Solvation

How to Become a Veterinarian

My friend's daughter has just begun at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.  How did she get there? Here are six key steps. Jaime Richards column: Want to be a vet? It can be done - Inside Bay Area.

When Variance is High

I was talking to a friend this weekend. He mentioned how broadly distributed intellectual potential is among the population, and it got me thinking....

When I was a kid, I played games at recess and ran around. I swam butterfly for a year in high school.  I played some tennis. A few coaches commented that I have decent hand/eye coordination and was reasonably quick. I was nothing special, either way... unless what I needed to do required both my feet to leave and then to return to the ground! In that case, failure was (and is) a reasonable expectation, and an injury, quite possible. Unless I'm going to be landing in water at the end, this whole "leaving the earth's surface" thing is clearly something my brain doesn't process well at all.

I was lucky, since I was a girl - the fact I was eager to play sports successfully offset my comparative lack of height as well as my leaping challenges. But for many boys, Physical Education class was a nightmare of humiliation, where coaches had achievement expectations that the boys just didn't have the inclination to train for and in many cases lacked the physical talent to meet.

Those same boys grew up in many cases to be academically successful men; fathers, who could determine funding priorities and administer school districts. I'm not sure this is related, but my son's academically excellent public school has a Physical Education department whose grading requirements for an A- in 9th and 10th grades are apparently "successfully changes into PE clothes."  There is no required physical education at all for 11th and 12th grades. The coaches do care a lot about the teams, but not at all about educating anyone of even average physical talent.

In other words, I suspect that since PE was difficult for people who weren't talented athletically, it was curtailed and then turned into an utterly useless program.  Imagine what would happen if we taught math that way? If you're not "math team" caliber, you show up for class, play math-based games if you want to -- hang out and talk to your friends if not -- and then you get an "A-" so long as you don't cause any problems.

I believe we need to create "learning environments" for physical learning in the schools. Teachers ridiculing kids who can't make the quota of pushups isn't okay; but neither is saying "voila! no need for push-ups!" I think understanding how to deal with the wide distribution of physical talent will help academics find innovative new approaches for managing the wide distribution of intellectual talent.

So back to the conversation with my friend, because there's another part to this, centered around the wide disparity in IQ that schools have to deal with, and how that affects the way people approach their lives, particularly how they approach conflict.

I don't actually have any answers to the questions he raised. But I have been thinking a lot about, specifically, the role of public education beyond the education of specific intellectual skills.

I have seen bright children become so competitive that they lose all sense of empathy. I have seen average children become so insecure and anxious they get sick. I have seen children (and adults) become violently angry and destructively frustrated when they just can't "get it," particularly when the pressure's on and the stakes are high.

I believe the future of education has to be team-based, because we can't afford, as a society, to exacerbate impulsive anger in children who aren't succeeding at the moment, whether they're just not smart enough or they're just generally prone to anger or impulsivity, or they are having short term personal crises.  Having social support helps people feel calmer, and gives them confidence they'll weather whatever they need to face.

We need to know a lot more about how to integrate people who are experiencing failure, anger, and obsession. We have an idea of how to create an intellectual learning environment: it's okay to try, mistakes are tolerated, unpacked, and knowledge is gained. Now we need to learn how to create learning environments that accommodate emotional learning.

And we have to expand those domains to encompass a way to differentiate the curriculum for a very wide disparity in natural talent.

Education Reconceived

Jamais Cascio, a compatriot at Institute for the Future, recently gave a Keynote on the Future of Education at Moodle Moot. His talk covered quite a bit of ground, some of which is fairly disconcerting, as the implications in some cases are of "disruption" in its most negative connotation. 

As I listened to his talk, I found myself wondering what the call to action is for educational pedagogy. 

This is the result: if I were in charge, based on the challenges it appears likely that this world will face in the next couple of decades, the following list would be what would be covered over the 13 years of schooling. Imagine the most basic components taught to small children building to the most complex for high school students. But the idea is that these would be the core subject areas, rather than English, History, Math, Science, Language/Culture, and PE.

(1) Learning Skills. (Learning how to learn)

• Personal organization and study skills
• Emotional intelligence
• Project planning
• Conflict management

(2) Science.

• Science
• Experimental Method & Problem Solving
• Technology
• Math
  

(3) Technology Practicum. (A curriculum of the use of whatever technology is of critical use. For example, right now:)

• Typing
• Social media (e.g. myspace, youtube, etc.)
• MS Word, Excel, and Ppt (or equivalent)
• Search skills
• Drivers' training and public transportation
• Home technology (safety, money, financial systems)

(4) Communication.

• Media
• Languages
• Logic

(5) Human Context.

• History
• Geography
• Political science
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Appreciation of arts and music

(6) Stress management.

• PE
• Meditation
• Counseling
• Food selection/preparation
• Practice of arts and music

Needless to say, this is rather different from the current pedagogy. If you've never looked into it, but are interested, here are the California Content Standards.  In reality, I realize we're in a period of tightening conformity, so I have little hope that this kind of instruction will transform our disintegrated public schools. However the point of moodle and other software is to provide ad hoc and open lessons available for those who choose to take them.

What I did there was scrunch all the liberal arts "common knowledge" courses into one bucket, but I expanded the bucket. Similarly, I put science and math into the same bucket but added experimental practice and technology.

Then I also took both the sciences and the arts and divided them into two parts: the theory and the practice.  The theory remains relevant because the point of school is to give us this shared context.  However, explicit practice in both technology use and the creation and dissemination of new communication forms is also critical. 

Beyond that I added  the practical topic of learning skills, which includes conflict resolution and emotional intelligence, two things that are absolutely fundamental to maintaining an effective society and so of course we never teach them in school...(!) And equally key is the ability for people to manage their own health. For kids, the biggest issue is usually how to manage their stressors, so instead of Physical Education (and drug/sex education) alone, integrating that into a larger curriculum of (physiology-based) stress management. As the earth undergoes stress it will be even more critical for people to be sophisticated in how they manage their own health.

Outcomes in Non-Profits

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had coffee with Marc Dangeard.  He related a talk he went to at Stanford on Non-Profit management, and specifically how funders want outcomes measurements but grantees lament the bizarreness that ensues when they try to meet these accountability demands. He pointed out that the take-away was that grantors should allow grantees to decide what they need to measure in terms of business process.

So, let me just go through this for education.

What is the mission of education: to educate. What does that mean?

California School System Evisceration & Revamp

Well, what do I know, really? But the budget cuts for Fremont -- which is in relatively good shape and contains the 49th best public school in the country (my son's) -- are so severe we're talking about the end of libraries, counselors, all transportation and of course the increase of class size (which means the decrease in teaching staff... and we all know which employees leave sinking ships first).

Please forget about textbooks, well-stocked bathrooms, or of course anything innovative in any way.

What happens next? I asked a friend of mine who sits on the Board and has two kids in the schools. Next step is that schools go through a certification process where they can be determined to be able to create a solvent (if severely curtailed) budget or not. If not? Bankruptcy.

We get to share the fate of Oakland: people -- led by a person -- come in and fix things using whatever process and towards whichever goals they believe to be best. 

Will your local school be better having been broken and rebuilt than it would have been through more gradual change? Hard to say. But abrupt change is looking increasingly inevitable, as those people who want to own public education are taking the helm by making it impossible for even well-run districts to function adequately.  About a third of California's 1000 school districts will need to be reviewed for solvency.

* How are these rescuers chosen? What are their qualifications?
* What is their vision for a functioning school district?  For a healthy community? Do they share the libertarian or green ideal of small centralized government enough that they'll allow local flavor to public schools?
* How do they evaluate those currently employed by the district in order to avoid not only actual cronyism but perceptions of it?
* And of course, what is their success rate? How do they measure it?
* What will it look like to be a teacher in those districts during the time of review and overhaul? How can we retain teaching talent, experienced counselors, and skilled administrators?
* And how do we best help the shock to kids and parents whose schools were functioning just fine, but are suddenly in a state of upheaval?

How to Disagree

A micropost today, on How to Disagree, which is really how to discuss something you have an opinion against, when online.

Decisionmaking Under Uncertainty - Global Warming

Here's a brilliant video describing how to deal with the "is it real or is it memorex?" questions about Global Warming.

In true Generation X leadership style, the argument -- devoid of idealism, only paying attention to pragmatic concerns -- is as follows: Who cares about what scenario is true or false? Who cares about who is right or wrong?

What should we do?

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2007

Thanks to Wikispaces for making highly visible this article on the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2007.

Most of these tools are about collaboration and information sharing.  Possibly more helpful for those in the field is a Directory of Learning Tools.

Bubble 2.0

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

The real harm of helicopter parenting: correcting the problems we encounter in OUR generation and forgetting that our children will encounter entirely different ones. Maybe, given what massive foreclosures can do to an economy, not to mention environmental mishaps and other disasters we seem to be one step away from, we should be teaching our children hyper-cooperation rather than fostering hyper-competitive "win or die trying!" attitudes.

(Update - previous video was pulled down. The link goes to a newly released version. Thanks to Sky's Blog at the Dalai Lama Foundation for alerting me.)

The video

The credits

California School Report

A report alleging the California public school FINANCIAL SYSTEM is broken is picked up far and wide, notably in the New York Times.

Some key points in the Summary Report I want to comment upon:

Voluntary contributions of money, and more importantly, time also add to variation in resources across districts.  While monetary contributions to schools get substantial attention and are large in a small number of schools, on average they account for less than two percent of funds to schools for operating expenditures (Loeb, Grissom and Strunk, 2007/GDTF).  Brunner and Imazeki (2004) find that monetary contributions averaged less than $40 per pupil in 2001. On the other hand, voluntary contributions of time appear to be substantial... Principals in higher income communities reported substantially more frequent use of volunteers to provide clerical work, adult supervision at morning arrival or playground duty, tutoring, and help running sports activities than did principals in poorer communities.  ...  Overall the difference in
volunteer time between low-income and high-income schools appears to be a greater source of resource disparity than are contributed dollars. (Emphasis theirs.)

The Education Policy Research Unit and I agree.

The Think Tank Review Project (for Education Policy Research) gave a 2006 Bunkum Award to a paper I lambasted last August.  We both point out the model the Harvard paper chose was weaker than the one the NCES used. 

Yes, a "bunkum award" goes to Harvard.  That said, it was probably a great manipulative ploy, and it effectively discouraged NCES from doing further research in the topic -- whether private schools were actually more effective than public ones, when controlling for differences in the clientele.  Obviously this is a key area of investigation for those who are trying to improve public school efficacy.

Activist academics: people who push the results of inferior research over superior research to influence policy makers or curtail support of valid areas of inquiry.

Life-Long Computer Skills (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

In his post on Life-Long Computer Skills (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox), Jakob talks about things kids need to learn in school.

I think it's a great train of thought, though I envision it a bit differently. I think there are four components missing from modern US education that would vastly increase our performance in general and in science and technology specifically:
- "Responsibility" standards
- A logic curriculum
- How to find information
- How to work on a project team

More Games for Me!

As much as I enjoy LinkedIn Answers "feature," I think this looks like even more fun: Convince Me - Debate Online.

Viral education

(1) Viral Marketing
(2) What is Web 2.0?
(3) YouTube as distribution for education content

This video.

Education as a System

In TIME's article, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century, the authors touch on the major problem with the frame of "no child left behind," which that it rather precludes children from getting ahead.  What happens to gifted children in schools where the efforts are so focused on keeping kids moving forward -- no matter how ill-suited a school might be for what the student needs -- that academically-oriented and talented students are left behind compared to where they would be in a different school?  If those students could be adequately resourced, would that help the community overall? 

Fundamentally, one of the issues with education, more fundamental than establishing the "right" objectives, is that for all students, at some point in their life, their schooling isn't the most compelling thing going on.  Maybe it's a death in the family or a divorce; maybe it's a new house or new sibling; but until schools are part of a living support system, they won't reach their full potential.

Luckily, there are a few resources to help us think about what this looks like.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

A Washington Post article discusses a new kind of class in an elite university:  Poverty 101. 

The Debate

Recently, NCES/ETS published a paper on public/private correlated data, "Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling" (Braun, Jenkins, Grigg).  It's an extremely technical paper, obviously intended for statisticians, given comments like, "And now I'll make it easier for you, here are the formula:..."

Shortly thereafter, there came along a refutation from Harvard Education Policy faculty, "On the Public-Private School Achievement Debate" (Peterson, Llaudet).

School Selection

The paper examines how it is that conscientious parents make school choices.  She uses a sample set that is deliberately constructed in a high-choice city, and the subjects all are "choosers," i.e. people relatively actively involved with their kids' education. 

Book Review

In a fabulous book, "Doing School" How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students, by Denise Clark Pope, the author illustrates just how thoroughly kids have internalized our zeitgeist-driven anxiety that it's all slipping away.

It's a stressful read, but one that every parent and every educator should do, and frankly many older students would do well to read and discuss this book... if they have time.

Vested Interest

When people talk about private vs. public schooling for their children, they think of the annualized cost, and sometimes they do the math for their 2.3 kids and realize that for K-12, they're well upwards of a half million dollars in completely illiquid investment (as opposed to buying a house in a neighborhood with top public schools, where the ROI is more tangible and when necessary immediate).

In Support of Joel Beinin and Free Speech on College Campuses

In the San Jose Mercury News today: Professor fights portrayal as supporter of terrorism.

Beinin, a 58-year-old Jewish professor [at Stanford] who supports Palestinian rights, knows he has enemies. Secure in his tenured position at an elite university, he routinely criticizes U.S. leaders for failing to understand why Americans are hated in the Arab world. He decries the humanitarian costs of the Palestinian occupation.

The Ivy League-educated Beinin, former president of the prestigious Middle East Studies Association, favors peaceful coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis, and seeks a solution to the conflict based on the principles of human rights and international law. His work has triggered death threats; one caller said, ``You know what happened to Daniel Pearl. . . . The people who are sympathetic are the first ones to go.''

Crazy American - favoring Human Rights!  What precedent is their in our legal system for the idea that people have inalienable rights and that governmental systems should support that?

But without irony: If thought leaders in research institutions can't explore all aspects of human endeavor in an environment that's safe, and if people studying at the top academic institutions in our country aren't intellectually skeptical enough to be able to judge their faculty's teaching with a critical eye, then the United States has truly lost any hope at intellectual leadership.

Here's an old blog entry in Informed Comment that discusses the people in question.  Note the persistence of the persecutory activities of this group led by Pipes and Horowitz, and the enormous funding from a single donor for the purposes of harassing individuals.

As a liberal Jew from Los Angeles, I appreciate Juan Cole's exhortation that moderate or liberal Jews need to be as careful that their religious charity supports the secular vision they have as any moderate or liberal of any religion.

(By the way, I'd like to explicitly mention Sourcewatch.)

Size Matters

Someone I met at a DonorsChoose fundraiser when they were up for the Amazon award recently began blogging.  She's a 3rd grade teacher in an East Oakland (read: extremely challenging environment) elementary school.  She was raised a white suburbanite.

I posted the existence to a blog where someone with whom I've butted heads about "market forces" and their use in the educational context before.  He responded positively about the use of technology to facilitate transparency - definitely a point of agreement for us.  How else do you help people who have managed to create a relatively safe and positive life for themselves and their families to gainfully -- because it affects us all -- immerse themselves in the often unsafe and traumatic lives of East Oakland 8 year olds?

But it got me thinking: clearly there's a human need when the problems are bigger than I, as a single person, can manage, to look to a higher power, whether that's God, market forces, individualism, communism, equity, or something else.  Looking for a -- hopefully single -- overriding force that, once restrictions are removed, will realign the world and make things somehow solve whatever the problem is.

I think that's now the project at hand, Finance 2.0 or whatever it's called: what are the forces that act on the world.  How do they interact; what are their components? And how to we parameterize, measure, track, and experiment with them?

It took years for physicists to realize that electricity was related to magnetism, and that vision was related to both;  or to understand that classical mechanics was only relevant at a particular scale (much bigger than an atom) and rate (much slower than the speed of light). Now long past that, physics has become math, and the intention is to unify the conceptualization of fundmental forces.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to note that a force is something that was originally observed, and then in the physical world what became relevant was how the force was mediated.  Is financial economics mediated by money?  Is value creation mediated by man-hours of labor?  Is knowledge mediated by hours in the classroom?

To the extent that physical forces are "potential wells"  (think of a ball rolling downhill to the bottom of a depression) are people potential wells in need-space?  Needspace would of course be comprised of physical, emotional, social, intellectual and possibly other needs.  What mediates those needs (well, money certainly; but obviously less concrete things as well)?  Then the next question is what acts on needspace (i.e. cultural expectations, historical need-fulfillment, etc.)

Is this analogy useful?  Does it break down too quickly?

A Force More Powerful

Personally, I feel that the stage kids go through where they run around violently exploding things is just more scatalogical humor along the trajectory first defined by "peepee" and "poopie" and migrating towards belching, armpit sounds, inventive expressions for various body parts, leading up to sexuality and violence.  In the same sense that everyone appreciates an adult who no longer thinks farting is hilarious, the expectation is that sophisticated men move past the concept that blowing things up is fun.

But then what is that obsession all about? All these other things are physiological urges, the lack of control of which creates a sense of humor about it.  When kids are young, they think that "beating up the bad guy" is the way to be protective. However as we age we realize there are all kinds of ways to protect one's society and family.

The Entertainment industry as a whole, like any industry, goes where the money is.  Hollywood has become sophisticated enough to have found markets for intellectually compelling stories, social commentary, romance, and adaptations of classic literature.  Is the game industry starting to break out of its constraints with A Force More Powerful, based on a TV series discussing successful campaigns of non-violent social change?

Online Research

OK, here's a pdf that should help you and your 10+ year old child become more efficient at online searching. 

Note that the biggest problems kids seem to have is that they type in their keywords, get the results and then just start reading.  They have to learn how to quickly sift and sort through the results for something useful, and then further to verify that it's really useful.

After they've done all that, they need to develop some systems for double-checking the validity of what they're reading.

(My apologies to everyone with graphic design sensibilities.  I began by using a template, but then it didn't quite fit and I started... adjusting things... anyway I hope it's still more fun-looking to read for the target 12-15 year old age group than the original 7-page small font Word document.  Feedback appreciated, both from a content and a design perspective; though I'm not a designer obviously when I hack around this much at things I need all the help I can get!)

Online Research

The Basics:

•    Best Dictionary:  http://www.merriamwebster.com
•    Best Dictionary for Slang:  http://www.urbandictionary.com
•    Best Thesaurus and coolest way to improve your vocabulary:  http://www.visualthesaurus.com
•    Best resource for "Why do we call blank, 'blank'?" questions: http://www.etymonline.com/
•    Best way to find driving directions: http://googlemaps.com

•    Best Sites on How to Write a Thesis Statement:

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/thesistatement.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/thesis_statement.shtml

•    More writing sites:

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/logic.html (how to form persuasive arguments)
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html (how to write conclusions)
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/intro.html (how to write introductions)

•    Multi-Language support: http://home.unilang.org/
•    Best English Grammar summary: http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/grammar.htm
•    Best free resource for self-teaching technology online (the top entry is HTML): http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

Here's The Experiment in Education, for better or worse: I wonder who is taking the data?  

Smart Mobs: Power User kids are revolutionizing education

Judy Breck posts on Smart Mobs about an article in eSchool News regarding technology in schools.  It got me thinking....

Social Rules vs. Censorship?

www.commonsensemedia.org is a great site, but it's done what it said it wouldn't:  get politically involved.  I'm torn, because I agree with what they're saying, but I don't like the way they're saying it: turning it into a bit of fearmongering by comparing playing violent video games with smoking risk.
 

Math for the Alienated

Note: This was intended as a Preface to a curriculum based on teaching Discrete Mathematics and a conceptualization of mathematics as a language for those people who were alienated, phobic, or otherwise performing poorly following a traditional calculation-oriented coursework.

How different people view information

I was excited to see a new blog aggregator: Memeorandum.

But was distracted by:  Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems - New York Times.

Donors Choose

Here's a letter in the Oakland Tribune by the teacher I mentioned when I was talking about the Donors Choose event.  She points out that it was heavily edited, but is glad it was published.

Why there's inequity in education

IN MY SEVENTH YEAR teaching at Lockwood, I am glad the issue of inequity in education is finally being recognized, but I think focusing on teacher salaries is missing the greater problem. ("Report: Poor schools get less money for teachers," Sept. 15).

East Oakland Schools

Earlier this evening I returned from an event in San Francisco raising funds for Donors Choose.

At this event I had the opportunity to speak with a charming young teacher who teaches 3rd grade in an elementary school in East Oakland.

Here are some things I learned:

(1) In only her 7th year as a teacher, she's the most senior teacher at the school.  They have extremely high teacher turnover.  Anyone who is there who is older than her was transferred there because they had a problem at a different school.  She feels it took five years for the community to accept her.  And principal turnover has been high too, though the current one evidently looks like she'll stick.  The custodian is utterly dedicated to the school and the kids.

(2) There are many parents who do everything they can to support the school, including showing up to volunteer.  Some parents help despite really awful experience with the school system from when they were in it -- which in some cases was not long ago.  Some adults help despite a 7th grade education.  Evidently a community organization has organized and TRAINED volunteers to help with literacy tutoring and things like that.

(3) The teacher takes a poll at the beginning of the year asking her third graders, 'how many of you have been told that you're just bad"?  She relays that this can be up to 90% of the kids.  It was probably 90% of their parents, too.

(4) Similarly, evidently the kids have the perception that somehow they're not allowed to go to college.  (She has planned a field trip to picnic at UC Berkeley just to include a college in the list of places that are familiar to her students.)  She tells her kids that if they want to go to college when they get older, they should come back and ask her for help.  They generally don't know anyone who has ever been.

(5) As a beginning teacher, she has had to deal with such trauma as a student who came to school and told her, shaking, that his dad was stabbed the night before.  "What happened?"  "He died."  She says that they do have a counselor now, but they didn't at the time.

(6) She's sure that most of the kids in her class have witnessed a shooting. One child saw her father shot in the face.  Nevertheless, when a child suffers the others generally want to write a card or otherwise support him or her and don't feel okay until they express their empathy.  After the hurricane they brought in 17 cents, 25 cents for her to send to "the hurricane people."

(7) For one child who had problems controlling his anger, she taught him the word "frustrated."  It helped; he was able at least to name how he felt (loudly!).  Another child articulated to her that he was trying to be good, naming another kid in class who he was trying to act like; but said that the other child had parents at home to teach him how to be good, whereas his mom was in her program (rehab) and his grandma didn't know how to teach him that.

(8) An adult came to school threatening with a gun.  The school went into lockdown.  They called the police.  But the police didn't come.  When the teacher expressed "displeasure" about this to the parents, they thought she was naive -- evidently the police never come.  What does it say when a community's police don't come to protect young children at school?

These are her projects on Donors Choose

Donate to Donors Choose via Amazon by Sept 30
Donors Choose website

You can't say, "You can't play."

If this isn't familiar to you, go to the real audio stream at
http://thislife.org

Do a search on Cruelty to Children
6/21/96
Episode 27

Act Three. Human Nature, the View from Kindergarten. Author and kindergarten teacher (and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient) Vivian Paley tells the story of an experiment she conducted in her classroom to make children less cruel to each other. She instituted a rule "You can't say you can't play." In other words, if two children are playing, and a third child comes over and wants to join them, they can't tell him or her to get lost. They can't reject him or her. This is the cause of unending pain in most classrooms and playgrounds. The experiment was a remarkable and immediate success. (12 minutes)

In the broadcast:
"By Kindergarten, a ruling class starts to form among children.  Certain kids notify others of their acceptibility, and certain kids are told they're unacceptible over and over again."  This sets the stage for a New Rule:  You can't say, "You can't play."

(The kindergartners were incredulous, and so she talked to 1-5 graders to hear what they thought. As she asked older children, they increasingly said it couldn't work, it's against human nature, but they all seemed to feel it could have gone differently at a younger age.)

Maybe this is why successful non-profits are often emotionally healthier;  as the importance of volunteer labor increases, you don't cavalierly throw away the willing help of anyone - you figure out how to fit them in.