Educators Just Wanna Have Fun

Educate This: A Podcast for Teachers, Trainers, Mentors, Coaches & Learners

EDUCATORS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

Hey! Thank you for being with me today. I’m going to get a little personal here. A little real; and reveal my childhood crush. She came on to the music and cultural scene like a kaleidoscopic whirlwind with a vibrant and effervescent attitude in fashion and song.
Her name was (still is actually,) Cyndi Lauper. Icon of the 80s.
Today’s episode is a lesson on the growth that we can achieve by rising to our personal challenges.

Through tough beginnings, which included a father who abandoned the family, a perverted stepfather, eating squirrel and other scrounged up food with her impoverished boyfriend, being raped by a bandmate, a court battle with her manager and more Cyndi Lauper fought through it all and rose to the heights where she could let her unique, chromatic style of music and fashion breathe.

There was though one trial that could have been the ultimate ending to any aspirations that she had of making it as a singer. For a little while in the mid-70s she found that she had damaged her voice and could barely speak let alone sing.

It was a years-long warning that she didn’t heed or completely recognise the implications of. There was a night for example, in 1974, where her voice, like her father, just up and left. She was going for a high note which with her 4-octave range she should have hit easily but it just wouldn’t come. She carried on though and kept booking gigs, mostly cover gigs where she would smash out versions of the growling, sandpaper, guttural voices like Janis Joplin and Rod Stewart. Eventually, her vocal cords gave out on her and collapsed. Doctors told her that it was time to put her voice to bed. She wouldn’t sing again. Definitely not professionally.

Distraught but never beaten, Cyndi Lauper was recommended a vocal coach by the name of Katie Agresta. It was no easy fix but through long, patient training Cyndi was able to regain her voice and make an indelible mark on the 80s particularly and create a legacy with music, theatre and fashion that lives on to this day.
Here are 3 Lessons That Educators Can Learn from Cyndi Lauper’s Journey
These are lessons we can both share and also self-apply.

1. One Person Entering Our Lives Can Inspire Course Correction
There’s a quote out there, probably a few actually, that speak to the idea that there is only one person who can change your life and that person is… drum roll please… You!
While ultimately true in a generally free society, we can all benefit from the wisdom, experience, expertise etc. of others. No person is an island. We all do and can continue to benefit from the help of others. Of course, while sometimes it takes another to give us a shove, it is then up to us to spread our wings and fly or retract our wings and plummet.

A story that I came across recently helps to illustrate this.
American Brian Flemming was a hyper-morbidly obese (weighing over 280 kilos,) depressed, alcoholic, 30-year-old college drop-out who spent his days gaming. He said he would drink a fifth of vodka mixed with a litre of soda every night and junk food was his main diet.
Then he met someone online through a Pictionary-like App called ‘Draw Something’.
That someone was 50 something year old Jackie Eastham, who lives in Paris and suffers from Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy, lives a hyper-conscious healthy lifestyle as a way of mitigating her condition.

The Draw Something game has an option to write comments to someone you are playing with. This opportunity to communicate and get to know Jackie may have saved Brian’s life and in the least, definitely catalysed a tremendous change that would alter his course for the better. Because of her own experiences with health issues, she was able to pick up on signs that he was not living an optimum lifestyle health-wise and so prompted, Brian confided in Jackie about his weight, depression and drinking issues. Long story short, Jackie determined to help him and Brian accepted that help knowing that he wanted her to inspire the change he desperately needed.

In the last update I could find Brian had lost 180 kilos and was preparing to run a marathon. He also flew to Paris to meet his “Coach” and self-appointed Trainer.

If Anne Sullivan hadn’t teamed up with Helen Keller how might their lives have turned out? Would John Lennon and Paul McCartney have been as successful without each other? Bernie Taupin & Elton John? Timon and Pumba? Rick and Morty?

As Educators we might find ourselves, by nature of our very jobs, in that Jackie position often. We are the ones to Train, Coach, Guide, Mentor etc. however we also need to allow ourselves to be open, to also being trained, coached, guided, mentored. Teachers need coaching, coaches need teaching - Sometimes that guidance is purposefully sought for and professionals are employed and sometimes, it can come from the most un-likeliest of places.
I have a friend who owns a highly rated and award-winning Indian restaurant. She told me not too long ago about a young staff member who she took on as a kitchen hand. I can’t recall exactly how she described a certain interaction but she explained how she saw him peeling an onion in a way that here was far less waste than she normally would create and so she complimented him and adopted that method herself.
Contrast that with a time many years ago when as a young adult I was working at a mattress making factory where I figured out a way to alter a template in a way that we could get an extra few millimetres from each foam roll – less waste and though it was tiny, with thousands of mattresses being made I could see it all adding up. My manager-supervisor was one who hated any idea that wasn’t his and so raked me over the coals (to the point where he was ranting and raving,) for having the audacity to suggest such a thing as a change to the template. A few years later, after I had left the factory, I was talking to someone who was still working there. Apparently, my template had been adopted and that manager had been demoted. Not that the 2 were directly connected but that prideful manager was obviously seen as a Luddite who couldn’t accept ideas for progress and improvement if they didn’t come from his own head.
As educators we can find plenty of learning opportunities not just from those above us in a work or qualification sense, but even from those who we have stewardship over.
By the way, that 20-year veteran of restaurant ownership still attends regular cooking classes as a student.

2. Weaknesses Can Be Catalysts

Weaknesses can be catalysts for decline or progression. It all depends on 3 things:
1. Whether we find the weakness
2. Whether we pay it attention
3. Whether we do something about it

As a long-time Personal Trainer who has moved on to education, I still keep a couple of clients on hand to keep my axe sharpened. When I was taking on new clients, I would tell them from day 1, “We will start with discovering weaknesses and when we find them, we’ll celebrate.” I didn’t mean balloons and a bouncy castle of course. We would just flip the usual reaction to finding a weakness.
I know that sounds odd, but it worked for us as the celebration was not for the fact that there was a weakness, but that we had discovered ...