Price of Freedom

Freedom is good. The freedom to create schools with very different goals, and very different curricula is one of the necessary foundations for an adaptable education system. But freedom has its price.

One general problem with freedom is that it clearly puts the weight of responsibility on the free person. In this case, freedom to choose means that we - the individual parents - have the responsibility for our children’s education. We can’t sooth ourselves by saying that the powers that be know what’s right. We can’t blame the government for bad choices. This is the type of price we already pay in higher education, where we choose much of what we do. In many countries there is also such freedom of choice with medicine, associated with the same side-effect of shouldering the responsibility. Barry Schwartz wrote a whole book about the problem - The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and gave a great TED talk about the matter.

What can we do about it? First of all, control expectations: Even with 100 choices for a school, the best one will not be perfect for the discerning parent. It will “only” be much better than the no-choice school assigned to a kid because of the address where they live. Secondly, learn to forgive ourselves for errors: We cannot correctly compute all the differences between those 100 schools (or 10,000 if we are willing to relocate), especially when we don’t know what the world will look like in 10-15 years, after the kids graduate. We could also give up on the project, and settle for the 18^th-19^th century mode of education. This is a real option and not a mockery, since it’s the familiar way of doing things, and that has its comforting effect. The effect is so strong, that I expect that creating the 21^st-22^nd century mode of education will be an uphill struggle. Anyway, keeping things as they are is not the scope of this blog, so let’s move along.

But there is also a technical problem that needs to be addressed. What happens if a kids enters a technology oriented school, and after 5 years decides that an art oriented school is a better choice? Or - just to emphasize that there are more than just these two choices – if the kid wants to move from a social-responsibility oriented school to a science-oriented school? The social-responsibility curriculum possibly emphasizes sociology, psychology, politics, etc., but probably very little science-related material. How would the kid pick up 5 years of calculus and theoretical physics? This problem must be addressed effectively to allow freedom of choice without lifelong commitment at the age of 6 (or even 3).

One answer is to allow for catch-up time. On the extreme end, we can allow 5 full years to catch up. This will enable the kid to catch up completely, but a “penalty” of 5 years is more than what most pupils will consider. On the other extreme, the kid can just move from 6th grade of school A to 6th grade of school B, but the student will just be lost in a world of unfamiliar concepts and missing skills. Even if the school tries to help the new student by attaching tutors, the gap will be too large to work well. A possible middle-ground is one year of intensive catching-up with the main issues taught in the new school. We have some good experience with children moving from a relaxed democratic school to a stricter school, and picking up missing material and skills during the summer vacation. We also have good experience with preparatory courses to university, enabling students who took a relaxed approach to school, to achieve university-entry capabilities. Some choice may be offered here, too, regarding the length and intensity of the preparatory phase - maybe allocating Two years instead of one year will enable deeper catching-up. More choice may be given to parents in employing special catching-up teachers - paid either by the parents or by the state.

This catching-up time is a straightforward solution, but it may encounter some opposition. One source of such opposition is the state: The state likes people to start being economically active (read: paying taxes) sooner than later. This opposition should be dealt with on the political level. Many states also like to conscript young people at 18 or so, but most of them also allow delays in the military service for extended studies, so the framework is already there. Another possible source of opposition is parents who are unhappy about delaying their child’s entry into real life. But this concern will have to be weighed in the light of the importance of the change in the child’s interests: Another year at school, vs. continuing in the wrong direction for years. Something like “throwing good time after bad”. Also, if we do a good job, being at school will be considered as a pretty good way to use time.

Grand Plan vs. Specific School Ideas

Over the past 6 months, I have been writing down thoughts about education and schooling. Since there was no outline prepared before writing, the blog entries took their own direction. Or, so it seems - two distinct directions: One group of entries has to do with specific ideas of how to teach a kid, or a class, or how to run a school. The other group has to do with a grad plan for an education/schooling system, that should be useful for any type of school. There is a bit of a contradiction between discussing the Grand Plan and discussing Specific School Ideas, since one of the premises of the grand plan is that there are many sets of specific school ideas, which are equally valid. From the point of view of the grand plan, specific school ideas have very limited value. Still, they are my ideas, so like them.

I will now put some order into the previous entries by categorizing them as either Grand-Plan-related or Specific-School-Idea… Or somewhere in between.

1. April 11, 2009 - About K12 Education - Grand Plan introduction
2. April 14, 2009 - Bare Necessities: Goals - Grand Plan basics
3. April 15, 2009 - Scope: Education for whom? - Grand Plan scope
4. April 18, 2009 - Bare Necessities: Measurement - Grand Plan basics
5. April 19, 2009 - Bare Necessities?? Research - Grand Plan basics
6. April 20, 2009 - Bare Necessities - A summary - Grand Plan basics
7. April 20, 2009 - The State Of The Art of Education - 2009 - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas - context
8. April 22, 2009 - The roots of the problem - Grand Plan context
9. April 23, 2009 - "It can't be helped" - Grand Plan context
10. April 25, 2009 - I don't have a plan - personal
11. April 26, 2009 - Some old ideas - Specific School Ideas - context
12. April 27, 2009 - Goals - Foundation Layer - Grand Plan foundation
13. April 28, 2009 - Measurement - In Practice - Grand Plan practicalities
14. April 30, 2009 - Finland - How to form a reform - Specific School Ideas - context
15. May 1, 2009 - Primum non nocere - First, do no harm - Grand Plan basics
16. May 5, 2009 - Learning and Meaning - Grand Plan basics
17. May 7, 2009 - Critical Mass of Learning - Specific School Ideas - basics
18. May 8, 2009 - Pedagogic Urgency - Grand Plan basics
19. May 9, 2009 - Teaching and Salesmanship - Grand Plan basics
20. May 10, 2009 - What we can take home from school - Grand Plan basics
21. May 14, 2009 - Hear, See, Do - Grand Plan basics
22. May 15, 2009 - Education and The State - Grand Plan basics
23. May 16, 2009 - Emotional Involvement in Learning - Grand Plan basics
24. May 17, 2009 - Explaining to a six-year-old - Specific School Ideas
25. May 18, 2009 - Customers - Grand Plan practicalities
26. May 21, 2009 - Long Term Results - Grand Plan practicalities
27. May 24, 2009 - Wild Ideas - Student Teachers - Specific School Ideas
28. May 25, 2009 - Experiments? NIMBY! - Grand Plan practicalities
29. May 26, 2009 - Tests and Announcements - Specific School Ideas
30. May 27, 2009 - Learning to Err - Specific School Ideas
31. May 28, 2009 - The Ultimate Knowledge Work - Grand Plan philosophizing
32. May 30, 2009 - The Main Course: Feedback - Grand Plan practicalities
33. May 31, 2009 - For Whom the Test Tolls - Specific School Ideas
34. June 1, 2009 - Wild Ideas - Anarchy - Grand Plan wilderness
35. June 2, 2009 - Mind the Gap - Grand Plan practicalities
36. June 6, 2009 - If We Build It, Will They Come? - Specific School Ideas
37. June 7, 2009 - Research Based - Grand Plan practicalities
38. June 9, 2009 - Teaching Teachers - Grand Plan details
39. June 10, 2009 - Paid Volunteers - Grand Plan practicalities
40. June 17, 2009 - Defining a system - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas - practicalities
41. June 18, 2009 - Ask Around - Grand Plan practicalities
42. June 20, 2009 - Dumbing Down - Grand Plan context
43. June 24, 2009 - Let Kids be Kids - Specific School Ideas
44. July 2, 2009 - Administration Remystified - Grand Plan practicalities
45. July 3, 2009 - Communicate^3 - Grand Plan practicalities
46. July 4, 2009 - Wild Ideas - Distributed Establishment - Grand Plan practicalities
47. July 4, 2009 - Education Market Analysis - Grand Plan practicalities
48. July 5, 2009 - What... Is Your Mission? - Grand Plan mission
49. July 8, 2009 - Mission - The Easy Part - Grand Plan mission
50. July 8, 2009 - Mission - Complicating Factors - Specific School mission
51. July 9, 2009 - Regulation - Grand Plan practicalities
52. July 11, 2009 - KIPP, SIPP and HIPP - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas
53. July 11, 2009 - Example: Technology Oriented Schooling - Grand Plan specific examples
54. July 14, 2009 - Interim Summary - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas
55. July 15, 2009 - The Essence of Time - Grand Plan philosophizing
56. July 18, 2009 - Still No Plan - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas practicalities
57. July 19, 2009 - Example: Art Oriented Schooling - Grand Plan specific examples
58. July 20, 2009 - Centuries 21 and 22 - Grand Plan context
59. July 21, 2009 - Australia - Specific School Ideas - context
60. July 23, 2009 - The Graduate - Grand Plan basics
61. July 24, 2009 - Education System Architecture - Grand Plan basics
62. July 25, 2009 - Information Exposure - Grand Plan context
63. July 27, 2009 - Data Crunching - Specific School Ideas - practicalities
64. July 29, 2009 - Limitations of Data - Specific School Ideas - practicalities
65. July 30, 2009 - Evolution vs. Revolution - Grand Plan basics
66. August 22, 2009 - Creativity - Specific School Ideas
67. September 20, 2009 - Too busy - Grand Plan practical philosophizing
68. September 23, 2009 - Unspecial Education - Grand Plan basics
69. September 23, 2009 - Quotes - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas philosophizing
70. October 7, 2009 - Research and Student Privacy - Grand Plan practicalities
71. October 8, 2009 - Research - Technical Issues - Grand Plan practicalities

The classifications above - Grand Plan or Specific School Ideas - are open to debate. Often the grand ideas stray away from the consensus, and should be demoted to specific-school-ideas. Sometimes specific ideas are actually general enough to qualify as part of the grand plan. Still, the above list gives a good idea of the content of the posts.

Research - Technical Issues

Below are some preliminary thoughts, before diving into the ocean of details of research problems, solutions and opportunities.
The problems and perceived problems should be thought of in the context of the broad issue of ongoing research as the tool for ongoing improving and adaptation of education to the constantly changing society - Looking ahead.

At the heels of the thought of research, comes the thought of experimentation, and the natural negative response to experimentation has already been discussed - indeed not exhaustively, but one has to start somewhere.

Another issue is that of research interference with the optimal course of learning, when the needs of the research seem to dictate an action that would not have been done otherwise. The most trivial example is that of asking students to provide their opinion, which will be part of the input for analysis in the research. The time spent by the students answering questionnaires could have been used for other ways of learning. Note, though that in some education systems, this is already the case. Countries are concerned about their position in the international tests (PISA, etc), and they put a lot of effort into intermediate testing aimed at preparing the kids to the international test. Also, since the learning disabilities are a hot issue, in some education systems tests and assessments take considerable amount of time in the lower classes of primary schools.

Looking ahead again: The problem of non-study-related activities required of the students can be mitigated by being aware of it and trying to minimize the disruptions. We must make sure that any action required or requested of the students, is truly necessary. Part of that, is the use of non-intrusive techniques for feedback and assessment, such as analyzing students’ behavior as it is reflected on normally accumulated records. Such records may include:

• Assessments the students would have taken anyway, right after the event the research is focusing on

• Assessments the students would have taken anyway, a while after the event the research is focusing on - as a sort of follow-up / retention feedback

• Assessments the students would have taken anyway, in fields other than the field the research is focusing on

• Normally scheduled satisfaction assessments of students, parents, teachers, tutors, etc

• Records of students choices of next-course following the event the research is focusing on

• etc.

The usefulness of video recordings was mentioned before, together with its accompanying need for anonymization and Chinese walls. But there is also the technical and logistic issue of analyzing the recorded video - Hours of it? Thousands of hours? Ok, so we can have many researchers analyzing different parts of the video. Such analysis requires a clear methodology, to ensure that different people analyzing different stretches of video, will come up with compatible partial results, so these results can be aggregated into a coherent overall result. If we have a very strict methodology, we will be able to create such a coherent picture, and even experiments that are repeatable - that can be repeated by different research groups, with consistent results. This would make great science, but we are likely to limit the types of results we may get, and therefore miss some of the picture. For example, Counting the number of times a teacher asks a question and waits for an answer from the class is a strict and objective way to analyze a video, but if the researcher is limited to this measurement, we may miss other interesting patterns, such as the length of the median answer from the class, or even the more subtle indications of the median amount of interest the students display. So, even with a good methodology, we are going to find ourselves in an imperfect point between producing consistent results with limited field-of-vision on one end, and producing deeply meaningful results with no repeatability (and hence verifiability) on the other end. I am sure this has been discussed academically in social studies, but I suspect that discussion has been more relaxed than what is needed for a systematic research based education system.

There are also some easier questions regarding analysis of video materials: How to search for an event? How to correlate actions by the same person in different parts of the video? Or maybe different days? Or maybe different research projects? Or their test records? How to block-out the faces for anonymity, where facial expressions are not important? How to count spoken words? How to measure the tone of voice? How to measure stress? How to measure level of interest? How to identify idle time? …
Some of these - the more the better - can be facilitated by technology. My guess - as a technologist - is that they are easier than meets the eye.

Back to more difficult issues - maybe the crux of the education research problem in an education system that allows different ideas and methods: How to make research in one school relevant in another? If the school system is highly standardized, there is no problem. But in a distributed school-system, where different school may have different emphases and goals, this is not trivial. How do we correlate the results in a school that emphasizes academic achievement with the results in a school that emphasizes cooperation between students? One option is to have different research projects and methods, managed by the schools themselves. But this way we will lose the system’s ability to understand the schools, and find ourselves nearing educational anarchy, which is more than what most of us will be comfortable with. The “system”, the state, the regulator have to have some understanding of the schools.

One direction for thinking about conducting a homogeneous study of a heterogeneous population, is to do "qualitative research". This method can generate intuitive understanding in the individuals involved in the research, and it can give rise to some questions to be researched further. But I can't bring myself to thinking about it as producing answers. It is too much of a personal experience by the researchers, and therefore not repeatable, and doesn't lend itself to neither scrutiny nor follow-up. There is a need to come up with quantitative research methods for the "soft" field of education. Tricky.

Another direction would be to break up the research subjects into small components that are measurable and can be compared across different schools, even when the goals of the different schools may have a different nature, such as individual achievement vs. social responsibility. Such component-subjects may include "individual achievement in basic arithmetic learned by rote". This component-subject may be more important in one school, and less important in another. In some schools, it may even be undesirable. But the quality of the teaching/learning of that particular component-subject can be measured, analyzed and compared across many types of schools.

The above suggestions are incomplete and a bit naive. To get better answers, it is necessary to do more study, thinking and mostly - more research about research. Quantitatively.

Research and Student Privacy

Talking about research in school starts easy, but gets in trouble very quickly.

A large class of problems has to do with the privacy of the students.

This is a general problem, but it can be illuminated best by considering the research method of recording classes and analyzing the records later. This brings up the problem of legal issues of student privacy, which was already there as soon as we started conducting any assessment, but seems to be aggravated when recording - especially in video - of class activity. Parents must agree to video recording; video recording may be totally illegal regardless of parents’ attitude; people’s images may be their own property and can’t be used by others without explicit permission; video may be allowed while sound-recording illegal; etc. But the efficacy of analyzing video is so great, that it is worth our time to look into ways to overcome this problem. In the long run, the legal issues can be resolved by passing the right laws.

But beneath the legalities, there are real concerns of parents regarding the privacy and safety of children. There are many aspects of that concern: Parents are worried that kids will be caught copying in a test, which they could otherwise get away with. This may sound a bit comical, but talking to a parent - who happens to be a primary-school teacher - I heard a deep reason for that concern: The stated rules of society are not absolute. They are part of a dialog/conversation between society, subcultures within the society, and the individual. Breaking the rules occasionally, is part of that conversation, which allows the individual to map the real limits of behavior, and is part of building the personality. Introducing what can be used as full surveillance interferes with that healthy dynamic. The rules of society may be acceptable and reasonable, but imposing them with too much success may be unacceptable. This is a nice opening for a philosophical discussion which is way out of scope here, but the concern is there, and therefore it must be acknowledged and taken into consideration. Suggested guidelines for a solution will be outlined below.

Parents are worried about the classic issues of privacy, applied to children: The danger of ridicule (e.g., when a student is “caught” on camera picking her nose) is always real, and is amplified by the ease of uploading such material to YouTube and the like to remain there for all eternity. On a smaller scale, there is the danger of abuse of information, like exposing a secret whispered between friends. There is even the worry that the system will know the weaknesses of the child. The same guidelines below can be a starting point for dealing with these worries.

Finally, parents are afraid of pedophiles watching their kids. Whether or not this fear is well-based or not, it must be answered convincingly.

Some thoughts towards resolving the concerns over student privacy:

First, it is worthwhile to remember the current situation, to which we are used, and which we manage to live with: Students don’t have much privacy. They live in a dense society where their secrets are revealed, their weaknesses - real or imagined - exposed, and their smallest quirks ridiculed. They are watched by the system through testing, in-class observation, snitching, and teachers’ “eyes-in-their-back”. Finally, the pedophiles don’t wait for massive video-based research to catch on - they have their ways. All this is just a reality-check, and it is true that careless implementation of recording-based research can aggravate all of the above. But the last sentence leads to a better way - that of careful implementation of recording-based research.

One guideline for such careful research come from the worlds of information technology and medical research: Anonymization - The removal of all identifying details not needed for the analysis at hand. As much as possible, the identity of the students should be concealed. Starting from names, which can be withheld without any damage to the research. Also, the name of the school can be safely withheld, and the researchers need not know anything about the community where the recordings were made. Same with the identity of the teachers. In general, every detail that is not necessary for the research can be eliminated. A minimal effort can eliminate the soundtrack of a video when body-language will do, and vice versa. A higher effort can automatically block-out faces, specific people, identifying location-related signals, such as pictures hanging on walls, etc. In general, the amount of effort being put into that anonymization can determine the level of privacy. There are complicating factors, such as the need to cross-reference observed student behavior with recorded test results of the same student, while leaving out the student’s identifying details. These factors can be dealt with, but this is out of the scope of this already long post. I intentionally left out the option of sub-optimal research, where details relevant to the research are hidden from the researchers. This is not part of the plan.

Another guideline for careful research come from the world of service-providers dealing with customers’ information: Chinese Walls. This is more tricky than mere anonymization, since while anonymization requires mostly working automatic mechanisms, Chinese Walls require people’s willing cooperation. In case a research is even mildly relevant to issues of privacy, a “Chinese Wall” needs to be erected between the students participating in the research on one hand, and the researchers on the other hand. Complete separation. This means, for example, that none of the teachers can be exposed to the recorded materials, and of course no student can have such access. This will hurt the research since it will remove the chance of unexpected insights by people who know the participants. But unlike the simple case in anonymization, the more complicated case of Chinese Walls pushes us towards suboptimal solutions.
… At least until we relax a bit about privacy issues.

Quotes

Humans have been educating humans for as long as we care to categorize them as "humans." Let's go for "millions of years." I assume they have been commenting about it ever since they could comment about anything. Let's go with hundreds of thousands of years. Lucky we have it in writing for only a few thousand years.

This is meant as a growing post. Quotes will be added as they appear and appear to be insightful.

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater"
- Gail Godwin (1937- )

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one"
- Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990)

"America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week"
- Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)

"It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated"
- Alec Bourne (1886-1974)

"College isn't the place to go for ideas"
- Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading"
- G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962)

"Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes"
- Norman Douglas (1868 - 1952)

"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child"
- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education"
- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education"
- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it"
- Alexandre Dumas fils (1824 - 1895)

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly"
- Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"
- Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

"Kids these days..."
- anonymous. circa 100,000 BC

Disclaimer:
These quotes and attributions are as accurate as one might expect from the Internet.

Unspecial Education

Many good educators-to-be choose as the focus of their efforts the underprivileged. In fact, admittedly without running a careful survey, I think most of the young people I know who want to go into education, want to go into “special education.” The special needs may be in terms of economic or social status, in terms of learning disabilities, in terms of mental problems, etc. Those with special needs are also the focus of many philanthropic organizations’ efforts and budget. For the sake of illustration, let’s pretend that the bottom 5% of students have good people looking after them. It’s never quite enough, of course, but people are making an effort. A heroic effort sometimes. “Heroic” is good.

At the other end of the bell-curve, there is much discussion about excellence, and some highly talented people put their time into discovering special potential, and helping it grow into spectacular career. Some education systems try to find the upper percentiles of the students, and provide them with some extracurricular opportunity. For the sake of illustration, let’s say that the top 5% of students benefit from some special attention. Again, we can always do more, but even with the limited level of such attention, we can sometimes see dramatic successes. “Dramatic” is good.

People like drama. Better yet, we like to be the heroes in a drama. That’s why many more of us go into the peace corp., rather than the potable water corp. or renewable energy corp. It’s more dramatic. That’s one reason they go into special ed. And not into “regular ed”. Take the best intentioned person, who wants to make a positive difference in a child’s life. It’s easy to see the difference-making when providing an underprivileged child with the special attention needed to allow them to live a full life. It is easy to see the difference-making when providing a prodigy with the special opportunities that can make them hugely successful. Tending to the bottom 5% and to the top 5% is very satisfying. What about the 90% in the middle?

If society’s goal is just to produce maximum achievements, it may be that society should invest much more in the top percentiles, less in the middle, and even less at the bottom. A bit of an Ayn Rand view. This is an extreme view, and I don’t subscribe to it.

If society’s goal is only to reduce gaps among people, it makes sense to invest much more in the bottom percentiles than around the middle and top. This is a more commonly professed view, but it is just as extreme as the Ayn Rand view, and I don’t subscribe to it.

To achieve a massive improvement, we would have to address also the main mass of people in the middle. We can try to do all three:

1. Keep the effort to lift the bottom percentiles in order to minimize gaps

2. Keep the effort to enable the best to push the envelope of human achievement

3. Have a stable focus on the main mass, to make being human a better deal

#1 and #2 are relatively easy, because of the dynamics described above. What about #3 – what about the 90% in the middle?

This part of an education revolution is not concerned with the special cases. It is concerned with the Unspecial case, and as such, it is not that easy to sell. How do we show that it is a worthwhile endeavor? One way is to ask people to look at themselves. Everybody feels special, but most people (though probably less than 90%) will recognize themselves as being somewhere within the middle 90%. It is easy to convince us that we should have received more. Another way is to ask people to look at their own children. Everybody knows their own children are special, but many would still recognize their children as being somewhere within the middle 90%. It is very easy to convince us that our children should receive more. Yet another way is to think in terms of “center of gravity.” Acting together to move the center of gravity by moving the main mass of as far as we can – that should be a good way to move ourselves as far as we can. This would take the thinking of people who are more special than I in terms of leadership.

A final thought about moving large masses:

Hitting a 45-gram golf ball and seeing it fly 300 meters is very dramatic and exciting. Rolling a 45 Kilogram cannonball along 30 centimeters is not that exciting. Let’s build a cannon.

Too busy

Indeed, I have been too busy since August 1st, but that's fixed now.

Being too busy is the common state of modern people in general. Not just in education. If I look at my calendar, and I see that almost every hour in the next two weeks is spoken for, this means that when an unexpected crisis arises, I won't have the time to deal with it without cancelling something that's already on my calendar. It means I am too busy. The same goes for an opportunity, except that's even worse: It is easier to justify cancelling a meeting for a crisis, but a mere opportunity? Chances are that I will let the opportunity fade away, and keep my original appointments.

Being too busy is especially true for managers. Not just those whose title says "Manager", but all those who should manage their time; who need to navigate a world of semi-expected tasks. Quite a few pensioners I know, somehow feel too busy... When the manager’s time is filled with “busy”, there is no room for seeing, thinking, responding, innovating. Being too busy causes one to do what’s prescribed and not what’s urgent. At best, if one overcomes the default behavior of following the calendar, one tends to what’s urgent and not to what’s important.

It's clear that school principals are managers - they manage a rather complex system, with students, teachers, parents and Government continually throwing semi-expected demands at them. Most school principals are too busy to deal with unexpected opportunities. Their time is chopped and divided into administrative tasks, legal responsibilities, and pedagogic concerns. Few of them are lucky enough to have some time for vision and leadership. Most of them make the time to respond to crises. Few have the time and freedom to respond to opportunities.

It is also easy to see how school teachers are too busy. They often have a full day of classes to teach - appointments. If anything comes up that requires their attention, there is no time to attend to it. And something always comes up: A pupil needs an extra explanation; another pupil has an idea; yet another is sick for 2 weeks and needs to pick up the material studied in that time... No time. Too busy.

More surprisingly at first glance, the pupils are too busy. They have full days of classes, with a few minutes between them to change rooms or books, and possibly to copy yesterday's homework from the kids who do their homework. What happens if the unexpected occurs, and the material being taught in class is very interesting for the students? What happens if an event in the news offers an opportunity to look into a new subject? Nothing happens - no time to talk about it for a few hours, to decide to explore the issue, to look for an expert, to do anything but end the 45-minute lesson and go on to the next lesson. By the time the same class convenes again in a few days, the magic is gone.

“Too Busy” doesn't mean doing more, or too much. It means doing too much prescribed activity. If one is occupied with prescribed activities, there is no time for innovation, for looking around and seeing what is happening, what is needed, what can be done, what must be done. This is the situation with many officials - too busy with prescribed activities and with prescribed work methods. This last issue of prescribed work methods is an interesting one. Since the industrial revolution, industry and society have benefited much from advancing the concept of work methods. But lately, the changes in society and in technology are so fast, that a prescribed work methodology becomes obsolete soon after they are invented and acquired. But this is a matter for a separate entry in the blog.

Prescribed activities give people a sense of purpose. If they ask themselves what they have done in the past month (or if the boss asks) they can look it up in their calendar and see that they have done a lot. But this is a false sense of purpose. Maybe the sense of purpose should work the other way around: Maybe the more entries one has in one’s calendar, the less one is likely to have achieved. In the fast moving and too busy hi-tech industry, many people consider meeting to be a time-drain. Even in the newspaper industry, the founder of Le-Monde - Hubert Beuve-Mery - is said to have made the decision that all meetings will take place standing up. The idea being that if people are not too physically comfortable, there is a chance to shorten this prescribed activity to its minimum.

In the normal human experience, every movement or repeating action tends to fade: A ball rolling, tends to roll more and more slowly – due to friction – and stop. Even of it rolls downhill – the hill is finite, and the rolling will stop soon enough. The same with a car, if we stop pumping gas into it, the same with a natural sound – even crickets don’t chirp forever. But when I set a recurring meeting in my computerized calendar, it will still be there every Tuesday in the year 2096. Our calendars – even just the paper ones – allow us to set up (prescribe) a meeting or any other activity 3 months in advance, and it will still be there on the prescribed day, even if the reason for the meeting disappeared in the mean time. We are often too busy with what’s no longer important. Trying to deal with this, some people double and triple book their time, planning to cancel the less important meetings. This way they waste the time of others, who may have vacated the time for a meeting doomed to be cancelled. Man, we are in trouble.

A cultural change is required, for us to see the benefit in the holes in the calendar. Specifically for school principals, teachers and students. I think we will enjoy that change.