From: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24034638@N03/3634379879/
When we were discussing the philosophy of our school division today, I decided to look at the Google philosophy and fell upon this quote:
Great just isn’t good enough.
We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
Would you work for a company like this? Is this type of vision inspiring enough? Do our schools have this type of vision? Are they ever that bold?
Do people want to be a part of something where “greatness” is a minimum standard? I believe in the importance of ethics, being a good citizen, and they are so important we to have those things in our school while aiming for great. Greatness and wisdom can go hand-in-hand.
When working with kids, can we shoot for anything less? What do you think?
George,
Just today I came across an interesting post with a video of one of Google Quality Launch Revie, a weekly meeting of google engineers associated with search who work to see how they can make small tweaks to improve search results. This time, they’re talking about long search queries (>10 words) that have misspellings. I only watched a few minutes, but the video is fascinating, since it evidences much of what the quote above is about. Here’s google trying to improve its search algorithm for queries that must be less than .000001% of all the queries it receives.
Perhaps even more interestingly, I’m impressed that google released the video from this meeting to the public. Sure this is just one meeting, and it’s edited and probably excerpted from a longer meeting, but at least its one meeting. I think I would have to search long and hard before I would find a video of even one faculty meeting from any school.
WOW wouldn’t it be great if every educator believed that “Great” was the minimum? Right now we are having discussions in our district about the evaluation term “Basic” and if it is OK to be basic in some of Danielson’s categories of instruction especially if educators have been teaching for 5+ years. While I agree that being “Great” should be the minimum for all educators, new teachers will probably not fall in the “Great” category for everything but they should strive to want to be “Great” and see that it being the minimum is just “Great” for ALL kids.
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