A few weeks ago I posted about how the New School turned the men’s room into an all-gendered bathroom but kept the women’s room single sex in my post “This is equality?” On a hunch, this week I checked the bathrooms on the floor below. On that floor, they turned the women’s room to all-gendered and kept the men’s room unchanged. Sorry, I was wrong and jumped to a conclusion[…] Keep reading →

As a physicist who left and is looking to transform a field (teaching social and emotional skills, which I generally call leadership), I like noticing other physicists who left and ended up transforming fields. The first one to come to mind for me are Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger’s Cat fame, who came up with one of the first equations at the root of quantum physics. Later in life he wrote[…] Keep reading →

As promised in yesterday’s post, “Writing a book is work!,” today I’ll share a problem I found after the deadline to go to press. Actually, I said I’d share more than one, so I’ll follow up with more in later posts. What got in This one is my term ASEEP, an acronym I created to describe fields that are active, social, emotional, expressive, and performance-based, which includes acting, playing musical[…] Keep reading →

UPDATE: I was wrong about this situation. Read the update here. I was visiting my friend’s class at Parsons, the school for design not far from me. I went to the men’s room, or what used to be the men’s room and found it had been converted to an all gender bathroom. Okay, no problem. I used it, but when I leave, I pass the bathroom that used to be[…] Keep reading →

As part of teaching my leadership course at NYU, I give out a mid-semester evaluation. One student gave me permission to quote her evaluation. Here it is, unedited, besides my making the name of the course a link and making some text bold: What I like about the course, Leadership Step by Step, is my understanding of the decisions I make and why I think the way I do. From[…] Keep reading →

The book and documentary Most Likely to Succeed are about the most inspirational and frustrating works I’ve seen on education. They describe the type of teaching I like—inquiry-driven project-based learning—as well as the problems with the current school system. I feel irresponsible just writing that I liked them without saying much about them. Reading the book, nearly every page merited a post. So I couldn’t think of how to represent[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been refining how to describe my technique in leading others succinctly: Leading others is about behaving and communicating so the other person feels comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities. Their vulnerabilities tend to be their greatest passions and strongest motivations. Their sharing their passions makes them feel understood and open to being led to act on it. In fact, they crave being led by their passions. With experience, their sharing their[…] Keep reading →