Narrowing the scope of responsibility

Chapter 252

“In every class, students angled for a way to do less work and have less engagement. One skill they had mastered was relentlessly narrowing the scope of their responsibility.

Compare this to the courses I taught at Mercy College, a local community college where most of the students had day jobs or small businesses. In every single session, they demanded more from me. More insight, more learning and yes, more homework. They made me stay late after every class. The difference was stunning—they were there to learn something.” - Seth Godin

This is why I no longer teach at the universities in the Balkan Republics, my classes were filled to overflowing by skilled masters of “relentlessly narrowing the scope of their responsibility.” It was so bad in our major seminary that if a student did not receive a passing grade on an exam, the professor was required to prepare a second (and sometimes a third!) for the student to take again until they received their passing grade!! This always felt like punishing the professor for making the exam too hard, rather than having any real expectations of the student.

The deeper sadness here is that you end up having engineers who can’t engineer and doctors who can’t diagnosis or prescribe and teachers who can’t teach, and mechanics who can’t mechanic, and in my case at the seminar, pastors who can’t pastor. Its a travesty in every sense of the word, and  far too easy to place this blame burden on the teachers and professors.

But I am pretty sure that if I had joined Seth at Mercy college and had some of THOSE students, then my perspective would be quite different. I love being in the classroom with people who are sucking out everything I have to give in the pursuit of learning, rather than people who argue endless about every tiny minutia on the syllabi’s.