On Turning 30

"All models are wrong, but some are useful," was the famous bromide of George E.P. Box that my statistics professor put up on a slide.

Turning 30 is just a date.  Just another birthday.  I know that.

And yet, this particular round number has been a useful model to think back on where I've been, and think forward to where I'm headed.  Maybe turning 30 is just a psychological juncture, but it's a juncture nonetheless.

First of all, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Perhaps because my itinerary for the big three-oh didn't give me a chance to think much: awake at 2:50, 6:00 flight from Chicago, 10:00 interview in Boston's Chinatown for an hour-and-a-half, 20-minute lunch, 2:00 interview near Government Center for another two-and-a-half-hours, 30-minute call about a job, 5 minutes sprinting through the rain.  Home by 6.  You could have stuck a fork in me.

It was finally at the bar that it sunk in.

It hasn't been as hard as I might have thought because I don't feel a day over 25.  All the years people have been telling me I look young.  When I was a sophomore in college I was mistaken for a sophomore in high school by the town librarian.  That's been the pattern ever since.  What once felt like an albatross--being baby-faced--now feels like a badge of honor.  There are plenty of folks who look 40 at 30; if I come off as younger, then either I've got lucky genes, or else the exercise and good eating are paying off.

Turning 30 has made me think about 20, and all the things that have changed since then.

When I turned 20, I was drifting through college, unsure where I was headed, with few buoys of support.  I hadn't yet made a truly close, enduring college friend.

I thought I was done studying Spanish--only to be headed to Chile 13 months later for a life-changing year.

I had never biked more than 10 miles--several years later I would huff and puff my way to my first metric century.

Above all, It's striking how little I knew, relatively.  How to write, how to write poetry, how to write pragmatically for a job, how to write about numbers.  My yoga instructor talks about how he'd trade his late-thirties body for his twenty-year-old body any day--but not the mind.  I couldn't agree more.

At the same time, I'm struck by how the core things that make me happy have fundamentally not changed.  Losing myself in an hour of pickup basketball, writing in any form, sitting outside in the sun on a summer day, breaking bread or sharing a beer with a close friend.  Those things sustained me at 20, and they sustain me all the same today.  I only hope they can keep on sustaining me over the next 10 years.

The Importance of FACE Time

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

—Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues”

I’ve discovered a few things this summer, and high up on that list, I have discovered the power of the “one-on-one.” 

The one-on-one is a key sequence from the organizer’s playbook.  Though my own organizing is limited to two years of student activism in college, I’ve snatched the idea for my work on family and community engagement this summer—and boy has it paid off.

A fact sheet from Organizing for America’s Virgina branch revealed the power of meeting people in person, individually.  OFA tracked the outcomes of various forms of reaching out to potential volunteers over a four-month period in the winter of 2010.  They found that only 3% of people talked to on the phone became leaders in the organization, and 6% of volunteers at events.  Folks entreatied through one-on-ones, meanwhile, were converted to leadership roles fully 23% of the time.

***

As I took stock of my summer-long work supporting family and community engagement (FACE) at the Wallace Elementary School in Chicago, I knew that I had something to offer.  I also knew I had to hit the ground listening. 

Part of my mandate to listen was because I am the ultimate outsider to the work: a white, middle-class male not from Chicago, not living in the neighborhood, and not recently a schoolteacher, working with a heavily African American K-8 school on the Far South Side.

But equally a part of my mandate to listen was that FACE work inherently has to be democratic.  Though surely there are many schools that give lip-service to family engagement, for a half-dozen reasons, I don’t think you can meaningfully “engage” families if you don’t listen to their perspectives—and put those perspectives at the center of your work. 

As I developed my summer work-plan, a three-stage process came into formation: Assessing, Assisting, and Achieving.  The first stage: assess the needs, capacities, and perspectives of teachers, school leaders, families, and community members with respect to FACE.  The second stage: capitalizing on what I’d learned in the first stage, assist the various parties in developing engagement strategies—contributing my knowledge and experience with engagement.  The third stage: from the end of my placement forward, it would be up to the school, families, and community to achieve their vision for engagement. 

The currency of the assessing stage would take several forms—attending community meetings, holding focus groups—but above all else, I plunged into one-on-ones. 

***

To carry them out, I’ve broken bread at local diners, met up for coffee at Starbucks, cleared a space in the corner of a library under renovation.  Through the process of more than a dozen such conversations, mainly with teachers but now branching into parents and community members, I’ve honed my techniques into what seems to be a workable set-up.

Before we even broach engagement, we get to know each other—at least on some level.  I’ve learned that a key ingredient of the one-on-one is telling and hearing each other’s stories. 

And it pays to go first, to tell my own story before I put my interlocutor on the hot seat.  I talk about where I grew up.  I put racial issues on the table: I talk about my choice to major in ethnic studies in college, the awareness and passion for social justice I gained from that.  I touch on my experience as a high-school teacher, then an adult ESL teacher, and how that led to an interest in family literacy and parents engaging with schools.  And I express a desire to work together with whoever sits across from me on community engagement.  By going first—and I’ve tried it both ways—I can show my interest in going deep, in being candid.

Then I listen.

One teacher told me about the intentional multiracial housing community she lived in in college.  Another about the ministry she leads.  Another about attending the Wallace back in the day, when it attracted students from across the city.  About the dozen pathways into education they’ve taken. 

Another talked about his high-school days at a strict Catholic school, where they vowed to turn boys into men.  Another about how her very parents reflected both visible involvement (her father served on the Local School Council) and subtle but critical engagement (her mother pushed her learning at home). 

I’ve seen faces open up, start to glow.  Not just about their experiences—also and ultimately, their vision for community engagement.

I usually don’t open my notebook until their personal story is over.  Then I dive into questions about community engagement, and start writing.  It’s striking how much information can be conveyed in merely an hour.  Even my limited stenography, when I retype it into Word later, can run for a dense page-and-a-half, full of insights I might have forgotten if I hadn’t been writing as I listened.

As we talk, I’m jotting notes about the person’s values, interests, and resources.  I’m identifying possible leverage points—attempting to chart Ellison’s sea: I plunge deeper when a topic seems to strike a chord, when the other person really cares about positive phone calls or the nuts-and-bolts of preparing for a parent-teacher conference.  I pivot off a topic when it’s exhausted itself. 

Finally: the commitment.

As the conversation winds to a close, I make explicit two to three talents in family engagement that I see in that person.  And I suggest a small way in which they might be able to contribute to FACE strategies.  In some cases, I’ve asked for a commitment on the spot: Would you be willing to teach newer teachers in how to make positive relationships with families in the first weeks of school?

Such commitments get funneled into an action plan, the template for next steps.

***

On their face, the one-on-ones I've put at the center of my work this summer may appear inefficient.  They are, however, purposeful--and purposefully limited, usually an hour, no more than 90 minutes.  And I have explored focus groups as a way to meet with more than one person at a time.

Beyond that, though, the value of the one-on-ones is that they allow me to make a potentially deep connection with the very individuals who will be responsible for carrying out—or not carrying out—community engagement long after my work is done.  They allow an individual’s perspectives, vision, and talents in the area of FACE to surface in ways that they might not in even very small focus groups.  As I’ve come to believe, it’s school leaders, teachers, and families who will ultimately have to do the work: if they are energized about community engagement, if they are the ones to build the strategies, they’ll own them. 

And the hope is—they’ll implement them.  One-on-ones are only the first step in a pathway that requires a lot of hard work.  But they make a very good first step indeed. 

Accomplished

Completed: The 30-30 Challenge on the 365 poetry blog.  Actually, 31-31: a poem a day throughout July.


Applied: To six jobs.


Set up: Two interviews.


Played: Tennis, for the first time in 8 months.  Sprains (on two forehand fingers, in my case) take a loooong time to heal.


Visited: Cincinnati (informational interview); Galena, Illinois (work retreat).

And all this in the last week!