Everything but the Book Study: In Defense of Dabbling

In this episode, Ashley shares her thoughts on the podcast episode, In Defense of Dabbling with Karen Walrond, which emphasizes the value of being an amateur and trying new things without a serious end goal. They bring up some specific examples from their childhoods, as well as talking about this decidedly non-education focused episode has so many important connections for educators and learners. 

Intro Music: David Biedenbener

Other Music:  Paul Krasnoshchok from Pixabay

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Ashley O'Neil: 0:00

You call me up and say, Hey, would you like to do a line dancing class with me, which, if you saw both of our faces, that's highly unlikely.

Introduction: 0:06

Okay, now we're recording. So welcome to teach wonder. Yes, welcome to teach wonder. A pod. A podcast hosted by Ashley O'Neill and Julie Cunningham.

Ashley O'Neil: 0:32

Okay, welcome back to our next episode of our mini series inside of teach wonder, which is called everything but the book study, where Julie and I bring different pieces, articles, book chapters, podcasts, things we've engaged with or have caught our eye, and we talk about them, so one of us will have listened to or read through something completely, and then the other person doesn't really know much. So we're hoping that you can come along with us as we learn something from these very varied, very varied pieces of content. And today we're taking a bit of a left turn, because the podcast episode that I'm bringing to you is neither education focused nor stem focused. And it is actually a podcast interview with an author about their book. And for the first 10 minutes, I was listening to it, just enjoying it. And then as soon as I started thinking about, you do that thing where, like, oh, this kind of reminds you of the MakerSpace. And then the rest of the article, I just listened or the rest of the podcast, I just listened to it from the lens of a teacher. And so it's a little out in left field. It doesn't directly apply to students right away, but I'm kind of making a case for why it should. I think

Julie Cunningham: 1:37

it does apply to education. I think once she talked about amateurs then, or at the very least, applies to learning, maybe not your classical student in a classroom, yeah, per se, but it definitely applies to learning.

Ashley O'Neil: 1:55

So yeah, so just some of the details. Karen walrand Is the author that is interviewed in this podcast, and she is author of many books. The book that they're talking about today is called in defense of dabbling, the brilliance of being a total amateur. And that was interesting to me on a lot of levels, but it made me think the way that this article kind of started, or the way that this podcast kind of started, is they started by thinking about revisiting who we are when we're children. So like, who were, what were you like when you were 10? And the one woman in the podcast talks about, like, her spunky socks, and how fearless she was, and she was willing to try all of these things, and kind of as she grew up later, right? And she became, she called it, I think, more serious. She lost a little bit of that bit of herself. And so the case that this author is making is that we as people need to consider and intentionally do things poorly or roughly or try new things without there being any serious point, and one the reasons that she outlines for that are really, really interesting to me, but one of the things I wanted to ask you first, before we get too much into it, is, if you revisit who you are when you are 10, is there an aspect of yourself like you as a kid That was a strong feature of your personality that has changed for good, bad, neutral, different over time.

Julie Cunningham: 3:26

Yeah, I was, I was thinking about that when I was listening to her examples. And, yeah, I think I was, oddly enough, like much more of a maker as a kid. I mean, I work in a maker space now, but I very rarely take on my own projects in our current space, and I think I did well. I also, I think you have to know that my mom was one of those parents who we always had to be taking a class to learn something new. She didn't tell us what we had to take, and she was pretty good at making it happen. If it was something we were really interested. But sometimes she would just come home with the school district and say, like, these extracurricular classes are going on. You have to choose one from there. But I can remember, like, I took piano and violin lessons, which I was horrible at, and I didn't stick with but also, like, I really enjoyed woodworking. Like, so, like, those are two completely different things, but they didn't come out of necessarily. Like, I don't know my love of music or, I mean, we had a piano in our house, and my mom was always trying to get a pianist out of one of us, and she still doesn't have one to this day. But, I mean, you know, I think like, again, we weren't like the whole world was not our oyster to choose from for classes, but she was pretty adamant that we had to be trying new things, and that was one of her so I did. I did do a lot of projects. I did do a lot of woodworking. I did like to make things, painting and drawing. And my dad was a bit of an artist. Went to art school for a while. So I don't know if I come by it naturally or not, but I do not pursue any of those. I did photography for a while in high school, like that was of my own volition, like I was really interested in photography. I don't pursue any of those sort of artistic, creative, maker type projects anymore as an adult. So I think that is sort of ironic, considering where I work.

Ashley O'Neil: 5:29

That is really interesting. Okay, so my example is the complete opposite, and I think that I don't know that's fun. So one of the conversations that they talked about in this podcast was, when did you realize you weren't good at something, and how did that shape your relationship to yourself and to that thing? And one of the things I immediately thought about was I had a lovely gym teacher. I'm sure she was fantastic. And if I could meet her as an adult, I'm sure we would get along just great. But I felt very early on that gym physical exercise. Physical being physical with my body was just not for me. And part of it was, I'm 510 and I was that tall come sixth grade, and so I was growing into my limbs. I would remember so much of gym was competition based, right, like we had the Presidential tests, or we were on teams and it was loud, and my classmates would love it. And I remember my head would fill with like white noise, and like the ball would come to me in basketball, and I would just panic. And it was like every technical thing that they had taught us about, how to throw a basketball, how to throw a football, what to do in a tag game, I would just forget, and then I would just kind of stand there in a panic. And so from a pretty early age, I was like, oh, sports are not for me. I don't I don't do sports well. Then fast forward to, like, adulthood, and I learned that I love moving my body. I love hiking. I love the feel of, like, sore muscles. I took a kickboxing class in my 20s with some friends. And I loved, like, moving to music. I loved doing workout videos. I liked being able to learn a skill in, like, from a step back right, like, I could watch you do it, and then I could start going when I wanted. And so, but for from, like, first, second, third grade all the way up until I was an adult, if you would have asked me, like, do you like do you like sports? Do you like being physically active, I would have been like, not for me. And so I think it's interesting, like, I decided that from a very early age, and I wonder what it would have been like for me had I kept that window open a little bit further. And it took a lot of work for me to say, like, Oh, I do like that. I just like it when there's not the social pressure, and there's not the competition, and I prefer being outside to do it right, all those things. So I thought a lot about that, and I know that many of our students are like you and like me. We're either they're full of this thing that they try and do and explore, full of this curiosity and it slowly like extinguishes over time, or they have an experience where it's not successful, right? And they make their mind up. One of the quotes from this article that I really liked is when they said, we allow excellence to be the reason that we stick to something, and so we define something when we're young, right? Where we try all these different things, we kind of shop around for different activities, and school is a great place to do that. But then we start extinguishing our experiences over time and funneling into the soccer or the art or the math because we have success with it, and then, like those other pathways, just kind of become faded. And that is pretty unfortunate. So one of the cases that this podcast is making is just saying we have to, because that's kind of how the natural way of things go. You can't continue taking 45 classes in third grade. We have to then be intentional about how we dabble, how we try things, and remove some of those pressures or points or reasons, because there's a lot of really good benefits. To that for ourselves.

Julie Cunningham: 9:05

Yeah, I was. I didn't listen to the entire podcast because I knew part of us making our podcast was me, but I did. I did listen just the beginning. And two things stuck out to me just from the beginning of what the author said. Number one, we've talked a lot on our podcast about play and learning through play, and I felt like there was some crossover there. The author talked about the joy of, like learning something new, just to learn something new. And I don't know I'm paraphrasing, like I don't have a direct quote, but there was some, some of that same language, right? I think that even talked about play at one point and and then secondarily, I'm curious as to when being an apprentice at something, does it become a hobby? Like, is that what we would call, as an adult, a hobby, or because you're not really. Guess you could be an expert at your hobby, but the podcasts are differentiated that as not necessarily being an expert, but that you like, sort of monetize it, or you sort of get good at something, and then you it becomes less, maybe joyful, because now you sort of have to do it. And I don't know that they called that being an expert necessarily, but they do

Ashley O'Neil: 10:20

kind of refer to this, like, tipping point. Yeah, when you grow your skill, you'll grow your skill. You grow your skill, and like, the moment when you're kind of sharing it with other people, or you're teaching someone, or you're monetizing it, or it becomes like something official, right? It is still a beautiful part of your life. And that's to say, like, I drop everything once I get good at it, but just say it serves a different purpose, right? And she has some tenants for what she thinks about as being intentionally an amateur, and one of those is to be playful. So to find ways in your day. And playful doesn't mean like stacking blocks, but playful means like entering into an activity, just to kind of experience it, to move things around, to see how you feel while you're doing it right, without like, a specific end goal. She talks about developing a curiosity mindset, so asking lots of questions. One of the quotes in this is one of the women said, like, I want to be a person who says yes to other people's yeses. So if you call me up and say, Hey, would you like to do a line dancing class with me, which, if you saw both our faces, that's highly unlikely, but if you called me up and said I'd like to do this, I would say yes, like I would be open and curious to trying something new alongside you. Another thing that they talk about is finding the edge of your comfort zone. And I thought that was super interesting. And I think this relates to children in a really important way, because often we don't ask kids what their comfort zone is and where that is. We either ask them to stay in it, and we they call that complacency, the difference of complacency or comfort zone where kids are disallowed to say, No, I'm gonna do that, not for me, and that's the end of the conversation. Or we don't ask them at all, and we ask them to disregard it and just jump in and do fractions or do competitive get

Julie Cunningham: 12:05

all dirty anchor space, right? And they're not ready to get their hands all dirty, yeah.

Ashley O'Neil: 12:11

And so one of the examples that she shared, I'm gonna, I'm gonna adjust it just a little bit for us in our space. But so she, she mentioned, you know, some of you very, very real in a very real way. Maybe are afraid of water, right? And so the idea of going and scuba diving the ocean, that would push you so far out of your comfort zone that that's not a good fit for you, and it wouldn't be a hobby. It wouldn't be a dabble, because the stress that you'd feel being kind of plunged into that scenario is not your comfort Zone's edge. It's way past it. But maybe what you could say is, you know, this year in Michigan, this is easy for us. We could say, I'm going to go visit every body of water within a day's drive of me at some point, and either walk around it, hike around it, sit on the beach, put my feet in just kind of really enjoy whatever the water is there, right? And maybe that is the edge of my comfort zone, right? And I learned something new. I learned I like hiking. I learn I like fly fishing. I learned that I'm super interested in collecting shells at the beach. And from that, from finding the edge of our comfort zone, we expand ourselves and learn new things about ourselves. But there has to be this fine line of I'm still capable of being curious. I'm not so stressed, uncomfortable at my like, fight or flight response that I can't really appreciate it.

Julie Cunningham: 13:32

Does that make sense? That makes sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, I think it's really, I mean, we've talked about both curiosity and maybe not overtly your comfort zone before. But I think we talk a lot in the makerspace about expanding your comfort zone, right? And we talk, definitely talk a lot about that the organization that I volunteer with, with getting kids on bikes, right? That's a lot of of what we do is to try new things, expand your horizons, try to get out of your comfort zone, try to do a little bit more. Be you know, how long or into what level can you be uncomfortable before it's

Ashley O'Neil: 14:16

before you need a break or like that, you are at your limit, and your limits not the same as someone else's. One of the things I was thinking about in this episode when I was listening was the beauty of dabbling, and kind of why it's perfect for finding the edge of your comfort zone, is that it does not matter, right? Like, this is not for pay, this is not for a grade. This does like, no one's going to get harmed or injured if I do something wrong, right? Like it's in the example in the podcast, like she was making a clay vase, right? Like it does not matter. And so you can really think about your responses to things and how, like, how you are in new situations, because the the the risk is actually. Quite low. And I think about that with students, right if we want to help students kind of expand their comfort zone, to try new things, to be curious, helping them have experiences in which the risk is really low is when we're going to see them at their most playful, their most adventurous, their most willing to kind of step outside their own limitations. You know what I mean?

Julie Cunningham: 15:24

Right? It strikes me too that when we have this conversation, and don't apply it back to students, but apply it to ourselves or as adults, think about it, that it requires a certain amount of reflection too, right? Like, how uncomfortable or comfortable was I? How enjoyable was that? And do I want to try to get like, what, you know, all those things about, how did I feel about this in the past me, and how do I feel about it now? It just feels like there's a lot of reflection involved. I did, kind of, I do kind of have to just a side story, and we don't have to include it in the end. But when I was at in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was in grad school, the university had, like, what we would think of as short courses that adults in the community could take just, you know, six weeks or eight weeks, or try something. And I had a friend that in Madison, when you said, you know, what did you call that? Will you go say yes to other people, say yes to other people's yeses, yes. So we would take turns picking a course out of there, and then just whatever I mean within reason, whatever the person picked, we would do together. And so we did pottery, we did hula like, we did ballet like, I mean, just not because, just because one of us thought it was interesting, and we did it together, and it was kind of a nice way to dabble, right? Like, am I ever gonna, like, continue to do hula? No, was I really good at pottery? Negative, but whatever, it was fun while it lasted.

Ashley O'Neil: 16:58

Yeah, she talks about that in that section. I'm just gonna read this quote, because I think the way she said it is really helpful processing how we react to something. So I'm making a clay vase, and it falls apart, and then suddenly you're having this like visceral reaction to something that has no repercussion, like, I'm not getting paid to do this. It's not something that it's going to have a real issue the idea of using something that you love to explore what you love, but then also explore yourself in the way you react. So like, like, you learn something about yourself when you were hula hooping, and it's hula hooping when you were learning hula dance, right? You learned something about yourself. And like, maybe your comfort zone for like, you like to be really physical, and you like to mountain bike, but you like the more like, adventurous outdoor part of it versus, like, the rhythmic, social community part, right? And so knowing how you react in those cases is really helpful. I thought, I think a lot about how we have students who the distance between knowing and not knowing is pretty big, and that that space between knowing and not knowing is frustration, right? And we don't often practice how to be frustrated in a space. And oftentimes, like, when you were learning that new skill, it was just fun. And so you could laugh at your mistakes, you could do whatever, because you went back home to your job or into your community, to all these things you were comfortable with, right? And so you've got to, like, kind of remove yourself from your regular life, go try something new, and practice learning again, and then go back to your regular life and then apply those things. And I think that is interesting for children, is if we can, if we think about dabbling, and we think about giving them a place where they can practice that space and grow that frustration muscle, then it does translate back to when the you're back in your real life, and the math test does matter, or the soccer game does have come whatever you know what I

Julie Cunningham: 18:51

mean, it's like a muscle memory, essentially, right? Yeah, that's a good point. And I mean really learning is about being uncomfortable, because to learn something new, you have to get outside your comfort zone. I mean, the whole premise of that is some amount of discomfort, and maybe you enjoy it, and maybe you don't, maybe you have a high tolerance for the discomfort, or maybe you don't. But I mean learning something new means being a little bit uncomfortable. So the more you can flex that muscle. It is, it does strike me as we do, you know, presentations or workshops or classes or whatever, for a variety of different age groups, and we always have you and I, when we do design thinking with a variety of different age groups, struggled the most with adults being willing to sort of like, just let it go, like you're making a prototype. It's this is not this

Ashley O'Neil: 19:51

is your willingness to fail, yeah, willingness to present something amateurish,

Julie Cunningham: 19:55

to be uncomfortable, the willingness to laugh at themselves. Or is you. Usually, usually students Yes, have a higher tolerance for that

Ashley O'Neil: 20:07

yes, and that is a perfect segue. Because I think one of the reasons I like this is I always think about students, but I think that when it comes to being an educator, you have to practice this for yourself, right? Like you have to practice doing this with yourself. I think we all realize, or one of like, big things that I like talking to you about on this podcast is when we think about people as whole people, we teach them better. We learn alongside them better, right? We value them more when we think about them in this holistic way. And I think when teachers view themselves in a holistic way, not as like the leader of the classroom, but as a fellow human who's also learning new things. And yeah, I got really embarrassed at my own watercolor class last night. And so when I see a child starting to shut down because they're feeling that, I remember that feeling from 12 hours ago. So I can, you know, empathize and relate with my students better. And I remember how step by step I need things to be because I remember being not good at things because I'm doing all the time. I think that's a really great way for us to keep our own head out of this goal oriented, perfectionistic mindset, which has its place. I'm not saying like, give up on all goals, but I am saying, like, just this willingness to be young in a process again and in the early days, is a real gift, and when we can see it as that gift and use it as an opportunity to expand ourselves, learn about ourselves, that also then makes us more thoughtful, empathetic and caring to our students and our community, I don't see a downside in that at all. There are two more points I wanted to bring up that just it made me think, oh, this podcast is a place for us. So one of the things I talked about was tapping into wandering awe, which we talk about often.

Julie Cunningham: 21:53

Yeah, those are the other words I remember hearing on the podcast, yeah. That reminded me of a little bit of our talk about play

Ashley O'Neil: 22:00

and seeing things fresh for the first time. So when we take kids outside, right? And they've been outside in that playground every day, but we want them to do like a notice and a wonder for a science activity, we have to embody that also, right, right? Because if they watch us be not engaged, not interested, we've made ourselves like we've just made it so much harder.

Julie Cunningham: 22:21

We say all the time in bike club that it's not your ride, adults, it's not your ride. You're Not You can go out and ride anytime you want on the trails, and I don't care what trail you've been on any number of times as an adult, that trail looks different to that kid every single time they go out on it, and they notice different things and let them. Let them it's not your ride. It's not your job to tell them it looks the same as it did the week before. Or come on, let's hurry up. Let's not look at this. Let's do that. No, it's their adventure. And when they're 567, 12 years old, it should two hours a week. Should be their adventure. Like leave your ego at home. Leave your

Ashley O'Neil: 23:03

yes and the cost of like efficiency, right? Because maybe you'd get through the trail faster if you went my route further, or you get further. Who cares?

Julie Cunningham: 23:12

It's not your ride. I think that even like when you take kids out in the pollinator garden and they see something different every single time they go out there, right? Whereas we might just see this postage stamp of a pollinator garden, and

Ashley O'Neil: 23:24

it feels huge to them, yeah? Like they always think like, oh man, there's so much to see in here. And I can I miss that, but you have a choice then, as the adult, right? And they excited, yes, or decide, well, our time is really up here. We're done looking Let's go. You say yes to their Yes, right? Yes. You dive into their enthusiasm, and you build off of that, and you you go at their pace, because this is their opportunity to be an amateur at something that maybe you're taking for granted because you have, you're so familiar with it, right? The last point that they brought up that I thought was really interesting and an interesting way of thinking about things. And maybe this relates to the classroom, maybe this relates more to yourself, but if I'm making a case for you to dabble, one of the women talked about how it connects you to your past and or your future. So she gave the example of she's not a baker. She does not enjoy baking. She's not appreciate baking, but her mom was a baker, and her grandma was a baker, and so once a year, they have this family bread recipe that they bake, and they do it together, and she, you know, kneads the bread and goes through the whole process. And while she's doing it, she thinks about like I am doing something that my mom did, and these people did behind me. And yes, I can go buy a loaf of bread that will probably taste better at the store, but I'm doing this thing that they did, and I'm marking it, and this is becoming a part of our family lore, like this is something that my kids have seen, and maybe they'll want to do someday, or maybe they now know that baking is a possibility for them. And I thought that connectedness to both like your own family or your own community or your own space, but also pulling things from the past. And saying, like, I'm doing this as like a line in history. I thought that was

Julie Cunningham: 25:04

really cool. That's really cool. Yeah, yeah, especially when you can think about how it connects community or family.

Ashley O'Neil: 25:11

Any final closing thoughts for us today?

Julie Cunningham: 25:14

No, I mean, I was again trying to relate this to myself, and I can think of what I mean. We've talked about agility before, and I really do enjoy doing it with my dog, but I've started and I'm, I am have a competitive personality. I am a competitive person. I know that about myself. I don't always have to be in competition, but like that is something that I do enjoy about sports in general, or games or such. But anyway, I think what I am starting to appreciate less about agility, like it's more fun when I was dabbling right before I was part of the competitions. And so I think that's kind of an interesting take that I wouldn't have necessarily recognized had I not gone this route. Like I enjoyed the class, I enjoy the time with my dog, I enjoy the other people in the class, I enjoy my instructor, I enjoy learning new things. I don't need to be super good at it. That was never my goal, but I'm I don't enjoy the pressure of the competitions in this sense. So I think that's kind of just as we're using this as a reflection. So in that sense, it's sort of, again, an argument for dabbling right, just to kind of keep it fun without this, I don't know grade or my case this, like leveling up right, like a

Ashley O'Neil: 26:33

number, a star, or whatever next to it. Yeah, I started a new hobby after break. I'm harvesting dye from natural things, and I'm trying to turn it into watercolor. I saw a friend of mine from forever ago was doing it, and I thought, oh, maybe that's something I could try. And earlier this week, I tried my first batch. It totally failed, because I did not understand the directions. And that's okay, right? And now, like, literally, I'm so excited to go home today, because I put my first batch through the filters this morning, and I could see that it was working, and it's not perfect. I can already see that there's some, like, white particulates in it that I don't want, but I'm like, so stoked to go see and my I was telling my friend about it, and she was like, oh, so you'll have water Club today. I'm like, Oh no, no. I'll have like, a precipitate that maybe I can try, like, grinding that might bind to this other thing that potentially could work out in that process. And but I'm kind of loving that I'm in this, like, nebulous middle part where I'm just testing new things. I have like, 15 pictures on my phone of like, cloudy green water to be like, Look, there's a chemical reaction happening. And like, I'm I will be a little bummed when I kind of master this, because then it will just become like cooking a recipe, right? When what I'm really excited about is, like discovering what colors does cabbage juice make? Could I use coffee to turn it into, like, this thing? So I'm like, in the very beginning middle, and it's so joyful for me, and messy, and I kind of want to stay here for as long as I Yeah, right.

Julie Cunningham: 28:02

Sometimes I think when you get to the I mean, as the podcast says, When you get beyond the dabbling point, and maybe some loses some of its yes shine, or some of its 100%

Ashley O'Neil: 28:12

so check back in later when I'm frustrated with watercolors. But for now, really now, it's really fun. Excellent. You. You.