Have you ever been in a social setting and heard a phrase over your shoulder that made you stop talking and try to listen in on the conversation behind you?
I
was at a neighborhood social gathering, way before social distancing became part of my vocabulary, when from somewhere behind me I heard the phrase “shut up and color” and it grabbed my attention. I couldn’t imagine what the subject could be, so I tilted my head and listened in to what was going on next to me. Two of my neighbors were talking about one of their mutual friends, an elementary school teacher in a nearby town. One shared that this teacher, when she was too busy to prepare a lesson plan for the following day, used to say; “Well, I guess my lesson plan tomorrow is going to be to tell the kids to ‘shut up and color.’
My first thought was to wonder how many of MY days in school were ‘shut up and color’ days for my teachers? I recalled a lazy third-grade teacher who used to have us copy the problems on both sides of the math paper. That must have been a ‘shut up and color’ technique? I also remembered having a few teachers when I was older who ‘let us’ work on our homework during class. Was that the high school version of ‘shut up and color?’ Come to think of it isn’t every study hall a ‘shut up and color’ period endorsed by the principal? As I walked home that night I remember thinking that ‘shut up and color’ was really not a good attitude for a teacher to have about being a teacher, and disrespectful towards students.
Now, I know a lot of great teachers and don’t mean to imply that they all use this technique. I also understand that teachers can’t always be 100% honest (particularly during parent-teacher conferences). But makes the ‘shut up and color’ mindset difficult for me is that it combines two negative traits: a lack of preparation combined with the assumption that the kids could be or would be fooled.
But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized that even as adults, we’re told to ‘shut up and color’ more than we think by the ill-prepared people we encounter. Anyone who is supposed to deliver a service or provide support and doesn’t plan ahead and ends up wasting our time might as well be handing us a crayon.
Can you imagine asking the receptionist in a doctor’s office, after waiting 45 minutes past your appointment time, when you’ll be called and having her say ‘shut up and color?’ Oh, that HASN’T happened to you? Sure it did, she just used different words. Can you imagine pulling up to the drive-thru and nothing comes through the speaker and you say “h-e-l-l-l-o-o?’--then from the speaker box the reply is the terse ‘Hold on: ’ll be right with you’ which, translated means of course ‘shut up and color.’
How about waiting for a hair appointment? Aren’t those year old magazines the equivalent of coloring books? We’re so well trained when we see a magazine in a waiting room we know we should ‘shut up and color.’ Even that popcorn they give you at some restaurants is giving you the same message. In fact, I’ve been to several restaurants where they actually let you color on the paper table cloth. Hmmm. Brazen!
If your favorite sports team hasn't won a championship in a long time (I forget THAT feeling, being in Boston), at the end of the season when they say ‘wait until next year’ they are sort of saying ‘shut up and keep coloring.'
Most of us couldn't or shouldn't add a ‘shut up and color’ safety net to our own personal planning no matter how much we see it in daily life. That’s partly because we probably deal with a more sophisticated audience, whether at home or at work, than the teacher who coined the phrase in this example. But the best reason to avoid the use of ‘shut up and color’ is that it usually reduces your credibility in some way. Can’t YOU tell when someone is telling you to ‘shut up and color’? It's an attitude that is pretty easy to see through.
Effectiveness, whether planning for 50 or for 1, starts with great preparation, and while it might include great crayons and a killer coloring book, it also includes a healthy dose of respect for the audience. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, there just aren’t enough crayons around to do that.
