Here's Some Advice About Giving and Taking Advice (Teaching/Learning as Advice)

Maybe our highest role as teachers is to create an environment where people can have fun; can exercise free will; can learn. The truly sacred acts are those we do freely, not because we have to or because someone told us to. This is one of the messages from David Grabler's piece in the Baffler What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun?

I was reminded of the importance of creating opportunities rather than simply providing content as I read a "A Word to the Wise," by Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal.  The article traces in humorous tones the folly of giving advice because people generally don't heed the advice. In fact, many people ask for advice with no real intention nor ability to take any advice given. Do obese people really need to be advised to stop eating? 

The subtext of advise, as described by Queenan, is "you're an idiot for not already doing it." Many people would rather be an idiot than do something they really don't want to do-- or to do as someone else told them to do. 

While I appreciated the sage advice not to take ourselves too seriously when giving or getting advice (and laughed a lot while attaining this appreciation, I did think how this might impact us as teachers (and parents). Really, how much will students take our advice in terms of our emphasis or interpretation of a concept or our sharing of pertinent facts and evaluation? Granted, we might not see teaching/learning as giving and taking advice, but perhaps we should concentrate on giving opportunities for self discovery -- self advice, if you will -- rather than thinking everything we say/do will be replicated in the willing and eager lives of others. 

Some of us might see facts as a form of advice. In the same Wall Street Journal (2/8/14) as Queenan's article on advice, there was an article by Zachary Karabell "There is no Jobless Rate" .  Karabell notes that a national figures on unemployment, while perhaps once meaningful, is not as useful as other statistics, such as local unemployment rates or demographics of unemployed, or even the fact that the unemployment rate does not really measure people that are not working, but rather people that are looking for work that can not find it. Karabell reminds us that totemic figures like the unemployment rate can take on totemic importance yet do not define anything important and serve to obscure issues such as why and where people are unemployed and what can be done for specific people rather then simply looking at the issue as monetary.