Why we satisfice - 2

I am always amazed at the amount of time and anguish some people will devote to completing reports - especially those useless ones required by the state or a central office.

Here's how I look at them:

If there is money involved, I attempt to be as accurate as possible without agonizing. When ever possible, I figure conscientious estimates are enough. I mean, is somebody actually going to come in and recalculate the average age of your science section? Re-measure the square footage of your media center? Really care if you count a set of reference books as one title or three volumes? Sit and monitor the average number of students who visit the media center? I don't think so.

As my dad always said, "A job not worth doing is not worth doing well." Give a good guess and then use your time helping your kids or staff. The world will continue to revolve.

The continuum's ends

My Australian friend Dr. Arthur Winzenried at Charles Stuart University in Wagga Wagga (voted 12 years running coolest name for a town in the entire world) and I have been commiserating about the diverse levels of expertise we encounter among those we teach. Arthur recently wrote:

At CSU I teach Distance Ed and with all the technology issues decided on a bold approach by setting the group of Masters students (200 odd) the task of collaborating (in teams of 4) on a joint PowerPoint using only a wiki ...  as their communication tool. The results are now in and the work is quite exceptional, but in their personal reflections, it showed that a significant number had never produced a PowerPoint before, let alone communicated via virtual chat, wiki etc. The group are essentially all working teacher-librarians in various parts of the world. Despite all of the hype, we still face enormous differences in the levels of expertise and access. Curiously, no access problems reported by students in Belgium or Ghana, Iceland or China, but one serious issue with a student less than 100k from the Uni ...

My fussing was about teaching Web 2.0 tools to educators. In every group setting, there are those who could (and possibly should) be teaching the workshop, who know more tools and more features of individual tools than I ever will, and those who say, "Uh, blogs? Whaz 'at?" And it is tough to do differentiated instruction in a conference workshop... "OK, Bluebirds at this table; Buzzards over here... Please, check your pretest scores!" I don't think so.

It seems to me that that the continuum between reactionary educators who still find overhead projectors a cutting edge tool and progressive educators who seem to master each tool and philosophy du jour is stretching ever longer every year. As a classroom teacher in the 70s and 80s, we all taught pretty much the same way, with the same sets of tools.

But today, teachers and librarians are, let's charitably say, heterogeneous in their skills and outlooks.

Technology use is the most obvious culprit for stretching the continuum, but there also seem to be other factors at work - improved communications, more voices, and an explosion of theories and practices and philosophies of education.

Are our technologies bringing educators closer together? Or are they driving the teaching profession apart?

Have To or Get To

Seth Godin's post Get to vs. have to resonated with me. In it he asks:

How much of your day is spent doing things you have to do (as opposed to the things you get to do)?

and suggests the higher the percentage of things you "get to do" as opposed to "have to do," the greater the likelihood of happiness and success.

Were Jessica Hagy at indexed to look at this, she might draw:

Yes, it's a book checkout card, not an index card. Tough noogies.

One workshop I give touches on the difference between intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, revisiting Ed Psych 101. A question I pose to illustrate the difference is "If you won the lottery tomorrow and never HAD to work again, what things do you do at work that you would continue to do?" I am sometimes disappointed that teachers and librarians are rather slow to come up with tasks that they like to do so much that they'd keep doing them.

Eventually a short list appears:

• I'd still read children/YA literature.
• I'd still read aloud to kids.
• I'd still teach kids how to use ____________ software (KidPix, Inspiration, PowerPoint).
• I'd still try out new software or technologies.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his old book Flow writes about people who are able to take even mundane tasks (washing dishes, loading trucks, working on assembly lines, etc.) and turn them into intrinsic challenges by setting personal goals or challenges. I expect many of us have figured out how to do this one way or another.

So far I run about 80% "get to" parts vs. 20% "have to" parts of my job. I genuinely like coming to work everyday. Well, almost everyday. It's a combination of luck and attitude probably. If ever the "have to" portion of my job gets bigger than the "get to" part, I hope I have the good sense and courage to move on.

What's on your list of "get to's?" What would you keep doing even if you won the lottery? How do we encourage those poor people who seem to live an entire work-life of "have to's" to find a more fitting position?