Elliot Washor's TGIF 04.04.2025

Are you with me now” A J Ryder

This week I had some great calls about BPLiving. First Shanna Mello from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine called about us partnering with them using our BPLiving materials with districts in South Carolina and Texas. Then, I talked with one of our BPLiving Fellows Jamie Brine in preparation for a Leaving to Learn (LTL) at Big Bang and his trip to Australia in The Fall. This LTL in Roger Williams Park is shaping up to be one incredible ‘park experience.’

My Zoom meeting with a group that the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put together around how we do internships and real-world learning was well-received. There were people from Wales, Finland, France and Canada on the Zoom. Similar to what goes on in the US, most of these countries were using internships either as an intervention for disengaged youth or a narrow selection of pathway options. When I explained our way of doing this work as an early prevention that keeps students engaged through their interests where what they do is meaningful and matters, they began to understand how this is the difference that makes the difference.

And… 

Today I was on a prep call for a panel taking place on Monday at the VerdeXchange around workforce development in the green and blue sector of the economy. Once again, the focus was on intervention through a few select pathways without necessarily following the interests of students from the get-go. At this conference, thousands of clean, green, and blue tech entrepreneurs, policymakers, financiers, and environmental stewards gather to figure out their next steps in this growing sector that includes all sorts of emerging skilled work that young people want to engage in because of their interests in the environment. Our Harbor Freight Fellows will be joining me. They will probably be the only young people at the conference. While I’m up in LA for the VerdeXchange at the same time during the ASU GSV conference about 60 attendees will be on a visit to the San Diego Met. Just yesterday, Anthonette ran a workshop for the Deeper Learning Conference taking a group of educators to an internship site at Auto Haven where a student from the San Diego Met who is also a Harbor Freight Fellow demonstrated his work. All this in a short period of time localized to conferences in Southern California.

Continued from Last week’s TGIF

Sally Rooney’s review of the world’s greatest snooker player’s book Unbreakable by Ronnie O’Sullivan has lots of implications for our work focused around, How do you do? And How do you know? Ronnie makes incredible shots without really knowing how he knows. The math here is incredibly complex. Snooker is not pool and is not chess. Computers can beat people in chess but not in snooker. It is way more complicated and difficult. And, to quote Sally Rooney:

“How is it possible for a snooker player to predict the outcomes of complex interactions in physics, with millimeter-level precision without appearing to perform any calculations at all?” And what does that mean for so many young people who just know but can’t say it when schools demand a written or verbal explanation. That’s tacit learning. Can anyone say IBPLC?

Twelve years ago, Yale Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley and John Krakauer Johns Hopkins Professor of Neurology wrote Is the Dumb Jock Really A Nerd? Here they make the case for movement to be included in the realm of cognition without verbally being able to express what you know or you being conscious of what you know. Here, doing is knowing. There are loads of cases like the one Stanley and Krakauer reference that I’ve collected over the years. Some are quite funny like the story of Dodger catcher John Roseboro describing how pitcher Sandy Koufax did what he did – Roseboro: “Trying to explain how he throws, how he got his control, how he thinks – he was just unfucking –usual. Who gives a shit how he threw it?”  And therein lies a long debated and mostly ignored part of understanding how we are smart and leveling the playing field around skilled trades and way more. This is one if not the biggest challenge we will face with the development of the IBPLC. Will it become a purely academic exercise of what we already measure but do it better or will we understand and, in the process, get others to understand the broader nature of how we are smart and the joy that brings us. That’s the bigger, bigger picture.

One more thing….

“The pool cue is a part of me. Ya know. It’s got nerves in it. It’s a piece of wood; it’s got nerves in it.”

As I read Sally Rooney’s review of Unbreakable, I couldn’t stop seeing the parallels between pool shark Paul Newsman plays as Fast Eddy Felson in The Hustler and snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan and author Sally Rooney and Piper Laurie’s portrayal of Sarah, the aspiring writer in The Hustler. My all-time favorite scene in a movie starts with: Sarah – Do you think I’m a Loser?

The movie segment is attached.

Be well!