Zak's Weekly Musings (January 9, 2022)

September 3rd, 2022 will mark the 55th celebration of H Day in Sweden. H Day might sound like a hallowed day to commemorate a great victory or mark the legacy of a great statesman, but it is, in fact, a day to remember Högertrafik”, the Swedish word for “right traffic.” 

Until 1967, Sweden drove on the left—opposite from neighboring countries Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Swedish drivers who traveled abroad got into car accidents because of their unfamiliarity with the traffic patterns, as did tourists who came to Sweden. Additionally, Swedish automotive companies made cars that were meant to be driven on the right so they could be more easily exported to the rest of the right-driving world – kind of like Swedish pop music, which is sung almost exclusively in English, the Swedish market is not large enough for Swedish car companies to cater to – but many of these cars found their way onto Swedish roads, which resulted in low visibility and higher accident rates. 

To combat these issues, the Swedish government pushed for a changeover. Following a months’ long marketing campaign, which included, of course, a pop song contest (Håll dig till höger, Svensson was the winner), the country was finally ready to move traffic to the right. Between 1:00a-6:00am on the morning of September 3rd, all non-essential traffic was banned from the roads. During these five hours, the government changed some 360,000 road signs. 

At 4:50am, a horn blared and a loudspeaker announced, Now is the time to changeover! Sweden now drove on the right. On this first day, only 157 minor accidents were reported. Experts suggested that changing to driving on the right reduced accidents, and, within just a couple of days, accidents were at an all-time low in Sweden, with a 40% drop in insurance claims within the first year of the changeover. 

In the years preceding H Day, the Swedish government noted that with more cars on the road and more and more of those cars having the steering wheel on the left, traffic accidents were only going to continue to rise. So, rather than slap a band-aid on a growing, systemic problem, they chose to take one of their country’s sacred cows head on. 

Last week, I wrote a bit about how we can be part of those 20% of people who actually reach their resolutions. Well, if any of us is going to be part of that 20%, let’s not just ask what changes you want to make, but ask what needs to change around you to help bring your resolution to life. So often, there are casual conditions present that actively work against us meeting our goals – I mean, if achieving our goals was just a matter of will and want, we’d always achieve them. 

When you think about your classroom, what are the sacred cows holding learning back? When I was in the classroom, I found that I had to do away with grades and summative deadlines in order to optimize learning. Whatever structural barriers are in your way, let’s remove them together. Book time with me, so we can figure out how to create the conditions wherein your goals are attainable. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can remove structural barriers in your classroom, even if they’re still present in the school, check out the work around going gradeless in a traditional grades school from Starr Sackstein found under the “Feedback, Grading, and Assessment” tab in the Resources Archive