What might work, might work better
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
The other day, I read a book by Michael Pollan, which described how the approach to solving a problem differs between children and adults. A child is more likely to use a novel and unorthodox approach whereas an adult is more inclined to choose a method based on previous experience, that likely works. Therefore, the child is better equipped to solve certain problems that require an unlikely solution. It seems to me that children are higher in openness than their adult selves because they have not developed their fear of failure yet. It is only when you embrace failure that success can truly be achieved. How many times did you fall when you were learning to ride a bicycle? Or who did not sink at first when they were learning to swim?
Of course, the fear of failure is also a good thing. It prevents us from dying too often. One should not pet the hungry lion or play with the electrical wall socket. In such cases, the adult is correct with their fear of failure. My argument is that our society has become so safe that we tend to overshoot towards the safety side. Our culture sometimes suppresses the inner child so hard that it can hurt us as a society. The moment you start to tread on your own path, you may experience that other people try to pull you back. But are they really stopping you or is it your belief that they are trying to stop you? In many cases I suspect the problem is the programming in your head. It is the shackles that you have put on yourself. I am a firm believer in free will. You always have the choice to listen to the inner voice, i.e. your conscience. You can also call it gut feeling. And my gut feeling told me that I must move all my education to the cloud.
I have started to become aware of this inner process and have awakened my inner child once again. In the past week I did two webinars and two live streamed lectures, four days in a row of online activity in front of an audience. I had intentionally prepared “too little”. If you are also an engineer, I think you will understand what I mean. We tend to be strongly focused on quality and often have a hard time to say something is finished and move on to the next thing. During the live streamed lectures, I was just having fun and playing with the possibilities to see what happens. Just like my son when he is playing on his Casio keyboard. What comes out resembles music more and more every day. And if he keeps doing it, we will hear beautiful music soon. I believe that is true in my case too. I knew that I would fail my inhuman quality standards and embraced it. I just needed to get the lecture out there. That was the mission and the mission was accomplished even if I messed up the server settings at first, chose the wrong camera angle and the audio feed was cut off a couple of times. It does not matter! It is physically impossible to produce the perfect recording of a lecture. The purpose is the process. I will have live streamed ten lectures and am working on my eleventh before my past self would be ready to start his first “perfect” lecture. Who would you bet your money on?
The greatest challenge here is that I am experimenting with education, which means that I am experimenting with other people’s lives and future. A mistake on my part can be catastrophic so I am without a doubt following a high risk, high return strategy here. If you wrongly patch a cable on your modular synthesizer you might get a laugh or no sound at all, but mess up a lecture, that is on a completely different level and indeed very scary. However, I remember something I read during my teacher education. Students can and will forgive most mistakes the teacher makes. They can see the process and appreciate that the teacher is trying to evolve. But there is one deadly sin that they will not forgive: Lack of motivation and inspiration. Can a desire to play it safe perhaps be mistaken for lack of motivation? In the post Covid world, us teachers need to awaken our inner child and once again embrace failure. We knew how to do it before, and we can do it again as adults. There is a clear distinction between doing something that you know will fail and something that might fail. Now, replace the word fail with the word work in the previous sentence. It gives a more positive feeling and yet the meaning remains the same.
What might work, might work better.