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LIKE A TEACHER

Was Your Teacher a Fashion Icon?

7/14/2015

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Yesterday, the cozy village of Manhattan witnessed the opening of the first ever New York Men's Fashion Week.

In an age of style-savvy rappers, red-carpet-swagged celebs, and bespoke-suited NBA stars, how is it possible that 2015 is the first year for NYMFW?

Even the men running for president are getting checked for freshness. So how is this first time for Fashion Week to go Dude?

More importantly, what the hell does this have to do with teachers or education?
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Tyson Beckford attends the 2015 amfAR Inspiration Gala New York at Spring Studios on June 16, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
Picture

like teachers, 
designers help others develop a point of view

See the World; See Yourself
Everyone has a style. Each of us has a wardrobe, no matter how casually curated. Even your most fashion-careless friend has a collection.

We all have a point of view.

And while very few of us ever attend a fashion show (let alone fashion week in New York City), we all witness the parade of style around us every day. Again, the most fashionably-tragic people have a sense of this. I know you're probably thinking about your dad, who cynically asserts that he wears the same khakis at least 3 times a week. The man cares about fashion: he just cares about not caring.

And that's the deal. Creating your style is personal. It takes time, experience, and relationships. And, to develop it, you need mentors.
Now take a fashion show like NYMFW.  To be clear, a fashion show is a business convention at its very core. This is New York, baby. It's an arena for scrappers, innovators, and startups. 

But fashion shows are more than a market place-they serve to direct and instruct. Fashion shows reflect and articulate cultural tastes; designers start trends, 
shape trends, and cultivate trends.

Like educators, designers help others create and articulate a point of view. 

Many fashion brands are named after people for a reason. In a world where stadiums, stores, and skyscrapers 
are named after companies, this is worth noting. The fashion industry knows the power of a personal connection. We want to model ourselves after people we admire.

Teachers know this, too. You can remember the style of your favorite teachers-- whether it was way they dressed, talked, or thought about things. Damn, they were cool, right? They didn't teach you WHAT to think; they taught you HOW to think. The point:  we need someone else's point of view to develop our own. 

And that's why Fashion Week is also Teacher Week. It's all just teachers and students, son. And, speaking of school...

Public School, you can make it easy for yourself and just tweet my VIP pass to your show to @mikekleba.  I mean, we should be hanging anyway, you know what I'm saying? #educatorsunite
Picture
Public School designers Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow 

We need to know someone 
else's style 
to develop our 
own style

photo credits: 
-Albert Einstein, courtesy of Mental Floss.  http://www.businessinsider.com/biography-of-albert-einstein-2013-1
-Public School, photo by Public School

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The Biggest and Quietest Movement in Education

4/12/2014

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Picture"Behold Alex's Cold Smoking Contraption" from HarmoniousHomestead.
"DIY" is really "TIY"
So I want to hardwire a lamp in the bathroom.  You know, like a real man.  My plan of attack?  Youtube.

You see, my dad didn’t show me how to hardwire anything.  Sure, he taught me how to put Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage in a bowl spaghetti.  He taught me that five Coors Lights is better than three.  He taught me that winning isn’t everything—but that it beats the hell out of losing.

But hardwiring a lamp? No.  So, back to youtube.  Or, if you prefer, what I call the "TIY movement." A movement so big, I guarantee you are a part of it and don't even know it.

#TIY Strong

Ask just about anyone under the age of 40 how to figure out how to change a showerhead, learn a guitar lick of a Rolling Stone song, or how to put filling inside a cupcake, and they’ll tell you to look it up on line.  

We call it DIY- Do It Yourself.  It’s an empowering idea, one that is about self reliance. It's also a bit punk rock-- "do it yourself" means "you can make it yours."  An enormous swath of the internet is dedicated to people showing other people how to do it yourself.  I think it’s biggest, least talked about movement in education today. 

And it’s got the wrong name.

We should call it “Teach It Yourself.”  It’s more fundamental than simply Do It Yourself: You have to teach it to yourself to do it yourself.  And that is what so many of us do when we need to do something we don’t know how to do.  It’s what I am going to do when I install this f#@$ing light in my bathroom. 

It's time for us to have a much better conversation about why DIY (sorry, TIY) is the best example of the “state of the art” of Education today.

The best of "DIY" is really just great teaching.

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Fishtail buns and advent calendars from OhtheLovelyThings.com
Instructions Make the Teacher

If there’s something teachers notice about the ubiquitous TIY instructions out there it's how good (or bad) the instructions are.  Because great think about instructions all the time- because great instructions allow people to teach themselves.

Anyone who has used an easy to follow instructional video or read a great manual (think workout plans or cookbooks), knows that these instructions can be great teachers, too. Great-instruction-givers allow us to invest in ourselves. It's schooling at it's most distilled:  education improves us.

The best of DIY is really just great teaching.  And, with the internet, its reach across age, gender, economic and social class, and geography barriers make DIY instructions the most powerful force in Education today.

Want to do what great teachers do?  Study what makes instructions easy to follow, efficient, inspiring, and delightful.  Look at the wide range of instructions available online and in books.  See how directions are put together, how words and images can be used to model and guide.  Now that's teacher training I could get behind.  Great instructions are encoded teaching.

For my teacher friends and teacher advocates out there: instructions cannot REPLACE teachers, of course.  Great instructions are the products and tools of great teaching.  And great teaching is teaching other people to teach themselves.

Now, the way to CREATE and DEVELOP good instructions is much more complicated, certainly. For one, it's about knowing and connecting with your audience (students). But getting into that right now will keep me from a delicious meal of breakfast sausage spaghetti washed down with a raft of Coors Lights.  

Just the kind of preparation I need to hardwire a lamp.

Images from and thanks to
the awesome blog http://harmonioushomestead.com/2013/08/07/homemade-cold-smoker/
and the fun site http://www.ohthelovelythings.com/2011/12/happy-friday-4-diy-projects.html
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    just a Fact:

    Teachers are injecting value into every corner of our society.

    Tweets by @mikekleba

    Mike kleba

    is the CEO and Chief Teacher Officer of DegreeCast. He's also a public school teacher  who lives with his wife and dog in Brooklyn, NY.

    RYAN O'HARA
    is the chair of the English Department at a school district on Long Island and was a high school teacher for more than a decade. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Old Beth Page, NY.

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Photos used under Creative Commons from James St. John, mayrpamintuan, quinn.anya, Kevin Doncaster