Starting about 3 weeks ago, I started prepping for a retreat I’m teaching at this weekend. I’ve known about the retreat for two months. It’s interesting to me just how hard it is to prep for something that isn’t right around the corner.
It’s also interesting to me that your mind knows what it can and can’t do. Sometimes you can overestimate what you can do in a short amount of time, but it seems pretty consistent that people will wait until the last minute to do their school work with deadlines. While some may fail when they do this, I’d say the majority fare quite well. At least better than you’d expect.
If that’s the case, it tells me that maybe we don’t put nearly as much as we could on our plates, and only make it worse by it being something we’re forced to do. If you can do something you don’t want to do in one day when it’s supposed to take you a week, imagine how fast you could do something that you did want to do.
That’s what I hate the school mindset. It’s “cram all of this knowledge in this set amount of time.” For some people that may work out perfectly because it’s exactly at their pace, but for everyone else, it may either be at way too slow of a pace or way too fast. By it being all in the same class with the same requirements, you don’t cater to the individual skills or struggles of each person.
If we switched this up and had more of an apprenticeship model, you would in so many ways be able to teach things in a comprehensive way that would allow people to learn at as fast a pace as they were interested in, and if they weren’t interested, they probably wouldn’t keep doing it long because it would be clear early on from doing it.
Everyone’s not a robot and I wish that our school system (and most education systems) stopped acting like we are.