Nope, no typos.  It occurred to me today that how we teach in schools should be more like dealing with restrooms.  Public restrooms in particular. Stay with me here – it’s going to make sense here in a minute.  I hope. So today I had the opportunity to use several public restrooms, in a couple of restaurants and a movie theater.  Each one is different, and loaded with challenges.  The first challenge is the choice of stalls – I’m speaking to women here of course.  Research says that the first one you come across is actually the cleanest because most people bypass the first stall and go to the second one.  Go figure.  So, choice of stall is important.  Then of course there are many choices in terms of flushing, handles, buttons, self-flushing and of course, sometimes you have to flush for someone else who apparently lacked the skills or moral fortitude to do it themselves.  Sometimes it doesn’t work when you push the handle down, so you experiment – maybe going up will work, maybe holding longer will work.  So you have to be a skilled trouble shooter to get the job done.  Oh, and have you ever had a door that won’t stay closed?  How creative have you had to be in that case?

And washing hands is another challenge.  The faucet can be automatic (provided you place your hands in just the right place), you can push down on it and hope you get hands washed/rinsed before it stops, or you can go the old fashioned route and turn it on and off.  At one point today I had already dried my hands and thrown the towel away before I realized the water was still running.  Oops!  Then of course we have air dryers, paper towels you have to crank, paper towels you just have to run your hand across the sensor (sometimes it’s enough towel, sometimes it’s not), and those wonderful Dyson dryers.  Very cool.

So why should schools be like public restrooms?  I think we make school too predictable.  There’s a lot to be said for consistency, but a lot of times we’re so concerned about consistency that we don’t give kids a chance to figure it out themselves.  There aren’t enough opportunities for them to troubleshoot, to learn to do things differently in different situations.  The current trend is that they need to learn everything exactly as we tell them or they will fail The Assessment. Every detail of every bit of behavior is listed on posters, including how to behave in the restroom (ironic, huh?).  But we never sit down with them and say, “hey, how would you handle this situation”?  What skills, strengths and knowledge do you have to solve this problem? We even want teachers to all behave the same towards kids so that kids know what to expect.  But what’s wrong with kids figuring out how to deal with different people in different ways?  What’s wrong with kids seeing that there’s more than one way to do something and let them figure it out using research, seeking clues around them or by using different skills they’ve developed on their own?  Then perhaps they won’t lack the skills or moral fortitude to face bigger challenges in the future.