Observe the actual for its potential
Early into my first English-teaching job, my colleague and roommate Ian showed me ticket to a baseball game. He said, “This ticket is a lesson.” I asked what he meant, and then he clarified. “The ticket has shapes on it and colors on it. You can use it to teach those topics. Same with the numbers on the ticket. The logo for the Hanwha Eagles – that’s a bird. You can teach birds using that image. The whole game of baseball – its vocabulary and rules, for example – can be taught using this ticket.” That was a better lesson in teaching than the teacher’s certification I had received a few months’ earlier. It taught me that anything could be a lesson and that the limits to the lesson may be in the limits of my own creativity. A similar story describes what inspired Velcro, which “was invented by a man named George de Mestral in the 1940's while hunting in the Jura mountains in Switzerland. Mr. de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, realized that the tiny hooks of the cockle-burs were stuck on h...