Habituation
"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not a virtue, but a habit." - Aristotle
Think about the things that you do on a habitual basis. Those old stand-bys that you always turn to when you are bored, stressed, or need some comfort or relaxation. What you do when you basically have free time.
If you are truly honest, many people will find that not all of those habits are truly healthy or constructive.
When I go into a substitute job in the mornings, I come across all levels and all kinds of students. Kindergarten-12th grade. And there is one habitual distinction that I recognize between the more successful classrooms and the more unruly ones.
When I have to continually and habitually pester you to get to work, you do not have a successful work pattern. You are treating the classroom as "free time" when it is not. Your particular habituation is to squander time, which is to squander excellence. It is not a thirst to excell, but rather a saturation of mediocrity. Mediocrity does not work hard; it complains. It protests and fruts and strets, and as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, it "signif[ies] nothing".
I do not believe that achievement comes naturally to 99.9% of people. Achievement means having a goal, and grasping it through work. You do not lose weight if you do not exercise; you must achieve the obstemious habituation of refusing excess food. You do not learn some fragments of knowledge by reading them once; you achieve that understanding through the habituation of "re"-"viewing": reading and/or reciting them over and over until an unconscious understanding of their meaning permeates your pores.
And yet, when left to their own devices, the students I encounter always return to the same habitual infatuations: movies, fashion, and (dear God, how many of them do I have to confiscate?) the umbilical phones/IPods.
We all have attention deficit disorder now. We change the channel. We shuffle our IPod. We see hundreds of advertisements and corporate icons a day. In fact, we are bombarded through constant environmental demands on our senses, both visual and aural. And that is certainly not a habituation that is leading to excellence.
Think about the things that you do on a habitual basis. Those old stand-bys that you always turn to when you are bored, stressed, or need some comfort or relaxation. What you do when you basically have free time.
If you are truly honest, many people will find that not all of those habits are truly healthy or constructive.
When I go into a substitute job in the mornings, I come across all levels and all kinds of students. Kindergarten-12th grade. And there is one habitual distinction that I recognize between the more successful classrooms and the more unruly ones.
When I have to continually and habitually pester you to get to work, you do not have a successful work pattern. You are treating the classroom as "free time" when it is not. Your particular habituation is to squander time, which is to squander excellence. It is not a thirst to excell, but rather a saturation of mediocrity. Mediocrity does not work hard; it complains. It protests and fruts and strets, and as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, it "signif[ies] nothing".
I do not believe that achievement comes naturally to 99.9% of people. Achievement means having a goal, and grasping it through work. You do not lose weight if you do not exercise; you must achieve the obstemious habituation of refusing excess food. You do not learn some fragments of knowledge by reading them once; you achieve that understanding through the habituation of "re"-"viewing": reading and/or reciting them over and over until an unconscious understanding of their meaning permeates your pores.
And yet, when left to their own devices, the students I encounter always return to the same habitual infatuations: movies, fashion, and (dear God, how many of them do I have to confiscate?) the umbilical phones/IPods.
We all have attention deficit disorder now. We change the channel. We shuffle our IPod. We see hundreds of advertisements and corporate icons a day. In fact, we are bombarded through constant environmental demands on our senses, both visual and aural. And that is certainly not a habituation that is leading to excellence.
posted by Brian | 3:51 PM
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