Students taught me to be wary of absolutes.
Once you say never or always, you can pretty much count on two things.
First, people will test the boundaries. So you have to decide how invested you are in the rule, how much time and effort you’ll spend enforcing the lines.
Second, no matter how carefully you craft the boundaries, you’ll encounter cases worthy of exception. The man who’s speeding because his wife is about to give birth. The kid who’s late because his mom’s car wouldn’t start. The guy who would add a lot to the tour but he’s terrified of fundraising and can’t afford the fee.
So you spend time and energy evaluating and making exceptions and dealing with That’s not fair!
I learned that controlling behavior with rules was a never ending, time sucking game of whack-a-mole.
I could have saved myself a lot of struggle by listening to Jesus. Where the hard-hearted religious rulers created circumstance-specific rules, He provided eternal, no-exceptions principles.
Love your neighbor. Seek justice. Welcome the stranger. Love mercy.
My classroom became a calmer, more relaxed place when I dumped most of the rules and told students we would treat each other with dignity and respect. I got to think through, got to actually model and teach, what that meant.
Imagine – spending time teaching instead of policing.
+ + +
I ponder this as we prepare for FREEDOM TOUR 2023. There’s the urge to create a bunch of well-intentioned “guidelines” to make sure things go smoothly. Tell folks exactly what we want, where to go, what to do.
And the old teacher wonders…what if we invested in teaching people what we’re about? Help them catch the big vision, then turn them loose.
I’m not sure what that would look like or how to accomplish it. I know it’s harder than making rules. I know the results are less predictable.
I also know people respond better to long-term principles than to short-term rules and that long-term principles release people to do the remarkable things God intended.
And that’s about more than bike tours and classrooms.
+ + +
A STORY
A couple of years before I retired, a colleague who taught 10th grade geometry in another state asked if we were “really” teaching “real” geometry to our 8th and 9th graders. So I shared the results of one of our open-ended projects. He was gobsmacked by what our students created and the depth of understanding they demonstrated.
But…his response wasn’t How do you guys teach kids to do this?
It was Our students could never do this.
I think there’s a lesson there that’s bigger than how to teach geometry.