The WorkGroup

Yesterday, I fixed a problem with an Excel Spreadsheet. To most people, that probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was to me.

I’m not a numbers person. Ever since I took my SAT’s in 11th grade, that fact has been painfully obvious. I’ve always been a classic verbal/linguistic with a heavy emphasis on the visual. Letters are my thing.

Upon assuming my quasi-administrative role, I knew that I’d have to make peace with, and live somewhat harmoniously with numbers, and the type of logical thought processes that go along with them. I knew I’d have to step out of my comfort zone to be successful in my new job.

One of the things I admire most about some of my students, and the attribute that I tend towrite most about on their college recommendations is their ability to function outside their comfort zone. Teaching mostly AP students, I get a lot of bright students who are “techies” that have a lot of trouble functioning in the largely verbal/linguistic world that is history. I love it when this type of kid excels, or even manages to keep their head above water in my course while they’re skating through their upper level chemistry, physics, robotics or engineering courses.

In teaching, and in any field, it’s good for all of us to function outside our comfort zone for a while. It could lead to some long term changes in the way we do business. For example, when I started in my district, I was predominately a verbal/linguistic learner, and taught the same way. Cy Resch, one of my colleagues, was, and still is, the King of the Visual. He showed me during our shared planning periods how to teach my entire Global History course visually. Cy helped me revolutionize my teaching and thinking.

It had profound effects on me as a learner also, since I applied what I now refer to as “Reschian” thinking to my Comprehensive Exam in grad school. I managed to condense two years and thousands of pages of reading into three pages of illustrations and diagrams that I recreated as soon as I sat down to write my essays. I’m a great paper writer, but not a good test taker, and was hoping just to pass. I passed with distinction, and I owe a lot of that success to Cy.

That’s why the prospect of budgeting and making sense of reams of data intimidates me. Two of my colleagues taught me how to make and use Excel spreadsheets. They worked great, and eased me somewhat painlessly into number crunching.

Until yesterday. One of the spreadsheets didn’t work the way it was supposed to. My first impulse was to call one of my colleagues for help, but I didn’t. I carefully worked through the spreadsheet, and found the root of the problem, applied what I knew about the spreadsheet and fixed it. Not only did I fix it, but I adapted it to make it work better for me.

How often do we as teachers, confine our teaching methods to our own comfort zone? We tend to find things that are easy for us to teach, and we retain techniques that worked great one year, whether they’re successful with future students or not. Having worked successfully with a spreadsheet now inspires me to grapple with some edgier technology, and now I’m wondering how I can apply spreadsheet applications to help me and my students to better understand history.

This really applies in any aspect of working. How often do we limit ourselves by sticking within the narrow confines of our comfort zone?