Re-thinking some things

Sorry, still no movies, I haven't actually watched that many recently. Maybe I'll do Spiderman 3 if I'm able to go and see it this weekend.

I went swimming this weekend and got a really terrible cramp in my calf, that didn't ever go away, so I sat on some chairs and watched all the kids swimming around. I watched this kid really close to me swim laps, he was probably 10, so why he was swimming laps is beyond me, but he was, and he had terrible form, it wasn't a very good crawl, and it wasn't fast either. I watched some kids try and climb up this rope thing that is there. Some of them could do it, some of them couldn't. They were doing it really inefficiently too. If their goal was to get to the top (which I'm assuming it was) they could change their technique a little bit and they would do much better. I watched a few other people and noticed that they could do a lot more if they changed how they were doing what they were doing.

All of this caused me to think about a lot of things.

I've taken one swimming class in my entire life, so I by no means know very much, but a professional did teach us and showed us correct form, and I know from personal experience that its a lot better. That kid in the lane closest to me, the one with terrible form, would he have liked to know a better way to do it? Would he have cared? If he has his own way of doing things, then who am I to show him my way of doing things? Whats to say that my way is better than his way?

I had the same questions for the kids trying to climb the rope thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching Jerman principles and not teaching the absolute and universally correct principles. That sentence came out weird. I feel sometimes like I'm putting too much of myself in what I teach to other people. There isn't any reason why my ways are better than anybody else's ways.

I'm also on my way of being a teacher. The kids in my classes are all going to already have ideas about how the world works, but there is a lot of things they just don't know, and don't know they don't know it. Like climbing the rope, they don't know how to do it, and I'm going to both tell them about the rope, and how to climb it.

Then there are still those people that know about the rope, have their own way of climbing it, and are doing a bad job of it. Would the world be a better place if all the robe climbers did it well? I think that's the wrong question to be asking.