Between the 1,000 and the 1
"As if you had 1000 years to live,
and as if you were going to die tomorrow"
This is one of my favorite quotes, and seems to be how I continue to operate in life. I first heard it when watching the Ken Burn's documentary The Shakers back in the mid 2000's. I believe it was on Netflix and I was impacted by Mother Anne Lee's quote. I used it in a design review back in the late 2000's because I believe it perfectly embodies the focus of life's purpose. I admit that I put high regard / high value / high price on craft. Part of this is molded into me through my education. It is hard to separate. Why do something half-baked, knowing that someone (which could be you), might have to correct something.
There is a running joke within the Foundry, which is based on a quote from Jonathan Wheat..."just because it is done, doesn't mean it's good." Jonathan is the Community Coach for the SciTech SciBOTs Robotics Team. So often in schools we find students getting to a "done" point, and thinking they've done their job and it's good. When actually, within a design thinking ethos, it is an iterative approach. There is always room for improvement.
I am taking a side track from expanding on the World Maker Faire discussion of the previous two months, to connect with something that I am finding to be an extremely important issue within Harrisburg. It relates to the beginning quote, which is floating around in the 3 spaces that I occupy in the area of 11.86 sq mi of this fine city (On a 170117 blog post I wrote about Third Space/Place, which would provide some helpful context to the discussion.)
The first is my personal work in a house renovation that I am managing with a contractor (First Space = Home/Life.) The second at the classroom level with the projects I am involved with at the Foundry (Second Space = Work/Office.) And the third, is the Harrisburg Comprehensive Plan - on behbg.com (Third Space = the space between.) For the past 2+ years, Harrisburg has been going through a Comprehensive Planning Process. For over 43 years the city has not had a large scale initiative to help guide the form of the city over the next 20 years.
This effort has been lead by Bret Peters of Office for Planning and Architecture (OPA). OPA was my employer from 2005-2008, when I first moved into Harrisburg from Philadelphia. The naming of the firm is purposeful for two reasons. The first is that people in Harrisburg were frequently confused thinking that we were a city agency. It was important because the city has never really had a strong planning focus the past decades. There has been neglect and dereliction of duty, much to the detriment of the residents of the city. More about that can be discerned within Chapter 2 - Land Use of the Comp Plan. The name OPA is also a play on OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), which is a NYC architecture / design / planning firm run by Rem Koolhaas.
I believe that Harrisburg is at an extremely critical point. I cannot repeat this enough. We need a GROWTH MINDSET. For too long we have resided in a FIXSED MINDSET mentality, which has been toxically transferred into two generations (40 years of neglect.)
I know I still need to discuss the Growth / Fixed Mindsets. This is important because SciTech Faculty are going through this in the Project Based Learning model.
Wait, hold on. Harrisburg is doing well. There are positive things happening. I get this response often. I don't disagree that there are good things happening. However, I find that when one digs deeper, the issues of race, inequality, and a lack of tending to the most important asset - people, we as a community, have not scored so high. We have a lot of people hurting, disconnected, disengaged. I see this in the hallways of the schools. I hear it in the voices of the students and how they view the city and learning. The more I hear this, the more my ears perk up to dig into the why. I want to understand perspectives. Some of these ideas connect with last month's post 171031 - A Higher Level of Engagement. The easy way of thinking of this is in a sustainability concept of Triple Bottom Line: Social (People), Environment (Places), Economic (Finance) (TBL or 3BL).
The Comprehensive Plan is an important document because is tries to marry the desires of all residents with exiting context and future vision. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but at around $200,000 we should take a look at what is in it to find out if it will serve the needs of all residents for the next 20 years. During the process, a lot was said that the process was a waste of money. As a part of research I reached out to the Planning Agencies at Seattle, Albany, and Raleigh to understand how their process/results might compare. Why these cities? They were referenced during the 4/6/17 City Council Meeting. The complaint at the meeting was the length and content of the Comprehensive Plan.
"But the city planning director said the first chapter alone was submitted at 97-pages, and if additional chapters continued that trend, it would end up being a bloated 1,000-page document that no one could understand. Knight said he asked Peters last February to submit concise, actionable chapters, but Peters ignored the request." - Christine Vendel, PennLive
While I am still going through the Comprehensive Plan, I am finding some good information about the need for a variety of housing types and affordability. It is good to find the discussion of Innovation Districts (Chapter 08 - Economic Development) and Makerspaces (Chapter 02 - Land Use) within the plan.
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This gets me back to the original quote. What are we all doing on this planet? What is our purpose. There are many answers to this, but if we understand a sustainable concept, it is more about working together as a collective. This is not easy. We need to do a better job learning this process, which I believe is better modeled through process. It connects to the original quote 1,000 vs 1. We should operate in this understanding. We should be doing our best in everything we touch. I certainly don't want to be remembered for anything I touched that was sub-par, or mediocre. This connects to my February and March 2017 blog posts, where I wrote in about Quality / Gumption and drew from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Some of this also is tied into value. What do we value? Why are things given more value than others? We talked about this today at John Harris. The teacher started a related discussion about 1 year of college costing $50k. As students talked about how much that was, I was getting the feeling that this amount of money was not easy to visualize. I asked the class to name a favorite car. One that came up multiple times was the Lamborghini Aventador. Everyone was talking about the car and why it was good.
I asked the question "how much did one cost." Nobody had answers and I asked people to raise their hands if they thought it was $100,000. Nobody raised there hands. Then at $200,000, I saw a couple of hands. One student replied with "half a mil." The teacher Googled it and we found that its MSRP was $400,000. I said that their favorite car was worth (2) 4-year college degrees. This was stunning even for me. Then I said what about a Nissan Sentra ($17,000), and the teacher added a Honda Civic ($19,000.) I asked what made the Lamborghini so expensive? People talked about the design and look of the vehicle. We looked up how many were made and they hit the 5,000 mark in 3/2016, since a launch on February 28, 2011. We found that in one year Honda puts out just as many Civics - Statista. So we talked about how each vehicle was manufactured and the limited nature of the Lamborghini. Some of that was related to price, it just isn't affordable. But that is partly due to the care and crafts.
Okay, so I don't advocate going out and purchasing a Lamborghini or putting it on your bucket list. We talked about brand, the idea of street presence, and a desire to impress people. We also talked about the vehicle would be mainly garage kept as a collection. The Sentra/Civic would be the daily commute cars. You definitely wouldn't want to drive the Aventador around Harrisburg with its low profile. In all the discussion about making, it made sense to talk about job roles. We were talking about this during the week as part of a group effort, students were guided by the teacher to create an "A+" e-portfolio/journal. This pulled the conversation back to what the students were to be thinking about in the STEM Lab - Career Pathways. We talked about how running the Carvey was like building an Aventador.
Based on the MasMEP (Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership), there exists a hierarchy in the workforce. I talked about that concept in the 1:2:7 ratio from the 150128 video Success in the New Economy, by Substance Media Inc. With the Carvey, students were exposed to 2 of the 3 levels. The first was a Basic Level Manufacturing Technician. This was in the process that the students learned in working with the machine; setup / cleaning / changing bits. The second was in at Intermediate Level Manufacturing Technician. When students were designing their layouts for the tile, they were considering depth of bit cutting, the thickness of the HDPE plastic, and edge constraints. They also considered the size of the vectorized images and fonts so they could be cut properly. The last level is the Advanced Manufacturing Skills, which is at the level of Engineer. We talked about this level being an Engineer designing the Easel Web App, or the hardware, or the design considering stress and strain. This was a good deep conversation because the students began to see the connections to real life. They possessed the knowledge that others outside the classroom did not have. The had a valuable skill that could be used to create objects to sell. This tied together the discussion of quality and value.
So today it got me thinking about when I connected to these concepts. I often wonder at the age of 44, if I am forgetting what it is like to be a high school teen. I try and keep things in check with what I am reading and researching as well as keeping a pulse on what teens might be focused on in life. This is where my experience at the Neighborhood Center was so valuable.
When did I learn this about quality / value / purpose? I am not really sure. I think the origins are in two threads. Some of it was a mix of my High School Drafting Teachers, Mr. Michael Flowers. I remember distinctly in my first CAD Class (Robocad on an Apple) where he would look for overlapping lines when we would print our drawings out on a 9"x12" pen plotter. Wow, this was back in 1987. I was hooked on the amazing connections to controlling a pen via a computer drawing.
But before all that there was my father. He really is an impressive figure in my life because, while our childhood relationship was not perfect, some things stuck. This was in the making of things in the basement. There was a "stick-with-it-ness" that just happened. In reflection today, I felt that this was picked up through the unspoken. It was modeled. Wow, this was a powerful realization. As a dad of two daughters, I find that my wife and I operate in that mode. I try and make the most of teachable moments, more as a way to reflect on what just happened. It really connects with Appreciative Inquiry, which is another future blog topic.
This has never been so true in this week with my own renovation of my house, which will bring me to a close of purpose and value in my First Space (HOME.) This started in November and has been a constant "fixing previous bad work." Work was either down cheaply or it was done quickly as a "quick fix."
Well because of both of these, my dad and I have had to do double work to get things right. I would like to close with a photo that I took of a nonbearing framed partition where we discovered that the bottom plate was just nailed right over the existing carpet. No effort was made to cut out the carpet when the wall was put it. No effort was made to fix the issue when the carpet around the wall was cut out to expose the hardwood floors. It is just one small example of the details.
These things do matter, because everything is a legacy.
I believe that is the point of Mother Ann Lee. It is about the process.
". . . another network, not physical like transportation, but conceptual, and equal in importance, is the network of learning: the thousands of interconnected situations that occur all over the city, and which in fact comprise the city's 'curriculum': the way of life it teaches to its young."
"In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students — and adults — become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching."
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language,
Chapter 18 Network of Learning
Thanks to my Maker Fellow colleague Jonathan Schlabach
as he spoke of this on 171130, which immediately
connected to the concepts found in this blog.
STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School
SCIENCE:
Trout in the Classroom (Sunada Roberts)
Today. 11/30/17, Nicole Pertillar and I transported 276 fish from Downey ES to SciTech HS Campus. We originally started off with 586 fish and we split them up between the two tanks. The fish are now in the Alevin stage without their egg sacks. They are very active and some love to dart about the egg basket. The students will be letting them out of the egg basket next week. The fish are now being fed and will soon be able to travel around the entire 55 gallon tank.
TECHNOLOGY:
SciBOTS Robotics Team (Robert Steps)
Well the SciBOTS Robotics Team didn’t make it to the 11/11 Scrimmage or 11/18 Qualifying Tournament in November. The students should be commended because they were able to get one drivable Bot together, which allows for practice in picking up blocks. This year’s field design has a lot of good challenges. There are two potential robots. The student schedules seem to be an issue, however there were specific lessons of Coding with Android Studio (Jonathan Wheat) and 3D Modeling/Printing within Sketchup (Rob Shoaff). Robert Steps made the decision to focus on January 6th and 13th.
Here are the upcoming dates to consider for the next two months until 2/24 - PennFTC.
STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School
TECHNOLOGY:
STEM Lab (Mr. Gigac)
After the close of the First Marking Period, the students begun work with the Carvey. For two weeks they had the goal to design a graphic and carve on a 6”x6”x.25” HDPE (High-density polyethylene) tile. It has been a good Problem Based Learning exercise as that students and their teacher have worked through a broken bit (1/16”), hardware connectivity issues, and graphic design constraints in the software.
The 2-week activity closed with an exercise of all the students as a group, going through a 10 Day Journal.
This was a good lesson because Mr. Gigac flipped the process so students could understand how they should be reflecting on the problems they encounter in the STEM Lab. In the wrap up this week we talked about technical writing vs creative writing and framed the exercise in a way to have students think that the exercise as writing a how to manual for next year’s students. We also looked at ways that this exercise broke down into 3 job types - Entry Level Technician, Mid Level Technician, and Engineer. See the above section containing the pyramid graphic showing the breakdown of Workforce Skill Levels (from MassMEP Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership)
ARTS:
A/V Studio (Mr. Cooper)
The students in Period 1 & 5 have been working out an idea for a Weekly Series that highlights stories of student interest. One of these have been the Weekly Rap speaking on Hip Hop Graffiti Artists. They are working on editing the footage. This was an offshoot from the 11/01 "Freeway" Rick Ross (Ricky Donnell Ross) visit to John Harris. It was a great event that seemed to connect with the interests of several students.
Thanks to Mr. Cooper for helping to bring more students into the studio. They had written some really good interview questions for our guests. I am excited to see what develops over the school year.