go through Terry Heck
Quality – you know what it is, but you don’t know what it is. But this is contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more qualities. But when you try to say what quality is, other than the thing that has quality, everything goes bad! Nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what mass is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know it exists? If no one knows what it is, then in reality it doesn’t exist. But for all practical purposes, it does exist.
exist Zen Buddhism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceauthor Robert Pirsig talks about the idea of avoidance quality. This concept—and, tangentially, the “Church of Reason”—questions him throughout the book, especially as he, as a teacher, attempts to explain to his students what quality writing is.
After some struggle internally and with students, he abandoned letter grades entirely, hoping students would stop looking for rewards and start looking for “quality.” Of course, this didn’t go the way he had hoped. The students’ resistance will only push him further away from his goal.
So what does quality have to do with learning? Quite a lot, it turns out.
a shared sense of possibility
Quality is an abstract concept – it has to do with things and the tension between things. ideal thing. a carrot and a ideal carrot. a speech and a ideal speech. your way think Lessons learned, and how to actually do it. There are many synonyms for this idea, “good” being the most common one.
In order for quality to exist—in order for something to be “good”—there must be some shared sense of possibility, and some propensity for change—inconsistency. For example, there is no use calling something bad or good if we think it has no hope of getting better. That’s it. We rarely call walking good or bad. We just walk. Singing, on the other hand, definitely has its good and bad qualities—that is, its quality or lack thereof. We know this because we’ve heard good songs before and we know what’s possible.
Additionally, it’s difficult to have a high-quality sunrise or a high-quality water drop because most sunrises and most water drops are very similar. On the other hand, a “premium” cheeseburger or a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony makes more sense because we A) have had a good cheeseburger before and know what’s possible, and B) can experience a huge difference from one cheeseburger to another.
Back to learning – if students could see quality – identify it, analyze it, understand its characteristics, etc. – imagine what this would require. They must understand a thing in its entirety, compare it to possible scenarios, and make an assessment. Much of the friction between teachers and learners comes from one between students and teachers trying to guide them to improve quality.
Of course, teachers just want to help students understand what quality is. We describe it, create titles for it, point to it, model it, and celebrate it, but more often than not, they don’t see it, we push it closer and closer to their noses, waiting for the light to shine.
If not, we assume they either don’t care or aren’t trying hard enough.
best
It therefore corresponds to the relative superlatives – good, better and best. Students use these words without knowing where they are starting from – quality. It’s hard to know what quality is until they can think about it from the beginning. And then further, in order to truly internalize things, they have to see their quality. Their quality depends on what they see possible.
Defining something as good or “best” first requires that we can agree on what that “thing” should do, and then we can discuss that thing in its native context. Consider something simple like a lawnmower. easy to determine quality A lawn mower because it’s clear what it’s supposed to do. It’s a tool that has a certain level of performance, but it’s mostly like an on/off switch. It either works or it doesn’t.
Other things, like government, art, technology, etc., are more complex. It’s not clear what quality looks like in legislation, abstract painting, or economic leadership. There is nuance and subjectivity in these things, making assessing quality more complex. In these cases, students have to think “big enough” to see the ideal functions of things and then decide whether they work, which of course is impossible because no one can agree on which functions are “ideal” and we’re back to zero. Like a circle.
student thinking quality
The same goes for teaching. There is no clear, socially recognized cause-and-effect relationship between teaching and the world. Quality teaching will produce quality learning, this. The same is true for the students themselves. What is the quality of writing, reading, and thinking?
What causes this?
What are its characteristics?
Most importantly, what can we do to not only help students see it, but to develop eyes that they don’t want to close.
Being able to see the circles in everything, from their own moral sense to the way they structure paragraphs, design projects, study for exams, or solve problems in their own lives—and do so without using adultism and external labels like “Well done,” “Excellent,” “A+,” and “You’re so smart!”
What can we do to develop students who are willing to sit with the tension between possibility and reality and bend it all to their will, always with love and understanding?
