Book Review: Called to Create: A Biblical Invitation to Create, Innovate, and Risk

Book: Called to Create: A Biblical Invitation to Create, Innovate, and Risk
Author: Jordan Raynor

Platform: I read this on the Hoopla Digital app (and the Hoopla Digital website) with my library card from the St. Louis County Library

You could also find it at:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks

Who's This Book For?

• Anyone who thinks they have entrepreneurial skills
• Anyone who thinks they might desire entrepreneurial skills
• Anyone who doesn't know what they want to do with their work lives
• Anyone who would describe themselves as a "creative."
• Anyone currently feeling unfulfilled in their "secular" job.
• Students seeking to understand entrepreneurship and working in a "creative" industry from a Christian, Biblical perspective

My Take:
Leading a single-income household with 3 children (my wife has been lovingly giving of herself, joyfully staying home since 2011), I've often felt a pressure to leave my paltry teacher's salary behind for greener pastures of private industry as a corporate trainer or the like.

The thing that usually made it hardest for me to envision myself NOT in education was the idea of leaving behind this people-centered industry for a job where my worth would largely be measured in efficiency over love, and generating wealth for others over shaping lives. It felt like a dead work. It felt less spiritual. It felt like a waste of the majority of my waking hours in the name of making my family more secure and comfortable. Certainly, I have a mandate to care for my family, but I don't believe God wants us to work so that we can put our trust in our 401k.

Part of that low view of corporate life came from ignorance on my part of the amount of face-time that you all not in education get with co-workers on your teams and in your offices, part of it was a blindness to the impact I could and should have been having to bless my fellow teachers (not only my students), and a low view of how God uses work and business to help us glorify Him in how we live and what we value.

If you've ever felt the same way about work, this is a great book for you. I appreciated Raynor's breaking the book into a what, why, how, and so what framework of entrepreneurship and creating from a Christian worldview. The tangible examples from businesses and business owners that you'll probably find familiar serve as a means to build your faith for the way God uses work, entrepreneurs, and creative productivity to bless those around you and to fulfill a mandate from Genesis to create and bring order, just like the Creator (who Raynor sometimes refers to for the purposes of this book as the "First Entrepreneur".

I also appreciated how Raynor mixes in biblical and scripture references into a genre that I've seen sometimes error toward vaguely biblical, but more self-helpy. I didn't come to this book expecting every piece of truth to come explicitly from scripture, but there is plenty of good reading on entrepreneurship and innovation if you're not looking for a Christian perspective. Layering the word God on an otherwise "regular" business book doesn't make it better, it makes it less genuine. All that goes to say, Raynor mixes biblical truth and business examples into the narrative in a way that enriches his story, rather than distracting from it.

Called to Create clocks in at 240 pages, which might be a tad longer than a busy entrepreneur/creative might typically be able to get through if not in the practice of reading, but the narrative is easy and the 4-part structure of the chapters also makes it more digestible.

I wholly recommend this book!

Pathways to Prosperity - Pathways for Teachers

I had an amazing opportunity to be a part of a program this past year called Pathways for Teachers (the professional development/curriculum writing arm of a larger program called Pathways to Prosperity.) The goal of the program is to pair up gen ed teachers with business and industry to give teachers "real-world" settings and experience that they can take back to their classrooms and use to enhance the relevance of their curriculum. The program was funded last year by+Boeing, through a partnership with +Cooperating School Districts.

We spent 2 whole days in the spring touring different manufacturing and business sites talking to workers and getting a general idea of what STEM-type jobs might look like beyond engineering. (I went to Icon Mechanical in Granite City, IL, Component Bar Products in O'Fallon, MO, Boeing HQ in Hazelwood, MO, and Ameren HQ in St. Louis, MO). During the summer, we had a week-long Pathways Institute that was designed to give us a more in-depth look at ONE site we had previously visited, training in developing project-based learning units, and time to collaborate and write the units.

I spent my externship day in the summer back at Ameren HQ downtown for what I thought was going to be a day of attempting to integrate electrical theory and problem solving into my Algebra class. What I came away with was several next-day applications for statistics and graphical analysis that completely caught me by surprise. Believe me when I say, real people do stats. Excel was EVERYWHERE (as were awesome 3 monitor setups at like every desk.)

After the day at Ameren, I worked 2 1/2 days with two other teachers from my school creating a project-based learning unit integrating everything we had learned at our individual externships. Collaborating on the project was a great experience because justifying decisions to my teammates and bouncing ideas off each other to solve different problems that arose in the process made for a better project. As just a small example, in the unit, students are grouped into teams and each student is given a job with an individual rubric. Giving specific tasks to kids in groups was not something I'd ever tried to tackle on my own, but we became our own support system. Its always harder to back down from makig innovative (hard) changes when you're got a buddy in the trenches with you.

Today I have the opportunity to share my experience with the this year's round of teachers - here are my slides.

Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

The Claims We Make About "The Real World"

I remember a strategy the teachers in my elementary school all seemed to use when they felt like we were slacking on effort or gripping about the difficulty of some piece of content.

TEACHER 1: (to the class) One moment please, Mr. Smith needs to talk to me about something

The two teachers speak quietly by the door about something the students usually can't pick up.

TEACHER 1:  (to the other teacher, but loud enough for everyone to hear) You know, Mr. Smith, we're working on our long division right now, and a lot of my students seem to think it will be okay if they don't ever master this. Do you think that will work out next year?

TEACHER 2: (with the same inflection as the last question) Oh, no! That won't fly at all in 5th grade! You know, 4th graders, I've been hearing a lot about your, and I think there are a few of you that aren't gonna make it next year. In fact, I think maybe some of you would be better off getting held back... Ya'll are gonna be in for a surprise.

The students used to doing well, who were probably not the ones he was really referring to, all stress out for the rest of the day and into the evening about potentially repeating the 4th grade.

We do the same thing to our high schoolers, too, right? "That won't work in the real world..." I've the pleasure working with EdPlus and Pathways to Prosperity this week designing project based learning curricula resources for our classrooms next year, so the real world is high on my mind. Perhaps the best part of the program is the full day I'll be spending at Ameren headquarters on Tuesday, one-on-one rotating through with representatives from every department. The goal of Tuesday is to get an idea best what the real world really means in 2014.

Post by Timothy Ryan.

Do teachers do this because they KNOW its true, or are they trying to make a point out of good intention?

Here's a list of things I'm planning on asking the Ameren workers I'm with on Tuesday that might be either wrong, or at least misrepresented -

"You need a scientific calculator because your smartphone isn't going to be able to do enough in a real job.""What are you going to do when the technology isn't there anymore to fall back on?""You can't NOT do fractions - fractions are in the real world.""You can either go to college or work at McDonald's.""You have to memorize this so you don't have to look it up at your job.""If you want a job that supports a good lifestyle, you're going to need a college degree.""Everyone uses math."
"Everyone writes" "You MUST show your work in a certain way, or else I'll take off points. Your boss is going to expect your work to be how he or she wants it!"

I'll give you a report back later this week!

Not Just a Math Teacher - You Know, (Insert Subject Here) Is Everyone's Job

The title is in jest - there really are so many aspects of education and learning in a high school that really are everyone's job. We have reading specialists, but we should all have our students reading subject appropriate texts and writing. I'm a math teacher, but I know the science teachers upstairs are teaching a whole lot of mathematics (and its always funny when we get together and share many of the same frustrations - they always think they're alone). We have business classes and personal finance, but every subject should be in the business of advertising real-world applications.

This op-ed from HuffPost jogged my memory tonight. ("Battle Unemployment By Focusing On Youth Career Education") This is where I'm at right now - many of my students will inevitably work their way through college, which means they're going to need marketable skills the day they receive their diploma, and I wonder how many of them will get it?

Here's the irony: the hard-working kid who's always had it tough and knows if they're going to college, it'll largely be on their own dime - those kids are the ones I see most motivated by tech school and getting in our co-op and CLP (Community Learning Program) courses. These kids get real job taste and always seem most ready for adulthood. The kids who slip through the job-skill cracks, who may potentially benefit most from every course integrating career readiness skills and discussing the very-near future are the "academic" kids who plan on just going to a university, but then have their plans foiled by life. Lost scholarships, chronic illness, family unrest, one or two poor decisions - these hit the "academic" kid hard, because he is thrust into the workforce competing with not only adults, but kids his own age who've been focusing on job skills for years by that point.

As the brick and mortar university dies, more students will be pulling double duty, which requires that we prepare students for the workforce in ways the American system probably hasn't for a couple of generations.

My district has a great career and technical ed program (as I'm sure others do), but the prevailing attitude right now is that the brightest kids go to the college-track courses and ambitious (but not bright) students take the career courses.

I'll leave you with a couple of graphics our Career and Technical Ed Coordinator, Jay Boleach, uses in his crusade to change the perception of these highly technical, fantastic programs.

This graphic most highlights a deficiency is skills that we ALL can work on in our courses - technology, interpersonal communication, and real writing. (More info on the STL State of the Workforce)

From St. Louis Community College State of the STL Workforce, 2012 New hires are frequently deficient in people and organizational skills 

From the MO Dept of Economic Development - The news here is obvious and doesn't really come as a surprise. As baby boomers age, they need more caretakers!

From 2008 MO Dept of Econ. Development: Healthcare is BIG in the future!

So what's the reaction? Do we dial back our school system to churn out vocations instead of students?