I thought the Adam Sadler movie "Click" was surprisingly helpful. The hero has too many remote controls in his life: tv, heating and cooling, So, he goes to Bed, Bath and Beyond. In the back of the store is the Beyond desk where he buys a universal remote control. He is very surprised to find that the remote mutes his wife and his boss and he uses that feature whenever he feels that he doesn't want to hear what they are saying. He finds that he can use the device to fast forward during an argument and get past it to a better, more congenial time in his marriage and his work. After a while, he finds the price for that convenience: a drastically shortened life time, much of which he had fastforwarded through.
When I went to college, I questioned many aspects of the assumptions and procedures of teacher training. Ok, I overquestioned and that attitude led to my doctoral studies in educational research. When I began, I gave too little weight to the political side of education and of improvement in education. But here 45 years later, it doesn't seem that we have any wonderful new insights into improvements in schooling. Much of what we know about doing schooling well was known 500 years ago.
Americans are often interested in being #1, in being the fastest and the best. But the best overall educations for the entire lifespan seem to come from not trying too hard. I just saw a headline about not trying too hard learning a 2nd language. Today, I see a headline about not overdoing exercise. Finland has been doing pretty well with education and I guess their schools give a 15 minute break each hour.
Sometimes, the hard part for moderns is accepting the timeouts, the pauses, the gap years, the slowness of maturation and the many seasons and experiences that are needed to build a happy, competent, well-balanced human being. It doesn't work well to skip the hard parts or the slow parts or the challenging parts.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
