On Teaching: "Efficiency"

This year at school, my friend Paul wants to emphasize “efficiency”, and so I have taken to discussing it with my students. I’ve often shared with them a definition I like: efficiency is doing things as quickly as possible while still being as careful as possible. They sometimes ask whether working quickly can lead to faulty products, but I tell them – and I love this – that the word “quick” originally meant “alive”. In the Middle Ages, if you were “quick”, it just meant your heart was beating, your blood was running, and your lungs were working. A quick person was literally “lively” – full of life – and so working quickly, in my definition, simply means working in an energetic manner. Soon, though, I want to talk to the students about another definition, from the American Heritage Dictionary, which says that efficiency means “acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort”. Surely it could be helpful to them, for instance, to think of doing their writing assignments with a minimum of waste – making sure that every word is absolutely necessary and is put to its best use. Also, they have a ton of homework to do besides mine, and they need to learn to “spend” their mental resources thriftily when writing their essays, so they’ll have some stored up for their other work. And surprisingly, a few of my students actually need to learn to occasionally make less effort, because some of their effort is completely unnecessary. This week, several students, in their desire to do well in my class, wrote outlines for their essays that were almost longer than the essays! This is an example of unnecessary effort – effort that will surely fatigue them and may even, oddly enough, produce a less successful essay than if they had made a brief, economical outline. Their outlines reminded me of the importance of teaching them the value of Paul’s favorite quality this year -- efficiency.