Egg Shell Wall Concentration

The research is going well. I'm also now working on a memo on the Parent Trigger and how other education reform organizations in LA can use it. I'm also learning about UTLA and its governance structure. It's pretty extensive. They elect a House of Representatives and a Board of Directors.

The high I had when I started my job still motivates me, but today I started to feel the gravity of the issues we are trying to address here in Los Angeles.

A lof of memories from high school have been coming back to me since I've been back home. I have this one memory of being in my room. There is nothing up on the egg shell-colored walls. I have no car to drive. No close girlfriends to visit. The girlfriends that I do have also have strict parents so we can't just get up and go somewhere without giving them at least two days advance notice. I have no CDs that I bought with my allowance, just some tapes with some recorded songs from the radio. So I stared at the egg shell walls. And I remember taking that staring really seriously. I felt like some good thoughts had to come out of there.

I thought that if I focused, concentrated hard enough something brilliant would surface.

Just in my first two days “back in the trenches” I have a sense that the work I’m about to embark upon will require a similar kind of egg shell wall concentration. However, the thing about education reform is that there are already brilliant ideas already out there. KIPP tells us so. Broad awards prizes to brilliant ideas each year. Children are learning at great schools and with great teachers in different pockets of the country. I am learning how incredibly politicized education reform work is in LA and in other parts of the country. But we need to distill the noise, pull out the truth.

Coordination is big.
Trust is huge.