Know Better, Learn Faster

One of the pinned tabs in my browser, perpetually open so I can access it and add to it eleven times a day, is a Google Doc titled, "Notes for Next Year."

It's a bulleted list of necessary changes and new ideas. It's full of hyperlinks. It includes notes on just about every unit, project, process, and routine.

It revisits everything that happened this year. I have notes for improving and redoing what worked. And even more notes for overhauling what didn't.

It's a lot of pages long. Looking at it is simultaneously dispiriting and motivating.

It's a highlight reel matched with an equally long blooper reel.

Because seeing both parts is critical.


It's how I come back and do it all again.

Getting to do this is a professional gift in the teaching world. My career is a series of do-overs.




I remember listening to an interview that Thao gave about her album titled, "Know Better, Learn Faster," and when asked why she titled it that, she replied, "Because you can't."

That has stuck with me.

She goes on to say, 'By the time you realize you should, it's too late. And I enjoy the predicament and the totally devastating, unfunny humor of that.''


This first year in a new place I've learned that I can be pretty hard on myself. And I know that it's important to honor the process. To create and attempt, then reflect, and try it all again.

1 comment:

  1. I have the same doc :) Any ideas for how to go through it all?

    ReplyDelete