Bulleted Life

• too busy to read sentences
• must condense
• to the point
• only essentials
• noun
• verb
• no adjectives
• no adverbs
• no phrases
• just facts

Lately at work it seems that everything we do has to be done in bulleted lists rather than any kind of written narrative. The explanation given is that all the administrators are too busy to read much, so they need just the essentials.

Now that kind of writing has spilled over to correspondence we send out of the office or make public. I was directed to write a letter home to parents and students and when I submitted it, I was told there was too much writing!

Half the page was a bulleted list!

I find it highly offensive that in education we are unwilling to expect people to READ!

Initiatives by Bill Gates and other “educational reformers” have the 3 R’s as Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships in a major move away from readin’ (w)ritin’, and ‘rithmatic. The old 3 R’s have been condensed to literacy and numeracy.

I’m just disturbed that in education we don’t read or write anymore. Literacy (readin’ and [w]ritin’) remains as one of the fundamental skills on which we focus; we just don’t practice those skills ourselves!

My Sunday School class, on the other hand, provides plenty of opportunity to read. We are doing a book-study on the Gospel of John and I’m reading five other books to go along with it.

Can you imagine that?! I have more literacy at CHURCH than in my JOB (in education).

The world is really upside down – I wonder which horseman of the apocalypse reading is…?