Welcome to readers new and old! This nookie is of the detoxification variety. Let’s dive in…

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Detoxing From Education

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Eventually I learned how to play the game. But by the time I finished high school, much of my curious, rebellious spirit had been drained.

My bio teacher was a disengaged drunk, routinely late to school. He was fired by my senior year. My math teacher just repeated herself and increased the volume.

As a young teen I didn’t know how to cope, so I stopped giving a shit. I “showed them” by engaging in self-sabotage, giving up precious summer time to redo classes.

We switched to digital report cards by the end of my senior year. I didn’t check my grades because I knew I had all A’s, but A’s at that point didn’t influence my university admissions counselors.

At Virginia Tech, we once scored a 50% on a group project for introducing the teacher to Google Docs.

Every-body has memories of school where the stuff didn’t make sense. Something felt off.

Every-body knows education is broken. This is the first week I’ve seriously considered the question: what if education isn’t just broken? When does it become toxic?

Mark Twain said, don’t let school interfere with your education. So, after college I took learning into my own hands, and have been on what I lovingly call an “autodidactic safari” ever since.

I learned words like pedagogy. And more recently, andragogy.

And even more recently, heutagogy. (Which, dear reader, Google doesn’t know how to spell)

​Heutagogy:

The theory and practice of self-determined learning that focuses on the importance of knowing how to learn as a key skill for the 21st century.

It builds on the self-directed principles of andragogy in which students develop their own learning skills. However in heutagogy learning moves from self-direction to self-determination. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning and students take responsibility for creating their own learning pathway by choosing what they want to learn, setting learning goals and choosing the most appropriate method of learning to them. In doing so students develop the capability to become autonomous and lifelong learners. Key concepts in heutagogy include double-loop learning and self-reflection. Heuatagogy can be applied to emerging technologies such as learning via social media and provides a framework for learning in the digital age.

Eventually, people began noticing that I had learned a lot and started asking for help.

So I started a coaching business. But I never liked the word coach. People would ask, what do you coach, as if it were football or soccer.

I had been encouraged to teach, but didn’t sense I could change the system from within. I knew that burning it down wasn’t the way to go. Building is the bee’s knees. After all, I used to sell shirts that say, “build the matriarchy.”

I dabbled in going back to work at Virginia Tech. My alma mater pitched me on a role paying 33% less than what I got as an entry level graduate, roughly a decade after graduating and maturing in my career.

Yuck.

But I kept learning. Kept up my safari.

What’s neat about safari’s is that they involve wildlife and wild-life.

This fall, my learning safari has taken a turn towards helping others detox from education. After removing the toxins, we get exposed to other things. I try to use discernment with my exposure.

As they say, all therapy is exposure therapy.

I’m exposing myself to a new type of education that finds me on 3 hour “work-as-play” calls till 2:22am (sacred numerology, anyone) for fun! I didn’t have to stay up that late.

I wanted to. I chose to.

If you’re excited about educational detox too — if you nerd out about learning the word heutagogy, I want you in the cohort.

If you want to, too, reply here and let’s talk. Or, the final call for last minute peeps with Sean is Tuesday, August 13. We start Wednesday, August 14.

No worries if you can’t make this one. Learning is life-long! We will have more safaris in the future.

Thanks for bearing the chaos, and if you’re curious, let’s detox together.

Peace,
Drew