" 'Correct discipline' and 'enough time' are inseparable notions. Correct discipline cannot be hurried, for it is both the knowledge of what ought to be done, and the willingness to do it--all of it, properly. The good worker will not suppose that good work can be made answerable to haste, urgency, or even emergency. But the good worker knows too that after it is done work requires yet more time to prove its worth. One must stay to experience and study and understand the consequences--must understand them by living with them, and then correct them, if necessary, by longer living and more work. It won't do to correct mistakes made in one place by moving to another place, as has been the common fashion in America. . . . Distraction is inimical to correct discipline, and enough time is beyond the reach of anyone who has too much to do."
from Wendell Berry's essay, "People, Land and Community"
in Standing by Woods: Essays (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1983)
This passage resonates with me as a teacher of today's high school students, especially those in an urban environment. Both they and I need to cultivate this kind of discipline. Berry's passage comes from his description of farming the same hillside for many years.
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For years I have struggled to find real ways for students to gain actual traction from my feedback to them. Several years ago, I joined a group of Bay Area teachers in a year-long fellowship based on a program called Teaching for Understanding. As my project, I studied student attitudes toward the value of feedback. More recently, I have used student pages in Microsoft OneNote to help them digest and use my feedback. Early results from this recent experiment are encouraging. In short, to refer to the Berry quote above, the experiment asks students to regularly re-visit the feedback, in order to notice and address emerging patterns. In this sense, they must farm the same hillside, noticing which crops do and do not grow where and when. They must keep returning to the same place, in order to know it better.
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