I was talking to a primary school teacher who has recently returned from 3+ years in the UK. She is currently struggling to get the time she spent working at a top London school recognised in her measly NZ salary.
I can’t decide what makes me more angry – that clearly relevant experience is ignored or the patently stupid fact that her pay is tenure based in the first place.
As it stands, I don’t expect we’ll enjoy her company here for long. She is already looking enviously at the better situation she could enjoy in Australia.
So, why do we have this system? Is there any evidence that teachers get better the longer they have spent on the job, or that the best teachers are those who have the longest tenure ? Is this the system that the best teachers prefer – i.e. do they prefer to just be paid in-line with everybody else?
Education is one of the three key area that Bill Gates has identified for his Foundation (the other two are Global Health and Poverty). In his first TED Talk he asked the question: “How do you make a teacher great?” and talked about three things he’s learned about this:
Past performance is the best indicator for future performance as a teacher – in other words, there is value in understanding how good a teacher is today
There is very little measurable difference after three years’ teaching – which doesn’t align very well with how teachers are usually compensated (see above)
Teachers are seldom told how good they are
The last point doesn’t really surprise me. Tenure means that managers can avoid difficult allocation decisions. Performance reviews are much easier – everybody is great, and those who have been around the longest are the greatest of all!
This is not a subject that I know a lot about, but I’m interested to learn more. How do we sensibly measure the performance of a teacher, track that over time, report that information back to teachers to help them improve, and ensure that we are rewarding and retaining the best? How can we encourage the best teachers to work at the worst schools, rather than the best schools as they currently tend to? If you have it, please point me at any details about how well we do in these respects in New Zealand.
I’m also interested to learn who benefits from the current system – it definitely doesn’t seem to be the best teachers. I’m assuming that somebody is winning as the result of the status quo? I think they should probably have some sunlight applied to them.
Without wanting to state the obvious, I haven’t been writing much lately. There is normally an inverse relationship between the frequency of posts on this blog and how busy I am. And so it has been. But that is no excuse.
I don’t stop thinking of things to write, and all the more as I busy myself with interesting work. So the main consequence at this stage is a bloated but much neglected drafts folder.
I spoke last night at the second Ignite Wellington event. It was fun – thanks to Amie, Catherine, Kirk (the true star of the show) and Siobhan for putting it all together and giving me the opportunity.
I spoke about lying and cheating – not exactly a topic that I can talk to with any real authority (while I lie and cheat all the time, just like you do, we all do it mostly instinctively). Somehow I picked the short straw and got to kick things off. But, I think it went okay, and it allowed me to sit back and enjoy all of the other speakers.
It’s a great format, accommodating a bunch of speakers on wildly different topics. My favourites were Emma on wallpaper and Tash on knitting.
Here are my five tips for getting ready to speak at Ignite:
Feel the fear. Do it anyway. Yes, it’s terrifying to stand up in front of a big audience and speak. Get over it. It’s a wonderful feeling when you’re finished, not dissimilar to the endorphins you get at the end of a long race. Focus on that, relax and enjoy it.
Choose your subject carefully. The point I wanted to make is something that has been bubbling in my head for a while, so this was a good way to force me to think about it properly and articulate it. You have lots of similarly interesting thoughts, I’m sure, so get them out. The best Ignite talks are often people talking about something they just find interesting rather than something they are necessarily expert in. People attend to be entertained and enlightened, so keep that in mind.
Work with the format. You get just 20 slides and 15 seconds per slide. You need to work quite hard to fit in with that. I recommend writing your speech out in full on paper first. Organise it into 20 sections, so you can start to think about the slides that you’ll use. Then delete at least half the words. You can’t say as much in 15 seconds as you think you can – probably only a couple of sentences. It’s much better to say less than to have to talk like the Micro-Machine Man to fit everything in. And, writing shorter sentences forces you to choose words carefully, which is always for the better.
Make beautiful slides. The last thing you want to do is fill the screen with words – people can’t read much in 15 seconds and, anyway, they will be wanting to listen to what you’re saying. Pictures always work. Choose something that relates to what you’re going to say, if for no other reason than as a useful reminder to yourself as you present, but err on the side of interesting rather than a perfectly relevant (the Creative Commons search and “Interestingness” filter on Flickr are your friends here). If you do use text then force yourself to use a large font so you have to keep it brief. Repeat one of the sentences you’re planning to say, to emphasis a point. Or just use single words on their own. And, there is no rule to say you have to use Ariel, Verdana or Times Roman.
Rehearse. Lots. You only have to speak for 5 minutes. So, you can practice the whole thing hundreds of times, if you need to. Set up a computer with your slides and practice your timing, talking out loud. Yes, that will feel silly, but until you’re actually speaking the words you don’t know how long they take to say and you don’t know how they actually sound. Then, change it so they auto-advance every 12 seconds rather than every 15 seconds and practice again – this is actually much more like how it will feel on the night when the slides can seem to fly by much faster that you expect (thanks to Dave Ten-Have for this tip). Then get a friend or family member to listen and laugh at the appropriate points in your talk (hopefully where you intended to be funny), which will force you to pause and say even less. By then you will have it nailed and will be able to do it in your sleep!
You’ll be great. I’m already looking forward to it!
I think that “a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve” might be the best one-line description of parenting that I’ve come across. And “[kids] are a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit” is a very close second.
For what it is worth, this is my advice for new parents…
Don’t lock them in a cupboard
Don’t drop them on their head
It’s pretty well established, I think, that doing both of these things is likely to lead to problems.
Even if you do one of these things, it may still be okay provided you don’t do the other.
Anything else you do or don’t do may or may not help, but probably won’t hurt too much either.
Either way, and most importantly, don’t get too hung up on the advice you’re sure to get from every other man and his dog, because it’s likely based on too small a sample size anyway. :-)
“Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”
– Thomas Edison
“I used to think I had ambition… but now I’m not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They’re easily confused.”
“If necessity is the mother of invention, discontent is the father of progress.”
– David Rockefeller
“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”
– Jim Rohn
“I wonder if ambition can be adjusted by teaching someone to live in the future. It feels like an entirely trainable skill. If you spend enough time thinking about how things can or will be, I suppose it becomes a habit. And to the extent that you think you can influence that future, perhaps you become ambitious as a side effect.”
– Scott Adams
This talk is from the first Ignite Wellington event held back in February.
Unfortunately I was out of town and wasn’t able to attend in person, so I’m pleased to see some of the videos from the interesting list of speakers have been posted.
“So, what might be the best of green design for 2010 are the things that don’t get designed. Don’t design me a new iPhone, figure out how to make my old one last. Don’t design me a new “green house”, figure out how to make the one I have more efficient. Don’t sell me physical objects, help me re-purpose the ones I have or otherwise give me digital tools for a higher quality of life that don’t require Chinese injection moldings.”
That is, a single button, probably located somewhere by the front door, which we can use when we’re leaving or when we got to bed in the evening, which turns off all of the lights and all of the appliances that don’t need to stay in stand-by.
If you’re building a new house then getting this sort of thing setup is relatively easy, if not cheap. Either way, I don’t think it would be too hard to justify the cost of installation if you ran the numbers, as I’d hate to think how much of our monthly power bill is wasted on these two things alone.
But, if this sort of stuff is so expensive that it’s only installed in new homes then the savings will be a long time coming.
Who is solving this sort of problem for old/existing homes?
“Although I endorse those who attempt to spend their time defying gravity (the world needs these people), I simply think students simply forget that the real world is not graded by professors with untamed beards. Students are largely unaware that they could realize just as much success, or perhaps even more success, if they point their incisive intellect at simpler, “stupider” problems. So why don’t they? Because these problems are typically unsexy, considered to lack academic rigor.”
I’m recently back from spending a few weeks in Africa. While there we visited some impressive non-profit organisations and got up close to some amazing wildlife. Below are four short summaries which hopefully give a flavour of the trip.
1. Don’t mention the war
When I would tell people I was visiting Africa, and list off the countries we planned to go to, it was always Rwanda which triggered the raised eyebrows. Unfortunately the country is now forever associated with the word ‘genocide’, which makes it a tough sell from a tourism perspective.
So, arriving there I didn’t really know what to expect, and I was right!
The capital, Kigali, is a busy city. Taxi-motos buzz in all directions, with both drivers and passengers wearing distinctive green crash helmets. All around is evidence of investment – roads being repaired and buildings going up. Mobile phone towers mark the skyline. Unlike many other third-world cities, you are immediately struck by the cleanliness of the place. Plastic bags have been banned by the government, and there are regular civic days when everybody is expected to clean up public areas. People are friendly and care about their appearance.
Nobody seems inclined to spend too much time dwelling on their horrible recent past, to be honest – they are all far too busy trying to improve their future.
We visited some genocide sites, including a church on the outskirts of the city, where 10,000 people were massacred. The victims’ blood-soaked clothes are kept as a memorial. Down in the crypts are the remains, including some skulls with visible signs of a common killing method – a machete to the side of the head. These places have a similarly eerie feeling to Holocaust memorial sites, although here all of this violence occurred only 15 years ago, and the fighting continues today over the border in the Congo. It’s chilling to think that everybody over the age of 25 was likely involved in all of this somehow, and not many of them came out of it looking good. Given that, it’s a miracle that the country functions at all.
Out of town the paved roads give way to rich brown dirt tracks, and the steep hillsides quickly become covered in thousands of tiny small-plot farms. Most of these belong to subsistence farmers (i.e. people who eat everything they grow, and would eat more if they could grow more).
We visited an organisation in Nyamasheke in the south of the country called One Acre Fund (or “Tubura” locally). They work with farmers to help them improve their yields by providing credit for better seeds and fertilizer as well as training (teaching people to plant in rows etc). They work from the bottom up, starting with the obstacles for individual farmers who are typically working with really tiny areas of land. In the place we visited they have about 15% of farmers using their services. Given that these people have on average increased their income by over 70% since joining the program, why isn’t this ratio higher? We asked one of their customers who explained that partly it is because others had heard that in rich countries people didn’t like using fertilizer anymore because it was bad for their health. Where do you start with that? I was tempted to try and explain that many people in the first world pay good money to try and stay as slim and as fit as she is, but couldn’t find the right words.
Traveling north we flew over stunning lakes which would not have looked out of place in Marlborough or Fiordland. We arrived in Ruhengeri at dusk, and as we watched the sunset over the nearby volcanoes the valley below filled with smoke from the wood fires cooking dinner. The next morning we got up early and trekked into the national park to see the mountain gorillas. We visited a family called Group 13. They are Agashya, a 200kg silverback, 9 females and 12 children. After walking for about an hour through the bamboo forest we suddenly come across them. They are stunning creatures and it’s a privilege to be able to be so close to them. The guides warn you to not point and to adopt a submissive stance, but they don’t have to tell you to shut up – that comes naturally as soon as you see them, the only sound to be heard is the click of camera shutters. We sat with them for about 20 minutes before torrential rain set in. At that point they all curled up and looked at us getting increasingly soaked as if to say “seriously, you’re still here?”. Even as the risk of hypothermia increased, this was not an experience we wanted to miss.
Rwanda is a beautiful country. If you have the chance to visit I throughly recommend it.
Mapendo is an organisation that works with the most desperate of refugees. After showing us around their office in Nairobi, Kenya, and explaining a little about what they do, they took us to visit a Congolese family living in the city, who they are currently supporting with rent and food, and helping with their application to relocate to the US.
The family is a mother, about my age, and her six kids (her husband was taken by rebels during the fighting and is missing, presumed dead), plus her 16 year old step-daughter who has two newborn kids of her own (a consequence of being raped by her former employer in Kenya). They all escaped from a refugee camp where they were treated pretty poorly, by all accounts – about as poorly as you can imagine, in fact. They all live in a single room in a large apartment block, about 2m x 5m. They fold out bedding at night, and during the day it doubles as a mat to sit on. There is no furniture. Pots and pans for cooking are piled up on a shelf on one wall and by a shared sink outside. When we arrived they turned on the single incandescent light bulb that lights the room, previously left off to save on power.
We spoke a bit with the kids. The younger ones are in school and speak some English (much better than I do Swahili, anyway). We asked why they were not at school that day: “Because you came to visit” they explained, to our embarrassment. The most chatty was about 8 years old. “What are you going to do when you leave school?” we asked. “Play football for Liverpool” was his immediate answer. We tried to explain that was a long shot, and it might pay to have a backup plan, but he was adamant: “I’m very good” he beamed back. The oldest, who is 18 years old and is effectively the father in the family now, was carrying a beaten up dictionary. He is too old for school, but is obviously keen to learn still. I showed them some photos of my kids on an iPhone which they seemed to find quite amusing. Like kids everywhere they didn’t worry about how to use it, they just started playing with it and quickly worked it out.
It costs about US$500 per person to help these sort of people jump to the front of the UNHCR resettlement program queue, and eventually escape their circumstances. Once you’ve stood in their “house” you’re hard pressed to argue that is not money well spent. It’s not difficult to imagine, if they do manage to get to the US, that they could land on their feet – who knows what they will be within one or two generations.
Future football star, or something
3. Investing in slums
It takes a certain kind of person to look at thousands of the poorest people living in slums, like Kibera in Nairobi, or at rural farmers struggling to feed their family let alone anything more than that, and see an opportunity to invest rather than merely gift.
During the trip we were lucky to meet a few people like this, who understand that what poor people really need most is not sympathy but income, who understand how important incentives are, who measure impacts rather than outputs, and who understand that to make any sort of dent they need to create an organisation which exists beyond their own contribution.
I was introduced to Martin Fisher from Kickstart when he visited New Zealand last year. He said enough in that brief meeting to convince me, and it was great to be able to visit him in Kenya and see the work he’s doing first hand (I also understand a little about incentives, and am comfortable admitting that there is a selfish motive for me in donating to organisations working in interesting places I can visit – see Holy Cow! my post about my previous trip to Nepal, for example).
Kickstart run a business which sells irrigation pumps to farmers. They took us to visit some of their customers. Typically these are people who previously irrigated by carrying water to their crops in a bucket. With the pumps they can significantly increase their yields, giving them income to reinvest one way or another. A popular option it seems is building a better house for themselves, and we were invited to visit a few of these houses when we visited the farms – they are usually obvious in that they are constructed of bricks and have metal roofs, as opposed to the mud and thatch alternatives which are more common. Kickstart have also successfully created an eco-system around these products, which creates opportunities for other small business, like farm supply stores who sell the pumps for a small margin, and repair men who provide routine maintenance. Currently for every $1 that is donated to support the organisation they are able to deliver about $15 of additional farmer income, meaning it costs about $300 to permanently lift a family out of poverty.
In Nairobi we spent a morning with Jay Kimmelman from Bridge International. In his previous life he was founder and CEO of Edusoft in the US. Visiting the slums in the city he made a simple observation – the reason poor kids aren’t learning is because nobody is teaching them. So, he set up a business which builds and runs private schools in the poorest areas. Parents pay about US$4 a month in school fees, and as a result pay close attention to the education which is delivered. The way these schools are set up is amazing – everything has been thought through and planned and is part of an overall system to ensure that the right service is delivered as efficiently as possible – a so-called “school in a box” covering everything from curriculums to recruitment of teachers and managers through real estate (finding and purchasing sites for schools at reasonable prices) and construction. Jay is not messing about – he is creating systems which will allow him to build hundreds, then thousands of schools. He started with one school, proving that he could deliver the service at the required cost point, and that people would be prepared to pay. He puts a huge amount of effort into testing and measuring results, so he can guarantee that the educational outcomes are good. Actually, they are spectacular, even compared to schools in the first world. I was interested to hear him explain the top three teaching goals which form the basis of their curriculum: 1) Reading with Understanding, 2) Maths, 3) Critical Thinking (the third one especially is missing in action in many first world schools). Now he is scaling up quickly – recently opening five schools at once to prove that could be done, and now many more, forcing the organisation to continue to refine and automate processes and systems so that nothing breaks. And this is a proper business – rather than asking for donations to fund the early stages of the business he sold shares and retains a good percentage for himself – he expecting all of this to make a profit too!
Those are just two examples. There are more like this, such as Living Goods who we visited in Uganda, and Komaza and Nuru International who are working in rural Kenya.
I was impressed by the way these organisations are using technology. About 80% of the parents whose kids attend Jay’s schools pay via mobile phone (everybody, it seems, has a pre-pay phone and payment systems like M-PESA seem to work well). They have created an entire command line operating system for their school managers to use running on top of SMS, for everything from authorising payroll to reporting test scores. They use handheld GPS devices to mark out potential school sites, and the data is automatically uploaded into Google Maps where they can check size and location and check for existing titles etc (not a simple matter in the slums). We even met a group who use face recognition in Picasa to authenticate customers who want to withdraw money from the community bank they run as part of their program – it will seem a bit old school typing in a PIN number next time I use an ATM in New Zealand!
These organisations are also all very focussed on measuring their impact. They are not so fussed about the number of pumps sold or the number of schools built – they are much more interested in the amount of money that farmers earn by using the pumps and how many kids are educated to an acceptable level. While it can feel a little clinical to talk about people as numbers the alternative is to focus just on outputs or, worse, completely ignore the impact and just think about the warm fuzzies you get when you donate.
… and on hose (this is Martin, the inventor of the pump we’re using)
This grandma earns more than both her sons combined, and proudly showed us the new house she and her husband have built with their profits. She was very nervous when I was taking these photos, as she didn’t want me to show the table empty – it would be considered rude to invite guests in without offering them food.
The most impressive Avon lady in Uganda
Home Sweet Home
4. Wildlife worth protecting
How do you stop poachers from killing off the amazing rare wildlife in a place like the Luangwa Valley in Zambia?
To finish the trip we visited an organisation called Comaco, run by an impressive American called Dale Lewis, who has been living in Zambia for many years and who has come up with an interesting answer.
He works with local farmers to add value to the commodity crops they grow. Bouncing along in the back of a truck, down a long dirt road full of pot holes that you could easily lose a small car in, he took us to visit the factory. Women are employed to sift the grains. They can choose to be paid a fixed rate or a per-kilo rate (they all choose the later). Inside there is a simple manufacturing setup for peanut butter and honey and mielie meal. Everybody wears white coats and gloves. Staff carefully weigh packed products, then use a heat gun to add a security seal to the package. The finished items are sold in the capital, Lusaka, and also in local stores.
The profits from all of this are feed back to the farmers and local community in the form of bonus payments, to provide incentives to locals to stop poaching. They now have over 25,000 farmers working with them, and in the process have confiscated thousands of guns and snares previously used to hunt bush meat to trade for food and money.
And, the wildlife that is protected is spectacular. We went into the National Park at dawn and dusk and were able to see giraffe, hippo, and hundreds of elephants, as well as more zebra than we could count. After dusk we found a small pride of lions, and tracked them with the spotlight – we were assured that this doesn’t bother them as much as you’d think, which is important because the only thing between them and us was a camera!
Having all of these animals walking around right around the car, close enough to touch, is truly breathtaking.
I’ve been looking for an excuse to try out Ponoko for a couple of years.
Recently I was clearing out a box of old stuff and found a neat piece of kiwi history – an old cardboard flag handed out at a street parade held in 1987 to welcome home the losing (as in “you’re a loser get off the stage”) America’s Cup team. The reason I had kept this all these years is not really relevant to this story. What’s important is that on the back there is a stylised moko design, which I’ve always thought was choice, and that gave me an idea…
I started with a hi-resolution scan of the flag. You can see it’s gone a bit yellow over time and there are a few creases which showed up as marks:
I loaded this into Aviary, and converted it to a vector format. I was pleasantly surprised how well this worked out of the box – there were a couple of rough edges that needed to be tidied up, and the connection between the eyes and eyebrows were a bit of a mess, but otherwise it was pretty much good to go:
My first attempts to upload this as a design to Ponoko didn’t work at all – it just came through as an empty design file with no edges for the laser to cut. After a bit of frustrated messing around, I eventually enlisted some professional help – James from BandIt imported the file I had into Adobe Illustrator and tweaked the colours and thickness of lines a bit, to produce something like this:
That worked a treat. I selected a material – frosted white acrylic – and clicked “Make It”. A few dollars and a week or so later the package arrived, still smelling of fresh laser cut plastic:
I scored a frame and some coloured card from an art shop, and got gluing:
Unfortunately my choice of material had let me down – the translucency of the acrylic was not opaque enough to stop the glue showing through as dark blobs, and the red backing card made it look like he had a bad case of the measles:
So, back to the drawing board. I tried two different materials for the second iteration – white acrylic (not translucent this time) and also technoply beech:
Both worked out well. The plastic suits the frame a little better, I think. But my favourite is the the wood – the sides are burnt by the laser cutting and as a result have a nice darker colour, and the grain makes it look more organic:
Overall I was pretty impressed with the Ponoko process.
It’s definitely satisfying to make something, no matter how much of a novice you are (I am!)
I’m keen to share this design file on Ponoko, if others are interested, but I have no idea what the copyright on this design is (if anybody does please let me know). So, for now, if you’d like one of these for your own wall send me an email and I’ll see what I can do.
My tips:
The hardest part is finding a design worth making :-)
If you’re not a designer you may want to have one on hand to help you out with wrangling the different file formats if required.
Be prepared to take a few attempts to get your design made well – although “well” will be variable depending on how much of a perfectionist you are (I am!)
Selecting the correct material is important, and it’s hard to know exactly what the result will be until you see it.
Small pieces and small kids don’t mix (note the missing eyes in two of the three final versions I made – asking a 5 year old to mind the bits while you glue is not recommended!)
Be prepared to look at things quite differently, once you realise that you can make anything you can draw.
Give it a go – you might be surprised how crafty you can be.
Bonus:
Some iPhone wallpapers I made from the same base design file:
(click to download full size versions)
