Why I hate outcomes

Part of a conversation in a separate blog with two colleagues, Mary and CeCe.

Photo by Tristan Gevaux on Unsplash

I didn't always. In fact I remember giving a talk to the senior school staff at Canberra Grammar, on their merits.

But now I have a visceral loathing of them. I can make some arguments, possibly sensible arguments, about why they might unnecessarily narrow the focus of teachers. But I'm not sure that I can explain my deeper gut feelings, such that whenever they're mentioned now, I feel the need to sigh, or moan, or roll my eyes, or whatever.

I've been thinking about them today while gardening.

I have desired outcomes when I'm gardening. I want to grow tasty tomatoes. I want my callistemon bushes to be planted near enough to each other so that they will touch when fully grown. I want my eggplant to actually produce eggplants, not just pretty flowers.

But when I get out into the garden, I'm not rigidly driven by these outcomes. What I love about gardening is that I walk outside with a little list in my head, and then I get diverted. First on my list is to water the pots ... but then I notice that there are some tiny green caterpillars on the broccoli plants, so I fetch the Dipel and make up a spray. The Dipel sits in the shed next to the broad bean seed packet, and I wonder if it's too early to plant broad beans, so I look it up and see that now is the time to start. So I wander round the garden looking for some little patch of really good soil that I can use for the seed pots. I'm listening to an audiobook as I do all this, and so sometimes I'm thinking about the garden and sometimes I'm thinking about 'The Invisible Man' and sometimes I'm just in this wonderful meditative state where I feel a part of things in a way that I rarely do at other times. And so on. 

And the outcomes? Well they're there. They get me started. And if one is ignored for too long, I get reminded of it in one way or another. But the outcomes don't tie me down. They don't narrow my focus or experience. And, above all, they don't give me the feeling that I'm some novice whose duty it is to discipline my practice so that I can enter the world of the initiated. I'm already a part of the world, a world which has outcomes in it but so much more. And it's my world, not someone else.

This last seems important to me. Our students, too often, feel that the world of the classroom belongs to someone else, or something else, that it's not their space. Too often, as a teacher driven consciously or unconsciously by explicit or implicit measurable outcomes, I allowed myself to speak and act in a way that undermined this feeling that the classroom was a part of my students' worlds.

There's so much more I feel about this. I do have an unsettled feeling that my rage around outcomes is a little unhinged! So I want to write about it, and maybe have one or both of you prod and challenge me,