
than it is to ask for permission.

We’ve all heard that before, but we can’t all be Gary Stager and do what we want when we want. [Please see the first two comments for some clarification on this statement.] Sometimes we have to be political, sometimes we have to follow protocol, and sometimes we have no choice but to ask for permission. That said there are times when it really is better to just do it… and beg for forgiveness should the need arise.

If you are going to take this approach in your classroom here are two rules and a suggestion.

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Rule 1: You are choosing this path because you believe it is best practice.

Rule 2: Your choice of path is safe for students to take.

Suggestion: Share your idea with someone you believe will support you in the interest of the rules above.

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Here now is a brief explanation.

Rule 1: If the goal of your actions is to make your job easier, then this is the wrong approach. You need to be doing this for your students. Often we get trapped believing that best practice isn’t easier when actually it can be. For example, we don’t read everything our students write, but we get online and suddenly we think we have to read everything. Create simple, positive rules online and maintain your high expectations… your best practice approach might just make your job easier as an added bonus.

Rule 2: Don’t do something stupid that puts a student in danger or your job on the line. I think this is a self evident rule- the ‘don’t be stupid’ reality check.

Suggestion: Learning conversations and collaboration help put you on the right path. There are other people around you physically or online, who make things happen. Use all the resources available to you and that especially includes people. This can often include asking permission from the right person.

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Related:

•Bud the Teacher’s Open Letter to Teachers

•My Learning Conversations presenation at BLC08, my Tribute to teachers, my Edupunk or Educational Leader? post, and my School 2.0 Participants Manifesto.

•Jennifer D. Jones’ Down In Front

It is now a month after BLC08 and a recent comment has stirred up some thoughts that sent me back to a blog draft I wrote months ago. On Defragging my brain after BLC08, Angela Kerns mentioned that of my nine ‘take-aways’, #3 and #4 resonated with her:

3. Face-to-face meetings with your network are powerful… very powerful.

4. More learning happens in the halways and at meals/socials than in sessions. Create opportunities for Learning   Conversations.

What is most amazing about BLC08 is that these two points are still resonating with me. Liz B. Davis, Lisa Thumann, and Laura Deisley adopted Dave Sands and I, and took us under their wings. Many of the discussions we had were of a quality that left me wishing that I had recorded them! Thanks to these ladies, I connected with many people that were in my network, but had never met, and I also met amazing people who are now part of my network.

But these learning conversations didn’t happen in the presentations at the conference. It was the conversations we had outside of the sessions that were really incredible.

Liz lived very near our hotel and so a car ride, or a chat walking her home would become an in depth conversation about strategies to promote technology integration or a debate about comfort levels with having students as social networking friends. (O.K., I’ll admit an embarrassing story here just for a laugh… as Dave and I walked Liz home on the second night, I walked into a pole while texting my wife… the rim of my baseball cap saved me from potential head trauma. Mental note: don’t walk and text in the dark!)

The conversations were not all heavy, Lisa and I razzed each other on the issue of ‘to Plurk or not to Plurk’, and Joyce Valenza always made sure everyone was having fun even when sharing our thoughts on education. But it seemed that very often the conversations, whether light, frivolous or funny, always went back to education.

Even at the dinner cruise social, (that Dave, Donna DesRoches and I almost missed after an ‘Amazing Race’ style route), it seemed that the learning continued:

On the boat: Clarence Fisher wanted to know the name of a fort we cruised by, but no-one could help him until Alice Barr handed over her iphone. Clarence used this experience in his presentation the following day to exemplify how information is abundant now and we need to go beyond rote memorization in what we teach.

On the bus ride back to the hotel: I had an in-depth conversation with Pegggy Sheehy about avatar gender. I never considered that I would ever choose a female avatar for myself until this conversation… biases I didn’t even know I had were challenged!

At the hotel restaurant: Darren Kuropatwa, Laura and I took a little idea I had about a Twitter version of 366 Photos and developed it into what would be a great project. Hopefully we will expand on it in the fall and maybe launch for the month of February.

Everywhere we turned we were having learning conversations. This seems to happen when you surround yourself with amazing people… people who are catalysts and agents of change.

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With each person I mentioned above, I linked to their blogs. Each of those blogs are in their own way agents of change… they are inspired by teachers and learners wanting more out of ‘institutional’ education. They are not the works of dreamers dreaming, but rather the work of catalysts reflecting, experimenting, learning, questioning, designing, succeeding and failing, and yes dreaming too.

What makes this so meaningful though, is the connections we make to each other, and the learning we gain from linking, meeting, and creating opportunities for learning conversations to happen.

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Are you an agent of change? Are you a catalyst that makes things happen? Do you create opportunities for collaboration? Do you initiate and inspire learning conversations? 

Keeping education meaningful and relevant is an ongoing process of evolution or emergence. The process requires us to learn and to change too.  We need to evolve. We need to learn, encourage learning, and allow learning to emerge.

In Science change occurs through hybridization or mutation… ideas go through this too. Institutional education doesn’t do this on its’ own.

In Science catalysts are often used in tandem. Different agents combine to make a chemical reaction happen faster. Catalysts of change work well together too. We learn from each other and interact more meaningfully from the learning of others. Often we need feedback loops to help us make sure we are making the right things happen… after all, change can be both for the better or the worse.

But if there is one thing I can be certain of, change needs to happen. Students today are interacting and engaging with the world in ways that would have seemed like science fiction to us.

If we are not agents of change then we are agents of boredom and mediocrity, the keepers of the status quo…. static… in stasis. 

Create opportunities for Learning Conversations. 

Be a catalyst that inspires learning.

Be an agent of change! 

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Photo of Change Agents, after the BLC08 boat cruise
by Joyce Valenza on flickr

I’m back from a wonderful holiday… in 12 days we visited my sister and family in L.A., and went to San Diego where we visited the Wild Animal Park, Zoo, and SeaWorld (twice). We also went to Disney/California Adventure for 3 days. My kids had a fantastic time, and I found more joy in their enjoyment than my own.

A few days ago I got a flu that went to my sinuses. Yesterday during the flight from L.A. to Seattle I realized that my flu was an infection and the flight home was nothing less than painful! I must thank my wife for doing most of the driving from Seattle to Coquitlam for I was agonizingly useless. Today, I am on antibiotics, Sinutab, a nasal salt water wash, and as of 20 minutes ago, a home remedy ‘tonic’ of a much stronger nature… I received a concussion in a water polo game 25 years ago when my nose was broken by an elbow and I think the pain I feel right now is worse… yet I just looked in the mirror in my washroom and I look no worse for wear than I normally do.

So why am I telling you this?

I wonder how many students come to us with hidden pain… not a sinus infection but pain none-the-less. How many students hide their broken homes, their emotional or physical abuse? How many students feel like they don’t fit in, that they don’t belong? How many students have moments where they want to die or wish they were already dead?

I’ve had students in my class that have dealt with issues I could never imagine. I remember my VP Gary Kern saying to me once, “This job has taught me a new respect for the student I’d never want to be…”, the student whose life experiences make them students of life long before we reach that point.

This is what makes a teacher’s job so tough, we don’t teach ’students’ we teach human beings with real-life issues. We ’see’ a lot, but we miss a lot too!

How many times have you had a parent interview after which you suddenly change your strategy about how you deal with a student? How many times have you made an on-the-spot decision that you believed was great, only to discover later that you should have handled it differently, that you didn’t have enough information to do what was best for the student?

Sometimes it takes feeling a hidden pain to appreciate that others feel pain too.

I’m sure every teacher reading this could share a story like no other. I’m sure every teacher reading this understands exactly what I’m talking about. As I sit here in agony, I salute the teachers of this world who do so much more than teach students the content they are required to teach!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go crawl under a rock until I feel better.