“I realize that the more that I do to manage, the more that I deny other folks the opportunity for growth and expansion in their own development.” —> My middle school tech ed teacher was a great example of someone who promoted development! I was in a Rube Goldberg Machine Design Contest in middle school and we were the “underdogs” coming in to the competition day (most teams were mostly made up of high school-aged boys from science/math academies who met multiple times in the months leading up… and our team had middle school boys and girls who barely got a chance to meet because we were from different schools in our district). I remember some of the coaches being in the building area with their teams and micro-managing… and our coach was completely hands off. He probably said something like “it’s about the kids” … well, surprise… we ended up winning first place!! There was one judge who told our coach (before the competition started) when they saw us walking in with our poster that we’d be the winning team. I think part of it was because the coach didn’t tell us what to do, I was able to come up with really creative ideas (like making a poster that captured the cartoon spirit of Rube Goldberg… and doing our machine presentation in the form of a story). We raised the bar for subsequent years and other teams ended up making songs for their presentation - ha! Anyways… I am so grateful for that project and it is still talked about in our school district as a huge achievement! The trophy was bigger than our faces and it had a huge rat trap on top!
Also, July has been a huge month for me so it was nice to read someone else reflecting on their month, too!
“I realize that the more that I do to manage, the more that I deny other folks the opportunity for growth and expansion in their own development.” —> My middle school tech ed teacher was a great example of someone who promoted development! I was in a Rube Goldberg Machine Design Contest in middle school and we were the “underdogs” coming in to the competition day (most teams were mostly made up of high school-aged boys from science/math academies who met multiple times in the months leading up… and our team had middle school boys and girls who barely got a chance to meet because we were from different schools in our district). I remember some of the coaches being in the building area with their teams and micro-managing… and our coach was completely hands off. He probably said something like “it’s about the kids” … well, surprise… we ended up winning first place!! There was one judge who told our coach (before the competition started) when they saw us walking in with our poster that we’d be the winning team. I think part of it was because the coach didn’t tell us what to do, I was able to come up with really creative ideas (like making a poster that captured the cartoon spirit of Rube Goldberg… and doing our machine presentation in the form of a story). We raised the bar for subsequent years and other teams ended up making songs for their presentation - ha! Anyways… I am so grateful for that project and it is still talked about in our school district as a huge achievement! The trophy was bigger than our faces and it had a huge rat trap on top!
Also, July has been a huge month for me so it was nice to read someone else reflecting on their month, too!