Why I am “Making Time” to Join Two Education Related Organizations
Here are some thoughts behind my decision to volunteer for both the board of SySTEM School and as a mentor at Eitanim
Being a founder of a young startup, especially at its early stage, which is where my company ZCast is at right now, free time is the last thing on my menu. Yet, I found myself making the decision to volunteer with two organizations in the past few months: as a board member for the SySTEM School and as a mentor at Eitanim. Why am I doing this? I know that many people who know me are asking themselves this question. To be fair, even I asked myself this question, so I decided to use my first ever Medium post to share my reasoning.
So why me, or any early stage startup founder in their right mind, would be spending any of our non-existing spare time volunteering, and why am I doing it with not only one, but two organizations?
Soon I’ll be closing on my 3rd decade as a software engineer and an entrepreneur in the crazy startup world. Being a parent that, together with my wife Iris, was able to send both of our kids to college over the past few years, I am very concerned for the future of our next generation, because of the current state of the educational system.
Simply put, it is broken!
The root of this problem is explained perfectly in this amazing TED talk by Khan Academy’s founder, Sal Khan.
To summarize Sal’s main point in a few words: we use tests in the most wrong way possible. Instead of using the test results to know what our kids need to improve on, we only use it to mark their grades, and to keep moving onto the next topic without first closing these knowledge gaps that we just identified.
In an amazing experiment that was done recently by Mark Rober for Prenda Code, another amazing organization that brings coding closer to more kids, these issues were demonstrated and proven as shown in this disturbing video below.
Bottom line: discourage students or threaten them to lose points for making or repeating mistakes (traditional school system), and they will avoid trying, give up and fail! Encourage students to accept failure and learn from it, and they will do great. As simple as that!
In my work, I’ve experienced this time and again, the poor level of the majority of candidates that came through our doors, seeking a job as a software engineer. Unfortunately too many of them are not trained to solve problems, only follow instructions.
So, when I was introduced to SySTEM School, and Eitanim, I couldn’t stay on the sideline anymore, as both of them are tackling this important problem, doing it in a way that is aligned with my belief of how this should be solved, and both needed some help, help I could offer.
SySTEM School, is a young Phoenix based charter school that is focused on problem solving and focuses on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) based learning. It teaches kids how to learn through the process of solving problems. I was introduced to the school by one of its board members, francine hardaway, who was asking for some help through the #yesphx growing community. When you come to think about it, the school is basically a startup by itself, and using the experience of local startup entrepreneurs to help the school grow is the right thing to do. I immediately jumped on the opportunity to support the school, and met with the school’s founder and head, Angelica Cruz, to see how can I be of assistance. Already in our first meeting we both agreed that the only way you can do important things in life, as a busy entrepreneur, is by making time, not finding time.
So now, I’m helping the school figure out how to grow, stay focused, and modernize their ways of recruiting new families. Hoping this will help the school bring more students to this amazing place, and give them the chance of a lifetime: being ready for tomorrow’s world, instead of learning how to be ready for yesterday’s world.
As the song says, “When it rains it pours”. Less than a week later, I was introduced to another school related program, this time an after-school program called Eitanim. Eitanim is a youth program that teaches high-school kids how to solve real life problems, while operating as a small startup. The kids appoint a CEO, CFO, CTO out of the group. Then they are given real life problems to solve, and they are expected to develop an actual solution, or at the very least, a prototype of a real product that solves the problem. At the end of each project, they are expected to present their solution in a traditional incubator/accelerator style public presentation at a demo event (“Demo Day”) in front of their families, friends and members of the community. Just like in real life!
The program is driven by the kids themselves, and we, as mentors, just guide them and offer minor suggestions and tips. And the mentors are people just like me. Experienced adults, people from the startup and high-tech ecosystem, who offer their time, knowledge and support to these young adults, helping them be better prepared for life. So once again, I found myself drawn into joining this effort, and I made more time to participate in this program as a mentor.
Now, if I will follow my common-sense and look at my endless list of tasks of running ZCast, I know I will never find the time needed to be involved in these two programs.
But, being a problem solver, I know that this is yet another problem to be solved, and much like anything else in my life, it will turn out that supporting these projects will not only take less of my time than I was afraid it would, but actually by doing it, I know that it will end up helping me and my business be better, in ways I can’t even imagine or predict right now.
I just know it will. Like everything else I did throughout my career that might have looked as if it was “not relevant” at the time, and ended up being the core of who I am today, and what I can achieve going forward based on these past experiences.
Everything you do in life will forever have one, and only one, of two outcomes: Success or Failure. Successes are always great, but failures are the building blocks from which you build your successes, so everything you do will help you achieve your goals, either as a success or as another failure that will add another rung to your ladder of failures that will raise you to your next success!
The most important thing in life is to embrace your failures and learn from them instead of being defeated by them! And the sooner you learn this lesson in life, the sooner you’ll be able to overcome anything that life throws your way!
And this is why I’m making time to join the board of the SySTEM School and the Eitanim mentoring team.
What are you going to make time for?
Raz Yalov is the co-founder and CEO of ZCast, a podcasting platform that is designed to enable the creation of professional audio content by all people without any technical background.
