"Courage to be less helpful"

I sense a recurring theme in my SDL experience, and educator/blogger Peter Pappas captures it with this directive: "Teachers, have the courage to be less helpful."

Last night I was sharing SDL thoughts with my son Max, who is working on his education license in New Zealand, where he will teach math.  We talked about how small children learn as they struggle in their play. The learning is in the effort, and the caregiver who can't resist the urge to grab Barbie and stick those claw-like plastic fingers through that miniature sleeve has robbed the child of the learning.  I don't know how many times my children came back from the farm shed, disgruntled because they'd been welding or pounding something and their helpful dad took over their project (to improve it, of course). We must remember that "theirs" is better than "best."

Teachers have my husband's well-intentioned urge to smooth the learning--and the cost is ownership, which I'm coming to believe is the peak of the SDL hierarchy. 

This week, again, I see my SDL thinking seeping into the more traditional classes I teach. I'm reading my comp students' research papers right now, and I have to slap my own fingers when my pen tries to re-write another sloppy sentence.

Research projects, awaiting corrections or sincere reading?

That's not to say that modeling doesn't have its place. But my eyes are opening to the many ways we hobble students' real learning in the name of helping. Highlighting unwieldy sentences, or marking them with a question mark tells the students I had difficulty understanding. The job of re-working the sentence to communicate with their reader is then theirs. 

But backing off my role as Sentence Perfecter involves risk. My students will be sharing their papers with "real" readers (as opposed to their "fake" reader: me) after their final revision. So in refraining from polishing their writing (grabbing the welding wand), I will allow some less-than-elegant prose to be read by our community members. And this calls for courage on my part: courage to be less helpful.