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I've been attempting to write a "Learning Goal" for my full-time internship, which I'll be doing this Spring. We're supposed to have a metaphor for ministry, which acts as a lens through which we view our learning goal. Out of the learning goal come specific objectives, out of which come strategies. The thing is, I know what I want to learn - I want a decent grounding in Anglo-Catholic liturgical practice. I want exposure to and practice in parish administration and experience with pastoral visits. But that's not a buzz-word-filled edu-tastic sort of personal mission statement. Mission statements and learning goals and whatnot have always sounded fake to me. They sound like the kinds of things that people sit around getting paid too much to come up with. "We exist to competently foster high standards in methods of empowerment such that we may continue to conveniently initiate high-quality solutions to stay competitive in tomorrow's world." Looks great on a poster, but says nothing. (Thanks to the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator for that.) This project does have more depth than that, but I'm having trouble anyhow. It's as if my entire person rebels against buzz words and "actionable objectives." Not that I dislike objectives that can be achieved...I just hate the sort of language that describes things as "actionable." It's like "dialogue." When did dialogue become a verb? I thought it was a noun, a word for a conversation between two persons or (preferably) two characters in a play. A dialogue is something you have, not something you do. Another word that makes me cringe is "modeling." When I was a kid I was involved in modeling...I assembled little plastic models of tanks and planes and whatnot. Terribly thin and severe looking women also model...they wear clothing no real human would be caught dead in, and walk down fashion runways with angry looks on their faces. But now modeling has been hijacked by the corporate world and, worse, by the slightly warmer and fuzzier corporate world of education and the church. Bishops love the word model, as in "We want to model a new approach to ministry." I get mental pictures of thin, angry looking bishops stalking down the runway and handing out sandwiches to homeless fashion photographers or something. What ever happened to the good old-fashioned "demonstrate" or the simple "show?" I have to go now. I need to dialogue with my classmates and model my learning objective so that we can actualize our actionable objectives. |
