Delphic Maxim 103: Give a timely counsel
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
103. Give a timely counsel
It’s exam time at universities — a period at the end of semester when students become overloaded with stress and pressure. I was lucky as an undergraduate: I’ve always been good at mentally lowering the stakes so I feel cool and collected going into high pressure situations. It helps me avoid being flustered — there’s a bit of counsel for you if you happen to be in that situation!
Anyway, the subjects I teach at university tend to not have exams. I think exams are pretty gross ways to assess learning anyway, but I understand they serve a particular purpose. I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with them. Instead, I deal with essays. And one of the more crucial things about essays is giving timely advice (or counsel).
The reason this comes to mind at exam time is because I see a lot of students posting to the rants Facebook page of my university. This is a student-run page where people submit anonymous rants, and it’s the best way to take the pulse of the students. And one of the most consistent rants is that students don’t get timely feedback on their assessments.
Now, let’s set aside the obvious logistical issues with feedback (ie. we get given 2–3 weeks to turn it around, and this can be difficult when you’re marking 60 long essays and trying to provide decent feedback). The bigger issue is that the counsel needs to be useful for the next assessment. And I don’t mean in the sense that they get it at some point beforehand — they need to get it at a useful point beforehand, a point in time where they can read the feedback and turn it into a practical piece of knowledge.
This is a lesson that really applies across the board, not just in educational institutions. The advice we give to people should be useful — there’s no use saying ‘I told you so’ unless a similar situation is likely to arise in the future. Plenty of these maxims deal with our relationship to our communities, and it makes sense that we should offer support, advice and wisdom to the people around us. This maxim is about ensuring that advice comes at a time that allows its receiver to make the most use of it.
Last week we read the maxim give a timely response, and in that I suggested that we set expectations, we slow down the speed of communications, but we also recognise when there are expectations for a response. Well, this week is less about managing the expectations of another, and more about how we look at a situation and structure our advice accordingly.
After all, counsel isn’t always sought, sometimes it is offered. In those circumstances when we are offering counsel, we need to be conscious that it is welcome and useful — that there’s a strategic dimension to it. For teachers, this is always about helping students improve their work from assignment to assignment. For anybody else, the logic is the same: how can you help the people you’re supporting to improve on whatever comes next?
Counsel is both prospective and retrospective. It may be that an opportunity doesn’t present to warn, but instead to educate after the fact. Timeliness here is about providing that conversation appropriately close after an event, rather than kicking it off into the future. This makes the twists and turns in life learning occasions — it smooths the path for all of us.
So give timely counsel — keep an eye out for opportunity, be gentle about it, and don’t hesitate if you think it’s necessary.
