The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map
makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells
inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
Perhaps he's overdoing it a little in his description, perhaps not. All I know now, though, is that suddenly, shockingly, I AM NOW ENCOURAGED TO MAKE MY OWN PRIORITIES! I ditch high school and go to college and, all of a sudden, NO ONE is telling me what's most important in terms of my schooling. I ended up doing a bit of prioritizing in high school, of course. But now, if I feel that I need to ditch a class to spend more time on another one, no one's there to rebuke me. I will still suffer consequences, of course--I will have to catch up, if possible, at a later time. But no one will try to stop me; they all just stand back and let me choose, rather than making me fight my way through them if I want to make a decison.
In fact, I'm exercising that prioritizing ability this weekend. As I mentioned before, I'm reading my textbook for my physical science class in preparation for the challenge test on Monday. Do you think I have time to read my humanities chapters, or my English assignment, or my Japanese assignment, while I'm trying to read around thirty chapters of physical science? Uh uh. I have done NONE of my homework for my other classes. In fact, in English, we don't even have to turn anything in until the last day of class. And if I sound like an idiot in Japanese tomorrow, so be it. I sound like an idiot in Japanese anyway, of course, but this time it's my choice, which is some comfort.
And now, here I am, suddenly in a position where I call my own shots and consequences with a freedom and responsibility never before experienced. If I tried to do it in high school, there was always the nagging insistence from every side that eventually made me comply to the overall pattern of school out of sheer irritation.
The sudden shift in responsibility, I think, can be explained by the reasons people are sent to school. Not why they go to school, but why they are sent. Some people do indeed go to K-12 school because they enjoy it or want an education. Others, because of their social life. Most, however, are there because someone told them to go there. Why, though, are they sent? Because it's the law. Mommy and Daddy get thrown in jail if their child doesn't get some form of schooling approved by the state; generally, this is attendance at a public school. If a kid is in school only because he's ordered there, can he really be expected to take control of his own academic destiny and seek a fulfilling education? No. He can be expected to sulk and to expend energy only when prompted, or trained to do it by habit. Thus, it is up to the state to plan his academic career and make him travel the path, with certain amount of electives required of them to make sure they don't turn into quite exact clones of each other. And if there is a student who really wants to be there and learn, well--the system would be extremely inefficient if it took time to identify everyone who really wanted to be there and tailored a plan for each one, so it just makes them conform to the preplanned system.
But now--there is no law requiring us to be here. College students go to school because we want to continue an education and learn, or at least because we've been trained to think we have to in order to survive in the world. Personally, I'm still here because I would die screaming if I stopped learning (which is actually a different reason than why I initially came here--maybe I'll rant about that sometime). Either way, we can be expected to put out a significantly greater amount of energy than the standard K-12 student would. Greater interest, greater effort, and thus greater trustworthiness when it comes to our own academic well-being.
And it rocks hard!
~Paul
2 comments:
Good luck on your test!
Come look at my blog about your last post.
Wow. I'm still amazed about how you put into coherent words exactly what I'm thinking. I didn't know that was possible.
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