STRATEGY I
former teacher, and, according to the New York Times , holder of the world record for the most consecutive days of standup comedy performances (1,001). It became clear that if I wanted to try to create irresistible educational content that would draw students to a subject and stimulate them to learn more about it, Obeid’s combination of brilliance, educational background and work ethic would make him the perfect collaborator (later, Netflix had the same insight, asking Obeid to co-host its hit series, 100 Humans ). I reached out to Obeid, and we ended up recording a short educational video on an iPhone in my son’s studio apartment. The bed had to be put on its side to make space, and the floor shook each time one of us moved. But when I took the footage back to France and our brilliant pedagogical engineers edited it and added visual and sound effects, we knew we had something. Instead of having to spend up to half an hour of valuable class time reminding students about the normal distribution in probability and statistics, we could now refer them to our seven-minute video that was clearer, more memorable – and compulsively watchable. We wanted to do more, but we had no budget, no structure for such a collaboration, and no idea of what we were getting ourselves into.
had been teaching for more than a decade when a good friend, a Business School professor like myself, shared an epiphany. The day before, he had gone to a rock concert, where, seated close to the stage, he was enjoying an electrifying performance by a band at the pinnacle of their stardom. He suddenly noticed, a few rows in front of him, a group of 20-somethings who looked like they may well have been his students; seemingly oblivious to the band leader’s impassioned solo, they were scrolling through their phones. ‘It was then that I realised,’ my friend confided ruefully, ‘that if they are ignoring this handsome, talented, guitar-strumming superstar singing his heart out… what chance do I have to hold their attention?’ My friend is a gifted, committed and loved educator, but his tale pinned down a nagging worry I had felt for years. Yes, there are many students who are passionate and motivated, and there are many more who may not be inspired but are hard-working and dedicated. But what can we do about the third category – and I have spoken to enough colleagues around the world to know that it is ubiquitous – who look like they’d rather be somewhere else? There are things we can do. We can participate in teaching workshops. We can talk to educators we admire. We can watch Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society again and again, hoping some of his magic will rub off on us. And slowly but surely, we get better, usually with frustrating emphasis on the ‘slowly’. Yet as years passed, I kept hoping for a breakthrough. Hoping for something that would allow me to glimpse a novel solution to this age-old problem. As Emily Dickinson wrote: ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’ – and it was. From France to California and back again Rooster T Feathers is an intimate comedy club in the heart of Silicon Valley. My wife and I went there one April evening three years ago, right after flying in from Europe on a holiday trip, simply as a way to manage jetlag. Any concern I had about dozing off during the show evaporated as soon as the headliner took the stage. Remarkably, his electrifying performance was peppered with concepts from mathematics and statistics… and no one was glancing at their phones. After the show, I looked him up: Sammy Obeid, maths and business graduate of UC Berkeley,
The ‘Inspiring Guest’ project Since its founding in 1903, TBS Education (TBS, formerly Toulouse Business School), where I have been teaching since 1999, has reinvented itself many times.
In 2018, it put inspiration at the core of its mission and changed its slogan to ‘Inspiring Education, Inspiring Life’. I am generally rather cynical
about slogans, but I loved this one. For any educator, ‘how
do I inspire my students?’ is a great question to wake up to. After our proposal to
22 |
AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online