Teachers Are Learners, Too

Some time ago I encountered the following in Proverbs 18:9: “Whoever is slack in his work, is a brother to him who destroys.” It almost seems–OK, not almost–that this quote is related to conversations I have had with students about their need to be more diligent about their work in order to improve or increase their learning. You mean I wasn’t the first one to think of that. Hmm!

THEN, I noticed in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat the following quote (an African proverb): Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

Although Friedman’s context was arguably different from mine, I contend our contexts are at least indirectly related. In today’s world of learning OR teaching, the results of our failure to attend to what needs to be done to best prepare our students for the 21st century may make us (and them) wish we had started “running” when we saw the sun rise over our digitally “flattened” world.