Resonance

I feel like one of the most important challenges in life is finding your resonance frequency. Resonance frequency is a physics term that refers to the tendency of systems to show more powerful effects at some frequencies than at others. One example of this can be found in this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K93AUFuvk

The water in the class is being moved by nothing more than a steady tone. The frequency of the tone is the water’s resonance frequency. That means that this is the perfect sound to get that water jumping. The tone is just right, strongly amplifying the oscillations in the water. If it was a little higher or a little lower, the effects on the water would be much smaller. It’s as though the water is humming along with the tone.

A more playful explanation is offered by wikipedia:

One familiar example is a playground swing, which acts as a pendulum. Pushing a person in a swing in time with the natural interval of the swing (its resonance frequency) will make the swing go higher and higher (maximum amplitude), while attempts to push the swing at a faster or slower tempo will result in smaller arcs. This is because the energy the swing absorbs is maximized when the pushes are 'in phase’ with the swing's oscillations, while some of the swing's energy is actually extracted by the opposing force of the pushes when they are not.

Imagine yourself pushing the swing. You want it to go very high. What do you do? Your first instinct might be to simply push as hard and fast as you can. But this wouldn’t be the best way to make the swing go higher. If you push too fast, you’ll actually be wasting a lot energy because you’ll be opposing the swing’s natural timing. You need to get in time with the swing. Stand behind it, wait for it to come to you, then give it a little help on its way back the other direction. You’re synergizing with the swing. It’s much better and more effective than just trying to tell it what to do.

I see this as a great metaphor for life.

The greatest feeling, the most fulfilling, the most validating, the most triumphant and certain feeling is when you know you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You can be in a quote unquote “good situation” where everything is great—your job is good and it’s very secure, you live in a great place, you’ve got a great girlfriend—and still find yourself feeling strangely unfulfilled. On the flip side, you can be working 80 hour weeks for shit pay, wrecking your health, just getting by on the skin of your teeth—and somehow feel like you wouldn’t trade it for the world. Maybe you’re helping to raise awareness about a cause that inspires you. Maybe you’re an extremely dedicated coach at a lesser-known college athletics department. Wherever you are, what matters is that you know that’s where you’re supposed to be. You are where life is telling you to be, and that feeling is more valuable than health, more valuable than money, more valuable, even, than happiness. There’s no more feeling than knowing exactly who you are and exactly what you are doing. A person with purpose is an invincible thing.

Now, that might be easy to say, but it’s not easy to do. How do you find this purpose? Where do you begin to look for your natural resonance frequency? You certainly can’t find it by thinking about it. You’ll be distracted a thousand times before you reach your final destination by the very tricky human tendency towards wishful thinking. It’s all too easy, when you’re looking for the answers, to convince yourself that the path you’re supposed to be taking is the easiest one you see. If you’ve been offered a nice scholarship to law school, and you don’t know what else to do next, you’ll be very tempted to convince yourself that that’s what you should be doing. But just because someone hands you a pile of money to do something doesn’t mean that doing it will resonate with you. It only means that it’ll be an easier path to start down.

Don’t get me wrong here. If you don’t know what’s next in your life, then it’s very sensible to take the easier softer way. Making the most of a law school scholarship while you have the chance is a very prudent thing to do. On the other hand, if you don’t feel that resonance when thinking about law, and you do feel it when thinking about something else, then you need to reconsider. Push with the swing.

But how to make the call? How can you learn what you need to know?

I haven’t figured this part out at all, but I think all that a person can do is try as many different things as possible. Try to get as many different experiences as you can. Talk to people who seem strange. Go far and wide and look for things you’ve never seen before. Read widely. See a lot of movies. Try having different kinds of jobs. Give different kinds of creative self-expression a try. Oh, and somehow find time to process it all and figure just how you feel about all these things. It might be impossible to do all these things, but that’s not important. More important is the idea of discovery. Somewhere out there, or somewhere inside yourself, is the life that is just right for you—the purpose that will make you powerful. You’ve got to search with determination. It’s not going to find you. You’ve got to find it.

Good luck, folks. Lots of love.

Randy

The profession

Children are complicated.

People have the perception that they are simple, but in fact, it’s much harder to understand a child than an adult. Adults are articulate. Adults have far greater insight into their character. Children are all at sea in life. They go where the tide takes them, and they have no idea where they’re going or why.

I’ve been watching a lot of my kids very carefully, trying to figure out what makes them tick. I’ve always loved studying people. Whether it’s a friend, a family member, co-worker or even myself, I’m always analyzing behavior, forming hypotheses, and imagining what it’s like to be in their head. This is my most practiced pasttime.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I’m finding it pretty fascinating at times to be working with young children. The kids I’m working with are young enough that it’s easy to see changes in their character. By the time we reach adulthood, change is slow in us. People continue to change throughout their lives, but it usually takes much longer the older we get. With kids, it’s totally different. Even a month can make a huge difference. A kid at four can be one way, and another way entirely at five. After all, that a period equivalent to 25% of her life that just passed! Think how quickly a month passes. Now try to remember how long a month felt when you were in kindergarten. It was like an eternity.

When I first arrived I didn’t think about how much I’d be learning about kids. I hadn’t been around children much before I got here, so I didn’t really know what they were like. I mean, I remember how I perceived childhood, but that doesn’t tell me anything about how adults perceived me. I hadn’t seen childhood with an adult’s perspective. I didn’t think much about it as a way to learn about people because I assumed none of my students would have enough English to really talk to me. That assumption had two problems. The first is that many of the kids speak very good English. The second is the idea that it would matter. I know the kids in my homeroom class very very well, even though they none of them can carry a conversation. They figure out how to get their feelings across.

The things that’s been the biggest surprise to me is just how much children are like adults. They’re dead complicated. Classroom politics change all the time. The battles may revolve around crayon use, but don’t let the subject matter fool you. These kids are actually fighting for their place in the social order. And they do it with striking ability. In one of my classes, a student brought a little notebook with nicely decorated paper to school, tearing out sheets to give to her classmates as a gift. The next day, another girl in the same class struck back. She brought a notebook of her own and did the same gift-giving, except she added a twist: first she let everyone pick a sticker from her sticker book to add to their paper. The first student knew she was one-upped. You could see it. It turns out, five year olds can go to war. Or at least the girls can.

The biggest difference between children and adults, though, is that children are very impulsive. They are pushed and pulled in a thousand directions by their emotions, which they are almost helpless to resist. Everything is a whirlwind for a child. Everything is a rollercoaster. When something is funny, they laugh hysterically. When they are upset, the world is ending. Just as their pencils are wobbly under their hands, with their motor control still loose, their emotions are the same. All the tools are there, they just haven’t figured out control yet. They have a thousand complicated tasks to master before they are ready to be on their own. This is why I don’t see myself as just an English teacher. They also need to learn how to get along with others, how to express their creativity, how to stay focused on the task at hand, and dozens more essential skills. If all they learn is English, then we are failing them. They’ve got about 10 or 12 years to learn how life works, and after that, good luck to them.

In any case, I just got the book “Teach Like a Champion” by Doug Lemov. I talked about this book before. Lemov compiled a slew of teaching techniques commonly found in the most successful classrooms, named them, and explained them in a very detailed and clear book. I’m about a fifth of the way through it and it is just rocking my socks. But one thing I notice is that Lemov and I seem to agree that there’s a lot more to a teacher’s job than teaching kids the answers. Over and over again, the book explains how certain teaching techniques will encourage kids to become more intellectually curious, or to push themselves harder, or to be more self-disciplined. It seems the best teachers don’t just teach facts and figures. The best teachers teach life.

I must push myself harder as a person to be worthy of teaching of the subject.

Goodnight folks. Lots of love.


Randy