cookies and the world we want

it's christmas time and that means one thing: seminar christmas parties at school. i like to joke with my kids and tell them that i am against fun and against breaks, but not a single seminar is christmas-party-less during the last week of school before we all run home to be rid of this thing called school for two whole weeks.

all of us have seen this situation. you have only 15 cookies, but there are twenty four kids in your class. you are now faced with two options that both follow a single underlying principle.
a. you can break the cookies in half so that everyone gets half a cookie and you have some leftovers
b. you can not give out any cookies at all

as i was contemplating this issue, a humorously evil thought crossed my mind. "what if i passed out the cookies in order starting from my favorite student all the way down to the kid that gives me white hair?" or maybe "i could start with the kid with the highest gpa and work down to the kids with the lowest." either way, i would obviously run out before the end.

any teachers reading this (or any decent human beings with an ounce of fairness) would be appauled if this actually happened in a classroom. shame on me for thinking such terrible thoughts! you see, that "single underlying principle" that i had been talking about earlier pertained to this universal and highly regarded idea of fairness. we place such a high premium on this fairness.

wait a second...

everyone gets the same share regardless of how hard they work? communism? the question then is this: when in the rest of their lives will they ever have another situation where they will be treated with such fairness?

do educators serve their students better when they prepare them for what they will encounter in the future? if this was the case, i think everything would be merit based. the smartest kids would get the best party foods, they would get the most attention and all the best stuff. but this is a sobering thought to even the most cynical of teachers. why? are we not preparing our kids for the world that is?

perhaps this is no great epiphany for most people in my profession, but this was a bit of a realization for me. someone once mentioned to me that one major role of teachers is to stand as a safeguard against the elements of change and ignorance. essentially, we preserve a society. although i agree with the latter, i think a very critical aspect of teaching is to challenge the status quo. another way of looking at it, we aren't administering merit-based snacks or merit-based supplies. we still adhere to this moral idea of fairness and goodness. there is some mystical moral element to our work that we seldom think about because of all the pressures to meet curricular and content expectations. we are teaching them how to live.

we are not simply here to prepare kids for the world that is. we are training them to become the citizens of the world we want and hope for.