THE LEAFLET

November 23 2023

what all-star teachers do after holiday break (1 and 2), the beauty of refrains

WHAT ALL-STAR TEACHERS DO AFTER HOLIDAY BREAK, 1

You’ve probably noticed yourself beating your own expectations before. Think of when you shoot hoops with with a new and better partner and notice yourself upping your game, or when a track coach didn’t let up on you until you beat your best. Recall a time you were told a production quota was twice as high as you thought, and somehow you figured out how to meet it; or the time you accidentally overheard a mentor tell someone how great a writer we were, when we’d thought we were lousy. Wow, we think, I better keep at this writing thing. When pushed, we learn that our expectations for ourselves are almost always lower than our actual potential. It’s that simple. 

During slumps, great leaders build this kind of momentum by straddling the tricky gap between ambition and realism, but they always cheat upwards. Why? Because the rest of us are usually cheating downwards. We expect less of ourselves than we’re capable of delivering.

Read the rest here.

-Ben

WHAT ALL-STAR TEACHERS DO AFTER HOLIDAY BREAK, 2

We don’t have to think back on too many compliments we’ve received in our lives to realize that what gets recognized gets repeated. So, it can be transformative when a teacher does two incredibly easy yet completely rare things: sees the tiny choice you made to improve, and names it out loud so you know its impact. 

When we work with students who typically have not succeeded in school before, we find their greatest impediment to 2x and 3x growth is thinking about the rut they’re in. The antidote is easy: celebrate not where they are but the rate of their progress—prefer steep slopes even to high points. 

In breakthrough classrooms, you’ll typically see lists on the wall not of kids with the highest grades, but of those who’ve grown the most since the last test or project. 

Read the rest here.

-Ben

THE POWER OF REFRAINS

Each of these three leaders is a peak performer. They excel at a variety of things. One that they’ve all seized: even in intellectual, creative, strategic work - the job isn’t to be the most interesting. It’s to be the most clarifying. The one who can access all the facts and flavors of experience and turn over something compact and cross-cutting. The one who can reckon with volatility and point with confidence at the thing that doesn’t change. They draw a through line and they give it a name.

A leader with a refrain does a service to these folks with cluttered calendars and burdened consciences. They offer a pure dose of signal. 

Read the rest here.

-Eric

COMPELLING QUOTES

Author David Brooks on building habits and useful desires through beauty, in The Second Mountain:

Plato advised teachers to take advantage of this natural longing for beauty. Present more and more beautiful objects to students, and so form their imaginations in such a way that as they age they will desire more and more serious things.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson, in The Givenness of Things:

Somehow, in a society that is extraordinarily rich by world standards, largely on the basis of wealth created by earlier generations, and one that is capable, if it or any other society ever has been, of giving its people the means to consider and appreciate their moment on this earth, we are panicked into reducing ourselves and others into potential units of economic production—assuming, as we never should, that we know what future circumstances will demand of us.

Sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson, in Seveneves:

Parambulator was a beautiful thing from the standpoint of mathematics and data visualization, but there were times when you just wanted to know what the hell was happening. You wanted a narrative.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric