For me, idealism is a key ingredient of successful teaching and coaching.

A foundational belief is that anyone (not everyone, but anyone) can learn what I am trying to teach them. They have to be willing to put in the work and it might take awhile, but talent is overrated and effort is more important.

Unfortunately, this idealism is also a liability. When I can easily visualize how something could be, I can get frustrated that it is not that way. So instead of working within the bounds of an existing system, I want to change the entire system.

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I have decided that the upcoming semester will be the last at The Little Middle School.

To bring the program to an end as smoothly as possible, I'll be headed down to Atlanta for a few months to work directly with the students and teachers. Covid has been really hard on everyone, and I'll be functioning as a relief pitcher. Or maybe the closer.

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It's taken some time, but I finally understand that the act of knitting is only part of the process of knitting.

It's possible to spend dozens of hours knitting a sweater only to find that it is about five sizes too big (it's happened to me). If you want to avoid that, you swatch.

A swatch is an opportunity to see how a given stitch pattern is going to look in a given yarn, using a given needle size. You can sometimes get away with skipping this process if you are knitting a scarf or something where the size doesn't really matter, but that's short-sighted.

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After months of being too bummed out to even look at the numbers, I started budgeting again properly in January.

Of course, numbers are numbers. They are what they are, without emotion. Whether I choose to examine them or not doesn’t change their reality. But if I didn’t pay attention too closely, I didn’t have to deal with them. I didn’t have to deal with reality.

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How do we know that we’re doing the “right” volume of work?

I first learned of the concept of the minimum effective dose from Tim Ferriss, who got it from inventor and exercise expert Arthur Jones.

Jones applied the minimum effective dose (MED) idea to bodybuilding; Ferriss extended it to medications and food. Here, I apply it to schoolwork.

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