correcting vs criticizing

So, I got home from a run today and was stretching.  My roommate, who is dating a dancer, mentioned to me that he told her that the stretches I was doing were actually bad for me.  We argued for a few minutes because she likes to argue and I don't like to be wrong and they were the very stretches that my coaches recommended to me.  She said that boyfriend said that athletes stretch wrong yadda yadda yadda. I didn’t believe him, but that’s not the point.  What struck me was not that she was critiquing my stretches; it was that she was telling me it was wrong without replacing it with what was right. As I was thinking about it later, it caused me to reflect on an experience I had at BYU.  I was there the summer of the non-lds missionary scare.  It’s all a little fuzzy, but there was a summer when it was widely advertised that some Christian missionaries were coming to Utah to try to “save” the Mormons.  None of my roommates were home the day our door got knocked.  I don’t remember what the missionary said to me, only that he didn’t have anything to offer as a replacement for what he considered to be wrong in my belief system.  He thought it better that I believe nothing rather than the gospel. 

 

I think it’s kind of an eternal truth that you can’t replace something with nothing.  You have to reprogram yourself when you’re breaking old habits.  You find new, healthy habits to replace the old ones.  So I was thinking of this in terms of my job (because that’s what I do in my free time, think about my job).  I should not expect my students to change if I don’t help them find good behavior to help them replace the bad behavior, right?  This is an idea that’s still marinating in my head.  Right now I’m trying to think of counter examples because I’m kind of a nerd.  I wouldn’t tell a student that he was wrong without giving feedback about what was wrong and how to make it right.  That would be ridiculous.  (I actually I have been guilty of that when grading tests and it is ridiculous.)  Hmmm.  That’s certainly something to think about.

 

My triathlon is just 6 weeks away.  I’m getting pretty nervous, as I don’t know how to swim yet.  I might be the only one to doggy paddle the whole .5 miles.  I wonder if I could just dead man’s float the whole way. J   My worry is not that I won’t finish, my worry is that it will take me so long that they’ll close up the race before I do.  That probably won’t happen, but I’m going to step up my training just in case.