The metrics we understand

We can’t judge yesterday’s fashions by today’s standards. (Tyne & Wear Archives & Museum)

As a child, I would read anything I could get my hands on.

At least, I would try. I had a small collection of classics that had been gifted to me, novels from Wuthering Heights to Dune, but I didn't get past the first page of a number of them.

My sole consideration in deciding whether to continue reading was, "Does this grab me right away?" If it didn't, I didn't.

I've come to understand that there are other criteria I could use when choosing what to read. I know that, if I persist, I can get into a book that initially seemed less appealing (although I tried Wuthering Heights again last winter and found the characters to be hilariously unlikeable and not worth rooting for).

I now recognize that the metrics for which I have a frame of reference are not necessarily the most valuable — in fact, they may be utterly irrelevant to the situation.

At Eclectic Music, we've taken thousands of children through the experience of learning an instrument. Most of the time, their parents are not, themselves, musicians. So when we check in to ask how things are going with the lessons, the parents tend to speak to the teacher's personality and how much their child likes the teacher personally, as opposed to any pedagogical considerations.

In fact, many parents will ask for someone "young and cool" to take lessons with. They're not sure what else to ask for, and I don't blame them.

Then, they’re surprised when their kid bonds readily with a middle-aged veteran educator who isn't bubbly or hip but happens to be incredibly good at the job. No tattoos and no Instagram followers — just a really good teacher who knows how build a rapport and get results. A professional.

I've made this mistake a lot, to my eternal regret, of taking into account only the factors I’m familiar with when evaluating opportunities, information, and fellow humans. I went to high school with so many interesting and thoughtful people that I just didn't get. On the surface, we didn't have shared interests or activities, so I didn't try to go deeper. It never occurred to me that our very differences would have been enriching and world-opening to me. I was paying attention to the wrong things.

In my work at The Little Middle School, parents have had a hard time with the lack of grades over the years. Since right and wrong answers are easy to measure, schools use them as a proxy for learning. However, true learning is a process that unfolds over time. It has many markers, but they are difficult to quantify. Therefore, educational stakeholders focus on the metrics they understand.

Many of us do the same thing with money, fame, and social media followers. To our detriment, we get distracted from what is real by what is easy to see and measure. We might not even be aware of our bias, which compounds the problem.

As a teacher and coach, one of the most valuable things I do is help people to know what to look for — to focus on the metrics that actually matter. To help them become aware of what might otherwise be invisible to them and the biases they hold. Of course, this is what many mentors have done for me over the years as well.

It makes sense that we'd navigate through the unfamiliar by clinging to the familiar. But this limits us to our old way of seeing and thinking, and then we're going to get the results we've always gotten, too.

When we can pay attention to new frameworks and new ways of evaluating our progress and circumstances, the result may be nothing less than transformation, which brings with it still another lens through which to view the world and evaluate what's possible. In a sense, our uncertainty at how we might measure our development is, in itself, a sign of growth. The cycle never ends.