I made a bunch of new friends yesterday. They’re 6 or 7 years old. They call me Ms. Kathryn. I’ve started volunteering in their kindergarten classroom.
I worked with pairs of students on letter recognition and numbers. I discovered that I LOVE working on letter recognition and numbers with kindergarteners!
Over the course of the morning we developed a game that got them off their chairs and sprawled on the floor in the hallway. They had to put a bunch of letters cut out of sandpaper in order from A to Z. When I asked one group if they wanted to do somethingreally hard, they yelled “yes!”
One quiet little girl couldn’t (wouldn’t?) identify the letter “a.” I hope I get to work with her again.
When the class traipsed off to gym class, their teacher put me to work cutting out little green triangles out of construction paper for a math project. I initially entertained myself by optimizing how many triangles I could cut (I got a blister). I then considered how different this project was than what I’d been doing, say, a month ago at Amazon. I considered how 10 years ago I would have been concerned about how menial the task is — how it wasn’t what I got an MBA for — how it wasn’t moving me forward.
Cutting green triangles yesterday, I realized, once again, how happy I am. Except for the blister.
And now when my new friends walk past me in the school hall, they look me in the eye and smile.
Maximize Your Career in Your Current Organization
From a University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education webinar: Prospective clients sometimes ask me how I have the credibility to coach senior executives in industries I know nothing about. Challenging question, right? So I have a choice here: I can answer in a way that risks sounding defensive, talking about my experience and my degrees. I like to do something really unexpected instead.
I like to talk about knots.
