I don’t know if Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead, starring a teenage John Cusack, qualifies as a cult classic, but it’s one of my favorite ‘80s movies.

In one memorable scene (featuring the late, great Vincent Schiavelli as the geometry teacher), Lane Meyer, played by Cusack, experiences that nightmare scenario of being unwittingly unprepared for class.

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Here we are at the end of 2020, and the Internet is flooded with people looking ahead to the brighter possibilities of 2021.

Of course, the division between the years is arbitrary. Though vaccines give us reason to be hopeful that the end of the pandemic is in sight, we are still very much in it. And we’ll still be in it when the calendar page flips to January. Some optimism is reasonable, but it’s delusional to imagine that there will be a drastic change in our circumstances from Friday forward.

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My goal, in most assignments, is to get my students to think.

This runs counter to the goal that most of them have, which is to complete their work as quickly and easily as possible, without thinking.

It can’t blame them for this habit. Many of the assignments they’ve had over their school years don’t require any thinking. You do the work to prove that you were in class, paying attention, and that’s it.

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These days, I’m learning how to manage projects.

This is not a well-developed skill for me. I’m good at managing a process — something repeatable that can be refined over time — and I’ve had a lot of experience dealing well with novel situations and improvising on the fly. My weakness is one-time, short-term endeavors with a beginning, middle, and end. Projects. Yeah, those.

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In the month of June, I didn’t have that much going on.

School was out, so my team and clients needed less input from me. Plus, I didn’t have anywhere to be (we can thank a global pandemic for that part).

It was a perfect opportunity to work on writing, curriculum development, and creative projects that I don’t always have the time to get to during the school year.

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