Teach Secondary Issue 14.8

Nobody should BE PERFECT Doing everything to 100% of your ability while trying to maximise your capacity at all times will guarantee suboptimal results, advises Colin Foster ... N one of us are perfect, but we can at least always do our best, can’t we? No one can ask more than that fromus. Isn’t that the message we’d want to give our students? ‘ Try your hardest at everything, give it your best shot – and even if it doesn’t turn out perfectly, you’ll know that you did everything you could. ’ It sounds like the kind of positive, ‘high expectations’ message that we should surely be promoting and modelling in everything that we do at school, no?Well, I’m not so sure... Your best handwriting I can still remember a teaching colleague who kept an old-fashioned fountain pen in his pocket. He could do extremely fancy and neat calligraphic writing, which was very useful in the days when students’ certificates would be handwritten. The ones he did looked superb. However, he was known for using this pen whenever he wrote anything, always in that same elaborate cursive. It was a point of pride for him that he’d never allow a cheap Biro to sully his hands. Whatever he wrote, it would be via that slow, careful and beautiful script he was famous for. Many colleagues admired how even short, throwaway notes fromhim would be penned with such craft that you could frame them on the wall. And yet, I wouldn’t hold up his penmanship habits as a great example for others to follow. Might they not equally be indicative of someone who struggles to prioritise effectively? Treating every piece of writing as deserving of equal attention to detail seems like an inability to distinguish between differing levels of importance. When writing a congratulatory card, or drafting a personal letter expressing sympathy, our attempts to make our script look as good as we canmay well convey to the recipient the level of care and attention we’ve given to the task, thus making the end result all the more meaningful and moving. But if we then commit the same amount of care and detail when writing ourselves a quick note or shopping list, doesn’t that diminish our other efforts somewhat? Adopting a single mode for everything seems like a failure to adapt appropriately to different circumstances. Limited resources All of us only have so much time and energy. Everyone can only write by hand for so long before their wrist starts hurting, so shouldn’t we try to deploy our resources as strategically as we can? All things being equal, we should probably take more care when writing something that hundreds of people will read than when writing something intended for only one person’s attention. We should all take more care when writing something that will, say, be printed and distributed to parents than a quick internal memo to a colleague they’ll hastily read before binning. One activity where you’ll likely see this more often nowadays is proofreading emails. Some emails warrant being carefully reviewed, checked and if necessary, edited before being sent. Others simply don’t. If I email you a request to send me a file I need urgently, and you reply with a curt response of ‘ Atached ’ spelt with just one ‘t’, that really doesn’t matter – I just want the file. We should all be much more understanding of how busy and stressed our colleagues often are. I don’t want to waste my time, and I don’t want my colleagues to waste theirs either. ‘Adequate’versus ‘amazing’ This isn’t a recipe for laziness and general sloppiness. It’s actually quite the opposite. Economists will sometimes say that if you frequently fly and never miss a flight, then you’re probably wasting far too much of your time hanging around at airports, arriving for your flights much earlier than necessary. Absolute goals, such as ‘ I must never miss a flight ’ or ‘ I must never make a grammatical error ’, would be better replaced with an acknowledgement of the trade-offs involved. Yes, I want to avoid certain errors, and make them as rarely as possible It shouldn’t be a ‘point of pride’ that every email you send comes with full boiler- plating, AI-generated or otherwise (‘ If there are any other files that you require, please do not hesitate to get in contact with me… ’) After all, your recipient is busy too. All that extra verbiage merely indicates that you, the sender, possess questionable skills of time management and an inability to prioritise. “Formany tasks, satisfactory is good enough” 38 teachwire.net/secondary