Quality vs. Quantity
David Bayles and Ted Orland’s opening day instructions to their ceramics students is a metaphor for how to live our lives. If we spend time conjuring ideas and plans trying to discover the ‘right’ one, we will be relegated to the wings of daily life. But if we dig into what we are doing, explore ideas, create options, we build on our experiences. We may taste mini successes, failures, perhaps not even ‘make it.’ But we will have knowledge we had not imagined.
Bayles and Orland’s argument recalls Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hours rule, the amount of dedicated hours necessary to achieve excellence in a specific task. And then there’s the potter I knew who threw out 10,000 pots before she produced one to her liking.
~ ~ ~
In today’s culture, it is a challenge to convince young people to value struggle. We may wonder, as critics have wondered, about Gladwell’s rule; certainly not true for prodigies. Yet you may remember learning to play piano practicing for hours and slowly becoming better.
And you may remember having heard a teacher say ‘well done’ after you’ve barely started a project. Looking back, you wish she said, ‘I see you have something here. What else could you do? Where could you go with that?’ Her ‘well done,’ shortens engagement with the work whereas probing comments open possibilities that encourages you to take time to perhaps, “busily churning out piles of work” And you can choose to become your own intermediary, probing your process to explore alternatives in your learning to encourage your best effort.
And when choosing AI to do the work, all this becomes irrelevant.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” (Kierkegaard)
I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century. My latest book, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way is available on Amazon. And I welcome comments here on my Substack or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.
