Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 418

Greatest Super Bowl commercial ever

If you lived in Savannah, Georgia, you would’ve been treated to this incredible, amazing, epic, unbelievable, spectacular, mind-blowing two-minute long masterpiece during the first local commercial break of the Super Bowl.

It’s real. I checked.

I love my job when I don’t hate it.

I don’t hate my job. I kind of love it. 

But there are moments, when things like this are going on at home and I am at work, that I kind of hate it, too.

   

Why I use “Warmly”

My friend, Tony, was included in a recent email that I signed with the valediction:

Warmly,
Matt

Tony’s response:

I must say the “Warmly, Matt” doesn’t seem like you.  

He’s right.

Joan Acocella of The New Yorker recently wrote a piece on the various valedictions and said that she never uses “Warmly” because it sounds too fussy.

“Best” seems to be fairly popular these days, if a valediction is used at all.

I see “Cheers” a lot, too, but it always makes me laugh.

I use “Warmly” in honor of my former professor and poet, Hugh Ogden, who I have written about before and who tragically passed away in 2007. Hugh wrote letters to me about my poetry and signed them using “Warmly” and I adored it because warmly captured his spirit perfectly.

When he died, I decided to begin using “Warmly” in remembrance of him. And it’s worked. Every time I type or write that word at the end of a letter or email, I think of him.

I explained this to Tony. His response:

Nice gesture on the warmly but it isn’t the you I know. Perhaps the you that you aspire to be.

Aspiring to be as beloved and brilliant as Hugh Ogden would be foolish, but I like the sentiment.

Upcoming speaking events

In case you’re interested in hearing me blather, here are a few of my upcoming storytelling and speaking engagements:

February 18: Literary Death Match at Laugh Boston (7:30 PM)
I’ll be competing against three other authors for the title of Literary Death Match Champion.
Ticketing info here.

February 20: The Moth StorySLAM at Housing Works in NYC (7:30 PM)
I’ll be putting my name in the hat in hopes of getting a chance to tell a story on the theme “Escape.”
Ticketing info here.

February 28: The Mouth at The Mark Twain House in Hartford (7:30 PM)
I’ll be telling a story on the theme “Sex and Lust.”
Ticketing info here. 

March 20: Plainville Public Library in Plainville, CT (6:00 PM)
I’ll be speaking about my latest novel, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, as well as writing, reading, storytelling and anything else you want to ask.

March 29: Speak Up at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT (8:00 PM)
I’ll be telling a story and co-producing the show with my wife and host, Elysha Dicks. The theme of the night is Law and Order.
Ticketing info TBA.

March 30: TED Talk at BKB Somerville in Somerville, MA
I’ll be giving a talk on the importance of saying yes.
Ticketing info here.

April 5: Moth Mainstage at Music Academy in Northampton, MA (7:30 PM)
I’ll be telling a story on the theme “Don’t Look Back.”
Ticketing info here.

May 17: Speak Up at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT (8:00 PM)
I’ll be telling a story and co-producing the show with my wife and host, Elysha Dicks. The theme of the night is Bad Romance.
Ticketing info TBA.

My daughter used a hammer and built a car. She’s already more competent than her dad.

I didn’t even touch a hammer until I was ten years-old. I can barely use one today. I can barely change a light bulb.

In fact, I’ve had a friend look at two lighting fixtures in my home over the last year, thinking that the wiring was bad both times when all it needed was a new light bulb.

As you can imagine, I haven’t heard the end of this and probably never will.

The same fate will not befall my daughter if I have anything to say about it. Even though she hammered my thumb twice on Saturday and stuck me with a nail, I refuse to allow her to end up as incompetent as her father. 

With the hope of The Home Depot, of course.

       

The Spiderman Principle of Meetings and Presentations

Kevin Smith’s approach to addressing any audience is the same as mine.

He writes in his recent memoir that anytime a person is speaking to a group of people, in any context, the speaker has a duty to be entertaining.

I couldn’t agree more.

I have attended hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of meetings over the course of my lifetime in which the person making the presentation, conducting the workshop or otherwise delivering the content made no effort to engage the audience in an entertaining and memorable way.

I will never understand this.

Regardless of who you are or what your previous experience might be, I believe that every person is capable of being entertaining while delivering content if he or she is willing to invest the time and effort required to prepare. This could involve the use of humor, self-deprecation, storytelling, drama, or surprise. It could mean designing a presentation that allows for meaningful and engaging interaction between attendees. It could include the use of food or props or even a costume. Whatever it takes to make your presentation entertaining and memorable to your audience.

Smith argues that the speaker or presenter is obligated to be entertaining for the sake of the audience. It’s what I call The Spiderman Principle of Meetings and Presentations (though Voltaire admittedly said it first):

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

If you are conducting a one-hour meeting, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room.

If there are 20 people in the room, you are now equivalent to a 20 hour investment.

It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that the hour is not wasted by reading from PowerPoint slides, providing information that could have been delivered via email, lecturing, pontificating, pandering or otherwise boring your audience.

But I also believe that there is a second, equally important reason to be entertaining:

It is a more effective way of conveying content to an audience.

When a student-teacher presents me with a lesson that he or she would like to teach my class, my first question is always this:

What’s the hook? What is the reason for my students to listen and pay attention to you?

Far too often inexperienced (and ineffective) teachers believe that if they design a lesson using all of methods and strategies that they have learned in college, students will sit quietly, attend fully and absorb the content.

For about two-thirds of an average class of students, this will probably be the case. But for the other third, effective lesson design is never enough. These are the students who slip through the cracks in many classrooms. They are the kids who have ability and potential but lack the necessary skills in order to learn. They are the children who are not predisposed to quiet, thoughtful attentiveness. They are the kids who can barely sit still. The ones with one foot still on the baseball diamond and one finger still on the videogame controller. They are the students who do not believe in themselves or their capacity for a bright future. They are kids who come to school hungry and tired and still reeling from the chaos and violence of an evening at home.

These are the students who need a reason to listen.

I believe that it is the teacher’s responsibility to provide a reason to learn. A meaningful, entertaining, engaging, thrilling, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants reason to keep their eyes and ears and minds open.

This is why every lesson requires a hook.

A hook is not a statement like, “This material will be on Friday’s test” or “This is something you’ll use for the rest of your life.”

A hook is an attempt to be entertaining, engaging, surprising, thought-provoking, challenging, daring and even shocking. This can be done in dozens, and perhaps hundreds of ways.

A teacher can be funny. Surprising. Animated. Confused. Even purposefully depressed. A teacher can offer students uncommon levels of choice or challenge them with meaningful, winner-takes-all competition. A lesson can include something students have never seen before or (even better) something they have seen a thousand times before but in an entirely new context. A teacher can use storytelling and drama and suspense to convey information. The lesson can include cooperative learning in groups that the children will actually enjoy. Students can be made the center of the lesson. Students can be invited to teach the lesson. Lessons can be broken up into smaller, rapidly changing segments in order to hold student interest.

This is just a smidgen of the strategies that teachers can use, and most of them, if not all of them, can also be used by a person running a meeting, conducting a workshop, or otherwise stealing an hour from people in order to convey content.

This is how I approach teaching on an everyday basis. I believe with all my heart that I am stealing seven hours of their childhood from each of my students on a daily basis. I am paid to be a thief. I rob my students of hour upon hour of the most precious and fleeting time of their lives. Therefore, I have a duty to make this time as meaningful, productive, memorable, and yes, entertaining as possible.

The best thing about all this:

If I do so, not only will my students be happy, not only will they look forward to school every day, but they will also learn better. Retain more. Become more skilled and knowledgeable and equipped for all that life has to offer.

Delta Airlines understands this. They recently produced an in-flight safety video that conveys the necessary information in an entertaining and surprising way.

Someone at Delta realized that if they are going to subject thousands of passengers a day to a dry, repetitive, but important safety video, why not make an effort to do better?

And they have. When your in-flight safety video has more than a million views on YouTube already, you know you’ve done something right.

If Dennis is a dentist, what is a Dicks?

You may have heard about , which seems to suggest that your name can influence your future career choice.

If your name is Dennis, you are more likely to become a dentist.

This works with other names, too. Lauras and Larrys are also more likely to become lawyers, for example.

The effect is attributed to something called implicit egotism.

“People prefer people, places, and things that they associate (unconsciously) with the self. People’s positive automatic associations about themselves may influence their feelings about almost anything that people associate with the self.”

I plan on using this odd human tendency as the basis of a novel someday.

But here is the $10,000 question:

If these findings are correct, what does this mean for someone like me with the last name Dicks?

Or even worse, someone like my uncle Harry Dicks, or my great uncle, Harry Dicks, or my father, Les Dicks?

Friends should not be allowed to retire if they’re going to have this much fun.

Friday morning. 7:48 AM.

I’m pulling into the parking lot at work. It’s 14 degrees. Slush and puddles fill the parking lot. The ground is covered with snow. I have a long day of teaching ahead of me. 

I receive this text from my friend and former boss who is now retired. It reads:

Teeing off in one hour.

It was accompanied by this photo.

He doesn’t mean to crush my spirit, but he does.

And I think he might be doing it on purpose.

I know it’s what I would do.

I am stupid and sensual

A female reader in Spain referred to me as “Estúpido y sensual.”

Stupid and sensual.

I’m not entirely sure how she arrived at these descriptors, but I’ll choose to look at the glass half full and take this as a compliment.

Quite possibly the single greatest parenting moment ever

The video is grainy, and it doesn’t look like much, but when five year-old and 20 month-old are cleaning up their toys together, singing a clean up song and rejecting parental assistance, you can feel good about your parenting prowess, at least for a day.