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Ode to the Mini Whiteboard

I fell in love with the mini-whiteboard in my 5th year of teaching.

Mini-whiteboards – a corkboard covered on one side with a plastic polymer – are usually 8 by 11 inches, small enough to fit into a binder. They’re humble devices. You can buy a classroom set at Staples, or – for the price-conscious (meaning all teachers) – plastic sheet protectors or cut up shower boards will do. In my math class, students would show their work for multi-step problems on MWBs. In my English class, we would craft beautiful sentences or practice grammar on them.

What I really loved about MWBs is that they dramatically – almost magically – increased student engagement. An 11-year-old with a whiteboard and dry-erase marker is an engaged 11-year-old. These tools also send a subtle message about power. Usually, it’s the teacher who wields the marker. When we hand over the marker, we’re ceding some authority to students. In addition, MWBs foster collaboration – I would sometimes have students in groups with one whiteboard working on a task. Finally, the little whiteboards made student thinking more visible. It was easier to see their work and thus notice (and respond to) misconceptions.

I’m calling this blog the Mini Whiteboard because it will (hopefully) make my own thinking public and visible. You’ll see short pieces the size of, well, a mini whiteboard. And as you now know, I just love mini whiteboards.

I have a few simple goals for this blog. The first few are personal: to motivate myself to write more, to record those thoughts and to maybe share some things I think are excellent and beautiful. I also hope that you – my dear reader – find something worth reading.

Disclaimer: All thoughts seen here are mine and not those of any other entity. 

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New Habits for the New Year

This Labor Day weekend is a perfect time to rethink our personal habits. As schools open up nationwide, many of us will be returning to in-person work for the first time in many moons. Amidst the uncertainty of this coming school year (Delta? quarantines? hybrid instruction?), one thing is for certain. The habits we encode for the next few weeks – the automatic, unthinking actions we take each day — will shape our lives for the months to come.

Consider what you did yesterday. Chances are a large part of your day passed by without deliberate, conscious thinking. According to the habit expert Wendy Wood, we spend 43 percent of a typical day doing things habitually. For instance, 88 percent of what we do each day for our personal hygiene – using the bathroom, showering, teeth-brushing, getting dressed – is habitual. 55 percent of what we do for work is habitual. Even 48 percent of our daily entertainment is subject to habit. Who else has mindlessly turned on the TV or clicked on a social media icon at the end of a long day? (Confession: I’ve done both while typing this paragraph)

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The Sword of Damocles and Johvian’s Call

In the 5th century BC, there was a tyrant in Sicily – Dionysius – who had a courtier named Damocles whose job was to be a professional flatterer. One day, Damocles proclaimed that it would be great to be the king. Dionysius then offered to switch places with him for a day. The next evening, there was a banquet with opulent food and great service, and Damocles basking in his seat at the throne. At the end of the meal, however, he looked up and noticed a sharpened sword hanging above his head, suspended by a single horsehair. Immediately, he begged to leave the throne and go back to his position as a courtier.

Now when we hear the phrase “sword of Damocles,” we think of the notion of impending doom. But as the classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn points out, the Damocles story has been misinterpreted through the ages. It doesn’t just mean that something bad is about to happen to you. Rather, there’s a larger moral parable that what initially looks like an enviable life – a life of privilege and status — is often fraught with anxiety and hardship.

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What I’ve Learned about My Own Unconscious Biases

Note: The last few months have been a whirlwind due to the pandemic, so please excuse my hiatus from blogging.

Last week, I watched Verna Myers’ incredible TED talk on “How to overcome our biases?” (Myers is the powerhouse VP of Inclusion at Netflix) There’s a part of the talk that I can’t stop thinking about. Myers tells a story of what happened on a recent plane ride. This 2-minute clip is my favorite part:

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An Epistle from the Epicenter: What Might School Look Like in the COVID-19 Era?

These are historic times.

I’m writing this from the pandemic’s current epicenter, where the death toll officially passed 10,000 yesterday. In New York, there is illness and suffering everywhere. Ambulance sirens are omnipresent. The NYC DOE recently announced that fifty employees – including 21 teachers – have died due to COVID-19 related complications. Every morning, I check out this online memorial to those educators and my heart cracks a little more.

Here’s the current state of schooling. Despite the fracas between our mayor and governor, the NYC DOE will almost certainly be closed until the end of the year. Nationally, 55 million out of 57 million k-12 students are out of school with no clear return dates. Worldwide – according to UNESCO — 1.57 billion students from 191 countries are currently not in school. In other words, 91 percent of all school-aged children globally are now learning from home.

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A Postcard from Providence: How to Create Thriving Adult Cultures

At Achievement First, our ultimate goal is to run great schools for children. Yet we also believe it’s vital to have healthy organizational cultures where the adults are also thriving.

Why the heavy focus on “adult culture”? For one, according to Patrick Lencioni, healthy organizations solve problems better. In these organizations, people “learn from one another, identify critical issues, and quickly recover from their mistakes. They cycle through problems faster without politics and confusion.” Besides, we all want to work in places that feel demanding yet positive. And we’re more likely to stay in workplaces like this.

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Lang Lang’s Master Class

The Chinese pianist Lang Lang is a classical music icon.

The New York Times has anointed him “the hottest artist on the classical music planet.” This year, the piano company Steinway commissioned a brand of grand pianos named after him, the first time in  its 166-year history. In April, Lang Lang shared the stage at Madison Square Garden with Billy Joel, who dubbed him “the top pianist in the world.” And the film director Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) is currently making a biopic focused on Lang Lang’s rags-to-riches childhood in China.

When Lang Lang isn’t performing, he gives master classes to the next generation of young piano prodigies from across the world. Each master class begins with the musician performing the full piece — usually in front of a live audience — before Lang Lang begins coaching.

What it’s like to be coached by the best pianist in the world?

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On Being an Asian-American in Public Education

My latest obsession is the song “Sunrise” from the hip-hop improv group Freestyle Love Supreme. If you’ve never heard it before, I urge you to click here:

In it, the Indian-American polymath Utkarsh Ambudkar (a.k.a. “UTK the INC”) raps extemporaneously about his identity crisis as teenager:

    • Growing up in Maryland as an Indian 
    • Struggling, juggling education and tryin’ to get a girl to remember my name
    • Hard game – when you’re skinny with a brown colored frame …
    • What do I do? These people don’t know, what is a Hindu?
    • Are you black or are you white? We can’t tell what color
    • Man – I always felt that I’m ‘an other’ …

As a contemporary of Ambudkar – an Asian-American of roughly the same age – that last line resonates with me: the feeling of being “an other.”

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A Gourmand’s Notepad: Observations from the Michelin Scene

A few weeks ago, the Michelin Guide – the world’s top arbiter of culinary excellence – released its annual list of starred restaurants. A large majority of restaurants – even good ones – earn zero stars. The absolute best can earn up to three Michelin stars, a designation that means “an exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

A three Michelin star restaurant is a rarity. In the romantic comedy Burnt, a young chef tries to describe to his girlfriend just how rare an accomplishment it is: “To get even one Michelin star, you have to be like Luke Skywalker. To get two, you have to be [Obi Wan Kenobi]. But if you manage to get three, you’re Yoda.”

Put another way, there are only 13 restaurants in the United States with three Michelin stars. Of the more than 26,000 restaurants in New York City, there are exactly five with three stars: Chef’s Table, Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernadin, Masa and Per Se.

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