What You Look For

I’m not a huge lover of New Year’s resolutions: it often seems forced and arbitrary to all of a sudden change your lifestyle or habits based on a random date. That being said, I made some promises to follow through on around the new year.

One of them was to take a picture every day of 2015 (and hopefully beyond). I’m using an IFTTT recipe to toss them all on a website that I’ll work on. Someday.

But it’s been interesting: knowing that I have to take and publish a picture every day has me on the lookout for the interesting. The beautiful. The random. Something that I can either toss up online right away or that I can edit into something intriguing.

BUT IT’S THE SAME WAY IN THE CLASSROOM.

Worry all the time about the small group of kids that aren’t working? That aren’t engaged? That aren’t thinking in the way you’d like them to? That’s all you’ll see. And you’ll miss all the great things other students - the vast majority of them - are doing.

I was so guilty of this in late October and early November. After a tough week this last week, during 20time last Friday I made a deliberate attempt to watch for the joy. For the learning. For the curiosity.

And it was an absolute dream to watch kids struggle with coding. Or try to dig into an article about the meaning of dreams. Or to have an extended conversation about why a student’s project about a Minecraft mod wouldn’t work because of an update that happened somewhere (Note: I’ve got no idea how to help many projects this year, like this one. Which is great.)

The quiet feel of focused productivity was cleansing.

It helped that that was what I was choosing to look for.

Coding during 20time