What Will You Sacrifice?
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2024-2025
Still on the topic of providing something concrete to help teach something intangible, I often used imagery to help students understand abstract concepts. Time and space are two such concepts. We really do not know what either really is except that it is associated with the temporal rather than the eternal. In fact, the only way to describe either one is by making reference to itself, such as an hour being composed of sixty minutes, which are in turn composed of sixty seconds. This does not really tell us what time is.
Another example: when teaching students the concept of goals and expectations, I explained the logical steps one should follow for doing so. The steps, summarized here, are: Set an exact and reasonable goal; set an exact and reasonable timeframe for the goal; set a reasonable manner in which you intend to accomplish the goal; and decide what you will give up to meet the goal.
When discussing the last step, I explained that there is no such thing as a free lunch, as someone somewhere pays for it. I then pointed out that we are all subjected to a maximum of twenty-four hours per day, every second of which is occupied with something already, so any new venture means something else has to go. In other words, a new goal requires time and energy, which has to be sourced somewhere.
Once it was established that time would be required to meet any goal, I discussed the two possible ways in which time is handled. One is to let chance determine how time will be spent, which takes it out of one’s control. Alternatively, time can be controlled through decisions.
To demonstrate what I meant, I employed a simple scenario anyone can imagine. If we had a table absolutely full with 48 water bottles, each representing a half hour, one could imagine their lives on that table. Any new goal or venture represented by a new bottle would require the removal of one of the bottles already on the table. One could simply shove the bottles on the already full table and leave to chance which other bottle would fall off, or one could pick which bottle would be removed and be in control of what would be given up.
Moral of this story? Simple examples are very useful in teaching abstract concepts.
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