twsjaf
03–08–25
tales and woes of an SJA fellow
my flagship year with the Steve Jobs Archiv3e
My end of year speech at the Steve Jobs Archive Summit @ Skywalker Ranch :0
DIRECTOR: Brinlee, take one. Mark.
[Video Intro]
BRINLEE KIDD: I’m Brinlee Kidd, I’m an SJA Fellow. My background is in education technology. And recently, I’ve been working on a documentary telling the story of what it’s like to be a teacher in Arizona right now, and generally what the teacher shortage there means for the future of our country’s education system.
This is the first piece of equipment I bought with the SJA funding. It’s a profile lens, and that’s kind of why I chose it for this. It was sort of marking my transition into documentary filmmaking, which wasn’t something I’d ever really done before. So having this lens definitely empowered me to get better shots and make a better film. And I hope that the story that I tell through the film puts a spotlight on the teachers and ensuring that we’re not leaving teachers behind or forgetting to consider them in this transition.
Hey, guys. All right. So, to start, I want you to imagine, if you had to go into work every day knowing you were just set up to fail. Like, guaranteed poor performance reviews, getting yelled at by clients, and barely scraping by on the pay. But, the catch: Every day at this work, you know that you’re making the world a better place. How long would you stay?This is a question my mom asked herself for nearly 20 years, until the answer was finally, “No more.” And she’s not the only one. We are in the midst of a teacher crisis. And nowhere is this more apparent than my home state, Arizona. Watching my mom get pushed out of a job that she truly loved because the system was so broken really inspired me to see if I could change something about this.
So I went to Arizona State University. I studied data science. I tried to build an ed-tech startup outside of class. And I also joined a research and development lab.
At this lab, we spent two years trying to build a one-to-one interactive simulation of Arizona’s public education system. So basically, I spent years scouring the web, even pestering the census office, trying to get the latest figures from them. As you can imagine, they absolutely loved me for that.
[Laughter]
But even after two years of definitely learning a lot and building something that was pretty cool, we never really got to that succinct answer from the simulator. It seemed there was an element to the problem that we couldn’t exactly calculate. So, after all that time, I decided to revert to something that was always really helpful: just talking to teachers.
For months I hit the road, ditching my computer and picking up a camera, just asking teachers and ex-teachers what their problems were and what kind of technologies that they thought they needed that I could build for them. But something became pretty clear. The problem that these teachers were facing was never calculable in the first place.
It seems like they were being confronted with a more deep-rooted, nuanced issue. They all felt they were being martyrized by a broader community of Arizonans that had basically given up on public education. It seemed like we’ve accepted this culture that our schools are so far gone, they’re not even worth saving anymore. This has given rise to some pretty radical policies, like universal ESA vouchers, which directly divert funds from public schools to build a parallel charter, private, and competitive system. So I decided, if I was really going to get to the root of the issue here, I needed to craft some kind of narrative before I was able to craft a tool that effectively solved this problem. So I set out to turn my interviews into a documentary, a story that would reach into the hearts of other Arizonans and convince them that the problem was that we were undermining the value of our educators as professionals and our public school system in general.
And thus, a very long journey of stepping into a new role as potentially an artist, not just a technologist, began. But it turns out it’s actually pretty hard to bring about an original and compelling piece of artwork. I feel like some people in this room might have an idea of what that feels like.
This was my first time ever trying to make a film or even tell a story like this. And I’m not going to lie, I struggled a lot this year. I definitely learned a lot, but I struggled. I learned that the creative process is not a linear one. I actually completed an entire draft of the film. But when I reviewed it, it just wasn’t there yet.
Actually, it’s kind of funny. I wrote “compelling” on my poster, because that was the one fault I found with my draft. It wasn’t as compelling to me as I knew the narrative actually was. But there’s this quote from Make Something Wonderful, a book that probably brought a lot of us here today, where Steve says, “If you’re going to make something, it often doesn’t take more money or more energy to make it really great. It usually just takes more time.” So that’s what I'm doing. I’m investing more time into my work in progress.
But I learned a lot of fun things about the creative process as well. During this year, when I was really frustrated with my work on the film, I would turn to music as a creative outlet. It was just so authentic for me. It was a way to make something and be telling a story again.
And this work actually spun out into kind of a pseudo artist project, which garnered almost 100,000 streams this year. That was sort of an unexpected experience, like a little creative side quest I took this year on my fellowship. But overall, it was a fantastic year of learning for me. And I’m excited to dive back in and do the hard part of rebuilding in the face of failure. But I guess that’s what the process is all about.
And I’ll leave you with one more message from Make Something Wonderful. This quote really helped me see past some of these challenges. I’m on the brink now of my 22nd birthday. And so I think that’s why maybe this quote resonates with me.
Steve said, “Our life is a journey. It may be hard to see it when you’re standing at 22, looking towards the rest of your life. But if you imagine that you’re a bit older, looking back, you’ll start to see it—your life as a story. The highs, the lows, the heroes, and the villains, and the forks in the road that in the end mean everything.”
Thank you, guys.
This is the first piece of equipment I bought with the SJA funding. It’s a profile lens, and that’s kind of why I chose it for this. It was sort of marking my transition into documentary filmmaking, which wasn’t something I’d ever really done before. So having this lens definitely empowered me to get better shots and make a better film. And I hope that the story that I tell through the film puts a spotlight on the teachers and ensuring that we’re not leaving teachers behind or forgetting to consider them in this transition.
[Start of Speech]
Hey, guys. All right. So, to start, I want you to imagine, if you had to go into work every day knowing you were just set up to fail. Like, guaranteed poor performance reviews, getting yelled at by clients, and barely scraping by on the pay. But, the catch: Every day at this work, you know that you’re making the world a better place. How long would you stay?This is a question my mom asked herself for nearly 20 years, until the answer was finally, “No more.” And she’s not the only one. We are in the midst of a teacher crisis. And nowhere is this more apparent than my home state, Arizona. Watching my mom get pushed out of a job that she truly loved because the system was so broken really inspired me to see if I could change something about this.
So I went to Arizona State University. I studied data science. I tried to build an ed-tech startup outside of class. And I also joined a research and development lab.
At this lab, we spent two years trying to build a one-to-one interactive simulation of Arizona’s public education system. So basically, I spent years scouring the web, even pestering the census office, trying to get the latest figures from them. As you can imagine, they absolutely loved me for that.
[Laughter]
But even after two years of definitely learning a lot and building something that was pretty cool, we never really got to that succinct answer from the simulator. It seemed there was an element to the problem that we couldn’t exactly calculate. So, after all that time, I decided to revert to something that was always really helpful: just talking to teachers.
For months I hit the road, ditching my computer and picking up a camera, just asking teachers and ex-teachers what their problems were and what kind of technologies that they thought they needed that I could build for them. But something became pretty clear. The problem that these teachers were facing was never calculable in the first place.
It seems like they were being confronted with a more deep-rooted, nuanced issue. They all felt they were being martyrized by a broader community of Arizonans that had basically given up on public education. It seemed like we’ve accepted this culture that our schools are so far gone, they’re not even worth saving anymore. This has given rise to some pretty radical policies, like universal ESA vouchers, which directly divert funds from public schools to build a parallel charter, private, and competitive system. So I decided, if I was really going to get to the root of the issue here, I needed to craft some kind of narrative before I was able to craft a tool that effectively solved this problem. So I set out to turn my interviews into a documentary, a story that would reach into the hearts of other Arizonans and convince them that the problem was that we were undermining the value of our educators as professionals and our public school system in general.
And thus, a very long journey of stepping into a new role as potentially an artist, not just a technologist, began. But it turns out it’s actually pretty hard to bring about an original and compelling piece of artwork. I feel like some people in this room might have an idea of what that feels like.
This was my first time ever trying to make a film or even tell a story like this. And I’m not going to lie, I struggled a lot this year. I definitely learned a lot, but I struggled. I learned that the creative process is not a linear one. I actually completed an entire draft of the film. But when I reviewed it, it just wasn’t there yet.
Actually, it’s kind of funny. I wrote “compelling” on my poster, because that was the one fault I found with my draft. It wasn’t as compelling to me as I knew the narrative actually was. But there’s this quote from Make Something Wonderful, a book that probably brought a lot of us here today, where Steve says, “If you’re going to make something, it often doesn’t take more money or more energy to make it really great. It usually just takes more time.” So that’s what I'm doing. I’m investing more time into my work in progress.
But I learned a lot of fun things about the creative process as well. During this year, when I was really frustrated with my work on the film, I would turn to music as a creative outlet. It was just so authentic for me. It was a way to make something and be telling a story again.
And this work actually spun out into kind of a pseudo artist project, which garnered almost 100,000 streams this year. That was sort of an unexpected experience, like a little creative side quest I took this year on my fellowship. But overall, it was a fantastic year of learning for me. And I’m excited to dive back in and do the hard part of rebuilding in the face of failure. But I guess that’s what the process is all about.
And I’ll leave you with one more message from Make Something Wonderful. This quote really helped me see past some of these challenges. I’m on the brink now of my 22nd birthday. And so I think that’s why maybe this quote resonates with me.
Steve said, “Our life is a journey. It may be hard to see it when you’re standing at 22, looking towards the rest of your life. But if you imagine that you’re a bit older, looking back, you’ll start to see it—your life as a story. The highs, the lows, the heroes, and the villains, and the forks in the road that in the end mean everything.”
Thank you, guys.