The purpose of teams

A better man than me once said to stop chasing the paper and live your life.

I go to a demanding school. The kind where the students are the ones filled with self-inflicted stress wounds and where friends are hard to come by, lest they mess up the curve. I stand looking back and I see freshmen worrying about getting jobs and seniors chilling despite or because of their job situation. How does that make sense?

The concern as educators should not be on whether the students solve a tricky test under time pressure as they worry not about how they did but how their peers did and wether they'll still be better than about half of them.

There's an obvious disconnect between effort and performance.

But we all know you need a 4.0 to get a job. And at least 4 assorted extracurriculars in which you are both a board member, a president and a ground soldier. It's all suits and ties and vault guides all over the place before we stop them and ask them why they're doing all this for?

Of course I'm not talking about the kids born and raised with a deeply rooted desire to be a banker or a consultant. What 4 year old hasn't heard of Porter's 5 forces? Or 5 year old heard about Cialdini's 6 persuasion tactics?

Perhaps it's not only time to revamp the testing process but the learning process. It's time to realize that when we learn the most is in fact at 3 am in the fluorescently-lit hallways of our local universities but it's certainly not coming from the books. Though I'll admit that some of the insights we can derive from professors and from prolonged ours sitting in front of two computer screens and an open book are often cool - I still remembered the moment Finance, my programming class, Chem and Marketing all clicked together with my world history class. It was only a quick and brief and passing thought of clarity but it was worth it. But the truth is that the knowledge comes from the people, our peers, sitting around us, supporting each other maybe by sharing a cheat sheet, or a sample test, or explaining the paper.

It is also, I would contend, a process that takes place when students engage in dangerous and sometimes illegal behavior downtown and they take care of each other. Yes, it's disgusting. Yes, the next day, a saturday or a friday or even a Wednesday if you're particularly aggressive they walk like zombies for the first 12 hours of the day as they trudge from door to door dolling out apologies and looking for his/her cellphone, wallet, credit card and dignity.

It's what some business leaders would call experiential. Give it a little more structure and fewer percentages and you could actually be called a visionary and an educator.

Isn't that what teams were for?