One of the Lee Canter's Habits of the Mind is Striving for Accuracy. I have this behavior on a poster in my room circled with the word Passionately written inside the circle also. I believe that this behavior of intelligence is the most important one to stress with my students.
One day, early in this year, when I was focusing on this habit with my lab students I realized that I believed it was the most important one. That was when I wrote passionately next to Strive for Accuracy. I then put a problem up on the board for them to do and waited for them to all be working on it. When they were all in the zone, I yelled at the top of my voice, "PASSIONATELY STRIVE FOR ACCURACY!" They all jumped and then we all laughed and I yelled it a few more times. Then I did the problem I had put up and checked for understanding. Next I put another problem up and waited again... like a shark... when they were engaged again in the problem I yelled, "KINDA SORTA MAYBE WANT TO SORTA TRY TO GET SOME OF THEM MOSTLY RIGHT!" I started laughing so hard I fell over and had to lay on the floor in the front on the room. From my back I yelled it again as best I could through my laugher. It just sounded so ridiculous! My students were laughing also and I'm sure they thought I was weird. But this is exactly how many of them were behaving. They were kinda of sort of maybe wanting to sorta trying to get some of them mostly right.
I CHALLENGE MY STUDENTS TO: Passionately (not apathetically) strive (not accept whatever happens) for accuracy (not just getting done.) The poster depicts a target with an arrow hitting the bulls eye. I want my students to aim for the center of the bulls eye and hit it and whip out another arrow with deft skill like Legolas and split the first arrow and keep doing that until they run out of arrows. I tell them, the tougher the problem the higher they need to aim... just like in shooting arrows.
There is a story I tell my students to drive home this point. They really enjoy hearing my stories. In fact, whenever I see a past student, one of the first things they tell me is how they enjoyed my stories.
Here is the story. When I was 22 years old, the first summer of my married life, I was painting a house in north Tacoma. I ended up bidding on another house at the end of the block and got the job. It was another big house. My friend and I were excited about the work we were getting. When all that was left to paint on the first house was the French windows(and there was tons of them), we hired another friend and the two of them went down and spent the week scrapping the next house while I did the trim up the street. At the end of the week I finished and carried my ladder down the street to the next house. It was a Friday afternoon around 2PM. They had two 28ft ladders fully extended with ladder jacks at the top of each and an aluminum framed plank across the top. They were scrapping on the third floor gable end of the east side of the house. This was their LAST section they had to scrap. There was such a filling of accomplishment and pride as I climbed up the ladder with my scrapper. The plan had worked perfectly. I was only going to have to scrap for about an hour. I climbed up on the plank and joined them as we all stood about 22 feet up in the air on a 12 inch wide plank. It was a beautiful summer day.
The house was 92 years old. It was olive drab green. Even the windows were green as no one had ever covered up the windows when it had been painted before. There was green over spray covering all of the windows. It looked like a haunted house. The paint was the thickness of two quarters and shriveled and deeply wrinkled. I had told my friends to scrap hard to knock off the loose paint and move on.
I took my scrapper and scrapped one diamond shaped shingle and a few small pieces fell off the house. I looked at that shingle and the rest of the siding I could see from the plank we were all standing on and I was troubled. It looked awful. I thought for a while and wrestled with what I knew I needed to do and say. Then, to my friends HORROR, I told them that we were not almost done... no we were just starting!! They looked at me in total bewilderment and asked me to explain. I told them that ALL the paint had to come off. They couldn't believe it. I turned and scrapped as hard as I could on the one diamond shingle I had scrapped earlier. It took all my strength to scrap off all the paint in about a minute. I scuffed a knuckle in the process. 4 hours later we finished scrapping that one section of the house. I had several bloody knuckles from scuffing the siding. We scrapped for 12 hours each days for the entire next week. At the end of that week we fired our friend who had worked for us for 2 weeks. We scrapped for another entire week. I had bid $450 to prep the house. We had just paid our friend $400 for his 80 hours of work. I had raw scabs on all 28 of my knuckles. During that last week of scrapping my wife drove up and told me we had 28 cents in saving and were overdrawn in checking. This was because the people who had just paid me wrote a check that was going to take 2 weeks to clear.
I had lots of reasons to not do as good of a job as I was doing and was going to do.
My focus was on the finished product and I imagined I was painting God's house. This carried me through. I talked the owner into 'letting' me use 4 different colors to bring out all the cool woodwork and craftsmanship in the house and she agrees. She even asked me to pick out the colors. After 6 long weeks we finally finished. We made peanuts on the house but I hardly cared because it looked AWESOME. I was so proud of it.
The next spring I received a call from a frantic woman. She asked if I was the painter who had painted, I'll call them, the Smith's house. I told her that I was and then she asked if I had time to paint her house this summer. Then she explain to me that it did not matter how MUCH IT COST. I kept getting phone calls like that after painting the Smith's house.
I told my students that they need to aim for perfection. It will carry them through and past all the difficult times and excuses. If they do, they will always be proud of the results. Do your best, be responsible and people will pay you better than you think you deserve.
"Whatever we do, do as unto the Lord."
Day 5
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