21 miles from understanding
dear son
i am wondering about teaching and teachers. what will schools and classrooms look like when you'll be my age?
i would wish for you to keep having guides that empower you with cutting edge tools that enable and let you surf at the frontier.
your mumma and i just delivered a workshop at your lovely little school. we onramped a bunch of kids 9+ years old to make their own apps using ai.
it didn't go exactly like we'd imagined.
the idea is amazing. intention top order.
but each partaker just wanted to prompt once and get an entire game out and play it. and that was so irksome.
getting impatient for results rather than enjoying the effort that it takes to tend to curiosities and relishing the process of figuring things out.
you get it?
our intention was to spark curiosity, enable crossing of the bridge of ignorance, such that a certain kind of friendship with the technology gets nurtured, allowing kids the confidence to explore the deeper end by themselves.
even if cursor can just spin up instantiations of apps, browsers and entire OSes whenever needed, eventually
humility and patience to understand how things actually work a cultivated sense of play and discovery ability to find fun in friction doing the hard things will always remain the point.
no?
why bother getting together if not to connect for cultivation of these human aspects?
because if it was only about mechanics of using a tool, it would rather be youtubed.
so. what will we do differently in the next cohort such that the transmission is different, more directed towards the essential?
these lines from chapter 1 of tao te ching for parents sit in front of me
so i got to share the joys and excitement of my own humility and patience, be more chill about figuring out and failing and trying again.
BE all that i wish to see imparted. hmm
what does it mean to be a world class teacher? how is the role shifting, what will remain of it?
as i write this you are 4 years old (okay 4 and a half) and attend a really wonderful nature-based school in bali.
we feel very lucky about this decision we made for your sake.
but it does feel even this tiny school is having difficulty overcoming inertia of the status quo.
it does feel we ourselves need to dig our hands dirty.
in a series of writings i shall explore how we are doing/ envisioning it.
maybe we get to leave a dot that gets connected backwards.
love,