By Ken Robinson

Managing Editor

I call this Things I have learned rather than things I was taught because my father taught more by example than by pedagogy.

He showed me how to work. He did this by working and showing work and its results.

He showed me the value showing up on time for work no matter how late I was out the night before.

He showed the importance of doing what I agreed to do, to follow through.

He showed me how to tell those I love that I love them and to show it in various ways. 

He showed me how to solve a variety of problems without losing my temper. I rarely saw him angry or lose control.

He showed me how to be respectful of others and to be open to understanding differences in all people.

He showed me how to use humor to diffuse conflicts when appropriate. 

He showed me how to think before acting. 

He showed me a love of language and the power to cobbling together words. 

He showed me the value of a lifetime of learning by reading.

He showed  me the value of being conservative in a stepping through life. For example, if he has a stick of gum, he would tear it in half, saving the a piece of later. He old golf bags usually contained fragment of candy bars, missing one bite.

He showed me and all by brothers than contentment can come from simple things, like brown gravy on a slice of white bread.

He showed me how to use a camera to document moments in life. 

And importantly, to me, he showed me how to be a good fisherman. He did this by example because he was a master. At its roots, being a good fisherman is being a good man, being a fair-minded man and a good human being.

Over time, while I stumbled and made mistakes, sometimes big ones, thoughout my life so far, the aggregate of his methodology has been a largely guiding force.

There are things I did not learn from him:

I did not learn well about shepherding money. And wasted a lot of it.

I did not learn much about how electricity works even though he was a Class A Electrician at Boeing for a couple of years. Maybe because airplanes are direct current.

I did not learn anything about how to behave around the opposite sex (when there were still only two sexes). His explanation about sex was brief and succinct and mostly a ‘you’re on your own, boy” kind of way.

I did not learn much about handiwork. Dad was a bit of a self-taught handyman whose determination to make things was driven by a low-grade fear of humiliation from friends, I suspect. Still, he always worked with love as his rule