When I lived in Canada for a while, I was always a little bemused by the Canadian approach to speed limits. The maximum allowed speed limit on the QEW and the 400-series roads around Toronto is 100km/h and yet if you actually do that speed you just about get run over. The locals routinely cruise the highways there at 120-130km/h and there’s no issue.
I like to drive fast, but it used to frustrate my sense of logic when I’d ask my Canadian friends why they didn’t observe the speed limit.
“Oh, it says 100,” they’d say, “but nobody actually drives at 100, we drive at 120.”
“Why don’t they just raise the speed limit to 120″, I’d ask.
“Because then people would just do 140″ came the reply.
Apart from being a really strange view of human nature, I’d ask, “Why don’t you just post the speed limit that you actually want people to observe and then enforce that, instead of having this vague gray area where people did what they aren’t supposed to do on the understanding that nobody really minds?”
This same logic struck me today when I saw a great tweet by Bill Ferriter, an outstanding educator from North Carolina who shares and blogs a lot of his great work on Twitter. I spotted this tweet this morning…
I followed the link, and sure enough, it’s an outstanding resource rubric for helping students understand how to leave a good blog comment.
You can read the entire Twitter conversation here…. https://twitter.com/betchaboy/status/296808814647320576
