30 December, 2019

The end of December and about to head away for a New Year with family and then off camping over January. Our daughter is rolling up on 8 and getting taller, increasingly clever and talkative. I finished up my secondary teaching role at the end of the year to take some time and focus back on my own work ideas for a bit. I also need to paint the house and generally clean up the property a bit.

The Boma Fellowship made for an interesting year and, as expected the trip to the U.S. was both great fun and very enlightening. High Tech High and the D.School were stand outs for me in terms of education and how I want to teach. In particular the D.School X’s liberatory design process help pop a missing piece into my classroom work. A visit to IDEO in San Francisco widened my expectations of Design work in NZ and the prototyping space made me lose my shit for a moment. Love the idea of a role that helps prototype elements of a wider solution. While in San Francisco I also took the chance to go over to Oakland and Berkeley and eventually found myself at 924 Gilman Street. Excellent to see a place that so many bands I love played at.

As the year rolled on I found myself struggling with my role as a teacher in a system I no longer have any respect for. The courses idea was working well for students willing to take a chance and take their focus off of qualifications as a central point of education. Those who couldn’t do that bombed almost completely as they tried to complete a year of work in the last three weeks. It was demoralising to say the least and coupled with a year of fighting for small changes to the system and the intense classroom work with students the thought of going back for another year was just depressing. To counter all of that I have built up my own workshop and am going to focus on contract work for a while that lets me continue working in education while doing my own thing. Hopefully there is a good balance in there somewhere.