Good Enough Is Not Good Enough

“Where are the strong? Who are the trusted?” -Elvis Costello

“A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” -Mahatma Gandhi

We often pretend that only some people lie. People love to tell jokes about how salesmen, lawyers, and politicians are constantly lying to us. We shake our fists at doctors who, trying to dodge potential malpractice, won't tell us exactly what to do. We hate the careful answers of our financial advisors and our mechanics. “Just be straight with me,” we fume.

And while we are complaining to each other about the lack of honest discourse in commerce and in politics, we'll happily fib our way through our day. From our private lives to our workplace to exchanges on the street, we're all carefully navigating how to say what we really think.

The problem is not that we are a bunch of phonies, however. The problem is that in our attempts to avoid calling things as we really see them, we're negotiating excellence. We're sidelining exceptionality.

We can't admire what is not admirable. So how and why are we pushing “greatness” to the side?

Lying: Hey, I Do It, Too

Who hasn't told an easy lie in order to avoid conflict?

-Your best friend is crazy about his new girlfriend. You think she's a total mess and would make a terrible partner. He asks you what you think of her. You say “she seems nice.”

-Your husband finishes the work on the bathroom and you hate the way he installed the faucet. It'll bug you for years and you know it. He looks at you proudly and you say, “Great work, hun. Thanks.”

-Your kid hardly ever practices baseball but wants start on the varsity team. It frustrates you because he's lazy. Later, he doesn't make the team. You say “I'm proud of you for trying.”

We spin it, like political pundits after a debate. And, sometimes, we just plain lie. We say the opposite of what we really think.

Some of us do it in the name of politeness. We don't want to be jerks. Others do it in the name of protection. We think that the truth hurts. Some of us just don't want to go the through the trouble of telling the truth. We're busy. Honest communication takes too much time.

All of this makes sense in our private lives, we think. Who can always tell the truth? It's absurd! We can't pretend that we can be honest about everything. Caring for people sometimes means leaving things out, right?

When No One Is Mediocre, Then No One Is Excellent

But we're lumping all of this together too easily. It's one thing to avoid telling your friend that her ass looks enormous in those jeans. It's another thing to avoid identifying flaws in each other and ourselves. By protecting one another from the discomfort of the truth, we deny ourselves the ability to grow, adapt, and reach for new things. We claim to be helping one another-- but, instead, we are only stunting each other.

This is because honesty demands fixing the broken and improving the improvable. The mediocre becomes plain and not good enough.  Things that work get celebrated and things that don't get identified. Honesty is the fuel of real and lasting progress.

I hear people say “I'm terrible with technology.” What this actually means is “I prefer it when someone else fixes my stuff.” “I can't spell” means “it doesn't matter how to spell things.” “I have no idea who my state senator is” means “I don't want to be involved in decisions about my community.”

We're saving ourselves and one another from unnecessary pain, sure. But we're also avoiding improving things. We're cycling medium.  And our country is paying for it.

The Exception: Complaining

I'd like to allow one caveat. We will tell the truth if we can avoid any responsibility that comes with being honest. This is the machinery of “complaining.”

We are great at complaining. We love to whine about things that don't work when we are removed from making things better. Take road rage. We are astonishingly honest in the isolation of our cars. Someone cuts us off and we are suddenly on truth serum. We'll uselessly scream a suggestion: “use a turn signal, moron!” Something sucks at work; a stupid policy is making everyone unhappy. Everyone will complain and no one will try to fix it, usually because the problem will take a bunch of time, energy, and creativity to fix.

It's so wonderfully easy to complain. Who wants to go through the trouble of confrontation? Of improvement? Our complaining takes the place of being honest.

The Haystack of “Good Enough”

Somewhere in the efforts to be polite, political, and/or non-confrontational, we're not just stunting our progress. We're making it impossible to tell the difference between “mediocre” and “excellent.” We're numbing our ability to identify (and reach for) greatness. And we are doing it most with our children and young people.

Think about that. Our willingness to spin has a special effect on the younger generation. Again, it's not necessarily about hypocrisy. It's about losing the ability to identify the exceptionally good.

Our kids in our culture watch us. When we don't call the average “average” or the weak “weak,” the real casualty is greatness. We extol average!  "I'm just an average guy!"  In the huge pile of nearly meaningless compliments and unspoken critiques, we can't find the exceptional and inspirational.

In schools, we celebrate showing up-- and not even showing up on time. We reward doing the bare minimum. And you know what? We do the very same thing in our lives, day to day. We lower expectations in order to be happier with results.

This isn't just the 'give everyone a trophy' problem. This is more of a 'it's easier to call it good enough' problem. 

It won't matter if our teachers and schools are better if we can't tell our kids (and the parents of those kids) that “not bad” is NOT “excellent.” It won't matter if the kids can't tell the difference between “weak” and “strong.”

Does spelling matter? Should you be able to troubleshoot your own computer? Should you know who your senator is?

Does my ass look big in these jeans?

Is there a difference between “average” and “great?”

It depends on how brave and strong we can be about telling the truth-- in our lives and in our schools.

For further reading on the subject of excellence in schools:

The best high school students in the world are now coming from other countries. The numbers are chilling. Check out this article in The Atlantic from Nov 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/your-child-left-behind/8310

Scapegoats and Saviors II

About a year ago, my friend Jason amused himself by starting or ending sentences with the phrase “in THIS economy.”

He'd say things like “man, it is hot today... in THIS economy.” Or, “in THIS economy, we should go to the movies.” Or, “this burger is really good... in THIS economy.”

Jason got a kick out of the fact that everywhere in the media, seemingly, everyone was talking about the ECONOMY. And Jason was spot on: people WERE freaking out. Everything seemed to be about THIS economy. The housing bubble was bursting. The Dow was tanking; unemployment was rising. Pensions were disappearing and factories were continuing to close. Healthcare costs skyrocketing. And, as some theorize, Obama, our first black president, was elected because of the desperation of THIS economy.

Nothing could be-- or can be, because we're still there-- seen outside the lens of money. Financial security is the panacea to all that ails us.

Enter teachers: summers off, long holidays, work only until 3pm. With fat pensions and solid healthcare benefits. All a teacher has to do is get through the first couple of years and then they have guaranteed jobs forever. With constant raises. Those jerks.

People hate a lot of things about teachers. But they loathe 'tenure' in education.

Some have forgotten why tenure has always been so important. It's quite simple: tenure allows professionals the right to be unpopular. In an industry where most of the 'product' and 'returns' come years (sometimes decades) after the work is completed, tenure has protected fantastic instructors from the caprice of administrators and parents.

Teachers are like umpires or cops: an essential part of the job is telling people things they don't want to hear. Tenure has allowed transformative teachers the ability to lead the unwilling and unmotivated to consider new ideas. To break generational chains of ignorance. To encourage courage.

My friend Nancy puts it most succinctly. Tenure gives teachers permission to be honest.

But I have a brief announcement:
tenure... is... dead.

Or, at least, is on it's last legs. About to bite the bullet. Buy the farm. Check out. Croak.

And, no, not because of 'No Child Left Behind' or 'Race To The Top' or any governmental edict (although I continue to research the RTTP national standards and I'll finish the article sometime soon! I hope). Obama's initiative might expedite tenure's demise, but the government won't be brandishing the executioner's axe.

Tenure will die because, in THIS economy, people are scared. And people are mad.

Some teachers are to blame for the bad rep of tenure. Who didn't have at least one obscenely horrible teacher? I had a half dozen freak shows in front of me as a student. Drunks, molesters, abusers, dimwits, anti-intellectuals... and that's just grade school. Ok, AND high school. I wish I were joking. You've probably got horrible stories, too. And I can practically guarantee that the worst teachers any of us ever had were tenured. They were protected while they made a sham of the profession.

And we return to our jokes about teachers.
What do you call a welfare recipient with a book?
A teacher.
What do you call a welfare recipient with a ball?
Coach.
What do you call a man in a dress who feels up kids?
A drama teacher.

Our favorite worst stories about school are about bad teachers.

Our memories of our teachers, coupled with our cultural tendency to portray teachers as either criminals or saints, give anyone the right to believe that tenure is the stink at the bottom of the education barrel.

And that's why teachers are so sexy these days. Because fear and anger and stinky things get us all hot and bothered.

So what will happen to honesty in talented but vulnerable teachers? What will happen to the greatness of those teachers who inspire hope and change?

In part III, I'll talk about why we keep having the wrong conversation about tenure and what will happen when it's over.

And I won't use any more death euphemisms for tenure. Let this blog be the last breath, the final twitch, the death rattle of these morbid expressions.