Educational Soul Mates

You are the average of your five closest friends, or your two educational soulmates…

On a sunny Austin 100f mid September day…

In the morning, pictured left, I planned to chat with Erin Defossé a brief 30 min, had no agenda, 90 minutes later, we were still talking as we walked away, and I think we barely scratched the surface of our interests.

In the afternoon, pictured right, I planned to chat with Jesse Farmer a brief 45 min, again, had no real agenda, 2 hours later I had to basically force exit the zoom - and yes, there was still more to talk about.

To say these two gents are my educational soulmates would be underselling of the nth degree.

Some Educational Principles that glue this analogy together…

- Teacher student relationship form the basis of everything
- Feeling secure is a precursor to learning
- Tangible skill development is more useful than test scores
- Languages promote symbolic thinking
- Curriculum needs constant updating
- Tenure probably doesn’t make sense outside of hard sciences
- A Global perspective enables powerful change

My background with Jesse Farmer started in 2012 when I went to Dev Bootcamp.  Some of the ideas and ‘ism’s that I associate with Jesse are “impedance mismatch”, “fungibility”, “the papaya method”, “when you wrote that code, what did you expect it to do” and “let’s not take this too seriously”.  Jesse will participate in an upcoming CTO Talk where we will touch on ideas like “why don’t LLMs invent their own programming language?”, “Are you responsible for the Everlane tiktok meme” and “This is how you get a flight attendant to complement your luggage”, Jesse is the founder of numerous early stage companies including Everlane and is deeply knowledgeable about starting software centric tech businesses.

My background with Erin Defossé stretches all the way back to last week’s UT/Michigan game (Hook ‘Em).  In addition to having an intense career in tech and as an entrepreneur, Erin is 1. A prior NASA engineer responsible for “a variety of interplanetary spacecraft programs” and 2. Founder of the Austin based Magellan School, a Spanish immersion based k-9 school with roots in the International Baccalaureate community.

In both cases, these Gents live their educational values, live entrepreneurial lives, display incredible seriousness coupled with pragmatic joviality and are generally great people to be around.  Yeah, my soulmates, but just in the educational sense.  Hook ‘Em