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May 30, 2006
Battlefield Triage
I had an interesting epiphany last night. I was helping out with some homework with Amber and one of her friends, American history which is one of my favorites, and I was asked why I'm not a teacher. That's a tough question for me. For those of you that don't know, I've had all the classes up to my student teaching to do elementary education, I was a tutor for Upward Bound, and Counselor at Space Camp. But my first tutoring assignment to start my student teaching almost killed me and haunts me to this day. Which is how the title applies.
Teachers like soldiers have to make decisions on the battlefield for the greatest good of the whole unit. They make calculated sacrifices to save the futures of as many kids under their care as possible. Which means they must also be able to accept the inevitable losses of those decisions. Unfortunately I don't like to lose at all. If I take responsibility for something, I will keep fighting until I win. It's fundamental to my personality, it's what makes me so annoying and what makes me so successful. But teachers don't get the luxury of the guarantee of victory, which I learned very quickly in my first attempt. I was tutoring a little boy who had never had any sort of mental stimulation in his entire life from all I could tell. He had almost no language skills and his understanding of even the most basic concepts was troublesome for him. I poured my energy into reaching him in our sessions, trying to find some common ground to work up from. Something that interested him, some way to trigger the curiosity and excitement that has pumped through my veins for my entire existence. And there was nothing, everything I tried failed. I stopped all my other classes and pushed myself harder to succeed. In the end, I achieved nothing at all. The soldier/teacher in me knew I'd done all that could be done, but the idealist in me wasn't able to take such a failure. It was a profound experience in my life and changed dramatically how I looked at the world at large.
I'm good at teahcing because I have little fear that I couldn't make the tough decisions that needed to made at a moment's notice. What keeps me up at night is that I could actually make the decisions and therefore have to live with each lost life for the rest of my life. I have a great deal of respect for anyone that can do it and I'm quite willing to give them a wide berth on whatever they say they need to do their jobs. And it's also why I fight so hard against those that give them grief about the decisions they make. Until you've stood there with the world on your shoulders deciding the future of this country, you really have no room to talk about those that make the decisions daily. Battlefield triage is not for the faint of heart or arm chair quarterbacks, but it's critical work that has to be done by those on the ground at the time. Anyway, that had been bothering me all night and I needed to get it out of my head.
Posted by Jamison at May 30, 2006 11:57 AM
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Comments
In leadership training I was tough that you have to have a Command persona which is different from your Personal persona. Your Command persona has to make decisions for the good of the group and not the best decision for any individual member. It really sucks. One has to have the mission objective as the group’s only goal. Why do you think that there are all those group projects in the last year or so of college, to find out answers the professors already know? They were all about having an objective and mixing the strong and weak students together to see who could work as a team together. The exercise may have been for a grade at the end but its true purposes was to teach every one to work with the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow group members. Part of it was to be able to sacrifice one to accomplish the objective.
Posted by: Royal at May 30, 2006 1:04 PM
The problem is that this kind of personality splitting always leads to a massive amount of cognitive dissonance that has be resolved. I've spent a great deal of my life trying to eliminate all cognitive dissonance from my personality so I can be more efficient. It's what makes me so effective in debates, because I don't have doubts about what I think or do. I tried the other way in college and it always turned out badly because at some point you either have to pay the piper for ignoring who you truly are or worse who you really are is completely lost to the sands of time. Even worse that's how Republicans deal with the world in that sort of hypocritical do as I say, not as I do sort of mindset. It's one of the reasons I work against them, because it's wrong.
Posted by: Jamison at May 31, 2006 1:59 PM
Both personas can work well together so long as they do not cross. For example one can not bring the office persona home without causing problems in their home life. Note I get away with this on the odd occasion I do, because I live alone. On the other side of the coin one can not let personal feeling, friendships, or any other relationship effect the decision as a leader one has to make. To do so is where the cronyism comes from. I can be your friend and still have to cut you off at the knees in the work place for the greater good of the public. True leadership is about being able to do what is truly best for the public, group or family at any given time without hesitation. No one ever truly reaches this goal but it is something to strive for. It is also a way to avoid ulcers on my part.
Posted by: Royal at May 31, 2006 2:37 PM