School Rules

Questions and model answers

1. Are there any rules at your school or workplace that you follow especially carefully?

   The academic honesty ones, mostly. Not because I'm worried about getting caught — more that the whole thing stops meaning anything if you cheat. If I get a good grade on something I didn't actually do, I've just bought myself a number, and I still can't do the thing. I'm also fairly careful about deadlines, which sounds boring, but late work creates problems for other people. One person being late pushes everybody else's feedback back by a week. Beyond that, honestly, I'm not especially rule-bound. I've eaten in the library more than once. The rules I follow carefully are the ones where I can see who gets hurt if I don't. The rest I treat as advice, which I realize is a convenient position to hold.

2. Would you rather have a few strict rules, or a lot of flexible ones?

   A few strict ones. Flexible rules sound better on paper, but in practice nobody knows where the line actually is, so everyone spends energy guessing. You end up asking permission for things that were probably fine. At my old school the dress code was basically "dress appropriately," which meant one teacher would send you home and another wouldn't notice the same shirt. That's worse than a strict rule, because it's unpredictable and it feels personal. With a small number of clear rules you know exactly what you're agreeing to, and you can plan around them. The trade-off is that strict rules occasionally catch someone unfairly. But I'd rather have a rule I can argue with than one that changes depending on who's enforcing it.

3. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a rule you had to follow.

   Our library had a rule that you couldn't reserve a study room for more than two hours. Which is reasonable in principle — rooms were scarce and people were hogging them. But during exam period I'd get kicked out mid-way through something, spend fifteen minutes packing up and rebooking, and lose my train of thought entirely. Twice in one week I lost a room to someone who booked it and never showed up. I did complain, and I was wrong about the fix. I wanted the limit removed; what they actually did was let you extend if nobody was waiting. That solved it without bringing back the hogging. I still think the original rule was too blunt, but I understand now why they didn't just scrap it.

4. Do you think students should be involved in making school rules?

   Yes, though not in the way people usually mean. Putting a few students on a committee mostly produces students who agree with the staff — you've selected for the ones who were going to say yes. The students who'd actually challenge something don't volunteer. What actually helps is asking everyone which rules they break and why. That data is more honest than any meeting, because breaking a rule tells you something a vote doesn't: where it stopped making sense. The phone policy at my school was ignored by literally everyone, which was information nobody acted on for three years. I'd say involve students in identifying which rules are failing, and leave writing the replacement to the people who'll have to enforce it.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.