Are you more concerned with how the students look than what they’ve learned?
Are you worried about how the students’ performance will reflect on you?
Do you care more about the image of learning or the learning itself?
Real learning is messy. It does not always line up in good straight lines and say its lines correctly.
It does not demonstrate itself in well-coiffed hair and unified choreography.
I think about those prison videos
The ones where they get hundreds of prisoners
To dance in precisely choreographed numbers.
To fulfill someone’s vision, they have all fallen in line –
And it is remarkable, truly. It is moving to watch huge numbers of people in sync.
But it is totalitarian. It looks good. It looks magic –
But no one but the one in charge got to have a thought for himself.
No one (but the one in charge) exercised his creativity
No one (but the one in charge) used his imagination
No one (but the one in charge) had any agency over his own body, or thoughts, or art or song or dance.
When we learned how to walk, we fell down a lot.
We landed on our asses. We didn’t look good.
And no one else cared either.
The important thing was the walking.
So it is with anything we learn.
We have to fall on our asses a bit
We have to look ridiculous.
The Hamlet Project 