Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.

In other words: Give a person content, you give them nothing. Give a person process, you give them everything.

This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at teaching.

Our church is recruiting Sunday School teachers for our summer time schedule. “All curricula and materials are provided. All you have to do is show up and teach.” That’s all. That’s a lot. I used to try and teach Sunday school. Sure, they provided me all the content I needed. But they never provided process. Most of our church’s Sunday School teachers are also teachers. The rest have been teaching Sunday School for so long that they are accomplished teachers. It never occurs to any of them that they need to provide any support except the curriculum and the materials. It never occurs to them that teaching is a process, not just content.

And yet they know instinctively that there is something wrong with standardized testing, testing that makes them focus so much on the content of their students’ learning that they have no time to teach their students a process of learning, much less a process of solving problems, of getting things done, of dealing with the world.
 
In my many careers, I almost never had a learning curve. Learning curves are for content. If you come into a job knowing process, you can start doing any job almost immediately. Whenever I was out of work, it took some time – once almost a year and half – to find someone who recognized from my varied background that I could do whatever they needed. Usually I got jobs with very fuzzy job descriptions, ones where the boss knew that next week’s challenges were going to be nothing like last week’s, and s/he needed my process ability, not someone who had the content knowledge to do the same thing every week.
In 1946, Albert Einstein said to a six-year-old Julian Bond, who later became the head of the NAACP, “Never remember anything that is already written down.”

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