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How Do You Function in a Crisis?

A long time ago I knew a consultant who was invited to evaluate a school. At first, when visited, everything looked like it was running very well. He kept visiting. Suddenly a crisis arose at the school, and very rapidly everything fell into chaos. From that experience, he developed a rule of thumb to use in the future, one that has stuck with me: “You never know anything about a school until you see how it does in a crisis.

At the AERO conference this year everything was going well: People managed to get to the school visits, to the campus, and into the dorms with minimal problem. The mini-talks went off as planned. The live stream was working. Almost every presenter arrived for their workshops, but one presenter, Carol Nash, was stranded by bad weather in Canada and no other flight was offered! AERO participants sprang into action. They arranged for Carol to do her presentation in the original room by ZOOM. They also set her up to participate in other workshop discussions. And AERO gave her access to the live stream. As she said, “I truly appreciated the amount I could participate while still at home.”

We had arranged for attendees to eat in the cafeteria to save them some money. Catered meals are many times more expensive. It was a little touch and go, getting them to keep the cafeteria open through our meal times but we managed to do it. But on Saturday I was doing the school starters workshop and couldn’t check up on it. As we were just finishing at about 4:30 I get a text from Peter: The cafeteria was closed and locked! There was no place for the 160 attendees to have supper!

We bolted down to the main building. All food service people had left the grounds! We called a meeting in the theater. Everybody came in, and we discussed the situation. We also had time constraints. The children from Pono had their documentary and presentation planned for just after meal time and their train was coming at 8 PM!.

In the meeting, we decided to get enough food for everyone as quickly as we could. We asked people what they wanted to eat. One participant ordered enough mixed vegetable for 25 people from a Chinese restaurant, to be delivered. We ordered a dozen large pizzas that we picked up after we shopped for lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers peppers and other vegetables for a huge salad. We bought biodegradable plates, 2-gallon containers of spring water, etc. We used some of the university serving equipment that had been left in the room. Within an hour we had everyone served and fed, in time for the wonderful Pono presentation. We decided to take them to the train afterward, so they would have time for their presentation, which received a standing ovation. Crisis averted.

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AERO Conference Attendee Reactions!

Maysaa Bazna of Pono wrote:
Thank you for another amazing conference! There is much more inspiration in me from listening to the speakers of the different talks I attended. Thank you for inviting me to talk, for having the survey documentary screened for the first time!
From Yan Li, China
We had a wonderful time at the conference. Thanks for your kind explanations! Because of my poor English, i couldn.t fully understand the conference. but I was still inspired.
From Nanci Dvorsky at Ridge and Valley Charter School
It was so evident how hard you at AERO were working to make things run smoothly at the conference. Not to mention the hours over the year that you must have spent planning prior to the event opening on Thursday!
I love the AERO conference and although from a fiscal perspective I know it is difficult to approach a break-even point with less participants, I can say as a participant I did not mind the fewer number of people at all. The choice of workshops was good, documentaries were inspiring, keynotes and mini talks were great, and networking can sometimes happen better in smaller groups.
In the end, I am grateful that your team still finds the enduring energy to organize and host the conference!
From Kumari of Goddard College
You offered a wonderful conference, as always.
You work so very hard to make the conference great!
Glad Goddard could be there!
From CR, Elkhart, IN
My first AERO conference and it was amazing. Henry Readhead was wonderful as were all the presenters. The informal networking was the best however. School visits were fantastic!! Just making connections with likeminded people — very refreshing and uplifting. I was very pleased with the turnout and the participation for my workshop. I had 6 points to discuss and we only had time to do introductions and the first point. It was fantastic!
From Laura, Miami, FL
This was my first AERO conference. What a passionate group you all are! Thank you all so much for all your help in answering my concerns about opening a Sudbury school.
From Mariola Strahbberg, Janusz Korczak Association of the USA
First of all,- thank you for making the conference possible. I met many wonderful, curious, socially active people, both young and adults. I learned a lot, made contacts, have a great recording of my talk on Korczak and am inspired by people who care about human beings, education and life in general. What more can I ask for?
“A hundred children, a hundred individuals who are people-
not people-to-be, not people of tomorrow,
but people now, right now – today.” Janusz Korczak
From Marla and her dog, Cailey, who helped with child care
It was WONDERFUL to meet everyone. I enjoyed the time with the kids very much. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. The best part of the conference for me was when one of the kids used the term, “Survey Sampling” during the question and answer session after the Pono documenary!
Brilliant! Bravo!
From Laurel Tien,
I thoroughly enjoyed the workshops and keynote sessions. Such a wonderful community to be a part of! On behalf of the SelfDesign team, we look forward to continued collaborations.
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HOW LABELING MADE ME THINK I WAS STUPID

People were fascinated with the above title of Lisa Harris’ workshop. As she said in her description, “In traditional schools, when they have a student they don’t know what to do with, they like to put a label on them, not realizing that it might hurt that student. In my case, I was thought to be a slow learner. So, to me, I thought that I was stupid. I felt this all my life and into adulthood. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that I was dyslexic. I think that if I was in an alternative school, maybe they would have looked further into the problem or given me the time to work through it.”

In the workshop they looked at labeling in schools, did some role-playing, and examined how people could find their strengths.

After the workshop, Lisa said, “one of the participants came up to her at lunch and thanked her. He said he no longer felt alone. His son’s school had labeled him as inferior because he was dyslexic and laughed when he said he wanted to be a doctor. Now he understood what had happened.”

Lisa said that when she was school age she made friends in other schools with an elite group who thought she was very intelligent. So finally, when she was a senior she insisted that the school test her intelligence. When the results showed a very high IQ the school panicked and tried to conceal the results so they couldn’t be blamed for the “injustice of my education.”

“Eventually I gave up trying in my high school. I think that many young people who have a hard time learning in traditional schools would do well in learner-centered alternatives. In fact, I met many people at the conference who felt they had dyslexia or some other challenge that hadn’t been addressed in school and this was one reason they were involved with educational alternatives.”

“For myself, I didn’t give up on myself. Eventually, I graduated from the New York Institute of Technology and have had a long career in teaching, writing, and photography.”

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The Live Stream That Almost Wasn’t

We hope you all enjoyed the live stream of this year’s AERO Conference. It went pretty smoothly, aside from a couple of camera focus issues. I’m super glad it worked because it almost didn’t.

Two weeks before the conference, I had assembled the gear I would need for running the live stream and ran a test at my house, which had worked perfectly. The audio and video synced up perfectly, the audio sounded great, and the video feed was crystal clear. So I decided to run a test at the university to be sure their system would work with mine. I loaded my gaming computer, the screen, the camera, tripod, and capture card (a USB adapter that takes the camera’s HDMI signal and converts it into a usable video feed for the computer), and Mbox 2 into the car. I drove to the theater at LIU Post, and unloaded it into the theater. I plugged everything in and fired up my computer.

All hell broke loose.

After booting up, my computer decided it needed to reinstall every device driver, my Mbox, my mouse, my keyboard, the capture card, everything. This took a while, and afterward, my Mbox, the device I was using to hook the theater’s audio up to my computer, wouldn’t work. It was constantly shutting itself off and turning back on every few seconds. To make matters worse, the capture card also refused to accept input and my computer wouldn’t even recognize that it was there.

I spent an infuriating four hours before giving up because I had another place to be. It took me an additional 2 hours at my house the next day uninstalling the wrong drivers and reinstalling the right ones to get my computer up and running again.

So two days later I was back, testing my equipment again in the theater. I encountered the same problem, drivers reinstalling, the Mbox turning and off, and the capture card not working. What the heck was happening?

It took me another hour to figure it out. My keyboard, mouse, and Mbox all HAD to use USB 2.0 slots, and I had plugged them into USB 3.0 slots to make room for the capture card. Once I got that sorted and reinstalled the drivers AGAIN, everything was working but the capture card. So, I did the reasonable thing, I called the company who made it. They informed me that it was incompatible with windows 7 (which I use) and only worked with windows 10 to which my immediate response was “you made your device incompatible with literally half the Windows market”?

The tech support guy told me he didn’t know what to tell me and he was baffled that I had gotten it to work before because that was supposed to be totally impossible.

So I was forced to run to Microcenter, return the old capture card, and buy a new one that was windows 7 compatible. After installing it and plugging up the camera, I finally had video feed coming into my broadcast software (OBS). So now I had sound and video, so I crossed my fingers and pressed the “Start Streaming” button.

My youtube live stream dashboard immediately lit up green and the stream, audio and all, broadcast to my private youtube channel. I was so stoked. One last problem, the audio was out of sync with the video. However, that was a matter of simply offsetting the incoming audio by what I figured out to be around 630 milliseconds. Finally, everything worked, and to keep it that way I literally took a picture of the back of my computer before unplugging everything, so I could plug it up the exact same way come conference time.

You cannot even begin to imagine how nervous I was on Friday June 29th as I set my computer up for the third time. This time for the actual live stream. I tested it and everything worked again, no driver problems, the audio, and video came back in perfectly, and the stream went out to my channel. So I switched the stream information over to broadcast on the AERO Youtube channel and pressed “Start Streaming”. Everything seemed to be working fine, so I brought the stream up on my laptop to make sure.

It was working. Thank god.

You can buy the archives of the live stream here.