This morning, my friend-and-colleague Sarah and I spoke on the phone, exploring this tweet of hers:
I have been grappling with legacy and impact lately. They seem to have tons of overlap, but is there a difference? Do legacy and impact always go together? Is it possible to have one without the other?#MTBoS #iteachmath
cc: @MrVaudrey @Math_m_Addicts— Sarah Galasso (@SarahGMath) December 6, 2018
As you may have read earlier this week, I’m on the verge of something.
The story of the last few years of my career is one of deciding what kind of impact I want to have on the field of capital-E-Education.
In those few years, my impact has gone beyond the 150ish students in my classes and spread to other educators around the country. Twitter, this blog, and a book, the impact I’ve had on Education is more than I thought it would be.
But what about legacy?
I got an email today from a teacher in Massachusetts with questions about one of my lessons that she ran in her class. Of course, I respond with excitement and support, answering her questions and prompting further learning. I’m not sure if we’ve ever met, but I’m happy to support here, even without any kind of relationship.
What really gets me interested, however is growth over time.
Sprout by AnastasiaW
Sarah pointed out on the phone that our job in getting teachers to try something new and to grow is like spreading seed on a garden or a lawn. When we take fistful of seeds and try to spread them, some fall on rocks, some onto the path, and some onto the soil where they grow into plants. (We realized later that it was the parable of the seeds from Matthew 13, but … like… from an Education standpoint.)
I work in a school district, building relationships with teachers to encourage them to grow. Sarah works for a curriculum company, and she prepares teachers to grow into new instructional practices.
Before a legacy, before the impact, there has to be a relationship. Someone has to till the soil, to water it, to pull the weeds, so that when the new idea comes, it has somewhere to grow.
image: Monica
That’s what I want to do. I’m happy to support teachers around the world with Barbie Bungee and Appetizers and Desmos and all the other fun things I know about… for an hour at a time. Or a day at a time. It’s fun to get teachers excited about stuff, especially when I’m one of the first to expose them to tools like WODB or Twitter. As Sarah texted to me later:
When you have to wear the Consultant Hat, you can’t afford the time needed for the relationship you need (to create the change you want). As a school admin, you’d have the time to make the relationships.
I want my day job in Education to focus on relationships first.
More on that later.
~Matt “You sound frustrated; what’s up?” Vaudrey
P.S. Nanette Johnson’s talk on Legacy is also relevant here.
ShadowCon 2018 – Nanette Johnson from Shadow Con on Vimeo.
Impact seems like an in-the-moment metric. You can see an impact as it’s happening. Legacy requires the lens of history. You need to be able to measure the impact against the other things at the time, where it falls in history, and how many people’s lives did it go on to touch. It’s a great thing to shoot for, but an amazing legacy is impossible to know in the moment. You could have done the most amazing thing one day, and not seen the results until years, maybe decades later. Look at the nobel prize winners in economics who don’t receive notice of their work’s prominence until decades later. Only after a bunch of people continued to follow that original work. Or after a lot of little moments of impact kept happening after that initial work. I think legacy is something you hope for, but since the only road to get there is through lots of little moments of impact, it seems like would be something that’s hard to plan for.
Carl, that’s good; an important distinction between impact and legacy, and further reminding me that I don’t care much about legacy, but I care a lot about impact.
I want change, not credit.