I had cause to undertake a task the other day which brought me well outside my comfort zone. Am not going to go into any great detail as to the nature of the task but it is enough to say it was significant and it didn’t go well.
Oh, to be comfortable!
If I was to ask you whether you would prefer to be comfortable or uncomfortable the answer is pretty clear. I suspect it’s going to be, to be comfortable. We want to be comfortable in our emotional lives, in our physical lives and in our spiritual lives, etc. But with comfort, comes habit and with habit comes acceptance and then things become taken for granted. No one celebrates doing what they have always been doing.
We achieve most when we take risks, do something new or challenge ourselves. That’s when the great things happen. We celebrate the good exam result, the award or the completion of a difficult task. To have overcome difficulty, to overcome challenge is to have succeeded and is worthy of celebration. These are the things we remember! But it also means that when things go wrong, they go wrong and leave you feeling down and having failed. That’s how I felt the other day, down, depleted and dejected. But does that mean, in seeking to avoid that negative feeling I stop trying or challenging myself?
Balance
The key here is that of balance. A challenge brings with it the possibility of the highs of success but equally brings with it the lows of failing to succeed. I think it is therefore about trying to reframe the narrative. If we don’t challenge ourselves we would be devoid of the highs and the lows. It would be safe, maybe even comfortable, but life would also be a bit bland. To seek the highs we must accept the potential for the lows, and that’s the rub.
Education, schools and AI
All of this makes me think of student use of AI in schools; Sadly some students will seek comfort and ease, using AI to produce coursework with minimal effort. They will therefore benefit little from the process of creating that coursework. Other students however will engage with the AI, using it to help develop ideas and their thinking and to produce the best piece of coursework possible. Some of this will be difficult with the use of different AI tools for different purposes, repeated refining of prompts, and providing of their own personal content as part of the coursework. Students will need to constantly review and evaluate the work as they co-create it with the help of AI. These students will produce excellent pieces of work, possibly beyond what they would achieve without AI tools, but most importantly they will benefit from their efforts and difficulties, learning as part of the process and isn’t assessment all about learning.
But back to me.
Desirable difficulty is a term I use often however when things don’t go well it isn’t as an easy a concept to digest. But I suspect I learned from this experience, even although it didn’t go well. I now need to get it in my head that it all wasn’t a waste of time. Making an effort matters whether we succeed or not, and that every experience is a learning experience. So comfort, although useful at times, isn’t the ideal state for us as human beings.
Oh well, suppose its time to dust myself off and move on; onwards and upwards as they say.
Technology and Learning