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| Let's sharpen those # 2's! |
The start of a new school year was a fresh start, or at least it seemed that way. Maybe you were continuing were you left off in a sense, but it wasn't as though your teacher from the previous grade was going hand you an assignment from last year and say, "You know that paper that you didn't get the best grade on? The one you had a really hard time writing? You know how you thought that even though it was struggle to get through it was over and done now. In the past? Well, we're going to have you re-write it, again. Let's dig up everything, go back over each mistake, let you relive them, and have you go through the same struggle again. How does that sound?"
No. It didn't happen.
What was done was done. You got a freakin' fresh start. I really miss that.
There's a corporate culture slogan / management ideology called "continual improvement," or something like that. I have an MSEE and not an MBA, but my understanding is that you look at a process in your business and whenever you complete a product launch, customer delivery, or whatever your company does, you look back at that cycle and determine what could have been done better. There's always something, right?
Put this into your best disembodied principle of the school voice:
"Couldn't you have done this better? How? Why didn't you do that in the first place?"
Can you ever say that you couldn't have done better? No. Of course not. One can always improve. I believe this...and that's a problem.
If you can always improve, and you never restart, then you always fail, you always have failed, and you are failing right now. Bummer.
Yeah, that's kind of a glass half-empty way of looking at things, but sometimes that's how you see life.
[disembodied principle of school voice]
"Well, couldn't you see life in a more positive manner? You can't try to be a little more pleasant?"
I really want a brand new box of crayons.
As a teacher, I always hated it when last year's teacher would accost me in the hallway asking to see if I had any of her old students. "Oh, let me tell you about THIS one!" she would say, and I would stare off into the distance and force myself not to listen. I wanted my students to have a fresh start as well, and even told them that on the first day of school. I think a lot of them appreciated that.
ReplyDeleteI think I have some leftover crayons around that you could have . . .
I think your students probably did appreciate it. I feel that children, or young adults, really deserve that feeling of resetting. By leaving any unnecessary baggage behind you, one would probably have a much better change of growing and developing.
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