Pitching the forest

The first fruit of Level’s renaming / rebranding process from Magnazine to Level is a gorgeous pitch deck by my co-founder Alex. He did a beautiful job of capturing Level — what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to do it and why we’re doing it in that way — in a few brief sentences and images, so that someone with zero experience in adult education or prison education can grasp it and, we hope, become intrigued, inspired, and invested.

(I imagine that compression applies to other subjects as well. Like reading, for example; if you still had to think through recognizing letters, you might still be reading the first sentence of this post.)

Part of good teaching is reading your students and where they are in their compression process. That’s how you know which terminology to use or avoid, where to pause and explain more, how long a lesson will take. I didn’t have to think hard about these estimations as a math teacher; I pretty much knew where my students were getting stuck, because I had gotten stuck in the same places.

But just because I could do it with my students didn’t mean I could do it with potential collaborators or funders! In fact, I struggled — still struggle — a lot with getting anyone outside our project sold on it. Turns out, most people are not engaged by plunging directly into the ins and outs of various pedagogical and learning science theories. I hadn’t just lost the forest for the trees — I’d lost it for the microscopic water veins in an individual leaf on an individual tree.

And I couldn’t figure out a way to zoom back out. Level had grown so directly, so intuitively, so gradually, from my experiences and my collaborators’ experiences and, most crucially, what we’d learned from all the students and inmates and student-inmates we’ve served, that I hadn’t noticed how much I had compressed them or how I had gotten there.

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