Class clown?
Teacher’s pet?
Know-it-all?
Rebel? Goodie-goodie? Smarty-pants?
Which one are you?
The other day, a friend of mine asked me what I was like in school.
It’s interesting to think back on your behaviour as a child and how it carries over into adulthood. While I like to think of myself as a complex individual above all kinds of stereotypes, the truth is, sometimes labels fit. To help explain my point, I’ll treat you to a bite of our conversation:
Hmmm, I think you could write a good reflective post about that. How your desire to gain all of the knowledge and be good at everything has affected your life. It’s so
fucking[very] crazy that you are a rule breaker!!! Yes, such a goodie good who wants to be good. I think you just have a desire to be toooooo good. Better than everyone.I don’t know much about people who don’t follow rules. It’s strange to me that someone who is such an over achiever would break rules… Maybe this is common among over achievers. – Kpups
Yeah, but in my mind the rules were dumb. – Alanimal
I can see this doesn’t portray me in a very positive light so, please, bare with me as I explain myself through self-reflection.
What did I mean by “the rules were dumb”?
a) they were barriers to goals I wanted to achieve;
b) they conflicted with my fundamental beliefs about right and wrong;
c) I was feeling rebellious;
d) my desire to achieve outweighed my desire to please;
e) I am selfish;
f) all of the above.
In the education system, there are many prehistoric rules that exist for seemingly obscure reasons. Like the ridiculous restrictions on bathroom breaks #letthechildrenpee
What’s the problem with rules you ask? I mean, they’ve done pretty well to keep society in check and prevent mass chaos. Well… it’s not so much the rule that’s the issue but rather the lack of buy-in. Deb explains why living by principles instead of rules is the way to go:
A rule externally compels you, through force, threat or punishment, to do the things someone else has deemed good or right. People follow or break rules.
A principle internally motivates you to do the things that seem good and right. People develop principles by living with people with principles and seeing the real benefits of such a life.
Let’s take a teensy intermission here and review the history on moral relativism:
Moral Relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) “believed that there are two questions that we must ask ourselves whenever we decide to act: (i) Can I rationally will that everyone act as I propose to act? If the answer is no, then we must not perform the action. (ii) Does my action respect the goals of human beings rather than merely using them for my own purposes? Again, if the answer is no, then we must not perform the action.”
However, Kant is wrong to think that ‘the rightness or wrongness of an individual act can be inferred with certainty from its falling or not falling under a rule capable of being universalized, says William David Ross.
So, we come to WDR’s distinction of Right and Good.
There is no one master principle that explains why the particular things that we believe are wrong/right are in fact wrong/right. Instead, there are a number of basic moral requirements which cannot be reduced to some more fundamental principle… Ross contends that four things are intrinsically good: justice (happiness apportioned to merit), pleasure, knowledge and virtue (or, ‘virtuous disposition and action, i.e. action, or disposition to act, from any one of certain motives, of which at all events the most notable are the desire to do one’s duty, the desire to bring into being something that is good, and the desire to give pleasure or save pain to others
So, I think it’s clear that I am no Kantian but maybe I’m a Rossite (is that a thing?). So, if I adhere to the belief that justice, pleasure, knowledge and virtue are principles associated with determining right from wrong then it makes sense that my moral compass revolves around selfish, success driven, fact-finding missions.
Now, let’s take a closer look at why I think it’s OK to break some rules.
1) Something about my personality finds justification in rule smashin’…
Some of my positive personality traits include: inquisitiveness, pit-bull tenacity, and curiosity (a.k.a. obsessive research capacity).
Some of my negative personality traits include: impatience, stubbornness, and skepticism.
2) I was raised by rule breakers #thanksmom&dad…
I can recall several examples of when my parents chose to break the rules to better our lives, I will share one example with you but only if you promise to keep it a secret.
Case Study #1: Golf Pros
My parents were young when they had my brother and I. They both worked, in fact on top of work, they had several paper routes and would drag my 5 year old brother and my 3 year old self out of bed at 4:30am to help them deliver their papers before school. And still, it was tough making ends meet. So, under the dusk of pre-dawn, we would drag our little bodies still in jambes out of bed, tie up our sneakers, hop in the car and drive down to the local golf course where we ransacked the bins for pop bottles and beer cans. What a fun game for a 3 year old! #trespassing #stealing
So, how do these tangents translate into my student persona. Well, I guess you could say I was, and perhaps still am a hybrid of rebel know-it-all. However a variety of humiliating humbling life experiences have tamed the inner rebel and taught me that, in fact, I do not know it all.
Would you believe that ginger cherub is the rebel herself? #oneoftheseisnotliketheothers
