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LIFE | Barbara Brier

Drilling Down

Blogging has me making new connections ... amazing stuff!

October 17, 2005 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 5 COMMENTS

By Barbara Rubin Brier

A good deal of my professional time in the past year has been spent on principal mentoring, i.e., supporting aspiring and new principals as they take on the extraordinarily demanding responsibility of running a school. Never easy, the stress of this complex role has become unbearable for many in this era of ‘No Child Left Behind.’ As a result, there have been more retirees and fewer potential candidates for their jobs in recent years, which has led to an explosion of ‘new’ programs [such as mentoring] to identify, train and retain principals.

Having written what feels like hundreds of pages on the theory and practice of mentoring, I have to say that it really comes down to this: having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable.

You might have guessed that what set me on this train of thought was writing for this blog – forcing myself to reflect on what I wanted to make public – and I am struck by how deeply it has encouraged me to drill down. I started by making the connection to mentoring from what I said in my last post about learning from Noah. But then the layers of my life started peeling away. I was all the way back to my first art professor’s thesis on contour drawing -- and had even googled his name (Robert Kaupelis) – when I realized that I was conducting a networked search. It is too cool that the internet is a metaphor for the way we think; it just blows me away!

By the way, Kaupelis’ thesis was that contour drawing – drawing without looking at the paper – forced you to really see what you were drawing rather than fall back on the image of ‘flower’, ‘face’, or ‘waterfall’ that is stored in your brain as a kind of caricature – a visual ‘tag,’ if you will. Quite the connection, no?

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COMMENTS

1Sandy

I can relate to the experience of drilling down. It's amazing to me, when I take a writing workshop (right now, my poetry class) how it forces me to discover what I'm thinking about, and all sorts of connections I would normally not be aware of. By the way, I really love the Kaupelis idea - look at the object you're drawing, not your tag of it. Hmmm. (But with writing, aren't we usually looking/thinking of the tag?)

October 18, 2005

2barbara

I'm not sure I understand the question, Sandy. I think we often start with a tag, if you mean an idea or topic we want to pursue, but as with this post, we can start in one place, and end up somewhere totally different. I think Noah has blogged about that -- writing for discovery (?) I've always thought of it as tangetial thinking -- just following a train of thought to see where it takes you. I find it much more exciting than having a plan, although it may seem a tad schizo to some ...

October 18, 2005

3andrea

It's difficult for me to think in a planned way; the tangential thinking IS more exciting, but sometimes I get in a little trouble.

October 18, 2005

4andrea

p.s. Since you're so in love with tagging, would you like to read my paper, "Database as cultural form?" (or not -- I wouldn't blame you!)

October 18, 2005

5barbara

Andrea, I'd love to read your paper! (I'm one of those strange people :) -- but I'm not sure you can say I love tagging. I love connections and the web concept. As a non-scientific thinker fascinated by brain science, I've always envisioned the neural network as an intricately woven web (not unlike a spider's web) which captures ideas. Each idea then becomes a point from which a new set of threads, or connections, can be generated.

October 18, 2005