One of the students brought forward an awareness last week. They noticed that dishes were being used and left around the school. When we reflected on our current queue of items in awareness I suggested a solution to try out.

Rather than come up with rules to problems, we have a longer term process that moves issues from “awareness” to a process of “implementation” then to “practicing” and finally onto “mastery”.

The implementation step is one where we try out solutions for a week at a time. Coming back to it every week and seeing how people feel about the solution. If we like it, we move it to practicing, if it isn’t working we send the issue back into awareness for future consideration. Once a solution is working for us and has been “practiced” enough to be second nature we then agree to call it “mastered”.

Snake Bite

The solution we decided to try out came from a collective house I used to visit in Brooklyn, NY. The house mates found that people would leave dirty dishes out (much like the problem we are having). Their solution was to play a game called snake bite.

When ever you see a dirty dish that has been left out you place it in a special container or area with other orphan dirty dishes. The dirty dishes collect there until someone witnesses another person leave a dish somewhere. When anyone catches an offender red handed they call out “snake bite!” which then means that the dish-leaver-outter mush go and wash their abandoned dish along with all the other orphan dishes.