Is balance over-rated?
Some students, maybe a slight majority, are well-served by advice to pursue well-roundedness and a balanced experience between school and outside activities. These are the students that any school would love to admit and any teacher would love to teach. For them, eschewing excess and exploring a multiplicity of options makes sense.Other students seem less well-served by the roundedness concept. They sometimes describe a dislike for school, finding much of what goes on to be tedious or uninteresting. While probably a minority of students, my anecdotal observations reveal them to be predominately male and at risk for disengaging from formal education. It seems to me that by trying to force every student to approach education in more or less the same way--sampling from a variety of offerings at the school smorgasbord--we inadvertently miss helping a sizable minority find something about which they can engage.In a revealing narrative, the current issue of Adobe's digital and print magazine, 99U, profiles Todd Hido, an influential and acclaimed American photographer. Hido describes how he came by his work:
"Was there one decisive moment when you realized you wanted to be a photographer?
"It wasn’t necessarily a moment, but it was more of a progression in my life, because I used to race BMX bikes and was the state champion of Ohio four times. So I picked up a camera and would photograph my friends doing stuff, like any kid with a skateboard today who would want to photograph their friends doing tricks. Your natural impulse is to record it so you can share it – if you don’t record it, nobody will know it happened. In high school I also had a great teacher, Mike McGlure, who said to me, “You are different from the other students in this class. You have a special talent.”
"He encouraged me and would enter my pictures in contests. I remember I got some State Governor’s Award for Photography, and it was from him entering me into the contest. I was bad at everything in school, but once I started being interested in photography, I wanted to go to school, because that’s where the darkroom was and I found something that made me excited about being there. Ever since, all I’ve ever done is photography. I’ve never done anything else."
Roundedness and balance were not what Hido, and, I would argue, lots of other students needed; instead, what they needed was coaching to find something (1) that they could succeed at doing, and (2) freedom to do it nearly to the exclusion of anything else. You want to teach a guy like Hido to do chemistry? Then do it in the context of photography and the chemical processes necessary to develop film.
Maybe we should rethink balance and roundedness as goals for all.