If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way…every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.
— Jerry Seinfeld (HBR, “Life’s Work: An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld.”)
As a requirement for promotion from Major to Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve, I have to take a correspondence course called Intermediate Leader Education (ILE).
One of the (many) assignments in ILE involved watching a video of a talk that someone gave at the Army Command & Staff College on the topic of professionalism within the Army Officer Corps. One particular point that the speaker made had a big impression on me — to summarize, he said that “a professional is someone who prioritizes effectiveness above all else, whereas a bureaucrat is someone who prioritizes efficiency above all else.”
As someone who has spent a lot of time around professionals and bureaucrats, this really clicked with me; also, it’s caused me to reflect quite a bit around my approach towards education.
Before I say anything else, let me be clear about something: I’m not advocating for inefficiency here. If something can reasonably be done in two hours, there’s no reason to spend four hours on it. There’s also no good reason to brag about how many hours you work in a particular week — just as you do, I know people who brag (truthfully) about their long hours, but who spend enormous amounts of time on things whose purpose is questionable, or managing things that can run just fine on their own.
But all that said, the reason that I love the quote so much is that I think education, when done right, shouldn’t be a mass-produced, “efficient” thing. It’s inherently idiosyncratic, it’s inherently “high-touch” and it doesn’t lend itself to cheap, mass-production. For example, let’s look at grading. For any sort of assignment that involves writing or interpretation — in other words, answers that can’t simply be reduced to quick “right” or “wrong” solutions — it should hurt a little. Anyone who has taken home a stack of 60 papers to grade on a weekend knows this…and better yet, the family members of anyone who has taken home a stack of 60 papers to grade on a weekend really knows it.
If someone thinks they’ve found a magic bullet around this — maybe by just giving everyone an A with a copied-and-pasted paragraph of “feedback” — then they’re shortchanging their students. Like someone handing out Sweet-Tarts on Halloween, they might be making people feel good for a brief moment, but ultimately they’re just handing out emptiness.
The same thing is true with other aspects of teaching. Let’s say I look at the Data Mining course that I teach. The truly “efficient” approach would involve re-using the same homework assignments, semester after semester. That would certainly make my life easier — no need to go chasing down new data sets, dealing with the formatting and other issues surrounding those data sets, writing the questions, debugging my own typos in the questions, etc. However, it would also mean that any student with a friend from the previous semester would have a massive leg up over someone facing the problem set “cold.” My approach here is to re-build all the homeworks from scratch, term after term, with minor exceptions here and there.
The points from the paragraph above could equally be applied to the in-class quizzes, or the end-of-semester team project. Going “all new, all the time” comes with its own set of headaches, risks, and time-intensity, but to circle back to the quotes above, it shows a prioritization of effectiveness above efficiency.
In other realms, there’s no need to make things harder just for their own sake. Class slides, for example, don’t need to change much, if at all, from one iteration of the course to another. Ditto for the video tutorials that are embedded on our class Blackboard page — if there’s no reason to change the content, then it takes about two mouse clicks to import them from one semester’s folder to the next.
The point, ultimately, is that I’m more interested in effectiveness than I am in efficiency, and I think most dedicated educators would say the same thing.
GoodWaveData 