From Word To Word

As you will probably have gathered on your own by now, very few of my interests lie in the realms of science or mathematics, but this was not always the case.

I was very interested in botany and entomology in my early teens.  During the summers that I spent with my father and brothers at the hunting camp on Manitoulin Island, I used to go for long walks, taking specimens of anything that seemed interesting.  I would dissect, pin, arrange, bottle, and collect things.  I would grind them and make infusions out of them and even paint with them as  pigments.  It was amateur science mixed with some strange instinct to herbalism and alchemy, all born out of months spent in the midst of nature without much else by way of distraction.

I was also fascinated by some of the more or less philosophical questions that mathematics raises.  I can remember pondering for hours about what zero was, for example.  If it was not a number, then I wanted to know what it was precisely, and this was my first flirtation with the idea that nothingness is actually necessary to thingness, not just as a placeholder, but in essence.

Unfortunately, as I have recounted to many people over the years, these kinds of interests were soundly beaten out of me by the very people who were supposed to be teaching me about them.  One mathematics teacher, for example, came by my desk one day to ask what exactly I was doing.  I showed her my notebook and explained that I was trying to work out the nature of zero.  She told me to stop fooling around and start doing my homework.  I never did any kind of mathematics again except under compulsion, and I dropped the subject entirely as soon as I was able.

A whole semester of memorizing the parts of a cell, for reasons that were never explained to me in any way, had a similar effect on my interest in biology, and my chemistry teacher the following semester actually told me, only two weeks into the course, that I should drop it because I was most likely to fail it anyway.  I ended up taking Science in Society instead, where we baked bread and wrote poems about scientific principles and mostly did very little of anything.

Since that time, however, I have found any number of books that have appealed to the initial interest that I had in science and mathematics, as rudimentary and uninformed as that interest was.  Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings was the first such book I can remember.  Its story engaged me so thoroughly that it inspired me to read further about dopamine and to learn more about chemistry than I ever did in any class. Its attraction for me was that it situates a particular scientific problem in its narrative context.  The reader is invited to identify with the scientist and with the patients and with the story.  The science becomes meaningful because it is a part of a story, and it was this story and that caused me to go beyond Sack’s book to some of the more technical details of his work.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage my students to read Robert Adams’ The Land and Literature of England if they are interested in the history of English literature.  As opposed to most history textbooks, it employs an interested narrative rather than trying to achieve some kind of disinterested objectivity.  It revels in the anecdotal and the tangential, even when it admits that some of these things are a little suspect historically.  It makes the historical study of literature into a series of tales that could be shared over a few pints, assuming that you are the sort of person who would share literary stories of any kind over a few pints, which I must assuredly am.  I find, invariably, that this narrative of English literature not only entertains and informs the students who bother to read it, but that it also encourages them to go to the historical documents themselves.  The story not only helps them to learn the basics.  It also creates the desire to learn more deeply.

I am writing about all this now because I have just finished another of these books:  Colin Tudge’s The Secret of Trees.  The front cover of my edition proclaims that it is “a love-letter to trees,” but it is more accurately a love story about trees, a story that goes back millions of years and is by no means finished yet.  Tudge does not at all shy away from the technical details of his subject, giving introductions to plant biology, natural history, and botanical classification, among other things, but neither does he dwell on them.  They are simply included as elements of his larger narrative, and this narrative, written as only a lover can write, inspires its readers to love trees too.  More than that, it gave meaning and interest to some of the mere facts of biology that were inflicted on me in highschool.

If some teacher, any teacher, had thought to tell me the story of how mitochondria, and other organelles as well, probably originated as independent simple cells and then invaded other single cells in order to form complex cells, this would have lent a whole lot more meaning to the apparently random shapes that I was labeling in my notes.  If anybody had taken the time to explain how plants use hormones to respond to their environment, I would have had a meaningful point of entry into chemistry.  Yet everyone was so busy trying to transmit information that they failed to make the information meaningful.  Everyone was too busy, too scientific, too objective, and too educated to tell a story.

Yet stories are how we learn, certainly as children, and also, if we are willing to admit it, as adults.  I understand that scientific papers and mathematical proofs serve their purpose, and I am not suggesting that we do without them.  I am only arguing that these things remain mostly meaningless without the context of their stories, and I am also perhaps suggesting that the increasing irrelevance of academia for many people has to do with its inability to remember and recount the stories that give its work meaning. It is these stories that inspire people to learn more, inspire them to love what they learn, and so these stories need to be shared more often.

As a teacher, I do not prepare a lesson.  I prepare only myself.  I prepare myself to teach, to model, and even, perhaps especially, to fail.  I do not offer my knowledge.  I only offer myself, with my knowledge certainly, and with my experience, but also with my failures and inadequacies.  No amount of lesson preparation can covera  poverty of self-preparation, and this self-preparation is not a matter of a few hours the night before class.  It is a matter of a life lived.  I prepare myself to teach with every moment that I live, for good or for ill.  I am always preparing to teach, and I can only hope that I am preparing well.

I was reflecting on this past semester and regretting that I was unable to host the class at my house for a party afterward, when I began to recall the occasions when I was myself  invited as  a student into the homes of my teachers and professors.   In university, I can remember attending  a few post-course parties at the home of Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy.  I have also had coffee at the home of several of my professors, including Kenneth Graham and Michael Keefer and others whose names now escape me.  I even had one professor, one of those names that I cannot now remember, who conducted one of her classes in her home.  There were many other occasions when I met with my professors socially in more or less public venues, of course, but there were only these very few when I was invited to meet with them in their homes, and these few remain significant to me even today.

As I was thinking about these things, I remembered suddenly an earlier time, almost certainly the first such time, when my highschool Latin class was invited to a Saturnalia party at the home of our teacher, Magistra Bell.   I had taken her class almost by mistake, mostly because it was not French, which still seems like very good reasoning to me these many years later.  I soon discovered that I quite enjoyed Latin, however, not the subject per se, though it was far better than French, but the class itself, the way it was taught, the way that I found myself learning in it. At the time, I would have identified this enjoyment as a product of Magistra Bell’s academic accomplishments.  She had her doctorate, which was not very common among my highschool teachers, and she had published several books in her subject area, including the second unit of our curriculum, the Cambridge Latin Course, and two collections of Latin literature, Amor et Amicitia and Imperium et Civitas.  I have since had the misfortune, however, of encountering many people who, despite any number of degrees and publications, are completely inept as teachers, and I would say now that Magistra Bell’s success as a teacher came from something else entirely, from the same attitude towards her students that motivated her to invite them into her home when no other teachers would.

It was not that there was anything magical about this invitation, of course.  Merely inviting students to your home will not make you a good teacher, and not all good teachers are able to invite their students into their home in this way.  Rather, it is the attitude that this kind of invitation reveals that is significant, an attitude that respects students, as Magistra Bell did, not as peers in knowledge, which could only be a false and unproductive respect, but as peers in learning, as fellow learners who were beginning on the same journey that she was still following, even if she had progressed much further along it.  This kind of respect does not minimize the greater knowledge and experience that the teacher brings to the process of learning, but neither does it assume that this knowledge and experience makes the teacher essentially different from the learner.  Rather, it understands both teacher and learner to be performing the same function, though at different stages and in different ways.

The result of this respect, of this understanding, is that the distinction between teacher and student is no longer of the kind that should prevent them from interacting with each other in ways that go beyond a formal and hierarchical relationship.  While there is a level of respect that will always remain, the relationship between teacher and student becomes of a kind that is open to a certain intimacy and informality, becomes of a kind that is able to offer and receive an invitation, even an invitation to the home.

This way of relating to students is not without risk, certainly, but it is a risk justified by tremendous value.  I recall vividly walking into Magistra Bell’s house, and I recollect, perhaps falsely now, that there were bookshelves that she had built and window coverings that she had woven and pottery that she had thrown, and I remember the books, the many books, and all of this produced in me an impression of someone who was learning and growing and doing things herself, quite apart from the role in which I saw her every day.  Her invitation to me, to come to know her beyond the classroom, even in such a small way, was a real gift, a gift of a sort that had never been offered to me before and has very seldom been offered since.

All of which is to say that I owe Magistra Bell a considerable debt, and that I have now recalled it, and that I hope in the future to repay it by offering the same gift to my own students in turn.

Learning requires failure.

In order to learn, it is necessary that we come to a place where we fail, where are be confronted by our failure, so that we will be forced to learn, before anything else, how to learn, because it is precisely when we fail that we are forced to go beyond ourselves to our teachers and our mentors and our peers and our resources and our technologies, and it is then that we can begin to learn.  If we are never allowed to fail, we will never learn how to learn.  Failure drives learning.  Learning requires failure.

Let me give you an example.  Something like twelve years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pie pastry.  I had tried to make it more than once, and I had observed my mother making it any number of times, but none of my attempts had been terribly successful, and I wanted to learn to do it properly.  I found several recipes.  I compared them.  I tried them.  In every case, there was something not working quite right.  The results were edible, but the dough was never very workable.  The process was frustrating.  The product was unattractive.  I was failing.

So I decided to go to a master: my paternal grandmother, who made two pies every weekday for many years of her life.  She lives on Manitoulin Island, and the next time I was there I had her lead me through her process.  I did exactly what she did, side by side, every step of the way, and somehow hers worked and mine still failed.  The consistency of her dough was perfect.  She could flip it over, fold it into sixes, and cut designs in it, then unfold it onto the pie like a work of art.  The consistency of my dough was at first too dry and then, after a little water was added, too moist.  I could get it into the pans, and it tasted fine, but it was certainly nothing to take to the county fair.

I despaired, but I persisted, and I experimented with every recipe I could find: with shortening or with lard, with egg or without, a dash of vinegar or not, less water or more, one temperature or another.  I failed and I succeeded, to one degree or another, time after time, and I began to find something that worked for me, though it is not something that will likely work for you.  There was no single secret.  There was only trying one thing or another, watching one person or another, and practicing, much practicing, so that I can now fold my dough into sixes and cut designs in it, though I rarely bother.

This is not the end of things, however, because learning by failing never really ends.  The other day I saw a cherry pie with the thickest, most unbelievable double-crust, so I talked to the woman who had made it.  She explained how she cuts the top crust about an inch too wide, so that there is a healthy bit overhanging the whole of the pie.  Then she tucks the overhanging pastry under the edge of the bottom crust, so that the edge is now three layers thick, and she squeezes these layers together to form her crust.

Of course, I should hardly have to say by now that I needed to try this technique for myself.  I should also hardly have to say that I failed.  Tucking the top pastry under the bottom was a little more delicate than I thought, and my first attempt could only have been called, even with all possible sensitivity, misshapen.  The second was much better, and future attempts should only improve as I get practice.

This is how learning works.  It works through failure.

I had the opportunity to appear on CFRU’s Family Matters show this morning, talking about fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  Though both of my kids are preschoolers, which probably disqualifies me as a homeschooler in a technical sense, there are few enough homeschooling fathers that just my interest in the idea qualified me to appear on the show.  I am rarely as satisfied with what I say as I am with what I write, and this was the case again this morning, but it was an interesting experience for me, and I do not think that my comments misrepresent me.

Those who are interested in hearing the audio can find it in CFRU’s  Program Archive, but the site does not provide links to individual programs, so you will need to select “Sunday: 2009-11-21″ from the initial list and then “8:00:00 – Family Matters” on the list of the day’s programs.

I wrote recently about how knowledge without friendship is deficient, and I was reflecting, in a conversation with just such a friend, that friendship makes knowledge sufficient, at least in part, by deflecting it from its course.

When I am thinking with a friend, when this thinking is taking place between us as an expression of our friendship, our conversation will always find itself drifting from whatever course that we had in mind.  Whatever purposes and aims that I might bring to the conversation, they always find themselves distracted by the response of the friend, perhaps only for a moment, perhaps for a longer time, perhaps for the rest of the night, and this distraction calls me to think differently, apart from the course that I had planned.

In other words, the thoughtful and considered response of the friend does not allow me to remain under the illusion that my thinking is sufficient, but opens me to the other courses that it might take.  This kind of conversation takes the closed and linear character of my all too monological thinking and opens it, diverts it, distracts it, merely by exposing it to the kind of dialogical thinking that is peculiar to a friendship.  It reveals that thinking is never finished, if it is ever truly begun, just as the conversation at the heart of a friendship is never finished.  It pushes thinking off course in order that it might really become thinking.

Not just any dialogue will suffice here, not just any conversation.  Most kinds of dialogue are capable only of agreeing or disagreeing with a thinking that remains stubbornly on course.  Thinking does not in fact take place here, because it has become external to the conversation.  It is the subject rather than the product of the dialogue.  This kind of dialogue does not know how to do anything but stay on course.

It is only the  conversation at the heart of a friendship that produces thinking capable of getting off course, of discovering what it might still become.  It is only this conversation that allows thinking to find its way on the way to thinking.  This is why it is necessary to cultivate meaningful friendships rather than being content merely to check a box on some social networking application, because the quality of our friendships will determine the quality of our thinking.

Ivan Illich says this: “Knowledge without friendship that delights in the friend’s knowledge is deficient.”

This is a profound truth. Knowledge finds its sufficiency only when it is shared between friends. It finds its sufficiency only as the medium through which friendship is fostered and expressed, as the opportunity for friends to delight in one another. Knowledge certainly exists apart from such friendship, but it is a poor, sickly, deficient sort of knowledge, a mere pedantry, lacking in everything that makes knowledge a delight.

This kind of knowledge, and these kinds of friends, have been the great pleasures of my life. I will not try to name them all, because there have been many of them at many times and in many degrees, but those who have shared this pleasure with me will recognize what Illich is describing, and hopefully they will also accept my sincere gratitude for their friendship, for their knowledge, and for their delight. There is little that I value more.

As I wrote a few weeks ago in a post on teaching literature and teaching reading, I will be asking my students to learn a little differently this fall, to learn without essays, without exams, without traditional lectures, even without mandatory texts.  Instead, they will be going with me to a used bookstore, where they will buy five books of their own choosing.  They will then be responsible to read these texts and to blog their responses to this reading on their own blogs, which will all be aggregated with the class blog into a blog planet.  In order to provide a model of what this kind of reading and writing might look like, I will be reading and writing along with my students in exactly the ways that I am asking of them, but I would like them to have many such models, to see the many approaches that skilled and interested readers might bring to a text.

So, I am extending an invitation to you, whoever you may be, to read and write along with us this fall.   You may do so very simply.  You need only to read what you would be reading in any case, without even the very rudimentary guidelines that I have set for my students, and then to blog about what your reading inspires in you, whenever and however often you feel so inspired.  Just create a category for your responses, something like Literature or Reading or whatever, and then send me the RSS feed for the category so that I can include it in the blog planet.   Of course, if this seems like too much commitment, you can also participate just by adding the blog planet to your reader and commenting on the posts that interest you.

If you want, you can even accompany us on our trip to the bookstore, for which I will post details shortly, or you can join us for our open discussions, which will be held during two or three of our classes this semester.  I will also be asking some of you personally to make guest appearances in our class discussions, and if you would like to participate in some way that I have not yet imagined, just let me know.  I am willing to explore anything that might make the learning process more open and more accessible.

My hope, in this invitation, in you, in your participation, is that it will produce precisely this openness and this accessibility.  I want to turn the focus of the learning process away from the requirements of the institution and toward the passions and the disciplines of reading and writing in the world, a reading and writing that you and I produce every day.  I want my students to find themselves engaged with people who read and write, not because they have something due tomorrow, but because they find something valuable in the very acts of reading and writing.  I want them, not merely to join a class for a semester, but to join a community of readers for life.

If you are at all interested in being involved with this project in any way, please let me know just leave a comment here or email me at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

Note:  This post has been changed several times to reflect some technical changes that I have been forced to make.

I have decided to approach my Survey of English Literature II course a little differently this fall.  It will be my fourth time teaching the course, and I have already experimented with it quite heavily the past two times I have taught it, but I have never been satisfied with the degree to which it, or any of my other courses, encouraged students to learn and read and write independently.  I always felt that I was perpetuating the very kinds of educational dynamics that I find so abhorrent.

A short while ago, however, Dave Humphrey posted on modes of lecturing or, perhaps, if you will pardon the neologism, on modes of unlecturing.  He was responding to another post by Kuis von Ahn, and I will not go into the details of the discussion, but I was particularly struck by something he wrote: “Let your own students produce the things they actually want. Let them build examples needed to teach these concepts. Let them critique and collaborate on the work, improving it iteratively. And let this process of collaborative learning and teaching become what happens in the classroom.”

What Dave is describing here is far more than collaborative teaching or experiential learning or any of the other classroom techniques that come in and out of fashion.  It is an approach that puts the onus for learning entirely on the students.  The students are responsible for determining what it is that they need to learn, for how it is that they would learn this best, for how their learning might best be supplemented, and for how this learning should be shared with their peers.  The teacher, far from abdicating the role of teacher, is then forced to teach truly, to enable, facilitate, encourage, model, and provoke the process of learning that the student has chosen.

Dave and I have discussed these ideas before, and we had a chance to discuss them again shortly after he posted. During this conversation, he made several suggestions, and I suddenly realized what it was that I wanted to do with the course this year.  Let me explain.  Then you can all tell me exactly how and why it will cost me my career.

The first day of class will be much the same as any other:  introductions, administrative details, etcetera.  The second class, however, will be held at a local used bookstore, where the students will be asked to buy five books from the time period covered by the course.  These books can be of any length and of any genre and of any variety.  They need meet only a single criterion, one unilaterally enforced by myself: No crap.

The students will then be responsible to read the books, think about them, reflect on them, and then post responses to them on a group blog that I will create for the class.  They will also be asked to comment on each other’s posts.  There will be no assigned format for these posts, but they will have the same criterion as the texts: No crap.

The classes, which may or may not be held in the classroom on any given day, will be primarily constituted by discussion.  The subject of this discussion will begin with the texts that the students are reading and with the posts that they have been writing, but it need need be restricted to these things.  Like any useful discussion, it will probably range in far different directions, though I will try to keep it circulating around questions of literature as much as possible.

I will also participate in this whole process.  I will buy five books, read them, and post on them.  I will comment on other posts.  I will participate in the class discussion.  Though my participation will necessarily be different at times, because of a differential in knowledge and experience of the subject that we will be discussing, and also because my goals will consciously include those of the teacher, I hope to encourage a discussion that permits each student to take the initiative in respect to the books that he or she has chosen, rather than relying on me for direction.

My goal is simple.  It is not to train literary scholars or literary critics.  It is not to produce academics.  If it were, my approach would be worse than useless.  My goal is to provoke my students into reading, into thinking, into writing, into sharing, into conversing.  It want to model for them an approach to literature that is based on passion and desire.  I want them to encounter something, even if it is only one thing, something that they love, something that will cause them to keep picking up the books around them in the hope of finding something else that they will love.

I want to stop teaching literature.  I want to start teaching reading.

Dave Humphrey just directed me to a post by Seth Godin on how unemployed college students might create for themselves a kind of informal post-graduate program.  I love this idea, even if my own such program would differ substantially from Godin’s in its content.  I am very enamoured with the idea of engaging in a program of intentional learning that does without the institution and without grading and without imposed curriculum, though I would detach this program even further from the necessity for employment than Godin does.

In any case, I thought I might list the elements that I would myself include in such a program.  Feel free to suggest things that you think I may have missed.

1. Volunteer for a local non-profit organization.

2. Have a regular walk through your neighbourhood. Try not to avoid eye contact with your neighbours. Explore the shortcuts and the back alleys.

3. Organize and facilitate a regular community event: an art tour, a pick-up sports night, a film festival, or a knitting bee. Keep at it, even if nobody comes at first.

4. Begin practising one new skill: gardening, cooking, sewing, woodworking, or whatever. Do not start by taking a course. Just begin and learn as you go.

5. Read at least one non-bestseller book a week. Operate on the no-crap principle. Read slowly. Read well. Think and talk and write about what you have read with someone else. Do this over coffee in the morning or over wine in the evening.

6. Watch at least one non-Hollywood film a week. Have it replace your normal television screen time. Do this with someone else if possible.  Have an actual  conversation about what you are watching.

7. Create at least one polished piece of writing a week, whether it be a letter, a blog post, a newspaper article, a poem, a shortstory, or a contribution to your favourite wiki. The goal is not to publish. The goal is to articulate your thoughts clearly and artistically.

8.  Apprentice yourself to someone part-time for free: a butcher, a stonemason, a chef, or a landscaper.  Keep at it for at least a few months.

9.  Have coffee or dinner weekly with someone who you could call a mentor.  Listen attentively.  Say only what is necessary.

10.  Have coffee or dinner weekly with someone who would call you a mentor.  Listen attentively.  Say only what is necessary.

11.  Start doing without some indulgence.  If it is easy, start doing without another.  Repeat until you start to feel at least a bit deprived.

12.  Try to begin a correspondance with a well-known figure whose thinking or art  has inlfuenced you.  Assume that this is possible until you learn definitively to the contrary.

Well, there you have an even dozen elements that I would include in a post-graduate unschooling program.  I may post other elements in the comments if they come to me.  Feel free to do the same.