Wisdom Equation

Knowledge and wisdom are seemingly intertwined ideals. Knowledge is defined as facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment. Using these definitions, you can see that while they are connected, they are not exactly synonyms, and you do not necessarily have wisdom if you have the knowledge, but you cannot have wisdom without knowledge. Knowledge is essential, but it is only a third of the wisdom equation.

Experience + Knowledge + Good Judgement=Wisdom

To truly become wise, you have to combine your background knowledge with experiences in the area of knowledge, and then you must make good decisions.  You can know EVERYTHING on a topic, but make poor decisions or lack experience. Likewise, you can have experience as say, a teacher, but lack the knowledge to be wise/successful. You didn’t have the needed preparation. The most difficult to swallow… You can have all the experience in the world, you can have unlimited knowledge, and still, make incredibly horrific, awful, terrible, no good decisions. 

As educators, we have so much access to “tools”, every workshop always gives you tools to add to your toolbox. Every book promises to give you the newest, most awesome additions to your toolbox. We almost have information overload! We have so many new fancy gadgets, resources, and ideas! We have to have the right tools for the job, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing!

Our biggest obstacle is knowing which tool to use in each circumstance that we face! 89.678435% of the battle is knowing when to use each of the tools at our disposal! Even with all of the tools in the world, if you don’t know how to use the idea, strategy, program, resource, etc, it doesn’t do any good. We all know people in our lives that have all the resources at their fingertips, yet they obviously don’t know the best strategy for using them! I think in education we sometimes become resource-rich and skill-poor. 

This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Having incredible knowledge is great! It is like having a ton of tools in your toolbox! It’s the application of this knowledge or “tool” that leads to wisdom. You have to gain wisdom to know when to use that certain resource, strategy, or skill. Remember, with even the most basic tools, a master can create a masterpiece. A person with limited “tools” but the needed wisdom can accomplish much more than someone with unlimited “tools” and little wisdom! 

Let’s use a golf analogy. I am a very average golfer. If you play with me, you can definitely tell I have played before, but I’m not going to be mistaken for Tiger Woods any day soon! I could buy the newest, best technology, and my drives are still going to be anyone’s best guess on where they might end up and I’m still going to miss more 8 foot putts than I make! On the flipside, give Tiger Woods my 13-year-old clubs and he is still going to be really stinking good! Another way to look at it. If Tiger and I were going to go play a round of golf together. I could have the maximum allowed 14 clubs in my bag and Tiger could probably just pick one club and there is a decent chance he would still beat me! (Although, I think I could put up a good fight in this scenario!)

Having the right tools for the job is important. I am not trying to diminish the importance of having the appropriate “stuff”. Even the most skilled teacher will struggle if they don’t have the basics. I am trying to make the point that having all of the newest, “best”, coolest isn’t going to magically make anyone the best teacher in the world. I will go as far as to say that having too much of these things will actually decrease effectiveness as a teacher. Information overload is real and can be paralyzing. As educators, it can be prudent to pick a couple of strategies, resources, etc, and become an expert on those! Focus on what’s important, and become really stinking good at those things!


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