BFTP: Be kind

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
                                          George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates

One of the best posts I've ever read is Give the kid a pencil by Chad Donohue on the Teaching Tolerance blog. He writes about a grad class discussing: "If a student shows up to class without a pencil, how should the teacher respond?" He writes:

Small groups collaborated for a few minutes. Ultimately, they came up with plans involving taking something (a shoe?) from the student as collateral to remind the student about the importance of having supplies, notifying parents and even assigning classroom cleanup duty or lunch detention.

“What about you, Prof?” they asked.

“I would give the kid a pencil,” I said.

“You mean the first time?” someone asked.

“Every time,” I said.

Why, as educators, as parents, as supervisors, do we think we have to be such hard asses all the time? "Give'm an inch and they'll take a mile" seems to be the going sentiment among a lot of people.

Come on, let's...

• Give the kid a pencil - everytime.
• Let the kid check out another book even if he has one overdue.
• Cut the kid some slack if he forgets to charge his iPad.
• Turn a blind eye if the para needs to go home to take care of a sick kid.
• Empathize when a tech makes a mistake.

I like responsible people. I really do. But I rather doubt being an ass ever made anyone behave better.

Be kind. We do tend to do behave and perform better for those we love...

And while you're at it, practice a little self-forgiveness as well.

See also:

• Niceness - a secret weapon
• Making kindness my goal

Original post 1/22/15

Dark side of my nature - redux

“You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” John Gardner on maturity (quoted by David Brooks)

Given the choice, I would rather be liked than disliked - as a co-worker, a colleague, a relative, a neighbor. a human being. There is, I'm sure, some survival advantages to being likeable - one is less likely to have one's head bashed in, being able to live long enough procreate, when others feel an affinity toward you as a person. One's self-perception, after all, is in large part made up of reflections and reactions of others. At least mine is.

Yet the older I get, the less I worry about my popularity. I know things I do and say simply honk people off at times. Knowing that some people are just never going to love me isn't that important. It's even, as Gardner suggests, "quite relaxing." Many changes I made as a technology director during my career (switching to Gmail from Outlook, for example) royally pissed a few people off, and in meetings, little digs and questions let me know the change was an ongoing rub and that I was personally responsible for their unhappiness.

With some people, you just know nothing will satisfy them. No action will make them happy. Not one thing you can do will make them like you. And I'm OK with that.

In fact, the dark side of my nature asks, "What can I do to drive these people even a little more crazy?" since they will never like me anyway. I would love for someone to invent an ethernet cable that works when I am near and doesn't work when I am not around. (Maybe I will create a Kickstart campaign. Partners?)

I remember a tech once telling her principal, "Nothing I do seems to make you happy. But luckily you are a lot more fun to watch when your mad." I suspect she had long stopped worrying about her popularity with this disagreeable man.

Original post 1/8/15