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Copyright © 1997, Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
From: Louis_Schmier
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 1997 07:33:03 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Random Thought: Nothing is Instant
Happy July
4th!! I have to admit, however, that my firecracker is
pooped! It's 5:15. I just did my six mile jaunt on the
darkened Valdosta streets. It was not, however, an easy
walk this morning. I found out why. The temperature is 81
degrees! Humidity is 96%!! The heat index is 94
degrees!!! And the sun hasn't even broken the horizon.
I'd call it a sauna out there, but I think a sauna is
really cooler than these ovens of the south Georgia
summer. Heck, even the few mosquitoes that were crazy as
I to move around had sweat towels around their necks and
were accompanied by an oxygen-carrying rescue squad!
As I slooshed
along the soft, melting asphalt, struggling not to be
like Brer Rabbit, I was thinking about an e-mail message
I had received yesterday. "Louis," this
mid-western professor wrote, "I thought I would give
some of your techniques one try to see if they would
work. They didn't. I'm going back to what I know works
best."
I
sometimes think we professors go into class as if we were
praying. When we want something to change or to change
something, when we want to try something new we read
about in an article or heard about at a conference, we
scream out impatiently demanding, "Lord, I need this
NOW!" Or, "Lord, give me this NOW!" Or,
"Lord, do this NOW!" Or, "Lord I want it
this way Now!" We so want things to be easy and
instant: just open a package, pour out the contents into
a pan, add a cup water, nuke for a few minutes, stir once
or twice, and SHAZAM, without any mess or fuss, without
slaving away for hours and days, we have a chef's delight
or mom's home cooking. We want successful attempts now,
first time around, guaranteed, 100% effective, with as
little effort as possible. After all, most us don't
include teaching in our academic definition of work.
We'll sweat buckets over running and rerunning an
experiment; we'll go into the ring and box for rounds
with interpreting a document; we'll go the full match
wrestling with a sentence in an article, conference
paper, or grant proposal. But teaching? So few of us
grunt and groan about it.
So, if we
don't get instant results, like this professor, we walk
away with a smug, false self-satisfaction, loudly
proclaiming righteously, "Okay, I've tried it. I've
given it a change." But, have we? Really? Did we
give it enough time, effort, thought, adjustment to
really see if it works. Did we follow that adage: if at
first you don't succeed, try, try again? Things don't
change just because someone's going through a lot of
motions and/or making a lot of noise. When all is said
and done, it is more of the persevering "done"
than the superficial "said" that makes things
work.
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