Department Rules: My ‘Brain Pickings’ Favourite

I follow a myriad of pages and groups online perpetually looking for ideas, incentives, challenges and anything and everything that could inform my work. One of my favourites is: http://www.brainpickings.org/

The ten rules for teachers and students easily translate into the context of higher education. The picture below is from the latest blog-post.

• Rule 1  FIND A PLACE YOU TRUST THEN TRY TRUSTING IT FOR A WHILE.
• Rule 2  GENERAL DUTIES OF A STUDENT: PULL EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR TEACHER. PULL EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR FELLOW STUDENTS.
• Rule 3  GENERAL DUTIES OF A TEACHER: PULL EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR STUDENTS.
• Rule 4  CONSIDER EVERYTHING AN EXPERIMENT.
• Rule 5 BE SELF DISCIPLINED.  THIS MEANS FINDING SOMEONE WISE OR SMART AND CHOOSING TO FOLLOW THEM. TO BE DISCIPLINED IS TO FOLLOW IN A GOOD WAY. TO BE SELF DISCIPLINED IS TO FOLLOW IN A BETTER WAY.
• Rule 6  NOTHING IS A MISTAKE. THERE’S NO WIN AND NO FAIL. THERE’S ONLY MAKE.
• Rule 7  THE ONLY RULE IS WORK. IF YOU WORK IT WILL LEAD TO SOMETHING. IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO DO ALL OF THE WORK ALL THE TIME WHO EVENTUALLY CATCH ON TO THINGS.
• Rule 8  DON’T TRY TO CREATE AND ANALYSE AT THE SAME TIME. THEY’RE DIFFERENT PROCESSES.
• Rule 9 BE HAPPY WHENEVER YOU CAN MANAGE IT. ENJOY YOURSELF. IT’S LIGHTER THAN YOU THINK.
• Rule 10 “WE’RE BREAKING ALL OF THE RULES. EVEN OUR OWN RULES. AND HOW DO WE DO THAT? BY LEAVING PLENTY OF ROOM FOR X QUANTITIES.” JOHN CAGE

I believe point 8 is one of the most common problems students have, which manifests itself as ‘over-thinking’. The students are sometimes so scared to do the wrong thing, that they stop their flow and intuition and try to analyse while creating. However, until reading this rule the mechanism of over-thinking was only intuitively known to me not actually obvious. I think I need to explore this issue further and definitely ponder more about the rules. Maria in her blog also suggest the actual publication. I know what is next on my reading list now!