The Magic of Conversation

The Magic of Conversation^[1]

Michael Greenberg

When you=re in a situation where you can do anything you want with your day, the fact is that most of what people do involves talking. I=d say the number one activity that everybody participates in is talking.

Why are they talking? What do they get from it?

Think about the mediums of expression for one second and you=ll see why people talk. I=ve argued for a long time that there are three activities everybody does regardless of culture: make music, decorate things, and talk. The rest is up for grabs. Not every culture by a long shot even has writing. Talking, making music, and decorating things are the three things that seem to be basically hardwired into the brains of everybody, that seem to happen in every group no matter how large or how small. The fact is that people invent their own languages, no matter how tiny the group; all have a very specific way of decorating their pottery or their bodies or something B whatever it is they can decorate, they decorate; and all have some kind of music that comes out of their own experience. To me, this says these are three modes of expression that almost tumble out of the human brain unbidden, as it were. They=re just part of who we are. The rest is technology, so to speak. Writing is technology, no doubt about it. Writing and reading are just representations of talk. They=re not their own language in any really meaningful way. They=re ways of representing sounds we make, words we say, and expressing them in another medium where they can be picked up and manipulated, in a similar way that you write down a piece of music; it=s not the music itself, but it exists as a symbol of music that can be recreated at any time. Words on the page mean nothing until you read them and you reassemble them as words that you might speak and speak them to yourself in an internal dialogue.

The thing that=s so useful about language is that words mean more specific things than colors and musical notes do. Painting and making music are judged by many to be far more expressive and emotional than talking. You can create a beautiful tone poem that evokes a place, or you can create a painting of that place, but when you describe that place in words you start using words like, AThe black chair in the corner of the red room.@ They tell someone exactly what you=re talking about. They can be very evocative too, of course, as in poetry, so they also have some of what music and painting have, but they have a specificity that none of the other modes have. There are certain things you can get at with music and painting that you can=t get at with words, or people would have stopped painting and making music a long time ago. There are certain emotional states that are best understood through music and painting. But there are a whole host of specific detailed thoughts, states of mind, arguments, and other things that can really only be expressed through language.

Talking is the first form of language. It=s the part that=s the quickest; it=s the most interactive. Having a conversation with someone is much more dynamic and flexible than an obviously one-way street like reading because there you have no chance to ask the author your questions. I=ve always judged reading to be more along the lines of watching a movie or television. It=s a one-way ticket B someone=s giving you some information to do with what you will, but you have no chance to ask them to be part of the conversation, except perhaps after the fact. The book doesn=t change, no matter what you think of it. You might change, from thinking about the book, but the book itself is unchanged, whereas in a conversation two people who talk to each other change as a result of that conversation. Both parties change, both people have input, and both people go somewhere with it. And newer forms of communication that have the simplicity of talk B like the way kids are Instant Messaging each other B have a lot of the same attraction that talk does.

For practical purposes a telephone call isn=t that different from talking to someone face-to-face. There are people who are more uncomfortable on the phone, and others more comfortable on the phone. Some miss the visual cuing of someone=s face, others are happy to be without it. But essentially when you talk to someone on the phone, words flow back and forth instantly. With Instant Messaging, there=s the time that it takes to write out words which is much slower than talking. Even if you=re the best typist in the world, typing out words is putting something between you and the thing that you=re doing. It=s not a big enough thing to really get in the way, and sometimes it=s fun because it gives you a moment to think about what you=re saying and it gives you a different context in which to be humorous.

But basically it all comes down to the fact that talking is still the most engaging and visceral thing that people do when it comes to exchanging the content of their minds. No one will say that writing something is easier than just saying it. It might be clearer B you might have a better formulated argument B and to me the real value of writing has to do with the reflection that goes into it. It=s the impediments of writing, the very fact that it=s not a natural expression and that you have to organize your thoughts. Someone writing a ten-page article takes great pains to organize their thoughts into that ten pages. Someone writing a book takes great pains to make sure that over the course of this 300-page argument things flow smoothly. You could have a conversation that easily uses that many words where of course the people don=t take as many pains to make sure things flow precisely, but the conversation has its own flow. One of the lovely things about conversations is the way, even right after having them, there=s something inherently mysterious about them. You can=t necessarily recall the way the conversation evolved; it=s almost like the act of the conversation is as important as the conversation itself. It=s the places you go with the other person as the conversation turns from light things to heavy things, from humor to sadness, and the personal to the general. It=s almost like a little journey.

Even as the pressure of certain kinds of commercial necessity has made people more and more isolated in a cubicle, dealing with a computer, being kind of removed from conversation, there=s still this massive human thirst for human contact. You might talk to someone on the computer for a year, but when you go to actually sign the deal you want to be sitting at a table with them. Why is that? Why is it that there=s something about people that just trusts the person whom they see face-to-face more than the person they simply interact with at a distance? It=s almost as if something about the way they look and act is going to tell you things that the words alone don=t say, which is a widely respected judicial principle in the sense that witnesses are judged by their demeanor, not just by the transcript of what they actually said. The juror always look at the person and how they act; that=s a big part of it. So, too, when kids are left to their own devices, it=s natural for them to spend most of their time getting the most bang for their buck, as it were. A direct interaction with a person is going to be so much more charged with possibilities for learning than an interaction with a book.

Then there=s the relationship between talking and thinking. That=s another reason I think people spend a lot of time talking. The human mind is in a flow that=s very like a conversation in a certain sense. One=s own internal self isn=t neatly organized into chapters and paragraphs and nice conventions of writing. It=s much more like talking, because who you are and who you become over the years of being yourself has, in a certain grand scale, a lot of the same elements that a long, deep conversation has. It=s got its unpredictable ebbs and flows, its odd little moments of pure bliss, its sudden sharp turns into despair, its unraveling in no particular order and yet, at the same time, its character is its own definition. Who you are is this weird accumulation of all those random thoughts you=ve had lined up in a row, the way a conversation is, the way all those things you talk about line up in a row. How you talk and who you are are very much linked together somehow, and you can=t just separate one from another without a feeling of falseness or a feeling of being removed from the reality of the situation.

Certainly, people realize the value of being able to look at something and understand it in a detached, analytical way. But people also realize that a much more important kind of analysis is the kind that takes place in the moment. Take, for example, what goes on in a School Meeting. You have a written agenda where people write down a concrete proposal for something or another. But what really makes or breaks whether that thing flies or not is, to a great degree, the free-flowing, unrecorded, unwritten conversation about it. The ability to talk about something, sort it out in that moment, make some connections, put your arguments out there, listen to what other people say, integrate that, and reformulate your own thinking, is a critical thinking skill which almost everybody needs. Everybody needs to make sense out of their own tumbling thoughts about something in order to tell another person about it, and then be able to understand that in that moment, someone=s going to improvise their own response to those thoughts, and they have to be able to improvise right back. The whole thing has to have a certain clarity to it for you to be an effective person with other people. It really doesn=t matter whether you know you=re right or not; if you can=t explain it to another person, you=re just whistling in the dark. The ability to explain it to another person is the ability to be in the world and to transmit to others whatever you think. In every situation in life, the thing you=re constantly faced with is that improvisational quality of thought B of being able to say to someone else, ALet=s sit down and read this and discuss it,@ and to read it and then to be able to turn around and say, AOkay, here=s how it stacks up to me,@ and to make some kind of framework for what you=ve just experienced, and then to be able to listen to another person=s critique of that framework, to take that critique and then integrate that into what you just thought and either refute it or incorporate it into what your thinking is B all in the moment, all in real time. These are processes that you have to be thoroughly comfortable doing in the moment. The saddest thing to me is inarticulate people. Often it=s not so much that they=re totally inarticulate; it=s that they never think of what they should have said until two days later. Why didn=t they think of that in the moment, when saying it would have meant something? There=s that horrible quality of having missed the moment whenever you=re in that position. It=s not as if you can go back to that person and suddenly bring up the point you missed. The moment has been defined and is over and maybe in the next moment you=ll take the lessons you learned and go on with it, but really the moment is gone and you=ve blown it by being inarticulate.

Human beings are social animals. Almost anything meaningful you can get done in the world is done in the company of others. Even the biggest loner in the world sooner or later takes the product of that loneliness and then tries to give it to other people. You can do a lot of things by yourself, but they rarely have meaning until other people encounter them. The notion of meaning for people comes out of their existence within a group. So it comes down to understanding the most effective way a group communicates. You might say that the group expresses itself through its beautiful sacred dance. True, there=s a deep form of expression there that may not even exist on the plane of words or anything else, which is why the group has kept its sacred dance going for these ten millennia; something about that is real and very important. But at the same time, most of life isn=t about that kind of experience. Most of life is, ALet=s go plant the field and start at the back end with corn and work up to carrots.@ You can=t dance that out, you=ve got to speak it out. And when someone says, AWhy are we putting the corn there? The corn should go over here. Last year we put it here and then we did really well,@ it=s a conversation again. It=s always about saying something to someone that seems to make sense to you, that they might agree or disagree with or they might want to modify slightly, and their saying, AWell, let=s do this,@ and your saying, AWell, let=s do that.@ The whole gist of human experience at every level seems to be someone has an idea and someone else wants to modify it, and someone else wants to modify the modification, and it=s an endless endless modification of things to the point where the original idea hardly matters. It=s all the modifications and their agreed upon outcome that matters.

That=s what a conversation is, essentially. It=s that going back and forth. That=s why, in discipline after discipline, the basic building block of each thing is people talking to each other in one way or another. Even in highly technical disciplines it seems as if there=s still that element. You have to go back and forth. Anybody who writes about something talks about it first; then they might sit down and write about it. The big, huge implication for kids is the importance of talk and being able to converse.

Everyone knows how to talk: even babies all learn how to talk. But talking and conversing are two very different things, and your skill level in those is critical. By skill I do not necessarily mean vocabulary, although vocabulary is certainly part of it. It=s almost like a vocabulary of concepts, rather than the vocabulary of words. It=s knowing how to argue, knowing how to say something in a way that makes sense to another person and then to realize what they=re saying to you and to be able to build the instant framework back to them, the bridge back: AWell, I see what you=re saying, but what about this?@ Conversation requires all the tools of the writer=s trade in the sense that you need to be able to use simile and metaphor, in real ways, because that=s the way people explain themselves, is by saying, AIt=s like this other thing,@ or AIt=s kind of like when the egg turned into the chicken.@ People have to be able to use expressive forms like that and to be able to think of them. Orwell has a whole thing about how the only true similes and metaphors are fresh ones; that similes or metaphors that have become like a piece of stock-in-trade lose their power as similes and metaphors, and a lot of them actually jump so far away that people forget what=s what. For example, people talk about being the hammer and the anvil, but they=ve forgotten that in its original context it=s always the hammer that breaks, not the anvil. People think the anvil is getting the worst of it because they don=t really think about the image enough. You can say, AWe better strike while the iron is hot,@ but it=s almost as if people don=t even think of the iron and its glowing hotness and the fact that you struck while the iron was hot because the iron is actually a piece of molten metal that you=re hammering into shape before it cools down because you=d have to heat it up again. It=s too much. It=s become shorthand for, ALet=s do it quickly.@ But if you really want to put that across, for the metaphor to have meaning as a metaphor, you have to invent them on your own all the time.

I have this inverse rule of importance: the more you can nail down a specific thing, the less important it is as an overall thing in your life. In other words, to me the really important things that are out there are things that tend to be so large that they border on the indescribable, for which describing them is a huge amount of work. Take a subject like history. If you can say that a battle took place on a certain battlefield on October 14^th, 1918, that=s saying almost nothing about World War I. We can agree as an historical fact that this thing happened at this point in time, but in and of itself this is really nothing. It doesn=t tell me anything about the war B why it happened, what the outcome was, why it=s important, why anyone should cares. It just tells me that on a certain day a group of people met and slaughtered each other. And maybe if I supplement it with a few other specific facts B this many people died, this person was considered the victor B it might start to take shape as something. But again, the broad meaning of the war is so much bigger. Then you say, AWell, to really understand the war you have to understand the history before it,@ and it leads you back practically to the beginning of time. Because to really understand why people need to kill each other, you end up in a huge discussion of the whole of humanity, and that little battle just dissolves into this tiny dot, a piece of complete trivia. So, to me, the more you can put your finger on something, the chances are the less important it is in the broad scheme of things. The more detailed something is, the more you can understand something, the less it=s worth understanding. And the more incomprehensible and huge something is, the more it=s worth grappling with. This is a personal prejudice of mine. I think that subjects radiate out from specific essentially meaningless detail to broader spiritual and philosophical generalizations that we make, and that ultimately the whole goal is to work out to those broader generalizations. The only point of understanding the trivia is to work out to the generalizations.

An open, free school is clearly the best environment for perfecting these skills. It=s one of those things where only practice works. You can=t write a book that tells someone how to converse. The only school for conversation is conversation.

The thing about education and conversation B the reason I=ve been saying all this B is that it=s all but impossible to teach someone how to converse. Think of the huge amounts of work that it=s taken linguists to understand syntax and grammar and the rules that govern people=s linguistic communications with each other. And all those rules were arrived at after the fact! It=s not as if the rules were generated and then people followed them. It=s that the rules evolve in this huge complex interface where people are talking to each other and then, with great intellectual struggle, people figure out what was going on and put labels on it, creating the rules, as it were, after the fact in the same way that the earth was spinning around the sun in its orbit long before we gave that orbit a name. We put a name on it and figured out how it worked for our own convenience.

Now writing is a much more formalized form of expression than talking. When people sit down to write, they write paragraphs and sentences and chapters and organize their writing in acceptable forms, like the essay and the short story and the novel and the doctorate. These have very specific forms compared to conversations, which are incredibly more free-flowing and are full of half-finished sentences when you already knows where someone=s going and your eye contact tells you and you interrupt them. Think about that. Think about the usually complex world of written language and how there are all these books out there to teach you the rules as they=ve been defined thousands of years after people started writing. You can study the forms that have been used and you can try to adjust your writing style to follow these forms more or less so that you=ll be comprehensible to your fellow man in written words. Then think about conversation, with its endless crosstalk, interruptions, and abrupt gear shifts, and you=ll realize that there=s no way you can even begin to write out a set of rules for someone that explains to them how to carry on even a simple conversation.

The fact that you can=t write it is that Athe bigger it is, the more significant it is@ thing I talked about. Just because people can do it doesn=t mean you can necessarily understand it. Just because you can do something doesn=t mean you can tell someone else how to do it. People=s brains are always way ahead of their ability to describe their brains B way ahead. There=s always a vast chasm between what you can do and what you can actually describe of what you do. It=s going to take all of people=s combined mental power to even begin to understand how the brain works, even though we all have a brain and we all work it. That=s the key to conversation.

It=s by having zillions of conversations that you discover for yourself thousands of little tricks for getting the other person to understand you. The more you do it, the more you discover, through trial and error basically. AOh, when I said that the person didn=t understand, but when I put it this way he did.@ AOh, at the end of the conversation this person did not understand me. I failed basically as a conversationalist. If I go back next time, what can I do to . . .?@ It=s a mental process. You=re not even thinking in conscious terms about it. You=re just realizing as you tell someone something that they don=t get it, and sometimes you=re very depressed and you realize that no matter how much you tell someone, they=re never going to get it, and that you=ve completely failed in your ability to put across what you want. But you keep going back because life keeps putting conversations back in your face and so you keep having to try. No sooner have you finished one conversation than you=re in another with a whole different premise and a whole different set of rules and you=re just plowing along with that other individual. So much of it is individual; that=s another reason there are no rules. But you keep doing it, and the fact is, like every other human skill, doing it is what makes you better at it. What you end up commanding with articulateness is not just words, in the simple sense of vocabulary, but concepts B the way people are going to talk to you and the kinds of arguments and ways of putting across what you mean.

Here=s where age-mixing is such a huge factor. The fact that people of all different ages mix freely at school puts them in different conversational places in a very clear way. What happens at school is a beautiful thing to see B to watch someone straddling the bridge between having a conversation with me at a very abstract philosophical level and then having other participants in the conversation who are much younger who say, AWhat do you mean by that?@ I expect to explain it in that same kind of language and it=s obviously flying right through them and then someone else might say, AWell, no, what they mean is this,@ and say it in another way, and it=s a completely different simile for the same thing but it operates at a level that a younger person can reach. For instance, when I was trying to teach the idea of negative numbers, I was trying to describe them using the bankbook theory, which seems like the place in my own personal life where I always use negative numbers the most. I was trying to explain that you start with a zero balance in the bank and you can put ten dollars in, but let=s say you spent fifteen. You spent your ten dollars and the bank fronted you five of theirs, so they would say that your balance was minus five. In other words, you owe the bank five dollars, but the way they mark it is as a minus five. Well of course these kids have never had bank accounts and they=re saying, AWhat do you mean?@ Suddenly one girl says, AOh, it=s like with temperature, when it=s ten below zero.@ I had never thought of temperatures as negative numbers, but of course it=s the same exact principle. If you=re fifty degrees above zero it=s a certain temperature, if you=re fifty degrees below zero it=s another one. In temperature it makes much more sense because zero is just an arbitrary point on the scale, from which numbers flow readily in both directions, which is exactly the whole point of negative numbers B that zero is an arbitrary point on a scale of numbers. You can=t really have a true zero any more than you can have a highest number because as much as there=s no highest number, there=s no lowest number once the principle of subtraction exists. So infinity goes out in both directions and zero is just a point in the middle, although it=s really no more in the middle than any other number. It=s totally arbitrary. Of course that opened it up for me and I realized that the temperature scale was a much more living example than a bankbook, especially for a lot of kids who live with temperature every day but don=t live with bankbooks. The point is that her simile was much more apt. She made that leap because we were trying to explain something and this girl chimed in, AOh, it=s like that!@ That, to me, is totally dynamic. That=s like someone realizing the outer edges of a concept and then suddenly fusing it with their own simile so that it completely makes more sense than my original simile to someone else. What we were having was a conversation as much as it was a class. I was trying to explain this concept and she was firing her lack of comprehension to me until it finally became comprehension; but it was her friend=s leap that made her get it, not my leap. There are a thousand examples of that, all of which illustrates the way in which different ages of kids provides different levels of simile and different types of conversation that are appropriate to making a person understand.

The genius of certain politicians, for instance, is their ability to use an appropriate language for their constituency. You might say that they are not employing a very well-reasoned argument, but it gets its point across and that=s what makes them great politicians, while you are just a chump on the side complaining that it=s not a very well-reasoned argument. You can go through all the financial hoo-haw you want, showing that by the year 2007 the Social Security system will be out of money, and that might not roust the votes out, whereas going to old people and saying, ADo you want to live in poverty?@ suddenly has tremendous resonance. A politician might not waste time with charts and things like that when they might just go to people and say, AWhen you grow old, do you want not to have any Social Security? Because I have this whole complicated proposal here that=s a thousand pages long that I think will keep that from happening, the basic gist of which is we=re going to pay more money now so that you don=t have to be broke later.@ That=s what people are going to decide on. There not going to necessarily look at all the formulas that make it true or not because the language of political discourse is not a language of knowing every fact and a reasoned analysis of every possible trend from every possible point of view. The language of political discourse is often the emotional language of, ADo I want to die for a bunch of Serbians?@ It=s not all the finesse of, AWell if you let us set an international precedent,@ or blah blah blah. Or, ACan I sit here in my comfortable home in America while having beamed into my home pictures of thousands of people being thrown out of theirs?@ So then that becomes like, AYes, I do want to die in Serbia because that=s the only way I can keep that from happening?@ All the layers of everything else for a lot of people are just layers. The bottom-line question is often, ADo you want people going hungry? Can you afford more to do this? Do you want to die over here?@ It=s often in very root terms, and all the underneath layers are just sort of irrelevant. What happens when stuff is terribly off course and going in a very bad way? Often it=s the person who can roll all the underlying reasons down into the nice little slogan who actually makes sense of out everything. You might see quite clearly what it=s all about, but can you say it? Can you convince millions of people at the same time? Not always. Often the difference between a great leader and a great thinker is seizing emotion.

So even in the broad world, conversation operates at many different levels. A lot of times with younger people you have to put things in much more direct emotional terms without explaining the whole background of everything. You have to go to the level on which the people themselves want to conduct the conversation. It=s not just an age factor, of course; it=s a maturity factor too. What=s interesting is seeing people conducting the same conversation at all these different levels, because when you have different ages, you=re likely to find that a four- or five-year-old has a much less developed sense of philosophy, but an equally highly developed sense of emotion as you, and because they=ve got a less of highly developed sense of philosophy, the emotion is what you have to deal with. You=re saying, AIt=s not fair.@ You=re not necessarily describing the whole reason it=s not fair, you=re just saying, ALook, when you want to play with the toy you don=t want them hogging it.@ So it=s do unto others as you wish they would do unto you, but in a direct way. AYou have to share this because how would you feel if you were trying to play a game and they wouldn=t let you play?@ AOh, I=d feel bad.@ You put it in terms they can relate to, because to get your point across you have to. If you say to them, ADo unto others as you would have done unto you,@ they=re thinking, AWhat=s that got to do with this? I=m holding a ball here.@ You just said something that doesn=t have the word Aball@ in it, therefore it=s not going to go anywhere in this particular moment of heated passion.

Adults at school have to learn that as much as kids do because a lot of times adults at the school will be trying to explain something in ways that seem reasonable to them and the kids will be talking about almost a completely different thing. Like when an issue will come up and kids will be talking about how it makes them feel when something happens. They might be saying, AI don=t care whether it=s right or wrong, the tone that that other person used with me is unacceptable.@ It=s become about that B now it=s about tone. It=s not about the merits of what you were saying or not. It=s now: ANo matter what you were saying you had no right to take that tone with me.@ And the person will be saying, AWell, I took that tone with you because you weren=t agreeing to this, this, and this, so the only place I had to go was to take that tone.@ ANo. I=m not even going to think about the things you=re talking about if you have that tone with me.@ Who=s right in that situation? I see both sides, because you can=t expect someone to listen to your logic if you=re taking a tone with them that is so disrespectful that there=s no way that they=re going to even proceed with the conversation. So adults have had to learn as much about the emotional priorities of an argument B whether you=re arguing just the argument itself or whether the context is equally important, and all those kinds of things.

A concrete example of that is the whole issue of trust. A person who is trusted can say things that a person who is not trusted cannot. Even if they=re saying the same thing, if you hear the same thing from someone you don=t trust, it doesn=t matter what they=re saying because you don=t trust them. It=s like if the head of the CIA says to the average American, ABlah blah blah,@ the average American is going to be thinking, AHe=s the head of the CIA. I can=t trust him.@ Whereas their own mother might say the same thing and they=re now totally OK with the same exact point, because you trust your mother but you don=t trust the head of the CIA.

Power is another huge motivator for learning how to converse, because a lot of a person=s power resides in how effective a communicator they are, and part of being an effective communicator also has to do with trust. You can have the most eloquent words in the world, but if you have completely lost people=s trust it means nothing. And trust is often not just based on eloquence and rightness, it=s based on the perception of respect and how you=ve treated a person in little ways. It=s such a deep and mysterious concept, like everything else that=s worthwhile understanding. How one earns people=s trust is a completely amorphous thing. Why is one person trusted and another not? The kids themselves would be the first to say that they realize that any adult who=s involved with the school is probably involved for the good reason of wanting to be a part of an enterprise that guarantees them their freedom. Yet, at the same time, they would not trust each person just because you happen to be an adult and happen to be at the school B not at all. You have to earn their trust through a zillion different little things that show them that you=re not just another person condescending to them, or another person who=s suspicious because they wear their hair a certain way, or another person who writes them off because they=re six years old, at the expense of older kids, and stuff like that.

Privacy is another issue that relates to all of this. The quality of a lot of the conversations people have has to do with a weird sense of privacy. The deepest things are often things you don=t feel like sharing with everyone. The things you=re really concerned about, the things you=re really scared of, are often things you only feel comfortable sharing with a select group. The ability to be in that select group and not have everybody else around is key for meaningful conversations to happen. You have to be free to choose who the conversation=s with, and be private in that. Yet, in a funny way, I=ve also noticed at school a counterpoint to that, which is that people will be having what are essentially very private conversations with other people in earshot B for instance, two teenagers having a conversation about something, like about their relationship with their own parents. That=s not a conversation they would necessarily have in front of every staff member, or other teenage friends. And yet, there=s a group of small kids playing ten feet away who are clearly listening to everything=s that being said who, for some reason, are trusted B as if they know that those kids won=t go and tell their parents or other kids. For some reason, they think that those kids will respect their privacy. I see that over and over again, and I=ll be asking, ADo you want to have this in the other room?@ and they=ll answer, AOh no, that=s alright.@ It=s as if they=re in another world, realizing that those kids aren=t going to use that information in some selfish way like one of their contemporaries might. So little kids are often privy to all kinds of conversations that they would normally be nowhere near that are very useful to them, I think. These are also very confusing, so a lot of it is filed away for future reference.

So the way privacy is measured is not an obvious thing. People can be having a private conversation in the middle of a busy room, but they still feel like the conversation is private because they know that no one else will suddenly be in that conversation, for instance, or will offer their two cents= worth or that no one who=s not in the conversation will tell somebody what it=s about. It=s very interesting and complex and I=m not quite sure what it=s based on sometimes. Because privacy is a key element, the right of free movement emerges as a key right. Unless you have a right to choose your space and to control it to a certain degree B like to say, AI=m going to go over here where nobody is and have this private conversation@ B the whole point of conversation is severely diminished. You can=t separate the two. You have to have freedom of movement in order to have freedom of conversation be meaningful.

If people were honest with themselves about the way they learn things, they would realize how often they come into a job and don=t learn what they needed to learn through a manual, but learn throughout the primary vehicles of doing and talking. The way most people learn a complex task is by talking to the people who already do it B who are already in the environment where it=s done B and by doing it. The method of trial and error and communication is still the main way people learn things. All the pamphlets and brochures and other things that are made up to help people learn things, those are just the starting gates. Given the choice, most kids too would much prefer to learn by talking and doing than by secondary ways of doing stuff, like reading and watching demonstrations. They=d rather just do it and make mistakes and talk about them and keep on going. That=s been going on forever; it=s only in the last couple of hundred years that people have at all gotten away from that. Not doing it that way is the aberration; doing it that way comes completely naturally to almost anybody and is a pure outgrowth of the way the human mind works. The lack of real opportunity to converse is probably the single worst thing about the current traditional school system. The whole one-way conduit of teacher, book, question, answer limits so much of it. If people were just in a conversation about a subject, it would be so much better.

I=m amazed by the degree to which people don=t really want to be instructed so much as told a few basic things and then left to discover on their own. The degree to which people will choose to reinvent the wheel, just so that they can feel how the wheel works. The degree to which they=ll choose to just say, AShow me how to use this,@ and then run off and use it and not necessarily ask what the best ways to use it are. People really want to learn hands-on, and because they really want to learn hands-on, a lot of kids B I was this way too B will just ask you for what seem like the most rudimentary instructions. In my own experience, I had a teacher for music theory with whom I really didn=t do that much. I=m sure from his point of view, he taught me nothing of consequence. Yet, what he taught me have been the basic tools with which I=ve been able to memorize as opposed to write down my music. Before I went to my music theory teacher I didn=t have any background at all as to why different tone clusters were called different kinds of chords. By giving me a language with which to describe musical intervals, he let me have a language with which, when I plunk down a bunch of notes, I=m able to tell myself what key this is in and what kind of structure this kind of chord has. Having a name for it helps me remember it later on. I needed a set of names to call things as a mnemonic tool to help me remember all the different sounds I was making. To him, I=m sure, in the grand scope of musical theory, he felt that he had barely scratched the surface with me and had given me nothing. But I really didn=t need someone to help me with my interior dialogue of how to write songs. What I needed was someone to help me with some tools that would help me remember what I=d done, but I didn=t know what to ask for. I just went and asked for music theory because it seemed like the thing to do and once I had the names, it was, AThank you, >bye.@ And then I went on for the next twenty years writing music without any of that other music theory that I=m sure would be lovely to have, that I=m sure goes into deep structure and all that, because that=s not the kind of composer I am.

Each person takes a different thing, but that was a classic example. The most important things to me I=ve taken a smidgen of formal training in, like guideposts. Show me how to do this basic thing and I=ll do everything else. Point me at the machine and tell me how it works and I=ll figure everything else out myself. Have I achieved professional levels of achievement? Yes, I have. Because I think a lot of people do that, and kids do it all the time. They don=t want to be told every last detail. They want to just be pointed in a direction and then fill in the blanks in their own personal way because then it=s their achievement, it=s their thing that they=ve come to. For me, that was a huge educational insight when I finally realized how I myself had worked and I realized that people I considered my great teachers and my great inspirations were people who had simply told me the most rudimentary aspects of what that subject is, things anybody could have told me, things that wouldn=t qualify anyone for great teacher status. AJust show me a simple thing and get out of my way@ is often what makes you a great teacher in a free context because people are really pursuing their own way. In that regard, I figure that I=ve taught people a lot because I=ve showed them one basic thing and then gotten out of their way. To the extent that another person might say, AWell, I=ve taught my students how to do this, this, and this,@ I reply, AWell, I haven=t. I=ve just showed them one thing and stepped away and let them talk about it.@

A lot of the kind of things that people want from you don=t even seem to impinge directly on the things they=re studying. People will be asking your opinion about totally secondary things and then, later, they=ll say, AYou inspired me to do something because you were doing this thing for yourself and it made you happy.@ Just coming in and sharing with them some of the stuff I=ve been doing that had nothing to do with them or with school is the best thing I did, so to speak B just them seeing me doing something, because I=m a person doing something. I have a photo student, and all I=ve done is really shown her the camera, and given her a few of the most basic principles of what I consider photography=s about. Almost everything I think about photography can be boiled down to the fact that when you=re taking a picture you should ask yourself what you=re taking a picture of, and take a picture of that. Of course, I mean it on a deeper level. I mean if what you=re trying to take a picture of is a certain mood, then you have to decide what visual elements will give that mood. If you see a certain thing and realize that it=s beautiful and want to convey that beauty, you have to figure out what it is about the setting and the thing that conveys the thing and then convey that and only that. That=s what will give you effective pictures B if you just step back for a second and ask yourself those questions. Then part two is about really seeing, really looking in the camera and realizing that everything that=s in the viewfinder is what=s going to be in the picture. You look in the corners of the picture and look everywhere and find the balance there and don=t think that there=s anything outside of that that=s going to impinge. There=s going to be no smells, no sounds, no thing right next to the thing you=re looking at for the viewer to see. It=s all going to be right there in the viewfinder and so you have to make sure that=s telling your story. These are basic, simple things that take five minutes to learn, a lifetime to master. Just by saying those few things a couple of times and helping with a few things like that, this person has become an incredibly creative photographer, and she=s only fourteen years old. She=s going to be like I was if she keeps going: when I was eighteen I already had much more of a voice as a photographer than a lot of people in their twenties do because I didn=t get all screwed up with a bunch of other stuff. I just spent my time looking and seeing. And I=m not weighing her down with a bunch of nonsense. I=m just saying, ALook at things,@ because I=m taking it as a given that she=s bombarded with thousands of images every day that are professional images B media images that are created by people who have spent a long time learning how to get that good at what they do, magazines that are shot by the best photographers in the world B it=s already all in front of her. She=s already using all of that, so it=s just a matter of what=s she going to do with it, and I can=t presume to step in and show a bunch of things. I=ve seen all the silly things that people do about the rules of composition and this and that; those rules are the same as the rules of grammar. They=re all arrived at after people have spent thousands of years actually doing it. They=re all explanations afterward of things that exist, they=re not the way you do the thing. They=re a way in which people might say, AThis explains the way everyone=s always been doing it. There=s a consistent pattern.@ But they=re not the way you do it.

I=m always surprised by how much stake people put in the aftermath. When people talk about teaching kids English, they spend all this time teaching them what a noun is and all that stuff. That=s what someone figured out afterwards! If you want to teach someone language, talk to them. If you=re going to teach them how to write, there has to be some framework within which they=re going to want to write or, failing that, something real you can give them to write about where their skill will actually come into play. That=s why most school writing is so atrocious. What is the point? I just don=t understand it. It doesn=t function at any level, except as an exercise in futility. It doesn=t bring anyone closer to real expression, it doesn=t deepen any understanding, it just creates a huge mass of mediocrity. People have to have a better reason than that to organize their thoughts on paper. I think a lot of people don=t find real reasons to organize their thoughts on paper until they=re in a situation when that=s the only way you can organize your thoughts, like when you have to submit a written report. Now, it=s scary to think that people will have never written a report until they have to submit a written report, but in a way if you think about it, it=s like the JC reports and motions that we write all the time at school. You know what they have going for them? They=re totally terse and economical, and there=s no extra prose. When we write up a report of what happens, it usually runs to a sentence or two. The most complicated motions usually run to a couple of sentences. To me, that=s the most important thing about writing: economy of expression. Sure, if you have to write something bigger you=d have to write something more, but you should never lose the fact that each sentence should tell something.

I think all good writers have that in common. It=s all about editing. It=s not about producing a mass of words; it=s about producing the least amount of words that will say the most somehow and making each thing count. And I think this notion of writing a ten-page report B as if somehow the meaning could be listed by the amount of pages B is like telling someone, AWrite a 550-page novel.@ Either the story=s going to be a certain length or not. You can=t box in meaning. I mean, sure, people can put out any kind of mediocrity to whatever length, but is that what you=re aspiring to train people for? People who are creative can create mediocrity fairly easily; the hardest thing to do is to create something really good. I get the feeling that a lot of it is job training for jobs that no longer exist.