Friday Mindset #164

Happy Friday!

If anyone caught the Manchester derby last weekend, you’ll know Autumn has well and truly arrived. The match was played a stone’s throw from where we’re typing this - assuming you can throw a stone about a mile-and-a-half - and it was absolutely tanking it. Today though, the sun’s out, the sky’s blue and the leaves are on the turn.

Love this time of year apart from the rain. (We did a session with a school in Hong Kong this week, and all the staff and kids were working from home whilst awaiting the arrival of a typhoon… so everything’s relative we guess.)

OK, weather-related small-talk complete. Let’s dive in.

Something we're reading...

Regular readers will know we’re a sucker for lists of lessons. Anytime someone wise shares a ‘100 things I wish I’d known…’ we’re on it. Not because we need it ourselves - though sometimes we do - but mostly because we think: this could be good for the students. We could discuss and reflect on these. They could generate their own list.

So it is with this week’s piece. This week’s contributor is journalist, writer and chess obsessive Sasha Chapin. We picked this one because he’s got a handle on what’s it feels like to be genuinely good at something. This one really struck us:

_{“Talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at.”}

Yeah, that’s neat. The full 50 are right here:

But we’re gonna remove a few - a recipe for cabbage (!), some grown-up, existential observations that might not strike the right note in a tutorial session, etc. So our shorter list of 30 is here. There are all clean, relevant, and interesting. You could ask students to choose a number between 1 and 30… and discuss the random advice that emerges:

Portal Talk…

The three of us sat down to leaf through another VESPA questionnaire report. This one caught our eye…

Steve: Look at that Attitude score. This is a confident person!

Tony: When I’m talking to students whose Attitude score is their highest - especially when it’s way higher like this - I often try and tease out whether they’re really scoring themselves accurately or whether they’re not being entirely honest.

Steve: Whether they’re deluding themselves?

Tony: Yes, I suppose!

Martin: I’d be interested in asking whether they agreed with their scores in the other elements. I like asking, “If you were in charge of scoring yourself, what numbers would you assign?”

Steve: Yes. Then we can see if there’s a difference, and explore why the students chose the numbers they did. It often reveals a lot about their perceptions of things.

Something to try...

Another thing we’re always on the lookout for - interesting people telling stories about how they proactively achieved something remarkable.

And this powerpoint’s a vivid and inspiring case in point. Comedian James Acaster tells the story of what he was up to at the age of 17 and 18. Clue: he wasn’t sitting on his arse waiting for something to happen. He wasn’t waiting to be picked. He was what we’re calling ‘actively seeking’…

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