The article and its premise got me thinking. Thinking about how and why we tend to look for meaning so much more in a crisis. Thinking about how much richer life is when we do find that meaning. How it expands our world-view and makes us more empathetic and unselfish and grateful.

This type of crisis can be broad (e.g., our economic crisis), but it can also be as specific as it was a couple weeks ago when Captain Chesley Sullenberger was somehow able to land his US Airways plane in the Hudson River without losing a single life. How many of us got teary-eyed while reading the stories of the passengers and their families that came out in the days following the event? How many of us looked at the world a little more wide-eyed, hugging our spouse and kids a little longer than usual? I know I did. And I know those passengers and their families and friends are forever changed. I know partly from experience.

Last January, my then five-year-old daughter, Roxie (who has special challenges caused by mitochondrial disease, which weakens her muscles, brain, and lungs), was fighting for her life in a hospital ICU. Her lungs were attacked by a virus that triggered secondary pneumonia making it very difficult for her to breathe. As a result she spent about three weeks in the hospital. One day it got so bad, in fact, that several doctors and nurses had to manually help her breathe for over an hour. During that time, my wife and I truly thought we might lose our daughter. We found ourselves holding each other, repeating half-silent prayers, begging any higher power that would listen to “please help Roxie.”

Roxie did make it, and a couple weeks later, we were home and very happy as life got back to normal.

But it didn’t get completely back to normal. The experience changed us. Over the next few months, I found myself engaging in more and more long conversations with friends, family, and even complete strangers, searching for meaning and human interaction.

Reflecting on these examples, I think at some point, in any kind of crisis, we realize that we don’t have control over everything, that we must rely on others, to trust others to help us. We start to see beauty in things. We start to find more meaning in everyday interactions, and we realize that “hey, maybe I really can live in the moment.” We find ourselves looking through a different filter than we previously had.

I think this is what those passengers on US Airways flight 1549 are feeling. And I think this type of experience is happening in some small way across the nation as each of us deals with the uncertainty and instability of these changing times. More and more of us are understanding how important it is to listen, to pay attention to the stories of other people, other nations, and other religions. People want to stand for something. We want meaning in our everyday lives, and we are starting to understand that to find that meaning, that beauty, we’ve got to slow down, look around, and breathe.

1. Majora Carter “Greening the Ghetto”
A moving talk about environmental racism and how she plans to reinvigorate the economy and the environment in the South Bronx which also serves as her home.

2. Sir Ken Robinson “Do Schools Kill Creativity”
Creativity expert, Ken Robinson, says that, in a massive disservice to our youth, the public education system is extinguishing individual creativity. One of his particularly good lines (of many) goes as such: “Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles in which we are educating our children.”

3. Jill Bolte Taylor “My Stroke of Insight”
A brain scientist recounts what happened when she experienced her own massive stroke and encourages us all to spend more time in our right brain.

4. Dave Eggers “TED Prize Wish: Once Upon A School”
Dear Everyone: Find a student, help them with their schoolwork, and bask in the positive effects this movement will have on the education of our nation’s youth.

5. Nicholas Negroponte “TED in the Field: Bringing One Laptop per Child to Colombia”
The founder of One Laptop per Child is changing lives and helping nations by bringing laptops to kids in developing countries. He explains, “Think of this as inoculating children against ignorance and think of the laptop as a vaccine.”

To engage an audience is to “invite” it to experience something interesting, meaningful, and relevant – and in context. But, the invitation alone is not enough. The outcome of relevant, engaging instruction must be an inspired and motivated audience that will explore the subject more deeply and more personally.

This cycle of willing and enthusiastic exploration by the audience – connecting with the subject, reflecting on it, assessing its value and real-life application, and putting new concepts into practice – is a vital element of successful instruction and evidence that genuine learning is taking place.

This period of reflection is crucial to designing relevant instruction. Reflection reinforces how the content, concepts, behaviors, and experiences are relevant and important, and when built in to the instruction, guides learners to find and make personal connections to the subject. If it feels personally connected to the subject, the audience will “take ownership” of its learning experience, resulting in a natural and willing desire to know more.

Successful instruction must also build in assessment tools, for instructors and audiences. Instructors must be able to gauge the impact of their instruction and materials. More importantly, audiences must gauge their own learning levels and experience the connection that comes with “getting it.” The subject “clicks into place” for the audience, preparing participants to put new concepts into practice and real-life application.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been interviewing wilderness/outdoors educators on their best practices for bringing teenagers into natural environments. In fact, I’m leaving today for I just returned from a wild Wyoming weekend and another round of interviews.

As I was preparing for the trip, I’ve been reviewing footage of the previous interviews and reflecting on what I’ve heard. One quote in particular continues to circle back to the front of my mind. It goes something like this:

When you’re talking about experiential learning, .. the nature of experience is that it’s a kind of a trial, a testing, an experiment, in a sense. So you are experimenting with things. You are attempting things, and the whole concept of an experiment is that you’re not quite sure of the outcome. You can’t guarantee it, or it wouldn’t be an experience you are having.

The context of that quote was of running a challenging whitewater rapid in a canoe. But it needn’t relate only to that. In fact, I think it’s every bit as relevant for parents in our everyday efforts to compel our kids outside and allow them to explore.

The easy solution is to be the helicopter parent we all tell ourselves we’re not. The more difficult choice — and the more rewarding one — is to send your children outside and then let your kids be kids. They tend to be pretty good at that. Let them — encourage them! — to explore, to experiment, and to test their own limits. Bruises and scratches rarely result in lasting harm. Even an occasional broken bone isn’t the end of the world. In fact, in some cases it may be the very beginning.

Today has been tough. I went to school today to tutor the 4th grader with whom I’ve been working since the beginning of the school year. She wasn’t in class. Her teacher explained that sometimes her mom can’t physically get her to school. You see, they’re homeless.

Wow. Stop. Ok, so someone I know and care about is homeless. Does not have a home. A sweet, 9-year-old girl who I have bonded with over the past several months is homeless?

After the initial batch of tears stopped flowing down my cheeks (come on, you know you saw that coming), I sat down and talked with the teacher for a little while. Ashwood Creek is a high poverty school, as we all know. Most kids get free or reduced lunch. Most kids live with only one parent – usually mom. And today I found out, according to this teacher, that 1 in 6 students does not have a permanent home. Statistics can be powerful, but today they became very personal to me.

So, you ask, why am I writing this email? First, to ask you to be nice to me today.

Second, I’m going to make an appeal. There are 300 kids in that school. Only a handful have mentors, but I’m pretty sure close to all of them could use some one-on-one attention. Renee, for example, who is in my student’s class. Today, she came over to give me a hug when she saw me crying. Almost every other time I’ve been there, she’s asked her teacher why she can’t have a mentor too. If you or anyone you know could spare just 45 minutes a week, there is a student right around the corner who needs you. A child who may be dealing with issues that most of us could not imagine dealing with as adults. A child who – just as my student did today without even being there – may shock you into realizing how much you take for granted. (I’ve certainly done a lot of self-reflecting today and will hug the bejeebers out of my family tonight.)

Please let me know if you or anyone you know has any interest in mentoring sweet Renee or any of the other students at Ashwood Creek. Thank you for considering it!

Needless to say, I was extremely moved by her appeal, by the power that her story held. It turns out others were, too. It’s personal and direct, and as a result, it’s very compelling. So compelling, in fact, that because of this story being forwarded around, it resulted in seven new mentors that very day with more commitments very likely to come.

Now that’s good storytelling, and it’s the kind of communication all of us should be doing more of, whether in our personal lives, or our professional ones. Personal and direct are the keys to authenticity.

Even though I grew up within 30 miles of Cassadaga, I claim no such psychic abilities. Well, there was this one time …

No. I’ll spare you that tale for now, and instead I’ll consult my crystal ball and share some of my predictions for the cable television industry for 2009 (with particular focus on education outreach).

• Web content extras will expand to include education. Overall, programming extras developed for devices other than TVs will continue to take a more prominent role. Fortunately, as everyone expands the definition of programming, the industry will start to take better advantage of what the Web offers for education. I’m excited by the prospect of interactives that imbed original and/or repurposed content to engage audiences in deeper experiences, while also providing ad sales with a vehicle for contextual product placement.
  
• Video on Demand (VOD) will take more prominence in offering educational content. Much like the potential of the Web’s coming closer to realizing its potential, the promise of VOD (potential that has been discussed for years) will take a big step forward. The rising numbers of digital users and greater comfort with VOD combined with the “sponsorability” of VOD content will catalyze the leap. Of course, it will fall flat if the content isn’t engaging and educational.
• Partnerships will become more codependent. In tight economic times everyone becomes more strategic, right? The cable industry has always been a leader in promoting partnerships — driven to tout the nonprofit partners’ work and driven by enlightened self-interests to tout their support of partners’ missions. (MTV springs to mind.) Still, stroking the checks won’t be like it once was, so all entities will look to take better advantage of the strengths of their brands with audiences and stakeholders and maximize the impact of reach and engagement. Education is a vehicle that can fully leverage this partner codependency.
  

All right. My guaranteed-to-happen predictions are out there. Okay, maybe they’re not as sure of a thing as there being questionable wardrobe decisions during awards season. Maybe there’s a degree of hope built in. Perhaps I should’ve swung through Cassadaga for some confirmation when I was down in Central Florida over New Year’s …

Teens are savvy consumers of information and know what they are getting.

Ellen Goodman, nationally-syndicated writer for the Boston Globe, started the new year off with a bang. She devotes her first column of 2009 to the failure of virginity pledges (specifically) and abstinence-only sex education (generally). A Johns Hopkins study showed no differences between those who sign virginity pledges and those who don’t — in their frequency of sexual activity and the age at which they become sexually active. The striking difference between the two groups, however, was in their use of contraception — virginity pledgers are much less likely to use contraception.

The quotation above from the study’s lead researcher jumped out at me — not because it’s Earth-shattering in its insight, but because it’s an idea that too few people appreciate. Teens have always been more perceptive and savvy than many adults recognize. Today, in a world of information overload, they’re especially savvy — particularly when it comes to ferreting out fiction built on fear (a la the specious information that can be touted in abstinence-only curricula).

I believe strongly that our attitudes and behavior (particularly when a change is involved a la New Year’s resolutions) must be motivated internally. Education should provide the external motivation and guidance that influences what we ultimately decide internally. That motivation and guidance must be credible and relevant for it to affect the internal motivators. Okay. I’m venturing off into Esoteric Land, capital Pedagogy City.

But I do want to mention one of our earlier projects and the approach that we took in providing effective external motivation and guidance. Our client was the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation, and our challenge was educate middle school students on the dangers of performance enhancing drugs (steroids, et al) AND encourage them to sign … yes, a pledge not to take PEDs.

The curriculum centered on a series of fictional audio diaries of middle school students learning about PEDs who were encouraged to sign … yes, a pledge not to take PEDs. We developed diaries for four students, each of whom had a different take on whether to sign it and why (or why not) to sign it. The diaries gave us a convention for peer modeling — a way for students to identify with peers AND peer into their thought processes. In essence, the diairies articulated the internal motivators of fictional characters, which in turn acted as external guides and motivators for our real students.

Of course, our client’s goal was to have thousands and thousands of students across the country sign the pledge, so that was our goal, too. However, we all wanted those thousands and thousands of students who signed the pledge (or didn’t, for that matter) to do so consciously (not reflexively) because they were motivated by accurate and compelling information — information presented in a way that played to their savvy nature and avoided over-simplified, fear-based “education.”

With this starkness came a personal realization. How many things, activities, interests have I neglected? How many opportunities have I simply overlooked because they were under my nose but I was not paying attention? What clutter have I kept around, out of habit vs. need? This metaphor gave me pause.

I have started to really take stock of activities in my life and determine necessity and/or frivolity. Sure the economy is a big driver. But last fall, when the Southeast had gas shortages, I questioned the need of a car each day with such a short commute. I plan to buy a bike in the spring.

I also plan to try this approach with new items on my radar as well as those things I have always done simply because I have always done them. At one point in my life, I even used this logic to rationalize smoking.

Even though it’s winter, for me, it is a good time to clean out my closet.