Everything Matters

Have you ever tried to give someone a haircut or make anything uniformly level? There's this tendency that when you try to fix something that you see a bit off balance that then causes something else to be a bit off balance too. Let's take the hair cut example: you see that one part of hair is half a centimeter longer than the rest, so you try to level it. Oops, a little too much. Now you have to level the rest of it with what you just cut and repeat ad infinitum, or until they're bald.

This is what creating my unit feels like at this point. It's not so much that I'm cutting things away, but I do feel like I keep modifying little bits ever so slightly that I then realize requires another slight modification somewhere else. For this week, I completed my objectives, overview of methods, and assessment plan. All of these are ridiculously intertwined with each other and the rest of the unit. When I write that I will assess X, well, I better make sure X was taught earlier in the unit. But now that I added X, Y no longer has space. Does that mean I should take Y off of the assessment plan or reorganize more to include both X and Y? Also, do X+Y = my stated objectives? But I think you get the point.

I'm so glad I didn't write my rationale at the beginning like I had originally planned. That would've been like deciding on a hair style before ever seeing what type of hair the person has or what types of scissors and clippers would be at my disposal, or, like solving an equation I never saw. In this way, the rationale does become much more of an explanation, as its name implies. To explain something, you need to know what it is first. I'm still not there, but I'm getting close.