Elliot Washor's TGIF 05.01.2026

Are you with me now? A J Ryder

Expression over perfection.

Playing over performing.

As Sarah Simon puts it: the growth is in the doing—not the perfection.

That line stayed with me all week.

I was back home in San Diego with Andrea, Taylor, and the San Diego Met crew, and it felt like one of those stretches where the work is the learning. We were focused on IBPLC development and training, but really, it was about being inside learning—messy, emergent, real.

Andrea’s scouting instincts led us to three “Leaving to Learn” sites, none of them over-planned, all of them full of possibility.

The first stop: the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s Gillespie Field Annex. A place humming with quiet potential—engineers, pilots, builders restoring aircraft from another era. You walk in and immediately feel it: students should be here. Not visiting—belonging. Interning. Contributing. Learning alongside people who know things that matter. It’s a kind of Habitat for Aviation waiting to happen.

We started imagining partnerships, pathways, internships—especially with folks like our soon-to-be ED.L.D. Intern Drew Barker, whose background in aeronautics could open doors quickly. All of it sparked by a hunch Andrea followed. That’s how this work moves.

Next day: kokedama at Kodama Forest.

And then Wednesday: the Big Picture Learning Room at UCSD—thanks to BPL board member Gary Kraut, who had the foresight to create a space in the education building that might pull us into deeper connection with the university. A simple move with long-term implications.

Each site carried its own learning conditions. Each pushed our conversations about IBPLC—how it lives in both informal and formal environments, how it supports reflection, judgment, and growth.

A quick pause on kokedama.

It’s an art form—part bonsai, part sculpture, not widely known here. A handcrafted moss ball, shaped like a small planet. Simple. Alive. Balanced.

Making them together mattered.

We were all beginners. No script. No certainty. And that’s where things got interesting—especially for educators who are used to knowing the outcome before they begin.

Using IBPLC as a frame, we reflected in real time: What does assessment look like when you don’t know what’s coming? How do you judge quality in the middle of uncertainty? That’s the work.

Andrea had never even been to these sites before bringing us. That added another layer—less control, more discovery. More engagement because of it.

‘Nuff said.

Something else happened this week.

You start reading one thing, and suddenly other ideas start finding you.

I came across Jerome Groopman’s review of Roxanne Khamsi’s Beyond Inheritance. The headline alone says it all: We are all constantly mutating—and that’s a good thing.

Think about that.

If genetics aren’t fixed—if they’re dynamic, responsive—then what does that say about the stories we tell in education?

“Demography does not equal destiny” has been a core belief for us. But we can’t say that on one hand and then shrug with “it runs in my family” on the other.

The science is catching up to the philosophy and hopefully will change people’s fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

This is where BPLiving sits—right in the middle of that tension. Identity as something you build, not inherit. Meaning as a search, not something assigned.

And then sadly, almost on cue, Craig Venter passed away. A giant in the Human Genome Project. I remember visiting his labs in San Diego—seeing our high school students listed as authors on a published scientific paper.

Venter himself didn’t fit the system. Struggled in school. Challenged everything.

And yet—there he was, reshaping how we understand life itself.

Makes you wonder maybe it’s not about fitting the system. Maybe it’s about mutating beyond it.

Back East

Back East, things are moving.

The START Center is coming online. Skill Trades Fellows are enrolling. BUnbound is ramping up to handle what’s coming.

The challenge is clear: how do we scale without losing the personal? How do we go big and stay small?

That’s the work ahead—and it’s work we’ve been waiting for.

Next week I’m in New Jersey—deep in skilled trades work. Time with Charlie, workforce partners, school districts, EASRCC, START Centers. And a podcast in Red Bank.

Some final meanderings that have been sitting with me:

• Growth mindset → growth → becoming

• Fixed mindset → fixed → outcomes

• Durable skills → academic origin → outcomes

• Mosaic mutations →  biological origin → becoming

Determinism says things are set.

But everything we’re seeing—in science, in learning, in life—points the other way.

It’s all more fluid than we were taught.

More happenstance than plan.

More becoming than outcoming.

Be well!