What are your 10,000 hours in?

After reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and skimming the themes from yesterday's keynote at NECC09, the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become a true expert or master an any skill, I am, of course, wondering- what am I getting my 10,000 hours in, exactly?

Just to do a quick assessment of where I'm getting my hours, for the ones I'm sure about, I show the actual hours. The others are just the activities that I participate in that make up a majority of my time.

1. Father: 39, 420 hours. (book in the works titled: The Expert Father)
2. Educational Networking (writing/ blogging/ Twitter/ Facebook): 1.5 - 2 yrs. - maybe 1460 hours? Possibly some more.
3. Professional Development (which would blend with Ed Networking, masters classes, reading blogs, reading education periodicals, sharing resources, blogging, teaching myself new Web 2.0 tools). This would require some Wolfram Alpha computation to calculate.
4. Classroom teaching: so far 2700 hours in 3 years.
5. Technology Integration
6. Curriculum development
7. Professionally developing other teachers.

About Educational Networking: This is quite hard to compute, but I estimate that I do about two hours of this per day (combined). Think about how many times you glance at your phone, answer a Twitter or text message, and add this up. Since I've really only been actively blogging, twittering, and texting for a good 1.5 - 2 years, I'll estimate my total time: 1094 hours. This goes pretty much right along the lines of Gladwell, who states that it takes about 10 years to be an expert (or 10,000 hours) at anything . So if this continues, which I assume it will, I should be an expert educational communicator in about 9 years (but it will take a shorter time, I think :-).

About fathering- I just had to put that in there to compare just how much time family takes up. It makes you wonder, when choosing your road to expertise, just how much of that is devoted to family?

So I'm looking through my behavior- teaching, using tech, developing social Web tools, integrating tech- and where is my real focus? I'm also thinking about the work that my students do, and wonder if I am offering opportunities to them that will allow them to become experts. Surely, I do offer many chances to use Web 2.0 tools and to create movies, presentations, learning Web 2.0 skills, HTML skills , but I'm also wonder if the opportunities to continue that learning will continue for them in the schools that they graduate to. Can I help them learn independently so that they can seek out their own opportunities and compensate for their possible adverse situations? That is not certain.

Another question persists: After a worthy conversation with Scott Meech, I question whether jumping to an admin level will help or hurt my ability to be effective in the classroom, without continually using those skills. If I have to learn a whole new set of skills, is that worth it? I'll be starting my 10,000 hours all over again!

These are perhaps the greatest questions I've asked myself as a teacher so far, and the widest objective view I've had of my teaching practice that I've had so far in my career.

So, I wonder- what are your 10,000 hours in?

Thanks to Michel Fillion on Flickr for the image.
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