 Welcome to Five More Minutes. Helpful videos in five minutes are less that support the teaching and learning of all students. I am your host, Shelly Moore, and this episode is Don't Shut On Me. We're going back to my dots because I love my dots. I told you I'm obsessed with my dots. But our question for today about the dots is, have you ever wondered where this idea of green came from? I mean, what does it even mean to be green? The idea of greenness is a very early concept in education that is connected to standardization. And to understand standardization in education, we have to go back to the Industrial Revolution. Way back when there was a flood of people moving to cities to work in factories. And to be successful in a factory, consistency was the key. The more similar and consistent your workers were, the more reliable and safe your product was in a factory setting, the greener, the better. Public education was then created and designed with exactly this idea in mind. And it recreated conditions in schools to mimic the conditions in factories. So when kids became adults, they would have the skills to be successful as factory workers. It makes perfect sense. It was the demand at the time. And it's quite a smart strategy, if you ask me. And so schools were created and students were taught how to be green. They were taught to do the same thing, to work alone, to sit in rows, to respond to bells, sounding a little familiar. Now, I don't know about you, but I was not a very green child. And I often struggled in school because I wasn't good at any of those things. I mean, I'm creative, I hate rules, I don't like working alone. I'm pretty much always late. This is pretty much an educational recipe for disaster. I prefer windows of arrival time. I had difficulty articulating this tension for a really long time. And I just really thought I was broken. It took me almost until I was 27 to finally realize that it was actually not me that was broken, but I was trying to exist in a very broken educational system. This happens to so many of us students and teachers who are still being expected to fit into this 19th century model of society when we are very, very much being propelled into the 21st century at warp speed. I mean, kids are born knowing how to double tap. Education is close to 200 years off the mark and more and more kids are struggling to fit into this archaic system. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. So if you like me grew up as a multicolored three-dimensional unicorn of twirling love, you also probably struggled in school. You may have also noticed that you got a few phone calls received by your mother that may have involved this word, should. This is where Shelly should be. This is what Shelly should be doing. This is the reading benchmark that Shelly should be reading at. I was shoulded on to death. Now I saw a T-shirt once that said, don't shit on me. And let me tell you, this could be the new slogan of education systems worldwide. So here's my challenge for you. How would your classroom or school change if that's all we did? Let's take out the should. Let's change our question from where should you be, what's wrong with you, to where are you now and what's your next step? Can you imagine how successful kids would be and how school would change if that was the language that we used? But in order for this to happen, we have to do one very important job but it's a hard one because we did not grow up this way. We have to let go of average. We have to let go of the comparison and the competition and this expectation that kids need to be something other than exactly who they are. And even more, we have to give ourselves permission to do exactly the same thing. Cause just like there isn't a standard kid, there's also no standardized teacher. Don't shoot on yourself either. Well, there you have it. That is today's Five More Minutes. How is this useful for you? Don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and remember to take a look on www.FiveMoreMinutes.com to check out supplemental readings, resources and supporting research for this episode. See you later.