Elliot Washor's TGIF 09.18.2026

Are you with me now? AJ Ryder

Alone Together – Dave Mason or Sherry Turkle?

First off, congratulations on the inaugural flight of Class of 2006 by Andrew, Sam Broun and all of the advisees. What a re great start. More to come. Here’s the info for participating in the Episode #2 Talkback.

This week, lots of meetings and work continued around the skilled trades—both from land and at sea.

That included meetings with Connie Yowell and Sasha Goldman from Northeastern University about their work moving into the credentialing arena to train and certify welders in Connecticut at Electric Boat. Andrea and Drew joined the Zoom to bring their perspectives from both the IBPLC and Drew’s knowledge of shipyard work.

Also, this past Monday in Providence, I connected Nancy Diaz and Brian Mills with Connie Yowell around the work both groups are doing with Electric Boat. There are some interesting possibilities emerging as these different efforts begin to find one another.

I also met with Shameka Gerald and her team down in Newport News, where we are part of a new initiative called All Hands. They are doing work similar to our START Centers in New Jersey, using B-Unbound programming to help connect young people to opportunities in the shipyards. We have lots to share —and lots to learn from one another—as this work continues to bloom up and down the East Coast and across the country.

Collectively, this work is bringing together B-Unbound, the IBPLC, Harbor Freight Fellows, and our START Centers into a meshwork of partnerships that continues to grow, connect, and learn from one another.

Our local work in San Diego is also connected to the trades, both on land and at sea. In late October, our San Diego team will convene a broad group of industry, union, school district, youth development, and university partners around our work in advisory, real-world learning, and the IBPLC. The larger goal is to help make San Diego County a hub for educational innovation that can inform work across the rest of California.

And in mid-October, I’ll be up in Seattle and Port Townsend speaking at the Teaching With Small Boats Alliance (TWSBA) conference. Quite a few TWSBA programs use elements of the BPL design in a youth development setting. In fact, that connection started even before B-Unbound was around.

What strikes me about all of this is how the work keeps connecting. Welding, shipbuilding, carpentry, small boats, internships, credentials, mentors, unions, schools, and universities may look like separate pieces. But increasingly, they are becoming part of the same meshwork of meaningful work—one that gives young people more ways to learn through real work, alongside adults who know how to build, make, fix, and teach.

Our proposals to ECMC and LA Futures went in this week as well.

The ECMC proposal expands our work around awarding college credit for learning in the skilled trades—credit that can lead to associate and bachelor’s degrees while apprentices and journeymen are working. EASRCC has been doing this for years, but we are now looking to expand both the breadth and depth of this work by recognizing and crediting the learning that happens on the jobsite, in training centers, and through real-world experience.

The LA Futures proposal is, shall we say, a labor of love? Sonn and Andrea have taken the lead on this one, which builds on ImBlaze and our approach to paid internships, with advisors supporting students in LA Unified schools. The proposal would provide paid internship opportunities for 6,000 students over three years.

Our partners are Javier Guzman and his organization, the Center for Powerful Public Schools, along with Linked Learning. This partnership is yet another example of relationships growing out of the California Secondary School Redesign work. All three organizations already have deep experience working in Los Angeles, so we are building on work and relationships already in place.

And did I mention the turnaround time for this proposal was 10 days?

On the AI front line

A Scene from Casablanca?

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Captain Renault: I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

 Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.  [aloud]

Captain Renault: Everybody out at once.

BREAKING NEWS

OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior

“The company disclosed instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission, amid an ongoing industrywide debate about A.I. safety.”

— The New York Times

Sad, but true. And I’m not sure there could be a more telling sub header.

AI hid mistakes. It made things up. It did things without permission.

Sound familiar?

Do we need any more proof that AI can reflect the people who create it—and the very human world it learns from?

AI may be artificial. Its behaviors, apparently, are not.

’Nuff said.

Just One More Thing…

The more stories I hear about AI, the more I want to tell stories about people—stories that are so much more enlightening about our capacity as human beings.

Last week, I wrote about how mathematicians work on problems together, somehow holding this complex math in their heads and hands all at once. These mathematicians can actually outthink and outperform AI because the work they are doing is original, intuitive, and personal. AI just can’t think and work the way we can. How could it? AI isn’t human.

This week, I’m remembering the story of how jazz virtuoso Erroll Garner created Misty.

Garner was on a plane when he looked out the window and saw a rainbow slicing through heavy clouds. A melody came to him. At that moment, he got down on his knees and began humming and tapping it out because, although Garner was one of the greatest pianists of all time, he could not read or write music. He played exclusively by ear. Everything was in his head and his hands.

The people on the plane thought he was nuts.

He wasn’t.

Out of that moment came Misty, one of the great jazz compositions of all time. A rainbow. Heavy clouds. A musician on his knees in an airplane, trying to hold onto a melody that had suddenly entered his head.

AI can’t have that experience. And even if AI could somehow produce the same notes, I’m not sure I would admire the piece in quite the same way. The story matters. The person matters.

And Garner’s story didn’t stop with the music. Among his many accomplishments as a musician and composer, he broke barriers in the music world and fought for control over his own work. Along with his manager, Martha Glaser, Garner took on Columbia Records in a long legal battle over his contractual and creative rights. It took years, but he stood his ground and won.

Maybe that is the larger point.

The music matters, but so does the life that created it. The rainbow matters. The hands matter. The struggle matters. The courage to fight for your own work matters.

AI may create plenty of things.

But it will never have stories like these.

Next week, I'm in San Diego then, off to Rochester (Jen's hometown) for a Weaver's Retreat. 

Be well!