Have you ever been driving the car and suddenly you arrive at a destination and can’t help but wonder how the hell you got there? You’ve had full control of the steering wheel but you have no idea what happened until you pulled up!
I find myself doing lots of driving in unfamiliar locations. I have joked for years about how I am terrible with directions and I don’t notice landmarks, unless I am the driver. I am one of those people who turns the street directory to make sure that I am travelling the right way! So, the maps system in the car is my best friend!
I plug the destination into maps and I follow the suggested route. A few times I have ended up in interesting places wondering if I have plugged the end point into the system correctly. Several times I convinced myself there was a Google conspiracy to make me pay every toll along the way!
Recently, I was speaking to the wisest person in my world and he suggested that as I started to return to places for follow up visits, the journey would become easier – my stored responses would become more refined in each location and the travel anxiety would decrease. He also suggested that maybe lots of people in schools are also driving on auto-pilot and just following the route determined by maps!
I reckon he is onto something! As I become a repeat visitor, I have relied less on the maps. Each trip I recognise more of the local landmarks and roads; I can ‘follow my nose’ more confidently; I can recognise the alternative routes that maps might suggest in response to accidents/closed roads – essentially, I have moved from novice to experienced (in some cases, like when I drive to the airport, perhaps even expert)!
So now I am curious about whether educators are following their noses; and at what point do we move from novice to expert, needing less reliance on the maps.
I reckon that often, we are relying on the maps to direct the teaching journey for longer than needed. I reckon we are having lots of moments where we arrive mindlessly at the destination and our students are yelling, ‘Are we there yet’?!
I’m wondering why this happens… Perhaps it’s a trip we have never made before – a class or subject area that we are unfamiliar with; maybe the map is a safety net to protect ourselves from the flooded roads of the system; perhaps we are just trying to avoid speed bumps or potholes; maybe we know how to drive in the city, but miss the hazards of a rural environment. We tend to plug in the route and just take the fastest route to get there. And sometimes our students are passively travelling in the backseat and missing the journey altogether!
I think we need to do more than rely on maps to get us there. We need to trust ourselves to stay on the High Road and navigate the journey knowing there will be bumps and detours, road closures and driving hazards; maybe even a random breath test along the way; the carpark might be full or the price of petrol high; perhaps the destination doesn’t even exist anymore and a new end point exists!
We need to have a bank of stored responses for all of these things that impact the trip, but we also need to be really clear about the purpose of the journey and the experiences along the way.
We need to develop a relationship with all aspects of the world around us so that we can navigate without the map. We know things often don’t go to plan; when we hit a traffic jam, or a detour, or the weather changes and everyone else has forgotten how to drive – we need to be able to adjust and follow our noses!
Every now and then, we need to take an exit ramp, slow down, wind down the window and smell the fresh air, notice the landmarks and adjust for the driving conditions, or even just take a quick pitstop. We need to get back to following our noses, guiding others to our destination and helping each other to notice key moments along the way.
After all, it’s not about reaching the destination, but the journey to get there!
How are you breaking down your dependence on maps and moving from novice to expert… Or even better, helping others to move from novice to expert!
