When I bake bread (and I bake a lot of bread), I invariably get some flour on the counters. Whether it’s the mixer throwing some out of the bowl, the extra flour I spread on my cutting board to do a final knead, or just the inefficiency of pouring flour from a bag to a canister, there is almost always some flour to wipe down, sweep up, or wash off at the end of baking.
It’s easy to think of this flour as wasted: that somehow I could be more efficient and eliminate all waste. But after thousands of loaves, I can confirm that’s simply not possible. That flour is a necessary part of the baking process, even if it doesn’t end up in the loaf.
There is an ongoing movement to eliminate all “inefficiency” from education. Somehow, people think that we can perfectly teach each student on a factory-like schedule, with no extra effort from teachers, no extra time needed for some students.
This is, plain and simple, wrong. It’s misguided to think that I can bake without some extra flour, and it’s misguided to think I can teach without the liberty to flexibly react to the needs of students and teach appropriately.
I don’t know if it’s going to take one time, or two, or seventeen!, for all of my students to understand the concept I’m teaching them. As a teacher, I must care more about them all mastering the concept than I do about delivering my curriculum in a regimented time. I must adjust my teaching for snow days, unplanned illness, and unexpected issues. I must react to the emotional needs of the people in my classroom, people who might not always be ready for the lessons I’m planning to teach.
Our contemporary world seems to value “perfect efficiency” – in manufacturing, in Amazon warehouse jobs, or, yes, in education. But it will never work: humans aren’t perfect, and our human needs will always interrupt that perfect efficiency.
Not all that we teach is measurable, and not all that we can measure is worth teaching. Let’s spend more time caring for the humans in our care, and less time caring about the curriculum we’re meant to insert into their brains.