Outdated maxims
As teachers, we carry a lot of baggage. Not just the baggage acquired from our professional careers, but also the 12 or more years we spent as students. How many of the maxims in our teaching philosophy don’t contribute to our overall goals as educators? Even as a relatively young teacher, I may not have built of too many of my own, but I certainly have a lot of work to do when it comes to evaluating all of the maxims I’ve learned through the course of my educational career as a student.
Jonathan Fields brings it up in a business context:
How many rules do we follow that have outlasted their original intent?
They’re all around us. How many people work 9 to 5 (7 to 7 in NYC), when they know their most productive, creative hours are 4 to midnight? How many people pour the coffee first, then add milk and sugar second, when pouring the coffee last avoids the need to stir? How many scrub the dishes before putting them in a dishwasher that’s been good enough to clean them for decades? How many top off the gas tank to avoid waiting for change, even when paying by credit card?
In more of an educational context, some of the maxims that persisted during my education that I’ve had to rethink:
- Is a quiet and orderly classroom necessarily a productive classroom?
- Why must math be done in pencil at all times?
- Why should students produce a written draft before typing?
There are many more, but I think it is far more important that it be a personal quest to seek out these maxims and challenge them. If any come to mind, do not hesitate to share them in the comments section.
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July 8th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Yes, rules so outdated that they seem arbitrary are as common at school (your post) as at work (Jonathan’s post).
The school rules that always bugged me the most were about scheduling. Why start at 800am and end at 230ish? Why take off 3 months in the summer?
There were probably good historical reasons for this but my guess is that they were based on an agriculturally-based economy’s calendar and/or an industrial economy’s work habits rather than on best practices for education or efficiency.