When I first started rowing, there was a heavy amount of exertion with little result.

I was stressed, frustrated, tired, and I had blisters on the palms of my hands — and after all that work, my strokes were sloppy and weak.

Now, my stroke is harder, cleaner, and more effective. I have some handy calluses on my hands to help me along. I have better stamina because my work is more targeted — I engage specific groups of muscles instead of desperately trying to maneuver the oar with my whole body. And I no longer feel overwhelmed and about to cry.

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I’ve written in the past about “the real world” rhetoric and the fact that many teachers feel it’s their job to prepare their students for a mythical future boss who won’t let you do any work over again or negotiate a deadline. Who are these bosses that act like fifth-grade teachers? Let’s all steer clear of them.

Beyond the silly notion that the teacher’s job is to prepare students for some mythical future job where a boss cares more about deadlines than the actual work product (“Nope! It’s a day late! I don’t even want to look at it,”) is the dark truth that these teachers are doing that very thing under the guise of “teaching accountability.”

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Challenging problems aren’t the ones that require a lot of labor. They are the ones that require thinking.

It is a huge mistake to focus on labor and think we’re doing such hard work. Maybe we’re actually being lazy by not coming up with a cleverer strategy for avoiding all that work.

We can use math as good metaphor to explain this idea. The brilliant Prealgebra book from The Art of Problem Solving teaches students to think algebraically — that is, strategically — about math, even no variables are present.

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School rewards good penmanship, strong language skills, facility with numbers, social ease, and athletic ability. Bonus points if you are well organized and approval-seeking.

Forgive me for broadly generalizing here: Engineers are often good at numbers. But their other strengths — such as spatial ability, innovation, making unusual connections, finding shortcuts, tolerance for failure, skill at manipulating inanimate objects, and asking challenging questions — can be virtually invisible in a typical liberal arts-based K - 12 curriculum. 

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