Whatever! No, really… do anything
Comments(0) Mike Johnston once again provides me with food for thought in his latest blog post called Feet are optional.
Once, I assigned a class to shoot a roll of film over a weekend. “What do you want us to shoot?” came the chorus. Anything, I answered. Whatever you want.
His problem was that some of them could not grasp the concept of anything.
What these straight-A kids wanted was for me to set the terms of their success for them. They wanted me to set up the hoop so they could jump through it for me. They wanted to be told how they could be certain of success. It was what they encountered everywhere else. But what I wanted was for them to set up their own hoop, or, better yet, look askance at the hoop and go, “Nah, not today,” and wander off somewhere and see what they could find.
I’m talking in very general terms here but I never quite understood why some people need everything planned, every step laid out for them, every detail precisely defined to achieve a certain goal whatever that might be. Why can’t they just go with it (an idea, an assignment, a hope, whatever) and see where that takes them? Couldn’t they just take a chance, use their imagination (and reason) to fill the blanks?
Yes, there are times and there are goals when precision is everything but when the assignment depends entirely on your judgment on how to proceed… why not just go with it?
I haven’t been fortunate enough to have a professor quite like Mike. A few were close but most aren’t. To my great dismay, everything is predefined.
Body copy in 12pt Times New Roman, headlines in 14pt Arial, 1.5 linespacing, margins so and so, quotes and references done in a specific way, so many pages, so many images, so many PowerPoint slides, so many minutes for the presentation, so many sources, so many….
Why not Adobe Garamond set in 12pt, or Gill Sans in 10pt? Why not 1.2 linespacing, why not use as many PowerPoint slides and as many minutes to get the message across?
The sad part is… even when the rules aren’t set, there are people who request them untill they are. Firm and strong.
