I'm leading that because I need to stay that with all due respect, the meditation taught by Master Shifu, the red panda voiced by Dustin Hoffman is garbage. 

According to Master Shifu, you meditate by shutting your eyes and repeating "inner peace," and then you either achieve transcendence or get annoyed by whatever is occupying your mind. And if anything is on your mind—if, for example, you're preoccupied by a student you don't know how to support (actual scene from the first Kung Fu Panda film) your meditation session will be a failure. 

This is not a time to mince words: this is the worst possible way to approach meditation. The thoughts that bubble up when you take time to pause and sit aren't distractions, they're information. The value of meditation¹ is that it allows you to attend to what's happening right now. And for you, your thoughts are a part of what's happening!  

I can't come up with an elegant way to make this transition, but this process (pause, become aware of what's happening around you in the present moment) is mirrored at a larger scale by continuous improvement. In order to improve, you have to understand where you're starting from. 

There's a passage by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn that clarified this for me:

If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing... we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations."

If you are trying to develop yourself, Kabat-Zinn argues, the best way to get information about "where you are standing" is to sit still and attend to the present moment. 

If you're trying to develop your school, you need to do a bit more. May I recommend starting with empathy interviews? 

Notes:

1. I'm talking specifically about mindfulness meditation here. Don't @ me, transcendental meditators.

References

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are, pp. 15-16

I just told some folks about the concept of "getting it on its feet" and they said "that should be your next blog post." Who am I to argue?

I can't remember where I first heard the "on its feet" concept articulated. It may have been Mike Alfreds' book Different Every Night and either way that book is exceptionally good, so it deserves a shout-out!

In any case, here's the concept. Let's say you're a group of actors working on a scene, and trying to decide how to play a particular moment. Someone makes a suggestion. Another person isn't too sure about it. 

At this point, the group can discuss the suggestion, and in fact, could spend the next twelve hours discussing it, and never get closer to a resolution. 

Or, they could stand up, try out the suggestion, and within a couple minutes they'll know whether it works or not. 

This is "getting it on its feet," and it's magical. It's also scary, which is why people often find it preferable to discuss something ad nauseam rather than committing to testing something real. 

I know it's scary because I feel that fear, but I'm not totally sure why it's scary. In part there's the sheer inertia of talking—transitions are generally tougher than "continuing in the same direction." Also, as long as something is abstract it's both perfect and infinite—no pathways have been closed! Once you get it "on its feet" it becomes finite and flawed. 

But not necessarily, because if you get an idea on its feet and it falls flat on its face, you're back to the magic infinitude of abstraction! 

Note: This is written primarily for people already familiar with “continuous improvement” as a method. If you don’t know much (or anything) about continuous improvement it will still make sense, but it’ll never explain what “continuous improvement” actually is. For that, I recommend Amanda Meyer’s “Improvement as a Journey: Going the Distance with Improvement Science.”

I recently started reading a lot about anarchism, and as I read, I kept having the same thought: “This really reminds me of continuous improvement.” 

I can feel your skepticism radiating through the computer screen. Stick with me. 

Continuous Improvement, to state the obvious, is a set of methods for improving. What you want to improve is infinitely variable, but the methods are pretty consistent (with the caveat that “flexibility” is an important component of the methods). 

“Infinitely variable” means “morally flexible.” If your goal is to help more high school students from low-income families go to college, improvement can help you with that! But if you want to get more children eating sugary snacks at breakfast, improvement can help you with that too. 

Here’s what I find interesting: while the goals of continuous improvement are morally flexible, the methods are not: they contain some basic assumptions about how human beings should act with each other. For example, two principles at the heart of continuous improvement are 

1. Gathering people together with a diversity of perspectives is valuable

2. In order for that gathering of diverse perspectives to be valuable, you need to ensure that everyone meets on an equal footing—that is, you need to create a space where normal hierarchy doesn’t apply.

As it happens, over the past couple centuries (or millenia, depending how you do the counting) another group of people has been developing methods for diverse groups of people to work together with an absolute minimum of hierarchy. That’s right, I’m talking about anarchists.

Now, merely observing that one thing resembles another thing is not especially significant, no matter how surprising the juxtaposition, so this whole essay may be no more consequential than saying “Hey, this slice of toast looks like Elvis’s face!”

But I think there’s more to it than that, because my work as a teacher and now as a facilitator of continuous improvement¹ have led me to believe that hierarchies of power tend more often to be corrosive than they are helpful.

And I'm as uncomfortable using the word “anarchist” as you probably are. For most of my life I've thought of anarchists as naïve, scary, annoying, or some combination of the three. That changed when I read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. The word “anarchism” doesn’t appear anywhere in that book’s 692 pages, but one of its authors, David Graeber, was probably the most famous anarchist writer in the world (he died in 2020). The Dawn of Everything overturned my entire understanding of human society, and it seemed to me that  if a book that had such a profound effect on me was co-authored by an anarchist, I should give anarchism a closer look.

This piece is a rundown of what I learned from taking that closer look. If, like me, studying continuous improvement has made you suspect that hierarchical structures create as many problems as they solve, and if you share Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford’s interest in using improvement “as a tool for our our collective liberation,” you’re going to find anarchism pretty interesting, both for its insights about social relationships, the pragmatic structures that anarchists use to make decisions and get things done without resorting to coercion.

What is Anarchism?

As soon as we get started on defining anarchism, we run into a problem in the structure of the word itself. Tackling the related word “anarchy,” the author Kim Stanley Robinson observes that the word itself is ambiguous:

An-archy: absence of rulers, or absence of law? The original Greek suggests the former, common English usage since the seventeenth century, the latter; and it makes quite a difference which definition you use (2019).

Anarchists themselves normally use the Greek definition (absence of rulers), and people using the word as an accusation tend to use the more recent English usage (absence of law). 

To expand on the definition of anarchism that anarchists use for themselves, here’s David Gaeber:

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts (2000).

Graeber wrote this definition in a piece is entitled “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” which is organized, quiz-style, into a series of questions. Here’s an example:

Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?

If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles! Another basic anarchist principle is voluntary association.

This is simply a matter of applying democratic principles to ordinary life. The only difference is that anarchists believe it should be possible to have a society in which everything could be organized along these lines, all groups based on the free consent of their members, and therefore, that all top-down, military styles of organization like armies or bureaucracies or large corporations, based on chains of command, would no longer be necessary. Perhaps you don’t believe that would be possible. Perhaps you do. But every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist—even if you don’t realize it (2000).

At this point you may be thinking “That sounds lovely, but I’ve never heard of an amateur soccer team that regarded itself as an anarchist collective.” 

You also might be thinking “So where do the violence and property damage come in?” 

The answer to the second question is that philosophically, they don’t. You can be an anarchist without advocating violence. There are two reasons that we associate violence with anarchism: the slippage between the definition of anarchism as “no rulers” and “no rules,” and a confusion between cause and effect.

The slippage between “no rulers” and “no rules” means that a certain number of people describe themselves as anarchist (with some linguistic justification) just because they really like chaos. In conversation, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and David Graeber explain the difference between this attitude and “anarchism” as a political philosophy:

MBK: [...] to be an anarchist is to be creating the rules with the others at every moment, not just being against the system of rules.

DG: Yeah otherwise you're just rebellious (111, 2020)

Many anarchists, if anything, probably like rules (in the sense of agreed-upon formal structures) more than most people. Graeber remarks elsewhere in the same book that “ the easiest way to tell if you’re not in an anarchist meeting [...] is whether it’s always the same guy leading the meeting, and whether he’s making all the proposals. Anarchists are more likely to have an elaborate process of facilitation where there’s always two people, usually of mixed gender, facilitating, who never facilitate twice in a row and never bring in proposals themselves” (163).

This brings me to the second reason that anarchism is associated with violence: the confusion between cause and effect. The Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta addressed this—here’s his observation, as paraphrased by Graeber:

Since people are so insistent that a lack of a coercive legal system can only lead to violent chaos, and that therefore anarchists must be advocates of violent chaos, people who actually are advocates of violent chaos start calling themselves “anarchists,” which tends to create confusion (p. 22, 2020).

What Malatesta is saying is that according to conventional wisdom, if you replaced hierarchies and coercion with “flat” democratic structures, the result would be violence and chaos. So the idea that “Anarchism is bound to lead to violence” has led to people who want to commit acts of violence and vandalism being called (and calling themselves) “anarchists.” 

Also, turn-of-the-century anarchists set off a lot of dynamite and assassinated people. This did not do a lot to help anarchism’s reputation (if you want to learn more about this, read Steven Johnson’s wonderful book, The Infernal Machine). 

As I mentioned above, people who are interested in anarchism as a political philosophy rather than a vibe tend to be very into structure, because coercion tends to be a short-cut to getting things done. Thus, if you remove coercion as an option you need not just more rules, but more equitable methods for setting, reviewing, and reworking those rules. The French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once declared “Anarchy is order, government is civil war” (Graeber et al, 2000). To unpack that a bit, Proudhon was suggesting that “order” can only be said to exist if everybody consents to the way things are. If “order” is only maintained because of an implicit state of violence, the nation’s default setting is an endless civil war.

Alan Jacobs states this more directly, if less dramatically: “Anarchists do not reject order or rule or governance but insist that in a healthy society these things cannot be imposed from above [...] Rather they emerge from negotiations between social equals” (2022). 

To bring it back to continuous improvement, this is the sort of insight that you might have if you agreed with W. Edwards Deming that “The people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.”

Deming is appropriate to mention here not just because he’s generally regarded as the intellectual precursor to “continuous improvement.” He’s also appropriate to bring up because Dr. Brandi Hinnnant-Crawford has recently been challenging this linear narrative of continuous improvement’s history. Speaking on the High Tech High Unboxed podcast, Hinnant-Crawford describes the techniques used by Bayard Rustin and other civil rights organizers to experiment and refine protest methods in the 1940s, then observes

But we typically look to Toyota and to healthcare when thinking about “Where are examples of improvement?” And I think it’s important that we don’t just look to industry or to even healthcare for insights of improvement because improvement is not new and no group or industry or sector has a monopoly on strategy (Hinnant-Crawford et al, 2024).

Anarchism, similarly, “is not new.” In fact, the vast majority of examples of anarchist social structures functioning successfully, in real life, come from indigenous societies around the world. The reason none of them were called “anarchist” is simple: anarchism is a word that defines itself in opposition to an existing, hierarchical social order (remember, an-archism means “against archism”—that is, “leaders”). So a society that functioned based on rules applied without coercion from the beginning wouldn’t be against anything. It would just be its own thing.

A caveat is needed: you could say that there’s never been a completely non-coercive human society, and you’d be right, but there are many, many societies that have been more consensus-driven and less coercive than ours!²

So it would be a gross misreading of history to regard anarchism as a “European” invention. In fact, you could make a case that the word “anarchism” is only meaningful when anarchist principles are the exception rather than the rule. Graeber echoed this with his observation that “the “founders” of anarchism did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. They saw its basic principles — mutual aid, voluntary association, egalitarian decision-making — as old as humanity” (2004).

Margaret Killjoy puts it more explicitly: 

There’s been a somewhat recent attempt, one that I am very excited about, to break the connection between anarchism and Western enlightenment thinking entirely. Indigenous North American anarchists have developed a framework around the word “anarchic,” a broader umbrella for all tendencies towards individual liberty and economic cooperation, regardless of their cultural origin. Many, many people all over the world have lineages and traditions of anarchic struggle they are more interested in referring to than something that was developed in Western Europe in the 19th century (2024).

The knowledge that neither continuous improvement nor anarchism are “new” brings me a lot of comfort, because it means that a different, less coercive, way of living (and learning) together is not only possible, but has been “normal” for millions of people throughout history. 

I’ll wrap this up with one more definition of anarchism from David Graeber: “Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails” (2000). 

This way of acting is a byproduct of continuous improvement. When it is happening successfully, you will find, whether you intended it, or not, that you are relinquishing control, where you are used to wielding  it, and gaining power where you used to be under someone else's control. 

And this is where I think anarchism is potentially useful, rather than just intellectually intriguing: Continuous improvement’s structures for "getting better at getting better" are unrivaled, but these culture shifts have larger implications. What anarchism can provide are structures for getting along together without coercion. This is critical because liberation comes about not only from an absence of coercive structures, but by a presence of alternative structures replacing it. 

An improvement project creates its own space within a hierarchical system where the least well-compensated people are recognized as experts, where people used to being told what to do are empowered to experiment and collect their own data, and, more radically, people used to telling them what to do are required to allow them to do so. Anarchism has a term for this: "building a new society in the shell of the old." It is in this work-on figuring out the new power dynamics created when two ways of relative share the same space, that anarchism has insights to offer to continuous improvement.

I may keep writing about this, and I’d be curious to know what you find particularly interesting. Here are some paths that I’d like to pursue:

• Unpacking the shared anarchist and CI interest in “building a new society within the shell of the old”

• The role of the “expert” and the role of “theory” in continuous improvement and anarchism

• The possibility in continuous improvement and anarchism that practice may precede theory, or in the words of David Price “it works in practice but will it work in theory?”

• Concrete strategies for drawing on diverse perspectives to solve problems in an egalitarian group

• The way that in both continuous improvement and anarchism, the “means” are inextricable from the “ends”

Notes

1. "Facilitator of continuous improvement is a bit of a stretch.  “As an editor adjacent to facilitators of continuous improvement” is more accurate.

2. Want to learn more? Read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I know it looks intimidatingly long, but a full 40% of it is endnotes.

References

Graeber, D. (2004). Anarchism, or the revolutionary movement of the twenty-first century. The Anarchist Library. https://davidgraeber.org/articles/anarchism-or-the-revolutionary-movementof-the-twenty-first-century/

Graeber, D. (2000). Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you! New York Metro Alliance of Anarchists. https://web.archive.org/web/20091202090253/http://nymaa.org/surprise_anarchist

Graeber, D., Belhaj Kacem, M., Dubrovsky, N., & Turquier-Zauberman, A. (2020). Anarchy - in a manner of speaking: Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman. Diaphanes.

Hinnant-Crawford, B., Caillier, S., and Taylor, C. (October 2, 2024). What improvers can learn from civil rights organizers. High Tech High Unboxed (podcast). https://hthunboxed.org/podcasts/what-improvers-can-learn-from-civil-rights-organizers/ 

Jacobs, A. (2022). Between chaos and the man. Harpers.

Killjoy, M. (July 3, 2024). On Socialism, communism, and anarchism. Birds Before the Storm.  https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/on-socialism-communism-and-anarchism?r=10515&triedRedirect=true

Robinson, K.S. (2019). Anarchism’s possibilities. The Institute for Anarchist Studies. https://anarchiststudies.org/10685-2/

• The piece was first published in the book Myths & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Ficton, edited by Margaret Killjoy

I, like everyone I know, am nervous about what's coming in November, and I feel so close to powerless that the distinction doesn't seem important.

I'm writing letters with Vote Forward, and I'll keep it up, but it's a faith-based form of activism: we send out the letters, we hope they'll make a difference, we'll never know if they did, and it remains possible—even likely—that Donald Trump will be our next president, again.

Meanwhile, I read the New Yorker so at least I get saddled with a better class of election anxiety, and I have the overwhelming sense that the country is slipping away from any form I can understand or empathize with, which may be the only universal sensation in America right now.

I learned from the New Yorker that lots of Muslim voters in Michigan are planning to vote for Trump, along with working class voters of all races in Pennsylvania. And I know that Democrats are now overwhelmingly a party of the college-educated, but I still don't get why anyone who isn't white would back Trump, who seems pretty clearly—to the extent that he isn't only in it for himself—to be only in it for white people. Like I said, I don't feel like I understand my country as well well as I used to think I did.

This autumn stretch of activism sucks. We send letters out, like setting messages in bottles afloat on an exiting tide, and then voters in a tiny number of states, most of which I've never visited, will decide whether we get Harris, or a man who has told anyone who will listen that he plans to be a dictator.

But what we do next doesn't have to feel like this.

Whether we spend the next four years in a Harris presidency or a Trump presidency, the work we need to do will be the same: to strengthen the bonds that connect our local community and build power by winning victories that make our city a more safe, abundant, and delightful place to live for everyone. Right now we ALL act like you'd expect people to act in precarious circumstances where nobody except those closest to you seems to have your back, and it doesn't seem like a good idea to trust anyone or anything all that much. Nothing will change unless we change how it feels to be alive right now. But we CAN change that, a little at a time, on our street, in our neighborhoods, across our city.

And if we do that, even a little, and other folks do the same where they live, we'll be in a better place four years from now, no matter what.*

Of course, this all feels urgent NOW but there's a lot that's urgent. Maybe in four years I'll read this post and think "well, I blew it again and forgot to build community" but I hope not.

*BUT a way worse place if Trump wins than if Harris wins, so I’ll keep writing those letters!

I'm partway through reading The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors by Lama Rod Owens. It's a guide to taking a socially-engaged approach to Buddhist practice, based on the concept of the bodhisattva. Owens writes "Bodhisattva is roughly translated as 'spiritual warrior' and is one who is motivated by the energy of bodhicitta, or a profound altruistic wish to free all beings from suffering" (18-19). So far there's a lot in the book that appeals to me, for example the distinction Owen draws between "reactivity" and "responsiveness" resonates powerfully. Here's a relevant excerpt:

Rigidity arises because we find ourselves trapped in the helplessness of the chaos. When I know this and can remember this, my relationship to the carceral state can be an experience of liberation because when I transition from reactivity to responsiveness, the state no longer dictates what I am, and I can start directing my energy towards liberation. When I forget this and start habitually reacting to the chaos, I am consumed by the chaos (39).

There's also a lot that challenges (and in fact implicates) me. For example, this: "To bypass the struggle of people surviving systems of violence in favor of an anesthetic life is itself an act of violence" (20). That really hit home. Also, this line (for context, Lama Rod Owens is Black): "Racism isn't my problem: therefore it isn't my work. [...] Although all Black and Brown people deal with the violence of white supremacy, we do not have the capacity to turn it off" (42).

There's just one thing in the book that REALLY doesn't work for me, and it's the central premise—which means that my issue isn't really with Lama Rod Owens, it's with the Buddha. In Owens' words, the Buddha "cut out a path of liberation by realizing the dreamlike nature of reality" (19). Owens develops this idea further in a section called "The Yoga of the Dream":

The yoga of the dream for the New Saint is the realization that this reality that we live and struggle through is not our true home. It is a dream, an illusion, or even a figment of our imaginations. [...] To free unconscious phenomena, such as unconscious biases or narratives that are not true, means disrupting our perception of what things are so that our experience of phenomenal reality becomes transparent, fluid, and basically, less real. This is how we experience freedom from the realness of things; when things are less real, we begin to feel more spacious, and, therefore, freer (26).

I find it helpful to recognize my unconscious biases and narratives as illusions, but I don't find it helpful to regard, say, a tree as an illusion. I don't think the phenomenal world IS illusion, and I don't think it would be helpful to me to cultivate a discipline of training myself to believe that it was. This brings me to my BIG issue with the book: the way that Owens uses the phrase "the carceral state." Here's what he writes: "The outer level of change is the recognition of the phenomenal world and the basic reality of suffering and delusion, which I call the carceral state" (30). In other words, the carceral state is "the phenomenal world," not just the messages on our phones and our social norms, but the plants, the soil, and the ocean.

To me, describing the entirety of reality as "the carceral state" feels like ascribing human problems to the world. In fact, not human problems, but systems of domination, which are no more innately human than systems of liberation and mutual aid (it's just that communities that devote themselves to domination tend to crush communities that devote themselves to liberation and mutual aid, because if you devote yourself to domination you tend to get good at it*).

To be clear, Lama Rod Owens has done WAY, WAY, WAY more than I have to liberate us all from systems of domination, so it's a little sketchy for me, in the midst of my too-often anesthetic life, to take issue with his work. But to me, for my thinking, and for my work, it's important that the phrase "the carceral state" refers to a specific way that humans organize our shared lives, one which is only made possible by our collective acquiescence. And my belief is that if we overcome it, we will be free (as long as we are able to sustain our liberation), but we will NOT find ourselves still imprisoned by the oppression of the phenomenal world until we reach enlightenment and recognize that it's all illusion.

This made me think about the film The Mission—I saw it in my seventh grade social studies class, and it left an impression. There's one exchange in particular that stopped my dead in my tracks. The film is about a Jesuit mission in what is now Brazil and, ultimately, about how disputes between European powers and the Catholic church ultimately lead to a group of Guaraní people being massacred and forced out of their homes. After the massacre, there's an exchange between a Jesuit Cardinal (Cardinal Altamarino) who can't really metabolize the horror of what's happened (which he had reluctantly agreed to) and a Portuguese political representative (Don Hontar), who takes a more "pragmatic" approach. Here's the exchange:

 Don Hontar: We must work in the world; the world is thus.

Cardinal Altamarino: No, thus have we made the world. Thus I have made it.

It seems to me that if we use the term "carceral state" to refer to EVERYTHING we're accepting the idea that "the world is thus," and I don't accept that.

Having said that, the film is also about the conflict between spiritual and material views of the world, and the film generally sides with the spiritually-minded (the Jesuits) so it's likely that all the main protagonists would side with Owens more than me on the whole "is the world illusion" question. 

*For powerful refutations of the idea that "domination" is "human nature" or otherwise inevitable, I recommend reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything

A note on the title: There's a Buddhist saying, attributed to the ninth century sage Lin Chi, that goes  "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The title is a reference to that. Many years ago (possibly before I was born) my dad composed the music for a play called The Man Who Killed the Buddha.

I've spent my adult life flummoxed about how to gesture to greet people. As a teenager, I tended to favor the "teen boy upward head nod" which is a gesture that to me carries a homeopathic dose of swagger—exactly the upper limit of the amount I was ready to risk, but without the sense of shame I might have felt by lowering my head. As I type this, I realize this sounds like one of the "Animals of the African Savannah" moments in Mean Girls so I guess that movie's on to something.

To me, waving seems best delivered enthusiastically and with lots of side-to-side motion, which is useful for actually getting someone's attention, but felt like too much for everyday use. But just holding an open, or partly open hand up feels a little too papal. The punk rock/skater friendly middle finger was never going to fly for me. I spent a few years saluting(?!) because it was a clearly-defined gesture, but it doesn't sit right for several reasons.

In San Diego people throw shakas. I think it was seeing that that got me thinking about my hand gestures again (and when I say "thinking" I mean at a subconscious level. Typing this is the first time I've examined this in any sustained way. Just to be clear). I don't have a take on who should and shouldn't throw a shaka other than that it doesn't feel right for me to do it.

Which brings me to the peace sign. At some point between late high school and early college it felt important to me to make it clear to myself and the world that I was not a hippie. I'm not totally sure what caused this but it mattered at the time. During the pandemic I started listening to "Time Crisis" and that brought me back to listening to the Grateful Dead, and it was just a matter of time before (sometime last year) I started greeting people with a peace sign. For my purposes, it's perfect: it sends a message that's important to me ("peace"), it doesn't require a lot of motion, it doesn't make me feel like I'm pretending to be the pope, and it is, by definition non-threatening. And, while looking up photos for this post, I discovered that it's heavily associated with Ringo*, and I can't argue with that.

*Side note: why is it that there's this common to the point of nearly universal "aging rock star" look of sunglasses, lots of earrings, and leather jackets? I get it if you were in Motley Crüe, but so many people have been dressing like that for decades who NEVER dressed like that when they were at the peak of their fame. Of all the eras of music fashion to choose, why did they all end up on that one?

All project-based teachers have had this question about critique (especially model critique): "what if the kids just copy the model?"

The answer to this is, literally, "I'd like to see them try." 

Here's the thing: if you're assigning simple, rudimentary work, like, say, a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary worksheet. Copying a filled-in worksheet is fast, has a low cognitive demand, and you don't learn anything from the experience. So a teacher who's giving out a lot of fill-in-the-blank worksheets needs to police copying very closely. 

But let's say the assignment is to shoot a short film, and a student shoots a shot-by-shot recreation of the first scene of The Godfather. Copying a film scene shot-by-shot takes a long time, requires serious thought, and you learn a huge amount from the experience. 

So create assignments for students in which, were they able to copy it, you'd be astounded by their achievement. 

Also, convince your school to pay for one of the plagiarism-checking services that universities use. That makes things better for everyone and means that a kid who's on track to get busted and kicked out of college gets busted by you first, so you can help them understand the error of their ways. 

In 2009, I interned as a researcher for Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety.org, which was designed to help UK residents become more active citizens - it's hard to believe now, but there was a time not long ago when it seemed like the internet was going to be an engine for a more engaged citizenry and a more robust democracy. 

One of mySociety's websites was called "Fix my street" - anybody could use it to tell their local council about a specific problem. They also created "They Work For You", which was a website that collected all records of parliamentary debate and voting, and made them searchable. 

The project I'm thinking of is inspired by this, but totally non-digital. I'm thinking it would be called "They Work For Us", and instead of an essential question it would have a challenge.

Here's the challenge: Convince an elected representative to do something to improve the community

We'd want to partner with a nonprofit in order to do this, and study approaches to bringing about change that have worked in the past, and methods that are working around the world now. Then I think we'd plan a few campaigns (with different groups in charge of each one) and probably ultimately funnel them into one single campaign based on what seems most likely to be successful. 

Some more specific ideas for this:

• Plot the addresses of all students on the team on a map (anonymously) so we can see where we live, and focus on specific geographic areas based on that
• Do ethnographic interviews and interview various local stakeholders and experts in order to figure out what to focus on

I just finished reading Warren St. John's excellent Outcasts United, about the Fugees, a youth soccer team in Clarkston, Georgia, composed entirely of refugees, and their coach and founder, Luma Mufleh. 

I'd love to read this book with students, and while I'll need to re-read it and mark it up in order to develop all my initial ideas, I want to get a few written down now, while I'm thinking of them. 

In particular, the ideas in Talking in Class would lend themselves to teaching this - there are so many great "what would you do?" dilemmas throughout the book. 

But first, 'Backstory' lectures, which could use a better name. 

Many of the book's chapters focus on the perspective of a particular family of refugees living in Clarkston, and open with an explanation of the conflict that forced them to flee their homes. These are social studies gold, but English trouble, because they slow the pace of the book, so less skilled readers will get bogged down in them and have trouble figuring out how to get through the sudden onslaught of new characters and settings, while more skilled readers will be inclined to skim them in order to get back to the soccer (as, I confess, I was once I was about three-quarters through the book).

I have a few ideas for helping the class to track the various families on the team, and for becoming conversant in the history of the 20th century through some of the conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

Here's what I'd like students to learn from this aspect of the project:

• Know the basics about what happened in a series of significant conflicts
• Understand why these conflicts forced people to seek asylum in other countries
• Understand the "semi-deep" chronology of events leading up to each conflict, and how they fit in the history of the 20th century relative to each other
• Know where these conflicts took place on a map
• Understand the role(s) that the US played in these conflicts, in order to underscore the broader point that America played a role in pretty much everything that happened geopolitically since WWII

• put a pin on the country of origin 
• put up notecards on the timeline as they explain them
• set eight quiz questions for their classmates for the end of the week.
• I'll add two questions of my own, and I'll also have the discretion to change the questions if they seem too easy, or incorrect