Rule #9

My office door has a multitude of signs, notices, and other documents of various interest and concerns. The text in particular that causes the most reading is a pair of papers called “Tilton’s Laws of the Academic Universe.” This document has been on my office door since I taught at the Ohio University of Lancaster. I believe that it was partly inspired by Gibbs’ Rules from NCIS (the most important of these rules is #29 “If you need help, ask!”), partly inspired by the Crazy Dog Guide to Lifetime Happiness, and partly inspired by the classic song Everybody Free (To Wear Sunscreen). I usually would throw out these rules during teaching, but I’ve never really created a history of how thes rules came to be. I feel it is essential to do so as there are currently about 210 rules. Some are written down, some are spoken, and some are just scrawled on the inside of my mind. There’s only one way to tell the story of the rules, and that is with Rule #9:

“Knowledge is best applied with a sledgehammer.”

Rule #9 is the first rule that I used in the classroom setting, specifically “Introduction to Multimedia Production.” It was used in the context of consistently reminding students to back up their work, log out of the programs they were working on and turn off of their computers before they left the classroom. The students needed to do this because the lab they were working in was a classroom and students from other courses could mess up the work they were doing.

It was one fateful day that the students came in to discover that the computers were wiped clean of all student data. There was a glitch in the system, and the IT department needed to do a system restore to most of the lab computers on campus. Most of the students were finishing up a small project and lost all of the work. They were upset because none of them saved their work on a backup drive.

I grant you it was a week’s worth of work, but they were complaining up a storm. I calmly explained that I understood why they should be upset. However, I also told them that I suggested multiple times to back up work on a semi-public computer. It was during this impromptu lecture that I said something along the lines of “there are times when I teach, and the lesson is lost to the massive amount of information I push on you. Sometimes, a lesson is best learned through a shock to the system.”

This statement was eventually shortened to Rule #9 after several times referring back to the original event in the classroom setting. I found myself using more of these axioms throughout my teaching career. I decided after moving from one academic institution to another that it would be helpful to put together a list of the more common sayings that I’ve used.

This list is the current one that hangs on my door today.