Mr. Benesh’s Online Community

Bud the Teacher wrote a nice post about what seven qualities he possesses that would make him a good leader in the classroom. (http://budtheteacher.typepad.com/bud_the_teacher/2007/02/leading_meme.html)

One point resonated particularly well with me:

5.  I don’t like ham.  (Okay — I don’t like metaphorical ham.  But I’ve nothing against the real stuff.)  When I took my current position, an administrator told me about a woman, let’s call her Linda, who, every year at Christmas, cut the ends off of the ham she prepared for the holiday meal before sticking it into the oven.  One year, someone asked her why she did so.  She did so because that’s how her mother had always done it.  Linda called her mother to ask why she cut the ends off of the ham. Linda’s mother laughed and told Linda that when Linda was a little girl, the family didn’t have a roasting pan that could accommodate the size of ham that she always bought — so she cut off the ends so the ham would fit.

When I say that I don’t like ham, I mean that I always like to know why something is either being done TO me or BY me.  If the “why” doesn’t make sense, I work as best as I can to change the situation so that it does.   Good leaders are always looking for the ham stuff in their organizations, groups, or selves.

Ever since I can remember, I have always asked the hardest question to answer: Why? The first time I ever really encountered a problem with it was when I began working. At McDonald’s, I would ask, “Why do we store these coke tanks here?”, or “Why do we do this procedure this way?”. In each case, my questioning was met with anger, like why is this person questioning me? The people in power did not like people asking questions about why they do things the way they do — particularly when they had no good reasons for why they are doing it that way! Being an efficient and quality worker, this angered me. My job was made harder because of inefficient, outdated, or antiquated procedures. Whatever rationale may have once existed is often lost in high turnover rates, and then becomes ingrained in the culture of the workplace, and is often hard to change unless you get strong people in leadership positions.

What does this have to do with education? Often times, policies and procedures will anger or confuse you as a teacher. It becomes hard, at times, knowing when to rebel or when to speak up to suggest a different way of doing things, or when to sit back and wait and not “step on toes” of anyone. Particularly when just entering the profession, often times you need to just wait it out until you are in a position of power if you wish to change something. It just irks me to no end that so many people will blindly do things they way they have always been done, without ever taking a second to question why. And then we wonder why education seems best at simply reproducing conditions that were already existing.

I think what it takes to get things changed, is first finding out what you want to get changed, and then you need to get yourself into a position to be able to change it. This can be done in a variety of ways, but first and foremost, you have to be good at what you do, and become well-respected and then you can have a chance. But at the center of everything is finding out WHY. Quit doing things the way they have always been done, and then complaining to everyone about how it is done, just get out there and do something about it.