Elliot Washor's TGIF 10.17.2025

Are you with me now? A. J. Ryder

Shallow Dives – Essays on the Craft of. Manual Care

“The unique artful expressions of the body that make us human cannot be measured or easily interpreted. No graph can contain them; no normative values can be assigned to them. And my failing as a serious researcher probably lies in the fact that I cannot ignore them.” Dorka

“Tom said he can see that the insurance industry is beginning to eliminate the reading mechanism we call the doctor by no longer asking for a second opinion but only an MRI after a single physical exam. This despite the false negatives and positives known to occur with such tests. “They don’t want my opinion; they want the machine’s” he says.”

I’ve slowly been reading Barrett Dorko’s book Shallows Dives for weeks. Dorko is a physical therapist who has written extensively about his decades long practice. This book of essays deals with things that are not easily or can’t be explained by MRIs, EMGs, X-Rays and if Dorka were alive today I’m sure he would include AI. Case in point, he discusses how insurance companies want to eliminate the human touch and opinion and rely solely on machines and reading mechanisms to save time and money. Although in a different field, he references the same problems we have and some of the same people who have influenced his practice. KISMET.

My Shallow Dives

 Last week Dennis sent me a text that he was with JJ Grant, a graduate of Fannie Lou Hamer who did a plenary presentation at Big Bang that centered around JJ’s design company where JJ also works with youth on their aspirations to become designers. The reason for sending the text was to ask if I could relay a message written by JJ to former BPL board member Marc Ecko who I’m friends with. I wrote back to Dennis that just coincidentally I was going to have a Zoom meeting with Marc and Andrew this week to discuss how Marc could support the Impact Campaign. I texted Dennis back and said for sure I’d do it. At our Zoom with Marc, one of the first things I did was read JJ’s text below.

Both Andrew and I could see he was visibly touched by JJ’s note. As we were talking, Marc reviewed JJ’s website and really and I mean really liked it. He asked me to put him in direct contact over email with JJ so they hopefully can meet before the big ComplexCon in Las Vegas.

Also, this week we submitted a response California Secondary School Redesign that called for a network of schools that had been doing work in California for decades on being a community school, providing dual enrollment opportunities and focusing on college and career. The San Diego Met, Met Sacramento and New Village (Los Angeles) are schools that have met the mark. They have been doing this work for decades using the BPL design dialed into their specific communities.  There’s way more to the grant that involves the IBPLC, ImBlaze/B-U and Harbor freight Fellows but what I got focused on for this TGIF were the references we received from Karen Hunter Quartz – Director of UCLA Center for Community Schooling, Richard Barerra – Vice President of the San Diego Unified School Board, Darrell Steinberg former Mayor of Sacramento and President Pro Tempore of the California State Legislature and Jonathan Raymond former Superintendent of Sacramento City Schools. These letters of support showed how our schools have truly impacted these folks and in so many ways the communities these schools are in. These letters are not transactional. They are very personal and they really made me reflect on all the work it took for everyone to understand what our design does as it is manifested in the work of our students and graduates. How does this get measured? Can it?

From discussion with Marc and letters from these folks I’m not really sure how to describe what I/we do or how to measure it or if I even want to. I have friendships with Marc, Karen, Jonathan. Darrell and Richard but like Dorko, my failing as a practitioner/researcher is that I believe that things can exist without exhaustive study and I cannot ignore what can’t be measured and that is the difference I hold.

One more thing...

A few days ago Pam Roy received ‘a great news email’ from Beacon Press that they want to publish our book – THE EDUCATION PIVOT: Meaning & Mattering in the Age of AI. ‘Nuff said for now.

Be well and Plenty, plenty, bye, bye