Dealing with Spring Butts
Back in my Year 1 residency I met a fantastic person who introduced me to the term spring butt.
A spring butt is someone who just cannot sit down in class and is always looking to go beyond or volunteer for a project. Spring butts are a necessary part of any class and some, hell, without them nothing might be done. I admit that I can be spring butt on group projects that need a leader or an assignment that is dragging out beyond realistic expectations.
I am stunned, though, how the spring butt mindset evolves into the exceeding expectations role. Symptoms of this type of evolution are:
- Overworking the project
- Over communication
- Creeping well beyond the scope of a project
- Info dumping
I am sure there are other symptoms, but if you see these taking place, you have a Stage 5 Spring Butt on your hands. Now what?
Like most adult learners I have a busy life with work, community involvement, family and friends. I balance all of my activities with school. This makes for a substantially tight schedule and leaves little room for time wasting. So, when I get into my online classroom and see an unusually high volume of posts, I get worried that I’ve missed something. If investigating those numerous posts leads me to read a lot of inane chatter, information dumping and spring butt activity, I get flustered.
This level of overactivity is common for online classes, especially for extraverted people. However, it quickly goes beyond friendly to counterproductive. Here are a few strategies to help with different situations
Spring Butt on your Learning Team
- Develop rules of conduct and appropriate measures in your learning team charter
- Concisely define the projects and seek agreement from everyone
- Set your boundaries for interaction and activity clearly
- Call out scope creep as often as it occurs
- Disregard the overload, info dumping, inane or irrelevant dialogue
Spring Butt in the General Classroom
Things here are diffused over several other classmates. In fact, in this realm of the classroom, it can be a good thing to have a spring butt to carry conversations forward.
- Disregard the overload, info dumping, inane or irrelevant dialogue
- Ask for restatements of too much information
- Don’t instigate or initiate the spring butt unless you are ready for the challenge.
Robust classroom interaction is key to my success as an online doctoral student. I enjoy the banter, the dialogue, discussion, debate, ideation, etc. My personal approach is to set boundaries and expectations with myself and my learning teams. To be a good class citizen you must take part in the environment. I am always remind to temper my enthusiasm for the topic, assignment, and discussion with patience and scholarly discourse.
If you have a good spring butt story, I’d love to read it, please comment.
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