Inspiration Mondays: No Holding Back

Today, I was told that I learned very difficult lessons more quickly than other people before me did. I asked, "But... did I learn too quickly?"

I've always been a quick learner, in school, in knitting, even in videogames. It comes from a need to please and a restless mind. I want to absorb as much as possible as quickly as possible. And when it comes to learning difficult personal lessons, I worry that I move too quickly through them, and that I should be taking my time with days and weeks of contemplation.

Today, I was told:
When a child is learning algebra quickly, you don't tell him to slow down. You know that he is understanding, and is hungry to understand more. To ask him to slow down is unreasonable, because he's ready for more. And so are you.
Except, that's not actually true. Look inside a classroom, and you'll see plenty of very smart people slowly going crazy with boredom because we tell them to slow down and wait. We give them more and more of the same ol' thing so that they can be "at the same level" as everyone else.

And that sucks.

I don't know what the solution is. Actually, I do have some idea of what the solution is, but it's hard to put such things in place in the Industrial Revolution-style education system we have in place. How do we find ways to keep us moving forward, not going stale in a world that tells us to "wait for the others?" How do we keep inspiring and challenging each other? And how do we stop trying to compare ourselves with each other with a single ruler someone else made to measure all of the wonderfully complex people in the world?

We do this by continually challenging the status quo and finding ways to inspire decision makers to make things better every single day. And we support their decisions with constructive suggestions to make things better, instead of criticizing every single move they make.And we also don't hold ourselves back when we can feel the rush of understanding flood our senses. And we start to recognize that rush in our children, and encourage them to find it again and again.

No one left behind vs. no holding back. It's an interesting conflict, no?



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