Ambiguity

As a student I love courses with a clearly defined goal, rubric, and assessment process, I have come to rely so much on clear goals and objectives that I become very frustrated when they are not present. I have often complained to professors, “What are you asking us to do?” and the response has always been, “Figure it out.” I could never understand how this was allowed to happen because my definition of good teaching was always somehow associated with clear expectations. I had come to rely on these clear expectations as a crutch to my learning. I needed them to guide me, to tell me what to do.  I struggled through courses that had any sort of ambiguity, and often felt that the professors were not given me the support I needed.

I have come to realize I was getting exactly what I needed all along. I understood this was true a few weeks into my internship. I was told to accomplish a task that I had absolutely no background knowledge on. So I set out with a smile on my face but confusion in my mind. I had no idea where to start but by sitting and trying to work through the issue I found what seemed to be a good solution. I failed, I failed again. I then proceeded to ask a huge amount of stupid questions that were unnecessary and eventually figured it out.

This was when I realized that I needed to be able to find a solution to problems that were not well defined. I finally understood why there was ambiguity in my classes, because there was in life and I needed to learn to deal with it.  As new administrators we all will be forced to deal with ambiguous tasks and so we might as well learn to deal with them even when this type of learning doesn’t always fit into our definition of learning objective.