Lap Swim Etiquette and (possible?) Gender Politics

At the beginning of this year, I started lap swimming more regularly.  First I started swimming at the Dodge YMCA, and when I moved to South Slope, I switched to the Prospect Park Y.

When I swim, more so than any other type of exercise I do (ie, biking and running), I feel like I face a lot of gender bias.  I have always tried to make sure that I'm not being overly sensitive to people's reactions to me in the pool, but the last few weeks have made me not want to keep my mouth shut any more.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I'm the fastest person in the pool the majority of the time that I go swimming. This isn't true for biking and running.

I'm starting to get the sense that a lot of people, and especially other women, view me as aggressive when I swim.  I touch people's feet to give them a notice that I want to go ahead (this is a typical lap-swim etiquette signal for wanting to pass)**. If people don't stop to let me go ahead after two or three laps -- which is really more than enough time -- I'll swim around them.  If I'm swimming around them, I'll always make sure that I pass quickly and safely. I've probably swum laps for more days in my life than I haven't, so I'm very aware of lap swim etiquette.

I've been scolded and told by other (usually female) swimmers that I'm in a communal swim lane, and that we all need to share the lane. I always circle swim if there are more than two swimmers in the lane, and I don't feel like I'm swimming aggressively, so I'm kind of dumbfounded by their reactions.  I'm just left to believe that they just want me to swim slower, or that maybe they don't understand the rules of lap swimming as well as I do.

I should also add that I always try very hard to go to the pool when it's not crowded to avoid these interactions, but sometimes the pool is just full.

The reason I think there might be some gender bias in their reactions is that when I see men do the same things I do -- tap people's feet and swim around people -- and they don't get the same feedback and reactions that I get.  In fact, when there is a swimmer who is faster than me (so far those have only been male swimmers), they get a lot of praise for their speed.  I haven't seen any get scolded.

It's also possible that I am just being sensitive and not seeing it happen, but it's something I've been hyper aware of in the last few weeks. I just am not seeing people react to men doing the same things that I'm doing in the same way people react to me.

There are lots of studies that show that as men get more successful, people like them more, while when women get more successful, people like them less.  I am starting to think this might be playing out at the pool for me.

Even if this has nothing to do with gender, no one ever became a better athlete by staying at a steady speed in an effort to please everyone around them. I have goals I'm working towards. I'm going to keep trying to swim faster and faster, and if I need to, letting people know that I need to go ahead of them.

And of course I'll leave you with my favorite ad of all time (I've posted it before), that gets at some of my feelings on this...

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**After sharing a draft of this post with two of my ScriptEd colleagues, I've discovered the foot-touching thing is something that might freak most people out, and that perhaps the people I encounter in the pool don't know this etiquette rule.

Work Life Balance / Running a Start Up / Burn out

I've been thinking a lot about work life balance lately -- not only for me, but for my team, too.

It's incredibly difficult to learn how to balance your life when you're running a start up. I didn't do a great job of it for the first three years of ScriptEd's existence.  I worked nearly from the time I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to sleep, and all through the weekends. I stopped seeing my friends as much. Even when I was training for triathlons, I would send emails from my phone while riding on my bike trainer.  I took almost no vacation. And, silly me, I thought it wouldn't catch-up with me.

From the start of my career, I worked in environments that promoted this type of non-stop work, first as a teacher with Teach for America, and then at a top tier law firm.  In TFA, our motto (at least while I was a corps member) was "relentless pursuit of results" -- meaning, do whatever it takes, no matter how many grueling hours you have to work, to get results.  At the law firm, long hours were celebrated. The more hours you work, the more hours get billed to clients -- it was good for business.

Luckily for me, I have a high tolerance for long hours and hard work.  I was also incredibly lucky to do work in which I was completely invested, so that helped a lot too.

Everyone has their limits, though. Running my own company has helped me learn about how this work style can be detrimental to both me individually and to teams at large.

Starting in the Spring, I felt myself coming close to the edge of burn out.  I'm not sure that I've ever really experienced burn out before. I started to feel tired, less inspired and borderline apathetic about my work.

This is NOT a good place to be if you're running an organization where your first priority and duty is to inspire other people to join you in working on your company's mission. I felt ashamed for feeling this way -- I have a great job and believe strongly in the work we're doing at ScriptEd. It took me a while to admit to even my closest friends that I felt this way, mostly because I felt tremendously guilty about my feelings.

After several conversations with people, I now recognize that it's really not surprising that this happened. I'm working on achieving more balance in my life now. The breakneck pace is just not sustainable in the long term.

I'm sure there is still a lot of work I need to do, but I started making small changes that have been helping. I think I probably just need a solid two week vacation (something I've never done ever...), but I'm not there yet.  I'm working up to it.

I know I need to do a better job at balance for both myself and for my team -- both so I can be an effective leader, and so that I can set an example of healthy working habits.

Here are some things I've been doing to try to get more balance in my life and to avoid burnout:

1. Writing: Committing to writing on a regular basis grounds me and helps me reflect.
2. Reading, watching and listening to things that have nothing to do with work:  This has two benefits -- it gives me a break from working, and it helps me think of new ideas.  Staying in the "ScriptEd bubble" makes it difficult to think up solutions to problems.
3. Leaving work at the end of the work day: If I don't have a night event, I try to get out of the office by 5:00 or 5:30pm. I often feel guilty about doing this, but I know that it's one way to prevent myself from overworking. It also sets the tone for the rest of the office that it's ok to go home and take personal time.  It forces me to work more efficiently while I'm in the office, too.
5. Not carrying my work cell phone on the weekends:  My work cell-phone stays in my backpack all weekend.  I still check my work emails (maybe I shouldn't be?).
6. Joining a community completely unrelated to work: I've written about this before, but joining the Brooklyn Tri Club was one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. It's a great community of people who live near me, and who don't talk to me about work. I see people from the tri club nearly every day.

Discipline

As an athlete, I know a lot about what it means to be disciplined.  I started training and competing at a very young age, and as a result I think I’m very good at being disciplined in the way that I approach most things in life. 

Discipline is becoming an increasingly important virtue at ScriptEd. The attention around computer science education in New York City means that we have a lot of great opportunities coming our way. We are positioned to expand rapidly and several directions.

At the same time, we have to stay disciplined and true to our long-term vision and values.  It’s tempting to make big goals, like saying we’ll teach a million kids to code or solve the entire problem in NYC in the next few years.  But for us, that’s just not realistic. 

Some organizations will take the “spray and pray” approach – for example,  getting millions of kids to do an hour’s worth of coding and hoping that it will stick with a few who choose to pursue computer science. These programs are valuable because they bring tons of attention to the issue and give kids an introduction to computer science, but this isn’t who we are at ScriptEd.  We are attempting to make a deep impact in the communities we serve. Our students need so much more than just learning how to code. They need access to the tech community, mentors, and other resources to help make them successful.  

We are also trying to change the mindset and practices of the tech community. Tech professionals working in underserved schools and building relationships will result, we think, in breaking down unconscious bias and getting talented young developers (primarily of color) from low income backgrounds into companies.  Through building relationships with their colleagues and supervisors, our students are changing the perceptions of what a software developer looks like. 

This all take deliberate, intentional and disciplined work. It means we must continue to develop deep relationships with schools, students, and people from the tech community. It means we need to grow at a rate where we can continually increase the quality of our program while serving more students at the same time.

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Thanks to Becca Novak for her contributions to this post!

Adjunct Computer Science Teachers

At ScriptEd, we are often asked about whether we will get into the business of training classroom teachers to teach computer science.

I don't know the answer to this question yet, but as an organization made up almost entirely of former teachers, I think think this idea makes us cringe a little bit.  Most trainings we experienced when were teachers were not very helpful, and most of the teachers we know do not think highly of professional development opportunities.

Teachers have a lot of work to do. They teach all day long and then have to grade assignments, lesson plan, call parents, attend meetings, etc. Teaching is, hands down, the hardest thing I've ever done.  It's more difficult than starting and running a company and training for triathlons at the same time. When I was teaching, any type of professional development training afterwork hours was a huge burden and mostly felt like a waste of time.

Asking teachers with full schedules to attend trainings is tough. Asking a teacher to learn an entirely new subject (computer science) well enough to teach it is infinitely more difficult. Further, 40-50% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, so even when young teachers are trained to teach computer science, many will end up leaving and taking that knowledge with them.  This is especially true for computer science teachers -- ed tech companies (and tech companies in general) are looking for talent.

Of course there are some teachers who will leap at the chance to learn computer science, and for those folks CS trainings are great if those teachers are supported with the necessary resources.  It's also important to incentivize these teachers appropriately so that they'll stay in the classroom.

So if ScriptEd ever does a training, it will be incredibly efficient, productive and useful, and will have an eye towards keeping teachers in the classroom.

In the meantime...

What other alternatives are there, then, to get more computer science teachers into the classroom other than training current, in-service teachers?

I've always loved the idea of an adjunct high school teacher role. ScriptEd volunteers are essentially adjunct teachers.  They teach a couple of times a week in addition to their jobs. This allows our volunteers to experience a lot of the joys of teaching without getting bogged down or overwhelmed. We now have volunteers that are in their 4th year of teaching with us, and these volunteers have become very good teachers.  Good enough, in my opinion, to be 'real' teachers.  Unfortunately, however, it's not possible to get our volunteers certified as teachers if they want to continue only teaching part-time.

I've been working with a couple of my ScriptEd team members to figure out whether we can make certification a reality for our volunteers.  It looks like an uphill battle. In order to get an alternate certification, our volunteers would need to become full-time teachers, which most are not able or willing to do.

We are going to continue to look for ways to figure out how to do this, but bureaucracy is real and in the mean time, we're doing what we need to get our kids the CS education they need to thrive in the 21st Century.