How to Cite Point of Learning Transcripts

I’m delighted that Point of Learning transcripts sometimes work their way into academic papers. As a former high school English teacher who helped with more than a few research papers, I’m happy to share some examples of popular citation formats.

Note: In all formats, 2nd and following lines should be indented (search hanging indent on your word processor).

APA

Horn, P. (Host). (2020, October 29). Maestro JoAnn Falletta [Audio podcast transcript]. In Point of learning. HornEd, LLC. https://www.hornedconsulting.org/podcast-transcripts/029

MLA

Horn, Peter. “Maestro JoAnn Falletta.” Point of Learning Season 4, Episode 29, HornEd, LLC, 29 October 2020, www.hornedconsulting.org/podcast-transcripts/029.

CHICAGO   

Horn, Peter J. October 25, 2020. “Maestro JoAnn Falletta.” Podcast audio transcript. Point of Learning. HornEd, LLC. 4:29. Accessed Month DD, YYYY. https://www.hornedconsulting.org/podcast-transcripts/029.

*Note: “4:29” refers to Season 4, Episode 029. Episode numbers for Point of Learning are always included in the transcript. Seasons start every May beginning with 2017, so Season 4 began in May 2020.

Maestro JoAnn Falletta Transcript (029)

MICHAEL J. PRATT: Hello, my name is Michael Pratt, and I am right now in my 43rd year as Conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra. You are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Pete was a member of the violin section of the Princeton Orchestra from 1993 to 1997, and he accompanied us on two of our early European tours, to England in 1994 and to Central Europe in 1996. I was a student with JoAnn Falletta years ago at the Aspen Music Festival and it was apparent even then that she was a rising star. I can’t wait to hear what she and Pete are going to discuss today. So welcome, and enjoy the show! 

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director JoAnn Falletta.

JOANN FALLETTA: As the conductor, your job really is to create a landscape where the musicians can excel. That’s the job: always offering different possibilities, different ideas, coaching in a way, encouraging the musicians to stretch themselves, or to go for it, or take chances, be free.

[VO]: We talk about why everyone should make music …

FALLETTA: Playing an instrument changes people. It helps the brain develop. It helps you learn self-confidence, it helps you learn what’s important, what beauty is about, why things that are great take time. A person who is playing in a band or an orchestra learns very quickly that you’re a team player, and that’s important. And it’s important to listen, it’s important to be patient, it’s important to work at things.

[VO]: Why conducting means learning all the time …

FALLETTA: As a conductor, you’re on this path always of learning. You’re always learning and you’re always getting closer to what it’s about. So that sort of unending road, I think, is a beautiful way to live your life. I love that idea that I will keep studying and learning things and being surprised by things—seeing them for the first time, even though I’ve conducted it many times. That’s the process of a conductor. You start learning and you just continue to learn.

Want some Point of Learning in your research paper?

[02:50]

[VO]: I don’t think it’s going too far to say that, as a rule, and across the board, folks here in Sunny Buffalo are fans of chicken wings, the Bills, the Sabres, and JoAnn Falletta. If you look at the timeline of Buffalo that greets travelers at our airport, you’ll see Falletta’s inauguration as conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1999 just a few ticks after the invention of the Buffalo wing at Frank and Teressa’s Anchor Bar in 1964. It’s not just that Buffalonians are proud to have appointed the first woman to conduct a major American orchestra. JoAnn Falletta is a Grammy Award -winning artist who has been compared to some of the greatest conductors of the 20th century—legends like Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, and (one of her former teachers at Juilliard) Leonard Bernstein. Maestro Falletta is Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and also the Connie and Marc Jacobson Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina and Artistic Adviser to the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra. She has guest-conducted all over North America and around the world, including many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, and South America. With a discography of nearly 120 titles, Falletta is a leading recording artist for Naxos. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has served by presidential appointment as a member of the National Council on the Arts during the Bush 43 and Obama Administrations, and has received many prestigious conducting awards. She has introduced over 500 works by American composers, including well over 100 world premieres. In 2019, Performance Today named her Classical Woman of the Year, calling her a “tireless champion” and lauding her “unique combination of artistic authority and compassion, compelling musicianship and humanity.” She is a fierce advocate for young conductors, and for the power of music for all people. Finally, I’ll add as a radio junkie who has mainlined National Public Radio since I was in sixth grade that Robert Siegel, host of NPR’s All Things Considered for 30 years, ranked his 2013 interview with JoAnn Falletta as one of his top 10 favorite music interviews of all time. So I was pretty pumped to get the chance to talk with JoAnn earlier this month! We spoke on October 1st at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s administrative home in Clement House, a stunning 106-year-old Tudor Revival mansion on Delaware Avenue near downtown Buffalo. The music room where we sat was designed especially for the original owner, Carolyn Jewett Tripp Clement, who played harp, piano, and organ. Check out the video companion to this episode for a look at this beautiful space. Details about all the wonderful music I get to include will be available on the show page for this episode, but for now, everything until the last few minutes is presented courtesy of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta, Music Director. 

[06:23]

HORN: JoAnn, thanks so much for joining me today. As somebody who first attended a Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra concert when I was 4, and who first saw you on the podium at about age 17, in 1992, in Denver where my father was living at the time, because he thought it was important for his violinist son to see a first-rate conductor who was a woman—you were conducting what was then known as the Denver Chamber Orchestra—it’s a real thrill and an honor to speak with you. 

FALLETTA: Well, thank you, Peter. It’s great to speak with you. And you just gave me a wonderful memory, because the Denver Chamber Orchestra was actually my very first job. I was still in school at Juilliard going back and forth between school and Denver. I fell in love with Denver and I loved that orchestra, but that was my very first position as music director. And I have so many good memories of that. So I’m glad you were part of that.

HORN: Me too. Because we’re talking here in the fall 2020, I wanted to start by asking about another trailblazer who has fans around the world, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died two weeks ago. She was famously passionate about opera. She said in one of the documentaries about her, “Most of the time, even when I go to sleep, I’m thinking about legal problems. But when I go to the opera, I’m just lost in it.” The love of opera that she shared with Justice Antonin Scalia was one of the commonalities that helped the two forge a strong friendship despite their often diametrically opposed views on the law. Do you have thoughts that you’d like to share about Justice Ginsburg specifically, or about the power of music as refuge, or about music as a force that brings people together? 

FALLETTA: Well, let me start with the Justice first, because I had the great privilege of being with her twice in my life, and I will never forget that. One was at Chautauqua—

[VO]: The Chautauqua Institution is a nonprofit education center and summer resort located in the westernmost corner of New York State, about an hour and a half southwest of Buffalo.

FALLETTA: —where she had been there to speak, and there was a little reception to meet her. I was told very strictly by the host that I was to spend 30 seconds only because there was an enormous line, as you can imagine—it was enormous, to say hello to the Justice. And so: just introduce myself to her and say a few words and leave. So I did. I tried! I said a few words, and when I told her I was the conductor of the BPO, that was the end. All she wanted to talk about was music! And she was talking about how she was brought up listening to music and how much it meant to her and about the opera … but of course I was violating my 30-second time there and I could see the hostess really, you know, just furious at me behind the Justice, but she didn’t want to stop talking about music. She loved music. And I saw her then when she came to Buffalo and spoke at UB Law School. And I was actually backstage with her when our string quartet was playing a Mozart quartet. And I was watching her as she was listening offstage. The two of us were offstage. And you could see that she went almost into another place when she was listening to music. It was as if she drew in and just focused on what she was hearing. It was very moving to see that. So for her, music—I wouldn’t say it was a respite. I mean, it excited her, but it was a world where she could exist maybe on another level. And I’m not surprised, because you know, she was so brilliant—I mean just talking to her, I don’t think she forgot anything about the law or about a case that she was involved in her entire life. She knew every detail. And I think part of that comes from music, and loving music. There’s a tie-in between someone like her and the attention to detail that she had, and her absolute passion for music.

[10:54]

HORN: Because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I want to focus on different dimensions of learning music and learning about music. You have spoken about your belief in the importance for young people to learn music not just for the purpose of becoming musicians, but for their development as full human beings. Would you say some more about that?

FALLETTA: I believe so strongly in this, Peter, and I’m happy to talk more about it. I mean, one of the things I tell parents and grandparents is I really believe the greatest gift you can give your child is an experience with a musical instrument, playing a musical instrument. And that’s not because I want to create more and more and more musicians! But playing an instrument changes people. It helps the brain develop, and you don’t even realize your brain is working when you’re learning music because it’s so joyful. It helps you learn self-confidence, it helps you learn what’s important, what beauty is about, why things that are great take time. A person who is playing in a band or an orchestra learns very quickly that you’re a team player, and that’s important. And it’s important to listen, it’s important to be patient, it’s important to work at things. And then the end result is so amazingly beautiful for them. So I think it changes people. Most of all, it gives people a sense of the world in a different way, an interest in other people, an interest in other music, because with music there’s never one way of doing it. There’s never one way of singing. There’s never one way of playing. So young people learn that there are many voices in the world and they’re all beautiful, and that kind of interest in humanity and just sharing with other people and acceptance of other people, embracing other people comes from an experience in the arts—especially music.

[13:11]

HORN: Some of my favorite experiences as a human being happened as a member of an orchestra, early on with the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra here in town and continuing through college and beyond for a few years, so it’s possible that I have a little bit clearer understanding than people who have never played in an orchestra about what the work of conducting actually entails—it’s possible that I do!—because I do think for lots of folks it’s a little bit of a black box, like, What exactly is she doing up there? So to put a finer point on that, what is the difference for you in terms of your own work in preparing to conduct a world premiere, like Ken Fuchs’ Spiritualist (for which you won a 2019 Grammy, incidentally). It’s a new work that nobody’s ever heard before, right? How do you imagine that? What is your process as opposed to getting ready to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth, which almost everybody has heard before—and you’ve got to have classic recordings or performances that have made an impression on you. How do you approach that in terms of your preparation?

FALLETTA: It’s a very interesting question. You know, it’s in some ways very much alike. I mean, as the conductor, your job really is to create a landscape where the musicians can excel. Sometimes people tend to think of the conductor as the boss on the top of the triangle, but it’s not like that. The conductor is someone who’s always offering different possibilities, different ideas, coaching in a way, encouraging the musicians to think out of the box, or to stretch themselves,   or to go for it, or take chances, be free. And that’s true whether you’re playing a Beethoven symphony that they’ve played already maybe several hundred times, or a new piece by Ken Fuchs. It’s all about going back to the score and seeing what the composer is telling us with those notes on the page. But when we have the opportunity, as we do with a new piece of music, of having the composer with us, that is something very special because all of a sudden, we become part of that compositional process. I usually ask the composer to stay with me on the stage and talk to us, you know, about things that he’s not sure of, or things he’d like to try again, or things he’d like to change: a different tempo or a different dynamic level. That’s really very interesting because we are living in the moment in that piece. It’s almost as if it’s coming to life and we’re part of that. But in a way we have to do that even with Beethoven and Mozart, we have to find our voice in that music. I mean, we know what the composer has written, and we’re very true to that, but there’s a lot of space for individual interpretation, in every single musician’s part and in the conductor’s overview of a piece.

HORN: So for example, you receive the score that—since we’ve mentioned this piece Spiritualist [by Kenneth Fuchs]—it’s a single piece, or is it a collection?

FALLETTA: It was a collection on the disc.

HORN: Is there any kind of like MIDI version of that that’s sent along with it? Are you looking at it? Are you just looking at the score and beginning to hear it? Do you go to the piano and play?

FALLETTA: Well usually for me, I like to try and hear it in silence, because that means I can actually screen out everything else, and hear in my head how the piece is put together. Usually composers send you a MIDI, but I have to confess, I don’t like to listen to it because—

HORN: It’s terrible!

FALLETTA: You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t have any color in it, you know? So you’re sort of listening to something electronic that doesn’t have color.

[VO]: Aight, so MIDI is short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which is basically a way for different electronic instruments and computers to talk to each other. What you’re hearing is an example sent to me last fall by playwright and composer Tom Dudzick for a show we were working on called Christmas Over the Tavern. This was the only recording he had because he was reworking this number from a solo to a duet. It’s almost impossible to tell from this MIDI recording that the song would eventually be quite beautiful!

FALLETTA: I mean, [MIDI has] gotten better as we’ve gotten more sophisticated about doing it, but to me, imagining the sound is the best way. But even the composer will tell you, as much as he’s imagined the sound and as much as he’s probably played it on the piano and heard it on the MIDI, when the orchestra plays, it’s like it’s technicolor all of a sudden. All of a sudden, it’s a different thing. It’s a different language. He recognizes that it’s his piece, but it comes alive.

[18:21]

HORN: In addition to the decades-long relationships you’ve established with orchestras in Buffalo and Virginia—not to mention the four years you were also Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland—you’ve also guest-conducted dozens of orchestras all over the world, from throughout the U.S. and all over Europe as well as South America, Africa, and Asia—pretty much wherever there’s an orchestra. I’m interested in how you go in for a relatively short stint, like a week, and establish rapport with these people who don’t know you and you don’t know them. Of course, top-tier instrumental soloists, they also tour all over the world—a concert violinist or pianist, right—playing concerti and making music with strangers. But as a conductor, you’re there to lead this group, so it’s almost like the CEO of Apple going in and taking over Microsoft for a week. If you’re only with a group of musicians for this short time, what have you learned about how to establish that rapport that enables you to be able to communicate with a new group of people—even leaving aside for a moment whether you happen you speak the same language when you’re talking about the music?

FALLETTA: It’s a very intense and wonderful experience. And I’m lucky in that when I go and guest-conduct, I usually spend a week with the orchestra. So it’s more time with them than a guest pianist might have, or a guest artist who comes in just for a day or two and plays. So I’m working with them. And I can be in a place where I know really no one, especially when I go to Europe to an orchestra, I might not know anyone in the orchestra. But it is truly true that music is an international language. And the idea is that we all know the music, but we don’t know each other. And how that happens, I think, for me, it’s in an environment of great openness. When I step on the podium for the first time, I am interested in them. And I think if they know that, they’re anxious to tell me who they are. Now, they don’t say that in words, but they’re anxious to— I might say to them, “I’ve heard so many wonderful things from my colleagues about this orchestra. I’ve really been looking forward to working with you.” Then they want to show you how wonderful they are—and they are! And your reason for being there, of course, it’s always the music and them. So if you’re involved in listening to them, if it’s really a team, it can be an incredible experience. I mean, I suppose there are conductors—maybe very famous ones who go to an orchestra with an aura of such grandeur that there can’t really be a connection because they’re on a platform of greatness. But if you go as a colleague, and as someone who believes in this music and loves this music and wants to make music with them, and appreciates what they’re doing, and leaves room for them to do it their way— Sometimes people ask me about conductors and what they do. Just as you said, a lot of people don’t know what a conductor does. Does the orchestra really need you? Are they looking at you? And I try and tell them that they might think about a director of a play. Let’s say the director’s directing Hamlet and he has all of his very wonderful actors there. And each one of those actors has a very strong idea of their role. You know, that Hamlet may be committed to an angrier approach to his dilemma, or another one may be to a more private and confused approach. The director who has an overall idea of the piece wants all of that to shine through. He wants the talent, or she wants the talents of those individual players to be there, to be front and center. So it means that the conductor has to have flexibility. And I think when I go to an orchestra I don’t know, I think that I want them to tell me something about themselves, and about how they play this piece. One of the prime examples is when I go to Europe a lot, they ask me to bring a piece by an American composer. Very often, they want to hear Gershwin, or Copland. They want to play that. They don’t play it that often, and it’s really fun for them. And they play it in a different way than we do in the United States, since we kind of toss that music off, because we know the vernacular, you know, it’s just the way we talk. That’s how we play this music. For them, they approach it like they might approach a Brahms symphony. And it’s very different—

HORN: So maybe a little stricter time?

FALLETTA: Stricter …

HORN: Or something like that. As opposed to swinging something?

FALLETTA: The swinging is very difficult because it’s something that you have to not think about, and Americans do it without thinking about it. [The European players] think about it, they want to do it. So it comes across, in a way, as more thinking going on than actually just living the music. But it’s very beautiful, because what they’re conveying to me is a respect and a kind of very special feeling they have for this music that they rarely appreciate. And I like to let that bloom. If the cellos really want to play a section like a Mahler symphony, and it’s Gershwin and maybe that’s not how Gershwin would have heard it in that way, it’s okay, because they’re translating that music into their vernacular. And I think that’s what’s beautiful sometimes about accepting gifts from the orchestra and giving them gifts back, and giving them ideas. Sometimes I will say, you know, “Generally we move it here a little bit.” Okay. And then they’ll try it. So it’s really a conversation that we’re always having—not always in words. I mean, sometimes we do speak to each other in words, in a rehearsal of course. But very often it’s just the way I’m leading them and they’re responding. It’s a very intense conversation.

[24:44]

HORN: This past February, the Irish composer and conductor Eímear Noone became the first woman to conduct the orchestra at the Oscars, an awards show that has been going on since 1929. So this was the 92nd Oscars, first female conductor. My ears perked up when I heard Michel Martin interviewing her on All Things Considered, partially because of the subject area, and partially because Michel Martin is one of my favorite interviewers. Martin cited the study by Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy finding that in 2019—just last year—in the 21 top orchestras in the U.S., only 16 out of 142 conductors were women. You, of course, were one of those 16, becoming the first woman, in fact, to lead a major symphony orchestra in the U.S. with your appointment here in Buffalo in 1999. When Noone was asked about this disparity, she said she gets asked the question all the time—and having watched just this morning your interview on CBS Sunday Morning from the early ‘90s, I know you’ve been fielding this question for at least three decades, so I’m trying not to ask it in particularly this way! So I wanted to share two other things that she said that stuck with me. One was that she felt when she was studying that she didn’t get the same encouragement as her male peers. I know that you had to campaign for about a year to be able to—

FALLETTA: —to be accepted into the program at Mannes [School of Music].

HORN: To pursue conducting, so that’s got to resonate. But then the other thing that I had never thought about that’s particular to conducting—she said there’s only so much preparation and practice you can do without an orchestra. Part of learning to conduct entails failing very publicly. So you hope you do it in a rehearsal and not at the concert, but even in a rehearsal, you’re doing it, failing, with 80 to 110 people, whatever—it’s a large group of people who are there! As a learning process it’s really much more public than just about anything I can think of.

FALLETTA: You hit on one of the oddest learning processes there are, and that is conducting. Because one, you really don’t start conducting when you’re in grammar school or high school. I mean, you don’t do that. So the first time you’re actually in front of an orchestra, if you’re lucky, you’re in college, as I was. I mean, I was maybe 19 years old or something, but I’d never conducted before. My first impression when I lifted the baton and gave the downbeat and the orchestra played was one of amazement. I didn’t even know if they would play! I mean, I never experienced that.

HORN: This thing [the baton] works!

FALLETTA: Yes, that’s it! I never experienced going like this [gestures a downbeat] and having the beautiful sound of Scheherazade all around me. I mean, it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. But you’re right. It’s exactly that: you’re doing it for the first time, but all of these players in this orchestra, even though they’re young people too, in school, they’ve been playing since they were four or five years old. They are experts. Already at the age of 18 and 19, they are experts. And you are the only person who is doing it for the first time. But you have to learn that way. I mean, you go into the experience having studied and studied and studied and studied by yourself. And then, of course, you go in and it’s completely different than you thought. The first time I conducted, in this one time I’m telling you about, I was just so amazed at how beautifully the orchestra was playing that I was listening to them, and I was getting slower and slower and slower. Finally, they stopped playing and they just looked at me and my teacher was so angry. I remember he said, “You’re supposed to be leading them! You’re not supposed to be listening!” So, how do you learn that? You learn it by making a lot of mistakes. And hopefully there are positions like assistant conductors and associate conductors, and we have an apprentice conductorship that we’ve developed here in Buffalo, where we invite young conductors who are in graduate school to come and spend many weeks with us and to actually work with the orchestra, and to see from it the inside. How does an orchestra think? How do they work? What is successful? What are the difficulties that come up? And the fact that they’ve spent so many weeks with us prepares them, I hope, for the time that they are having their own first performance with their orchestra. But you learn while you’re doing in a way, I think this is wonderful. And I hope you agree with me, because as a conductor, you’re on this path, always, of learning. You never really get to the end where you say, “Well, now I know Dvořák Ninth. I don’t have to worry about it anymore!” No, you’re always learning. And you’re always getting closer to what it’s about. Listening to the musicians you learn different ideas, just through listening. You get closer to what the score is. You know, a conductor once told me that we never really know the score. We just get a little closer to what it means every time we study it. That sort of unending road, I think, is a beautiful way to live your life. I love that idea that I will keep studying and learning things and being surprised by things—seeing them for the first time, even though I’ve conducted it many times. That’s the process of the conductor. You start learning and you just continue to learn.

HORN: Are there scores that you try that you try to do by heart, as opposed to—I mean, I imagine if it’s a brand new piece … you know, well, I actually don’t know the answer to that. I’m going to stop talking!

FALLETTA: There are certain things that I don’t do ever by memory—a concerto, for instance.

The soloist needs to feel that if anything goes wrong, we know where we are and I can help the orchestra get back on track by calling out a number or something like this. (That rarely happens. I’ve never done that.) But with symphonies that I know well, I do like to conduct by memory because it means that I can actually have more visual contact with the players. They’re always having visual contact with me, but I can  have visual contact with them. That’s more continuous. And I feel that we get a more vibrant product because we’re connected more closely to each other. So I enjoy doing that. I can’t do it with every piece, but I do enjoy doing that. And there’s always a connection in any case.

[31:59]

HORN: To return to the difficulty that you had in terms of advocating for yourself to be taken seriously as a conductor in school, to be able to enter the program as a woman. With Noone’s comments here, in terms of education or training or access—you just mentioned the apprenticeship program—what needs to change in order to continue to have more women, more people of color on the podium, so it’s not just this field that’s been dominated by White, mostly European, men for so long?

FALLETTA: Well, the most important thing, I think, is to help those people earlier in their career path, not when they’re in their 20s already and trying to find a job in an orchestra, or trying to become a conductor of a symphony. They need guidance. They need help when they’re younger, even in middle school, high school … when they’re just forming their ideas about music and forming their ideas about conducting—that’s when they need mentorship programs. And I’m seeing more of them start—for men and women now. But I don’t think there are enough. That’s why we founded this program in Buffalo. So essentially people can come up, not knowing everything, not knowing how to conduct this piece, not knowing why this tempo is the right one, but learning in a safe environment. As you mentioned, when you’re performing, it’s public, and yet there you are learning. So we try to bring people into the situation earlier where they can watch, they can try with an orchestra that knows the situation and knows that we are part of the learning process for them, and we’re helping them. We’re going to do next summer, for instance, a week-long conducting workshop for women only, to give them time to see about themselves, how they feel comfortable in front of a conductor and what to expect from the orchestra.

HORN: Will that be the BPO?

FALLETTA: The BPO is going to do that this summer.

HORN: Wow!

FALLETTA: So it’s exciting for us to do that. And one of the wonderful things that young conductors tell me when they leave our program—they’re usually finished with school and auditioning for jobs—they say, “Since we spent so much time with the BPO and getting to know everyone and inside life at the BPO onstage with you every day, we will never be afraid of an orchestra again!” That’s saying a lot, because young conductors are rightly afraid! They’re just afraid to do this for the first time. And these people have that experience that at least let them live inside an orchestra for a while and realize, “Okay, I could be comfortable here. You know, I think I could fit in. I think I could learn and be able to do a job at the beginning that will help me develop.” So that’s what we need to do.

[VO]: Danish composer Carl Nielsen himself titled his fourth symphony “The Inextinguishable” to, in his words, “indicate … what only Music itself is able to express fully: the elementary will of life.” So I’m going to go ahead and let this lil’ bit allegretto movement roll on beneath a brief word from Lyceum, the education podcast consortium of which Point of Learning is proud to be a member. Right after that, back with the finale of my conversation with Maestro Falletta. 

ZACHARY DAVIS: Hi, I’m Zachary Davis. I’m the host of two podcasts: Ministry of Ideas, which explores the philosophy behind everyday concepts, and Writ Large, a new podcast about the books that changed the world. I love educational podcasts. I love listening to them and talking about them. I want everyone to have that chance. And so I’ve built a new platform called Lyceum, which makes it easy to discover great educational podcasts and have conversations about them. There are more than a million podcasts out there. We’ve done the hard work of sifting through them and finding only the very best education shows to listen to, shows like the one you’re listening to right now. So if you love learning, download Lyceum today on the App Store or Google Play, or visit us at lyceum.fm.

[36:51]

HORN: I don’t have the stats on this, but I believe most conductors come to the podium with primary expertise in piano or violin, or both. You come as a guitarist. Guitar, of course, enjoys a beautiful tradition in classical music, as it does in most kinds of music I know about, but it’s not, for instance, a standard instrument in orchestras. So I wonder if you have thoughts about how your experience with the guitar, your relationship with the guitar, has influenced your approach as a conductor?

FALLETTA: Well, I think it has. You know, [guitar] is my primary instrument, although I did study cello and piano as well. But the guitar is the one that I started as a child and stays with me, and I think it’s actually helped me in two great ways. First of all, as a guitarist, you’re very often accompanying people—a voice or flute or violin—you’re playing chamber music. And since you are playing the harmonic background, the harmonic fabric of the piece, you’re always listening to someone else and following them. And really, in a sense, that’s what a conductor is always doing. You’re leading, but you’re leading because you’re listening to the oboe play a solo and giving them enough time to take a breath and then go on, or you’re listening to the pianist right behind you or next to you, how he’s approaching the tempo of the Beethoven concerto and you’re right with him. So that listening skill has been very helpful. But more than that, I think guitar, as you know—and people can imagine this—like several instruments, it doesn’t have a sustaining ability. It’s like a harpsichord; once you pluck a string, it starts to dissipate. So since you can’t actually physically sustain a sound, you’re constantly finding ways of phrasing to connect things, phrasing forward, connecting notes to each other, making the line go forward, thinking of the end of the phrase and thinking that way as a guitarist, where you’re thinking of making the music flow forward and tell that story … because you’ve developed those kinds of mental processes, you’re thinking always in the orchestra of music flowing forward, of the architecture, of the orchestra. And for a conductor, I think that might be the single greatest attribute you need. When you’re confronting a Mahler score that’s 90 minutes long, it somehow has to make sense, from the first note to the last. It has to be like a book that you open and as you’re going through it, everything falls into place and comes to an end. That’s what a symphony is. I mean, you do the same thing. So that sense of always connecting and building an architecture that goes forward, I think I learned from the guitar, and I certainly use it every day in conducting, of thinking where the music is going.

HORN: And I know that you have a guitar competition, isn’t that right? And where’s that?

FALLETTA: That’s here in Buffalo. The Buffalo Philharmonic, we have every other year an international guitar competition and fantastic guitarists from all over the world. It’s just amazing. And many of the people who are coming here from Asia and Europe and South America are coming to the United States for the first time. And I think it’s a point of pride for us that they meet the USA in Buffalo and the people of Buffalo.

[41:03]

HORN: The orchestra, of course, has this civic dimension as well. How do you think about the relationship between the orchestra and the larger community, and your role in helping to bring more people to understand who may not have had this deep connection? I was very fortunate, again, as I said, to begin going to the Philharmonic and starting to feel comfortable in Kleinhans [Music Hall] when I was a little baby, but not everybody has that, you know. So, in terms of that relationship of helping people get to know the orchestra and connect with it—

FALLETTA: Well, that’s a big part of my job. We realize the orchestra only exists for Buffalo. I mean, we don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for this community, Buffalo and Western New York. That’s why we’re here. And we’re very conscious of how we began, which I think for us has meant a great deal. We were started as a Works Progress Administration orchestra. It wasn’t an orchestra that was founded by a wealthy board, or a very, very wealthy individual. It was started by the government simply to give people jobs. I mean, they desperately needed work. Musicians desperately needed work. And also to provide a kind of comfort for people who were really struggling in the Great Depression. So we started as an orchestra of the people in a very modest way. And I think the Buffalo Philharmonic has always maintained that connection with the city and the region, that we are here for you. That’s our meaning. So that’s why we play music. And that’s why we play music that runs the gamut of a Mahler symphony to a children’s concert, to a concert for tiny children who come with their parents, to holiday concerts, to pops concerts, to all kinds of concerts, even concerts for people who have special needs and can’t always be quiet listening to a concert. We have special concerts for people with those special needs. So that’s why we exist: we exist to serve everyone in Buffalo. So part of my job, my mission, is to let people know that Kleinhans is their hall, and the Buffalo Philharmonic is their orchestra, and the doors are open for them. I mean, literally anyone who wants to go to a Buffalo Philharmonic concert can go. There are ways of finding a way to get there, no matter what your economic situation. Our ticket prices we keep deliberately low so that anyone in this community can somehow find a way to come and be with us—free concerts, as well—because that’s our only reason to exist.

[44:04]

HORN: You just spoke about the efforts that you and the orchestra have traditionally made to continue to connect with audiences. You know, I’d have to say for me, one of the strong examples of a conductor leading that effort would be Leonard Bernstein. And I know that he is a luminary figure in your life. I’m thinking about his concerts for young people, is that right?

FALLETTA: Young People’s Concerts, yes.

HORN: I always want to say like Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, but that’s something else!

FALLETTA: He did. So many of them brilliant ones!

HORN: And you did some master classes with him. Was that at Juilliard?

FALLETTA: Yes, because Maestro Bernstein lived in New York. So occasionally he would come over to Juilliard to give us master classes, and we were a very small conducting class, maybe four or five of us at any time in the class. And we were always terrified because Leonard Bernstein was one of those people who was larger than life, you know! And he actually was a lot shorter than people think he was, but he seemed enormous. He had a beautiful, leonine head, just gorgeous! He would walk into the room, you know, usually with his sweater tied around his neck and this little cigarette holder, and the room was electrified. I mean, he was a person of such charisma and such strong personality. And when he would be working with us, everyone was crammed into our rehearsal room. Usually we rehearsed, it was just ourselves, you know, with our conductor. But no, on the day that he was going to be there, not only all the musicians came in, but the dancers, the actors, I mean, they were also studying at Juilliard. The faculty, everyone was in that room just to be in his presence! And he was very, very gentle to us. I mean, you can imagine it was a stressful situation for us, and I think he realized that, but he taught us one thing that I think is probably the most important thing to know as a conductor. And that is, it’s not about how you beat or the pattern. It’s not about how you hold your baton. It’s not about where you’re looking or how you’re moving around. None of that. It’s all about the emotion in the music. That’s all it’s about. And one of the most memorable lessons we had was when he was teaching us the opera Carmen. And of course we were worried about were we being clear and were we like looking around at the right people [in the orchestra]. And he said, “You know what you have to be thinking? You’re in the bull ring and the sun is beating down on you. And the crowd is screaming and you can smell the blood of the bull on the sand. That’s what you have to be thinking, that your heart is pounding and you’re in the middle of this unbelievably intense music and this life and death situation. So that’s what it’s about. It’s not about how you’re beating.” He was right. People now can see videos of him and he was so into the music, he became the music, he became the Mahler symphony or the Brahms symphony or Carmen. He became the music. And that really is what it’s all about: to become somehow the vessel, to communicate that to the orchestra, and together then, to the audience.

HORN: With Carmen, of course, we’re talking about conducting the music from the opera, which has this story there in Seville. And, you know, there is a particular plot that goes along with it, but am I mistaken in thinking that—wasn’t it his view that, you know, say, let’s take something like Beethoven 5, right? That it was a mistake to attach a particular story to it? That it was what it was, and it wasn’t—am I mistaken?

FALLETTA: I think you’re absolutely right. In music like Beethoven, all the Beethoven symphonies were, you know, maybe the Ninth is a little different because it has words, but all of the symphonies generally are what we call abstract music: the composer is not revealing what it meant to him or what the meaning is. And the greatness of that is that everyone can feel their own story; whatever they’re feeling is right. But knowing about the piece, I mean, knowing that Beethoven was such an advocate for the individual common person, I mean that he lived his life railing against authority and the monarchy, and talking about that it’s what each individual has in his heart and in his mind that makes him great, knowing that puts all of his pieces in a different light. So yes, they don’t have really a story—

HORN: but it’s still the emotion that you’re connecting to. So you're, so you have an emotional connection to it. You’re translating that, you know, you’re interpreting that. And then together with the orchestra, translating this to the audience. Cool.

[49:24]

HORN: Elvis Costello once quipped that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Translating music to words is hard. But I have to ask, just to hear what you say—picking a piece not quite at random; I was listening to it on the way over—conducting, say, the fourth movement of Dvořák New World Symphony, what does that feel like? 

FALLETTA: It’s an amazing feeling! It’s an amazing feeling of joy, but part of it is also tied for me to the idea of Dvořák writing this as a gift to United States. I mean, Dvořák came here to teach Americans about music. You know, he was at that time the most famous composer in Europe, and yet he came to New York and lived for three years in New York, teaching young American musicians. It’s amazing that he gave so much of his life to do that. And at the end, he wrote this piece as a gift. So it’s “from the New World.” I mean, he’s writing this: Here I am in the New World, writing this from the New World. And it’s, and it's basically a symphony of power, of affirmation, of strength. Yes it sounds, of course, Bohemian, because that was his language. I mean, he would always sound Bohemian, but in it, I think he has a kind of sinew of the American character, which he loved. He loved his time with Americans. And he loved all Americans. He was really famous for always wanting to know African American spirituals and building music on that. Or even, he was constantly trying to find out about the music of Native Americans. What kind of music did they sing and play? So he was completely enmeshed in our country and this wa s his feeling about us. And it’s such a strong symphony, and it speaks to everyone all over the world, but I think to us as Americans, there’s something in there that we understand is based upon his experience here.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to JoAnn Falletta for taking the time to talk, and to Diana Martinusek, Patrick O’Herron, and all the staff and musicians at the BPO for their support of this episode. For information about the Buffalo Philharmonic’s current on-demand and soon-to-be-in-person (we hope) performances, visit bpo.org. A special shout-out to my mom, Gretchen Meister Brand, whose playing and touring with the BPO when I was a kid was a real inspiration. Thanks to Terry Fisher, Harry Jones, and John Parascak from Full Circle Studios for shooting stills and video of the interview at Clement House. The YouTube version, transcript and other supplementary materials are available from the show page for this episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating, and sharing the Point of Learning podcast with even just one person you know curious about what and how and why we learn. A proud member of the Lyceum education podcast consortium, Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me, here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I just got trained as a poll worker for Erie County, so I wish you a healthy and redemptive election season! Back at you with a fresh episode just as soon as I can.

Leading with Mind and Heart Transcript (028)

KATHLEEN BLACK: Hi, this is Dr. Kathy Black with MH Educational Solutions, and you’re here with my good friend, Dr. Peter Horn, at the Point of Learning. Peter and I attended graduate school together. After about 10 minutes, we figured out we had a love of all things Buffalo, New York, including Buffalo wings and even the same high school—although Peter’s a lot older than I am! I’m here today to introduce my good friend, Dr. Errick Greene. Dr. Errick Greene and I worked together in the Washington, DC Public Schools, where his love for literacy allowed him to give me very direct and supportive feedback all of the time. I was privileged to work for him and with him. I am excited to hear about what he’s doing with his team in Jackson. Please enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Dr. Errick Greene, an inspiring school leader:

ERRICK L. GREENE: My job is to ensure that we create conditions for great, magical, excellent things to happen, and to be done.

[VO]: As the superintendent of schools in Jackson, Mississippi, he has had to contend with relentless complications of the COVID-19 crisis: 

GREENE: We have to be extra cautious about the safety of the young people, yes, but also the possibility of them carrying the virus back home to elderly family members and loved ones and community members.

[VO]: We talk some about the solutions that Jackson is discovering:

GREENE: We’re working with the city to create a meshing—a wireless meshing—around the city, and in some of the densely populated areas where we’re concerned about folks having less connectivity, less opportunities, and access. For education, for employment searches, and that sort of thing, for tele-health … lots of opportunities that that opens up for those families.

[VO]: We also explore some of the moral imperatives of educating young people in this moment of greater awareness of social injustice.

GREENE: This is the work. The work is not simply teaching young Eric to read, teaching young Kamisha to write, or to think critically about some benign topic, but thinking critically about the world, the world around us, and the broader context, and the ways in which we can all act to make it better.

[VO]: And some of the practices that are helpful for any kind of leader or team player. 

GREENE: I’m modeling those times when it doesn’t feel great. I’m modeling those times when I’m so, so determined that what I’m thinking is the right way, but my team is not on the same page with me. I’ve got to investigate that. I’ve got to explore that. Like, how is it that I’m just completely right and everybody else is wrong? How is that possible? Right?

[VO]: All that, and much more on this episode of Point of Learning. Do stick around!

[03:30]

[VO]: Errick L. Greene’s career in education spans more than 25 years, and about half of the continental United States. He started in the classroom, teaching middle school and elementary students. Later he became a principal, principal supervisor, chief of staff, and consultant to senior district leaders in Washington, DC; Detroit; Syracuse; Baltimore; and Newark, New Jersey. Dr. Greene served as Chief of Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma before arriving in Mississippi, where, as Superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, he is responsible for the second largest district in the state. Errick earned his doctorate in Educational and Organizational Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I met him back in 2011. He  holds two master’s degrees in education—one from Trinity University and another from Howard University. Howard was also where he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science. I could go on, but a.) Errick urged me to “hit it and quit it”; and b.) I want to reserve as much space as possible for this important and timely conversation. It gives an inside look at some of the challenges facing school leaders in this especially complex moment charged with challenges related to public health and social justice, and also provides great ideas that anyone leading anything can apply—whether it’s a team, business, or household. So just one last note before we get started: you will notice that Errick always refers to the [22,500] kids in the 54 schools and programs of his district not as “students,” but as “scholars.” It’s a small clue as to how seriously he takes the promise and potential of each and every one of them. 

HORN: Errick, thanks so much for taking time to do the show today. When I met you nine years ago, you were supervising administrators and schools for a large sector of the Washington, DC public school system. After that you served for a number of years as Chief of Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2018 you accepted the call to become Superintendent of Schools in Jackson, Mississippi, where you are now. Now historically, Mississippi has invested less than most other states in public education, which is one challenge. The Jackson district, with 22,500 young scholars in [54] schools, narrowly avoided a state takeover in 2017. So the district is being especially closely monitored all the time. And of course, your city is a state capital, so state education folks are not far away. Anyhow, the scrutiny, or as public school folk like to call it, “accountability,” is another challenge. As somebody familiar with you and your talents, I can’t think of anyone better to serve in the role of JPS superintendent, but I’ve never asked you directly, what drew you to Jackson and this work?

GREENE: Well first off, just thank you for having me on, Pete. Really excited to have this conversation! There were several things. I was obviously building in my career, building towards the superintendency and looking forward to leading a school district. And in a district made up largely of children who look like me, and with many of them with low-income households and neighborhoods, communities—a district where there have been lots of challenges and lots of—I just say lots of room for continued growth and development. As I was looking around at opportunities to lead a district, there’s something about the size of the district, the makeup and the composition of the student body, the team, some of the characteristics of the city, of the surrounding community—there are lots of things about Jackson that just spoke to me: one, it’s large enough to matter, but small enough to get your arms around. As I said, the student body and the families that we serve: mainly folks of color, and there’s a good number of folks living in low-income families. And so that’s the work that I’ve done so much in my career, and where I just feel comfortable. That this really tough work—that I’m making a difference, and doing something that’s meaningful. As well, though, I met the leadership here, the school board members, the mayor here in Jackson. I had known the state superintendent for some time from our work in DC around the same time. So there were lots of folks in and around Jackson Public Schools, where I felt like we were of like mind. I could see their vision and what they were looking for in terms of excellence in leadership and service, a commitment to lock arms, and not to immediately be adversarial and to fight and challenge the work of the superintendent here. It just felt like it, well, it was clear to me as I was looking at Jackson and considering this as my new home and where I’d do work for probably the rest of my career, that this is a place where I could really, really call home and where I could really dig in, stick and stay, set up roots, and just become a part of what works here in Jackson. They also just had a number of partners, the Kellogg Foundation, and as I said, the city and the state. Even though the state had moved to take over the district, they didn’t want to take it over. They were determined that something needed to happen, that change needed to happen, and they weren’t getting that kind of urgent response from the school district early on. And so that’s why they made the bold move that they did. But it was really clear that there would be partners in the work here. And so this—it just made sense to me. And I’m excited. And, frankly, in the two years—almost two years that I’ve been here, I don’t regret it, not for a bit, but it’s been tough. I will tell you, it’s been tough!

HORN: We’re going to get into some parts of that, but, you know, I understand that under your tenure, the district moved a full letter grade in terms of quality, and you give some credit to some of the things that were already in process, but of course that’s part of the graciousness I know to be characteristic of you—I’m sure you had some role in that as well. But as if you didn’t have enough on your plate already, speaking of challenges, COVID-19 dealt your district, like every other district and school of any kind throughout the country and across the globe, the coronavirus pandemic dealt JPS a staggering blow this spring. Now you re-reopened last week, I believe, completely online. Right?

GREENE: Right. Well, we were scheduled to reopen schools this week [interview recorded on 8/11/20] and due to the governor’s latest executive order that delayed the start of school in eight counties around the state because of some of the numbers, the rising cases and infection rates… So we delayed until the 17th, but yeah, it’s been tough in general. And then of course, since March of this year, it’s just been ridiculously difficult, just to lead and to keep our arms around what is the truth with regard to the health crisis, and what are the numbers saying? Because the same numbers—you have a few people talking about them and they’re drawing vastly different conclusions, and next steps, and all of that. And that’s been, I would say, part of the challenge I would bet all of us, as district leaders, and likely others and in other fields, but across the country—just struggling with the, you know, you hear this data, you hear these recommendations, you see these kinds of urgings from certain leaders, and then folks develop plans that don’t align, right? There’s some folks who are going back to school here in this fall, going back full-blown in in the traditional model, and others with options. And we actually started offering options: the traditional, hybrid, and virtual. And over the course of a week, our numbers just spiked so rapidly and so dramatically that it was just clear we couldn’t continue with that original plan. And so we dialed that back, and decided to offer the virtual model only.

HORN: Was that number spiking among students, or among the community at large, or what?

GREENE: The state at large, our community, our county, and the City of Jackson in particular. And then we were starting to, we’ve been starting to see more of the pediatric COVID cases, so that as well. Plus, just some of the context of our district. We know that many of our scholars live with grandparents, or an elderly aunt, or there’s someone in the home that’s of age and there’s lots of underlying health challenges—diabetes, and asthma, and high blood pressure, and just on and on. So lots of that throughout the community. And so that, overlaying the COVID pandemic, it was just clear that we have to be extra cautious about the safety of the young people, yes, but also the possibility of them carrying the virus back home to elderly family members and loved ones and community members.

[13:53]

HORN: You mentioned that the governor issued an executive order delaying the opening of school, but was it up to you, was it up to each district to decide what reopening would look like, whether it was going to be hybrid, or was that also a public health decision?

GREENE: So there was guidance from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, there was guidance from our state health department, and there’s guidance from the state education agency. We never had an overall or permanent requirement that folks wear masks in the state, though there is a requirement in the city. And the governor looked at some of the infection rates and some of the data around the state and identified eight specific counties where there was greater concern. And so we had a mandate to delay the start, but there was still all the variety! There’s tons of variety, even within the Jackson metro area, as to the models of delivery of education, of instruction, that folks are using. So there’s a district adjacent to us that is 100% traditional, with some exceptions of folks who are choosing virtual [instruction] and then there are others that are offering models that are maybe virtual for the first few weeks or through the end of the month, or that sort of thing. We’re one of, I don’t know, at this point there have been more that are going virtual, at least in the short run, but more over time who are making that choice. But I know of maybe one or two other districts in the state that are virtual for the year. We elected to go virtual for the first semester, again, because we can—just based on the numbers and based on the data—it just made sense to call it for the semester, allow families to plan around that virtual model, allowing us to prepare ourselves for this longer-run virtual and frankly, you know, as we continue to hear the news reports and health experts, I don’t know that come December or January, folks will feel very differently and we’ll have a different level of spread in the state or in this county that would suggest that Oh, okay, now we can do something different and open up some of these other options. Obviously, as you know, the virtual option though, it’s really problematic for families who, you know, if there’s a parent who’s a working parent and they need to now find an alternative for their child to be during the day—custodial care and that sort of thing.

HORN: And that’s not to mention, the technical difficulties, I think that you and JPS were able to estimate that about three in 10 families in your district have issues connecting to the internet, including sometimes lacking devices. How are you addressing that challenge for online learning?

GREENE: And that’s, you know, that three in 10 is the estimate for families. It’s even greater as you think about individual scholars. So we were not 1:1. We had about half the number of devices in our inventory for our 22,500 scholars.

[VO]: “1:1” is school-speak meaning that every student has access to a device like a laptop or Chromebook for their own use. 

GREENE: So we had about half that in our inventory, of Chromebooks and devices for them, which is a good start. And so between the inventory of devices that we have and what we’re learning from families, in terms of who has at least one device, even if there’s two, three, or more scholars living in the home—

HORN: —and trying to figure out how to share—

GREENE: —which is crazy! but at least there’s one there and some level of connectivity. So we’re confident that we’re able to get all of the homes connected and then families have to do this crazy dance of who’s going to get on because, you know, school is largely happening at the same time, no matter whether you’re in kindergarten or ninth grade or a senior. So they have to do this crazy dance of trying to share between them, but once we’ve blanketed the district and each of the families, we are confident that each family has at least a device and some level of connectivity. Then we start kind of going back to, okay, now, were there multiple siblings within the home? And where can we start to build up more of that? That’s for now. We’ve ordered devices to completely go 1:1. And you know, we’re in line with everyone else around the country in getting devices and shipments, and so as those come in next month and on, we’ll be able to deploy those devices. And so later in the fall, we should have a device for—we will have a device for every scholar, which is really, really exciting. It’s just getting there, right? It’s getting to that point, and all of the cultural and logistical things around going 1:1. Of course you don’t flip a switch and just decide, okay, well, we can go and buy the devices and we’ve got the devices in, and now we’re 1:1! There’s all the planning, all the preparation, all the professional development for our teachers and the readiness for our scholars, the readiness for families, just all of that stuff. One last thing I’ll say on this is that we have a small number of hotspots within the district. We’ve purchased more of those to help families that are just completely disconnected. And so we’ll have some of those to deploy as well, but we’re also working with the city. Well, the city has a longer-term multi-year plan for expanding broadband connectivity, which is awesome, but that’s years out. And so in the immediate future, we’ve got these these hotspots and in the shorter term, kind of into the fall, we’re working with the city to create a meshing—a wireless meshing—around the city, and in some of the densely populated areas where we’re concerned about the folks having less connectivity, less opportunities, and access. So creating that and creating some wireless opportunities that we can then just provide to our scholars and families, and so for education, for employment searches, and that sort of thing, for tele-health, lots of opportunities that that opens up for those families.

HORN: You mentioned health. You know, one of the other concerns I think about close to 95% of your students, your scholars, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. And so one of the real services that you provide is a nutritional service as a school. Are you able to make provisions along those lines, or how do you address that?

GREENE: Yes. I will say while we’ve got a pretty strong sense of where those needs are and who those families are, and those scholars are, it still feels like somewhat of a moving target, right? One, because families that are housing insecure and, you know, perhaps are underemployed or unemployed. There’s oftentimes some mobility there. And so moving from school to school or home to home. And so we experienced that throughout the year, and that’s in and of itself a challenge, but also thinking about how you set up hubs or distribution sites for meals, for instructional packets, or other resources for scholars. Those can sometimes be a little tricky, but that’s exactly it. We had some experiences where every summer we set up meal distribution sites around the city. And so it’s not totally foreign to us.

HORN: Is that right.

GREENE: Back in the spring, we did the same thing as we closed down for virtual or at-home learning to close out the year. We created a system to get meals out, but we just ran the sites themselves and families had to come to them. And you’d find that individuals in a community would come and get meals for several families, or several of our scholars within that community, on their block or in the housing projects, or what have you. Going into the fall, we are still running— I think we’ve increased the number of those hubs, those sites by a couple, and we’re using our bussing, our transportation team to help us to get the meals out further. We’ve been working with further into the communities, to Boys and Girls Clubs, some of the other nonprofits, to churches. We’ve been working with those groups to, where possible, to create little pods or opportunities for families, for the scholars to be there while parents are working and they can get connected and work remotely, plugging into the classrooms from those sites. But they’re also just sites where you know, folks can more readily and easily get there and pick up a meal and then go back home if they are learning from home. So lots of kind of layered strategies to try to provide for the needs.

[24:18]

HORN: Well, there you go with strategy, and that’s what I was going to ask you. I mean, these are all these additional logistical considerations that, some summer provision of meals notwithstanding, I mean, you don’t expect to do this during the school year! So I wanted to know how you keep thinking strategically. How do you go big picture in the face of this very difficult, adaptive challenge that you are all figuring out? I know you rolled out a strategic plan last summer, for example. How do you keep thinking strategically, educationally, amidst these ripples?

GREENE: It’s a challenge! I will tell you it’s a challenge, even outside of COVID, right? Because the day-to-day issues of life, the challenges of living in an urban area where sometimes, you know, our buildings are burglarized. And so, okay, there goes the coil from the air conditioning. And so we’ve got to replace that, or there go some number of our laptops or other devices or whatever it might be. Those kinds of issues, they exist already. We have the staffing to serve the scholars that we have, but that means that there are that many more people that you’ve got to worry about as well. Our staff members and team members, they have lives, so they may get ill or they have family issues. And so keeping staffing in place is yet another issue. So those things are already at issue. And then you layer on, again, this pandemic that just makes it that much more difficult. So how we maintain the focus is by, as frequently as possible, keeping the strategic plan in front of all of us, referencing, putting it directly in front of us as a leadership team, in front of our staff members or our school leaders, in front of our families, parents and community members, all of those folks, because it has to live and we have to continue to ensure that it lives. And so why are we making this decision? Well, if you refer back to our core values and our strategic plan … Well, as we stated in our strategic plan, one of commitments is X. Well, as we noted in the strategic plan, we’re not only educating young people so that they can read or count or write or whatever it might be, but they do those things for a purpose. There’s a larger goal in life that we’re preparing them for. And so again, using the strategic plan around that, it’s also ensuring that the plan is not just Errick Greene’s. I was very clear early on, we’re not building this plan for Errick. One, I don’t need it just for me! We need it as a community so that when we get into the thick of things, and we’ve got all these difficult decisions to make, and the answer is not so clear, we’ve got something to ground us and something to redirect us. And when we get that funder or that community leader, or that parent with a strong influential voice or whatever it might be, who’s got an idea of something that they want us to do and it makes sense on the surface of it, we can put that up against our strategic plan to say, Hey, these are the things that we committed to doing, first and foremost. Does that new idea fit in this plan? Yes or no? And if it does, is now the right time to do that? because we’ve also given some thought to not only the right thing in general, but the pieces of the thing that make sense today, next month, next year, three years out, et cetera. So it kind of insulates us from all of the great ideas that bubble up throughout the year, seemingly every day and gives us cover for doing a few things really, really well and seeing the successes from that and having those successes fuel future work. One last thing I’ll say about this, we get beaten up, have been beaten up quite a bit, right? Long before the state came and said, Hey, you know, you’ve not been performing. We really want to move to take over the district. Long before that. We’ve gotten, you know, because of performance, because of incidents, because of, you know, leadership moves or whatever, it might be just ongoing and lingering perceptions of the district leadership, of the staffing in general, of our children, of our families, of the city, all of that, right? And so what I’ve been really, really determined to do is create some wins for us and really publicize the heck out of it.

HORN: Yeah. Celebrate, yeah. Gotta have that cheerleading role as part of public leadership.

GREENE: Sure. And arresting that narrative of JPS, of Jackson, of our community, of our people such that one else owns storytelling rights of who we are, what we’re about, what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t. We have to be honest about those times when we don’t quite get it right, and recommit to getting it right in the future but also being really dogmatic about the others who don’t get it right when they tell our story and pushing back hard on that so that in the very least, it’s a balanced retelling of who we are and what we’re about. And that’s something that I think all educators, frankly—whether you’re a classroom teacher or a principal, a district superintendent, it doesn’t matter—that all educators have to be more intentional about because, you know, everybody went to school. Everybody in this country, at least, we all went to school, and so we all have some experiences with it, and therefor believe that, unlike what we do with our doctors and with our lawyers, we all believe that we can run a school and we should, you know, our voice and our opinion should rule the day. Oh well!

[31:05]

HORN: We’ve talked a little about COVID-19, but let’s shift to another pandemic, in the U.S., at least: systemic racism. Days after the murder of George Floyd, which of course succeeded the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and far too many others, you recorded a powerful video letter to the Jackson Public Schools community, which I’ll link to the show page for this episode. You spoke candidly about the intersection of your personal class privilege of living in a more affluent neighborhood with your racial identity as a Black man, using Claude Steele’s term “whistling Vivaldi” to describe what you found yourself doing as you went out for a run, actively trying to seem less threatening to those you passed along the way. You emphasized that you didn’t share this anecdote as a play for sympathy, but rather to acknowledge that despite the academic and professional achievements that enabled you to earn, in your words, “a bit of that American dream,” your skin color is often a liability. You quickly connected this personal example to the broader district aims of relevant education, and the moral imperative to support young scholars to become righteous leaders in their community and in the larger world. Along with, I know, many others, I was addressed and deeply moved by this kind of public testimony that we don’t normally hear from our school leaders, certainly. I can’t think it was an easy decision to record this video letter. May I ask about how you decided to do it, and how it fits for you into what you consider the public leadership dimension of your role?  

GREENE: It was a few things. One, you know, we were in the midst of the COVID pandemic. And so we’re at a distance, and so all of the happenings of life—illnesses, deaths, birthdays, anniversaries, just all of the happenings of life are being experienced at a distance, so this resurgence of attention around racial discrimination and injustice, all of that was being experienced largely at a distance and through television and computer screens and on social media platforms and all of that. And so you know like others, I was grappling with my own kind of sense-making of it. And you know, what does this mean? And what is my responsibility as an individual, as a member of my own community and network, but also as a leader in the district? It just felt like remaining silent was not an option. And then you know, I rarely position myself as the stereotypical “activist” and use my voice and my platform in those ways. But I felt it would have been reckless and a huge missed opportunity for me to remain silent and not share one, just my concerns about what had happened with those individuals and others, many others in the past, the ongoing challenges around racial injustice. I find myself as someone who grew up in the North, I’m living in the South and specifically in Jackson and in the state of Mississippi with all of its history around race and social justice and all of that. It’s just, again, I couldn’t remain silent. I wasn’t sure exactly what I needed to say, though. And yeah, I think like many people just grappling with what is it that I want to say and what is it that I want to promise and commit to, and pretty quickly, what surfaced for me was, you know, I lead the Jackson Public School District. I work with some amazing educators, amazing board members, peers in the community, and families, and folks who, you know, we’re all grappling with what now? How do we keep from coming back around to the same horrible acknowledgements of killings and injustice in all their forms. And so I wanted to just spark for us as educators, let’s ensure that in the very least, what we do in classrooms and in learning spaces, that we’re creating opportunities and taking responsibility and the opportunities for developing in our young people the skills, the capacity, the desire to make the world a world in which we all want to live and seeing that as not just a nice-to-have, a nice-to-do, but a moral imperative. This is the work. The work is not simply teaching young Eric to read, teaching young Kamisha to write, or to think critically about some benign topic, but thinking critically about the world, the world around us, and the broader context, and the ways in which we can all act to make it to make it better. And I want to be real. I typically feel safe when I’m out running, you know, relatively safe when I’m out running in my neighborhood. But the reality is even with that, and even with, you know, the trappings of the life that I’ve amassed over time, it occurs to me that the White woman running near me could feel some level of fear or danger from me simply by my skin color. And so I’m really conscious of that. And obviously in the moment, I want to try to dispel any of those types of fears, but I’m also conscious of the fact that that’s on my mind, that that’s taking up part of my headspace in the moment. And it’s just, it’s unfortunate.

HORN: Well, real was how it came across. And I think that was, you know, a part of the power. It was not at all dogmatic, it was not at all prescriptive. But I think that was the thing that felt like it was really clearly that you were speaking from the heart. You said in the video letter that you don’t consider yourself a quote/unquote activist, but that nobody in this current moment has the luxury of sitting on the sidelines when it comes to fighting oppression and systemic racism. Then you just said that you were beginning to think with some of your colleagues at JPS … And I just wanted to ask, because as you know, some of the work I’m most passionate about when I consult with schools is helping educators, students, and parents have more productive conversations about hard topics including social identities, you know, for example, and systemic racism. So I’m curious about if there are, you know, plans taking shape, or where you are in terms of thinking about this, perhaps in a more explicit way, given the climate of the country, given the charged character of this election. Are there plans to listen to students’ and educators’ concerns about the current politics? I mean, how are you thinking about moving forward to a more just society and school’s role in that? Because there are all of these other things, you know, those issues about teaching somebody to read, teaching somebody to write and compute, those are important things. But one of the things that we can tend to abdicate, especially for public schools getting slammed with these standards of accountability at the expense of thinking about how we are modeling and how we are asking students to participate as citizens, giving opportunities to do that, because it’s not easy to do. So I just wanted to check in with where you all are with that.

GREENE: There are few things that are bubbling up. One is some pretty specific work around just kind of rethinking the curriculum, what it includes, what it doesn’t include, how it lives in classrooms. And obviously we’re not, you know, we’re not in a place, and certainly not right now to totally revamp the curriculum! But some pretty targeted efforts around like, what are some of the required readings and lessons around history and that sort of thing that we can fairly easily push on and layer into the current curriculum, just to beef that up and ensure that all of our scholars see themselves and see themselves more readily in what they’re learning, and the relevance in what they’re learning and how they’re learning.

HORN: And Relevance is one of those core values that drives your mission, which I think is super—

GREENE: There are six, and we mean it. We’re constantly referencing it. You know, we do shout-outs for things that people have done in the past week or so, in team meetings and that. And we reference, even in agenda items with our Board the core values, or the pieces of the strategic plan that this new item, this new contract, or this new initiative—that they align to. Early on, Excellence, Growth Mindset, maybe even Relationships were the easy go-tos. Now more and more, folks are referencing our work around, and the connection to, and the furtherance of Relevance as we do those shout-outs. And as we acknowledge the connectedness of these new initiatives.

HORN: If I could interrupt to give you a shout-out in real time, I think this is one of the things that is so important and such a great model. You know, plenty of schools have these mission statements, or let alone strategic plans, you know, which many people in the district don’t even know about, right? They’re far removed from the life of the school, and it’s very easy for that sort of thing to happen. And nobody’s going to want you to recite the strategic plan and look at the flag every day, you know, as we do with the Pledge of Allegiance. It can’t happen that way, that you remember it because you repeat it all the time, but as a way to make it real and to make it live, to make it live, that the applicability of what you’ve decided that you want to do, to keep bringing that out—I think it’s so important, because otherwise it is just something on the front page of the student handbook, or the district handbook, or what have you.

GREENE: And it doesn’t live. Thank you. I appreciate it. I mean, we thought quite a bit as we were developing the plan about how we would keep it alive and who would keep it alive. It can’t just be Errick. So that, but the point I was making with that is, you know, relevance has been a thing that is bubbling up more and more, where folks are seeing opportunities to create relevance and to acknowledge the relevance or where things are irrelevant. And therefore, we need to look again at, so is this the thing that we should be doing? So that work that I named as well, one of the pieces of the strategic plan is the Profile of a JPS Graduate [available on the JPS website]. And in that we specifically call out this need and this desire to develop young people who have some sense of government and democracy and have a strong sense of and ownership of the political issues and that’s big-P, small-p political issues within the community, state, country, around the world, and that they act on it. And so that they are registered voters and that they have, you know, developed a stance, and likely that stance will change and evolve over time as they grow. But that’s specifically called out in our Profile of a JPS Graduate. And so we’ve developed a partnership with actually a couple of organizations that are helping us to one, just ensure that our young people are registered, but also providing them with platforms and some deeper understanding of the governmental systems and some of the various workings of the democratic society. And so, you know, there are ways that we’re living into this and we see that there’s so, so much more that we could and want to do.

HORN: And I imagine being in the state capital, you know, there would be some more opportunities than there would if you were a hundred miles away or something like that also.

GREENE: Yes, absolutely. Also, I’m just highlighting, again, some of the young people who are already using their voice right, outside of us. There’s a young lady who just graduated who led one of the protests around police brutality and killings of unarmed black folks. And so you know, it’s great to see that one, that there exist young people who already want to engage and have a mind to engage, and that we’re finding ways—authentic ways—to engage them over time that they are responding to.

[46:42]

HORN: We’ve covered some hard ground here. How about hope in this moment, and this hard job, where are the seeds for you? Where do you find hope right now?

GREENE: I’m a hopeful guy, right? I was raised just to believe that, you know, pretty much anything is possible. You have to create a plan, you gotta commit to it. You’ve got to find the resources, or acknowledge and access the resources that you already have. So that is my orientation, just to life and to work. I came here because I was hopeful, not because of all of the things that were broken and dysfunctional and not in place, but for all the things that were sources of strength, and the resources and the assets and all those things that exist here in Jackson and in JPS in particular. As I look out at our babies, the more and more I see them, the more I’m just like, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t go out and kick butt in the world. There’s no reason, right? And quite often, the reason why you don’t is because people like me in this role or others in district roles or school leaders or teachers or what have you—because we haven’t prepared you. And so I am determined that that’s not going to be your story. You’re going to be well prepared and you’ll have the option to go out and do great things, or sit on it, but it won't because you weren’t prepared. So for sure, as I see our babies and just think about all that, you know, could be in their lives if somebody just give a daggone. I also hope in the team that we’re amassing here. For all the haters, you know—and we have some on the team, but not a lot—but for all the haters that exist, the people in and around the area who just don’t believe it can be done, there are tons more folks who know, who believe it in their bones, that it can and must be done. That they are enough. Whether you know how to use Zoom or Google Classroom or any of those right now or not, that you are enough. You’re smart enough, you’re caring enough, determined enough to figure it out, access the resources, get smart about how to do the work better, more effectively, and that it’s your job to do that, and you’re going to do it. So there’s lots of hope around us. You know, we, as I say, we have the haters, we have the folks who make it their business to tear down the district, to tear down the leaders, the teachers, the children, and families, period, pretty regularly, but for whatever number of them—

HORN: And they’ve had a little more time on their hands in the past few months!

GREENE: Apparently! I can’t imagine that being my life’s work. Like, are you retired? How are you able to do this? But, for whatever number of folks like that, there are so many more who have locked their arms and are standing around us, kind of protecting us, protecting the vision and the possibility that is Jackson Public Schools.

HORN: I wanted to ask too about this notion of team and the way you use “team,” because this morning I watched your recent message. I think maybe it was just yesterday that it came out. I’m not sure. It was very recent. To administrators, faculty and staff, is how I took it, right? Of Jackson Public Schools, whom you addressed as “Team JPS.”

GREENE: Yeah.

HORN: Now I know when you’ve alluded to it, and I know from talking with you over the years, that your vision of leadership is not the traditional guy at the top of the org chart, just calling the shots. I know that for you, it’s about teamwork, real teamwork and collaboration, more of what scholar Jill Harrison Berg likes to call “co-performing leadership.” [See Leading in Sync with Jill Harrison Berg, episode 016]. So that notion of team and JPS, first of all, do I have it right? That you’re thinking about all the people as part of the team?

GREENE: Yes.

HORN: Okay. And you and I have talked about the importance for you as a leader in allowing people the space to screw up and learn from that. Can you riff on that for just a second? Because I think sometimes people confuse leadership with management and then, of course, especially with micromanagement, like when you do this thing that I exactly told you—

GREENE: May I breathe today, sir? May I breathe? Is it okay if I breathe today? Like let me know when I can—that kind of a thing. Yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking about leadership, about team and all of that. My job is to ensure that we create conditions for great, magical, excellent things to happen, and to be done. And so, I spend a lot of time ensuring that I’m building up the folks around me, and that’s not the arbitrary and kind of baseless accolades—

HORN: You’re not blowing sunshine.

GREENE: Absolutely. No, we have to give one another the hard truth. We’re building a muscle. I like to say we’re building a muscle around feedback, giving and receiving. Because as I’ve learned, you know, it’s just as hard sometimes to give the tough feedback as it is to receive it. But we’re doing that. I’m modeling it. I’m modeling those times when it doesn’t feel great. I’m modeling those times when I’m so determined that what I’m thinking is the right way, but my team is not on the same page with me. I’ve got to investigate that. I’ve got to explore that. Like, how is it that I’m just completely right and everybody else is wrong? How is that possible? Right? I mean, it’s possible, but isn’t likely that everybody else is wrong, so let’s explore. This is why I think as I do, this is why I believe what I do, help me understand what I’m missing. And so quite frequently, if not in every meeting, what I’ll say to team members is I’ll ask a question or pose a direction or a pathway and then ask for feedback and not move on until I’ve gotten it. And then do some cold-calling [around the table] or I’ll say, “Poke holes in this. What am I missing? No, you cannot just allow me to jump out there with this. I know that I’m missing something, help me see what I’m missing.”

HORN: And did it take a while before people believed you?

GREENE: Yeah.

HORN: You know, because this is not the way—this is not what a lot of leaders ask for.

GREENE: More to the point, it took a while before they would even say like, “Listen Dr. Greene, this isn’t how we have operated.” And I say, “But I told you, I need the feedback. I hear you.” And what we’ve experienced, for many of us, over our entire careers is that when you disagree or oppose the person, you know, who’s supposed to be leading, then that puts you in danger.

HORN: Yeah. You’re supposed to be talking smack in the teachers lounge! In the cafeteria or something like that. You’re not supposed to be actually disagreeing, respectfully and constructively, in a moment where it can make some difference.

GREENE: And that’s exactly it. So “we will have the meetings after the meeting in the parking lot or in the lounge or off in our individual offices, but we won’t say it at the table.” And so I’ve started calling people out for having meetings after the meeting. That’s what you’re going to get called out for. You’re going to get called out because you didn’t push back on me when I said _______. That’s what people are getting called out for. So if this is the thing that drives you, then let’s give you some of that experience. But for doing the things outside of this constructive—let’s build and riff and iron sharpening iron here together at the table. Don’t text me after the fact, “Oh I would have said …” or “I was thinking …” Nope, that’s not okay! Next time say it at the table. And when I’ve gotten the texts during the meeting—

HORN: From somebody at the table? Oh man!

GREENE: Yes. “That’s not true. Dr. Green. It’s actually the …” My response is, “Say it. Say it!”

HORN: Do you text them? Do you text them back?

GREENE: Yes! Yes. I absolutely do. I absolutely do. “Say it now.” Because you know, again, those are the behaviors that—it just perpetuates that sense that, you know, we can’t do honest conversation here. [I’m like,] “We’re okay. Our relationships will survive this. Your employment will survive this. Let me show you. I know that you had some strong feelings about X. Say it now.” It’s a culture we’re building. We had to do the things. The relationship building, getting to know one another. We’re continuing to do that. We had to create the norms. You know, attack the issue, not the person; assume the best intentions; confidentiality; all those things that create the conditions for me to have an honest conversation with you right here.

HORN: And you make those explicit.

GREENE: Oh, we created those norms.

HORN: Really.

GREENE: As a team, created those norms from the beginning and every year we re-up, “Okay, these were the norms that we had last year. Do these still make sense? Okay.” And people will say, “Hey, you know, I’m going to be vulnerable [a norm] now.” And I’m like, “Okay!” And then when you do it, people are celebrating you and whatnot. So you were being vulnerable. Okay, well let’s have more and more of this vulnerability.

HORN: That’s critical for any kind of team that hopes to be productive, and I advise teachers to do it with students, to create those things together. It creates a much different environment in classes, just to draw an analogy for a second, a much different environment to develop those things together, rather than, you know, having students roll in and you hand them a sheet of paper, or point to something on a wall and say, “This is the way that it’s going in here.”

GREENE: Right. One last thought on that is I also have become pretty disciplined about coming back around to apologize for something, or naming something that I got wrong. Again, because I want to debunk this belief that the positional leader has all the knowledge and is always going to get it right. So I’ve got to debunk that. And very intentionally, when we’re talking about, I don't know, high school schedules, I very intentionally position the leader in that discussion as the person who does that work, the assistant superintendent for high schools. “You’ve got to lead this conversation, because I’m out of my depth. Please lead us through this. And not because you’ve got all the knowledge, but because you have more of the knowledge, intimate knowledge and experience, than most of us at this table.” And so, you know, pulling myself back from that, you know, not only positional leadership, but leadership in this discussion to position others to lead us out. I think it’s another thing that’s allowing people to see themselves as equals. [I’m like,] “No, no, we’re equals in this discussion. And your ideas and your beliefs and your experiences have got to show up at the table or we’re not getting the full benefit of who you are as a professional, as an educator. You’re holding back on us, and therefore our decision-making and the pathways that we take are likely not going to be the best because we don’t have the full benefit of all that you could bring.”

[1:00:04]

HORN: Leadership is never easy, let alone in an urban school district, where I think the average tenure of a superintendent is something like around four years, and, let alone, during a pandemic in which the federal government has completely abdicated a leadership role, how are you taking care of yourself?

GREENE: Wow. I appreciate that question. I will say I’m doing a decent job, given the crazy stressful period that we’re in, but I’m doing a decent job because I came into this role being really, really intentional about it. Before I even started the role, I was very mindful about the home, and what I needed at home to relax when I come home, finding that restaurant, or that place where I could go and walk or, you know, those kinds of things … a massage therapist and, while I haven’t settled on one yet, finding a therapist, a psychologist. All those kinds of things. Yeah, I was very intentional about those things coming in because I wanted to make sure that I was giving myself a fighting chance to sustain and to be sane, and to manage stress. You know, high blood pressure runs in the family, diabetes runs in the family, all those kinds of things. And I was just determined that I would be as intentional as possible about that. So here comes COVID. I already have some practices around just healthy eating, or healthier eating, healthier living, exercising, creating the breaks in my day, in life, just to kind of rejuvenate and that. So I’m doing a bit of that. I do a lot of self-talk as well. Also, frankly, I’ve just got a lot of people who are betting on me, and holding me accountable for taking care of myself. And so, getting the rest, unplugging at some point, not taking on too much at once, you know, all those things. I listen a lot to my peers who have been, or are currently serving in the role and, you know, there’s a number of us who are intentional about surviving the superintendency. I’ve named from the very beginning of my tenure here that I plan to be here for quite some time. I plan to be here at least for a decade, because I just want to ensure that the things that we build take root, that I’ve built out a team here where if something happens to me or if I get “voted off the island,” as I sometimes say, that they’ll be able to easily find someone from within who can pick it up and carry it forward. Cause they’ve got the skills, they’ve got the knowledge, there’s a level of commitment and they’ve been in the work. So it wouldn’t miss a beat.

[1:03:37]

HORN: Often because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I like to ask guests  about a teacher who was a strong influence on you. Even though I’ve mentioned already your bio on the JPS website is pretty short—you know, it’s five succinct paragraphs—but Mrs. Grandberry gets a shout-out, your third-grade teacher whom you credit with inspiring your love of learning. And you say a little bit about her there. I wondered if you wanted to say anything else quickly about her, but I also wanted to ask about some of these influences in terms of leadership. So however way you want to take that, but I’m interested in the influences and the inspiration for you in doing this.

GREENE: I am blessed in a lot of ways, a lot of ways, not the least of which is my network. It’s hard for me to hold in my head the numbers of people that I’ve learned from. And that’s folks that I’ve worked with very closely, and it’s with folks with whom I’ve had a shorter experience. And so Mrs. Grandberry was an amazing teacher. And honestly, I don’t know how she did on evaluations or classroom observations! I don’t know how she would have done on that. What I will tell you is she had relationships. That was her superpower: relationships. I believed that I could do anything. She partnered very closely with my family. And so, you know, that is absolutely clear. That was a clear lesson as I moved into the the profession as a teacher and school leader and on, that relationships—that that was going to be part of the magic that, that helps me to achieve anything in the work. So for sure that relationship, my parents—my dad is deceased now, but my parents were, my mom is—they’re just really good people. And again, with relationships, both of them just exude this level of comfort so that people very easily warm up to them, come to them with challenges and come to them and want to celebrate successes, that sort of thing. And so that’s the cloth that I’m cut from. I want and need people to be comfortable around me. That makes me comfortable. That’s of course—I’m talking about people who are good, people who are doing good things in the world. I don’t want folks who are tearing others down to be comfortable around me. In fact, I want you to be uncomfortable. So again, you know, by all the colleagues, people who’ve worked along with me, people I’ve supervised, people who have supervised me, families that I’ve worked alongside, parents, on and on and on. I find myself over time just taking pieces of individuals—people like yourself, people who are super, super smart, very critical of ideas, and the world around them—that have challenged me to think more critically about what exists and why what we really want want out of life doesn’t exist. And therefore, what can we do about it? What’s my role in this? And seeing myself as someone who has some agency to make things happen, and challenging myself to do that.

HORN: Eric, thank you so much. Thanks for that lovely kind word, thank you for your time today. Is there a question you would have liked me to ask that I did not ask? Or is there something else that you would like to add?

GREENE: One thing that I just don’t want to ever miss the opportunity to do is to shout out this amazing community. I now get it. You know, I heard in DC, the superintendent, well, the chancellor there shout out and give accolades to the community there. And I agreed, but, you know, I wasn’t in that role. The same in other places where I’ve been. Definitely in Tulsa, the superintendent there, she doesn’t miss an opportunity to shout out the Tulsans and the fiber of the community there. I get it now. From this role, with this perspective, understanding more deeply the challenges that people face, but also the options that people have to lean in or to lean back. And the numbers of times that people actually lean in, with resources to support their fellow man, another family, another organization, offering resources, giving grace to us when we don’t quite get it right, or when we misstep, or what have you—just all of those things. It’s pretty remarkable. In fact, it makes me emotional when I think about just all that people do to create the kind of community that we all really deserve and want, that many of us want, and want to live in, and that we want for our children. And so I’m just deeply, deeply indebted, greatly appreciative, and humbled by the heart that goes into the experiences that I’ve had here in Jackson. It was never my plan to be here in Jackson. But I’m so, so, so, so thankful that I’m here now.

HORN: And I’m sure that there are a lot of people in the community who would say that they’re very thankful that you are there.

GREENE: Thank you.

HORN: I’m thankful you’ve been here. Such a pleasure to talk to you under any circumstances, but this has been particularly rich.

GREENE: Thank you. Thank you, Pete. I appreciate it. Always just good to chat with you. I feel blessed every time I emerge with “Okay, we got this. We can do this!”

HORN: Now like over/under for the closing credits: like you, me and Al do some karaoke? Is that what we should—

GREENE: Yeah, that’s what we should do. Exactly it.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Dr. Greene for taking the time to talk, and to Gil Scott Chapman for laying down some special Mississippi-inspired piano tracks for use in this episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks to you for listening, sharing, and subscribing to the show. Rating and reviewing on your podcast platform of choice helps us connect with other people curious about what and how and why we learn. A proud member of the Lyceum consortium for education podcasts, Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me here in sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you with a fresh episode just as soon as I can. Until then, stay safe, strong, and prophetic. Make sure everyone you know has participated in the census, and, as someone who just volunteered to become a poll worker in my county, see what steps you can take to help November voting go smoothly where you live.

US + THEM Transcript (027)

US + THEM with Jonathan Haidt (7/3/20)

DON CALDWELL: Hi, I’m Don Caldwell. And you are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn, who was my English teacher around 20 years ago. So about five years ago, I stumbled upon a political debate on Facebook. And it led me to recommend that Peter read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. It’s a book that really opened my eyes to why people become so polarized in times like we’re seeing today. And also, it really changed my own approach with how I view political and religious disagreement, especially with how things have changed with the advent of the internet and social media. Well, it looks like Peter took my advice and not only read the book, but was able to book Haidt for an interview on this podcast! So without further ado, I give you Jonathan Haidt and Peter Horn.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on how politics got so tribal:

JONATHAN HAIDT: Our minds, our thinking, our reasoning did not evolve to help us find the truth necessarily; they evolved to help us adapt and survive in the complex social worlds that we’re in. And those worlds are very structured by relationships and teams and intergroup conflict. Our prime directive is not to find the truth. Our prime directive is stay popular, manage your reputation, don’t get on the wrong side of the powers that be.

[VO]: On the value of diverse viewpoints for teams and communities:

HAIDT: If everybody in a community shares the same politics, I can guarantee you, they are not able to think clearly about a complex issue. They will be experts in certain aspects of it, but they will be completely blind to other aspects of it. And that is why you need, in certain areas, you actually need a kind of an adversarial system, or at least you need other people who can challenge your confirmation bias. They don’t share it.

[VO]: How schools, universities, parents, and citizens can do something about it:

HAIDT: We have to educate for this complicated, hybrid democratic republic. And part of that is going to be, I think, educating for some sense of moral and intellectual humility: that you don’t know everything, that your group can’t possibly know everything, that we’re all deluded by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, that we actually need engagement with people who are different from us to improve our own thinking.

[VO]: Plus, some of the research he’s been doing on technology, anxiety, and depression:

HAIDT: It turns out that the number of hours that one spends on a screen every day does not predict depression or anxiety. Screen time is not the enemy in terms of depression and anxiety; social media is, and it is overwhelmingly for girls. So does it lead to depression in boys? Maybe a little bit, but it’s not so clear. For girls, across different kinds of studies, it’s pretty consistent.

[VO]: All that, and much, much more on today’s episode of Point of Learning!

[03:19]

[VO]: Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures—including the cultures of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, OpenMindPlatform.org, and EthicalSystems.org. (All those links are available on the show page for this episode.) Haidt is the author of the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, but we’re mostly drawing today on ideas from his two New York Times bestsellers, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.” As of this month, his four TED Talks have been viewed nearly 8 million times. He has been interviewed by Bill Moyers, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Krista Tippett, Stephen Colbert, and Alan Alda, to name a few, so I was more than a little fired up that he accepted my invite to chat over Zoom in early June.   

[05:31]

HORN: So based on your work and what you’re seeing right now, as you visit schools across the country, what are the most urgent insights you’d like to share right now?

HAIDT: You know, I wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff, and it’s about a variety of problems that are besetting Generation Z (kids born in 1996 and later). What is happening everywhere—every university, every high school, every middle school—is a big increase in depression and anxiety. And there have been surveys of college presidents in the last couple of years saying, “What are your top concerns?” And the number one concern across the board—the number one, the most widely cited issue is mental health services, the rise of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide. So something really big is happening to American kids. It began happening around 2012: the graphs of the rise of depression and anxiety, they just take off like a hockey stick for girls, especially, around 2012, plus or minus a year or two. It’s similar in Canada and the UK, and we can talk about other countries too. It’s very clear in the English-speaking countries. I don’t have as much data on other countries. So that is the number one concern. And that’s really my top concern about kids: something about the way we’re raising them, the way we’re educating them is creating teenagers and adults who are fragile, who are suffering, who are less effective, who are afraid to take risks, who are easily harmed by words, or by events not going their way. And it’s now filtering out into the workplace. Gen Z just began to graduate from college about two years ago. And now I’m hearing from people in the corporate world that their most recent employees are much harder to incorporate. So we have a gigantic national issue. We have extraordinary amounts of suffering and we’ve got to figure out what’s going on and then do something about it.

[07:38]

HORN: So here’s a confession: I’ve chosen to focus our conversation on ideas of yours that can improve our civil discourse because a.) it’s one deep interest of yours that I’m also passionate about, so it’s a through-line of this podcast; and b.)  I needed some way to delimit the dozens of questions I’d otherwise be tempted to ask you. We’ll be talking about how we can better communicate about hard issues of shared concern using just two of your books that I had real trouble putting down, The Righteous Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind, which, as you just mentioned you wrote with legal scholar Greg Lukianoff. I chose not to read The Happiness Hypothesis before talking to you, just to make things easier on me! To start off with a softball, drawing on Sam Gosling’s work, you’ve written that it’s possible to guess people’s political leanings at better than chance levels, just from looking at photographs of their desks. The idea subtending that claim is that liberals and conservatives are wired differently. It’s not just a matter of gravitating toward one pole or the other of a political spectrum in a given country at a given moment. There are deeper tendencies at work, right?

HAIDT: Yes. What Gosling found—he’s a personality psychologist at the University of Texas—is that back when he was at UC Berkeley, they took photographs of students’ dorm rooms. They asked the students to leave—“Don’t do anything, just step out. We’re going to take photographs of your dorm rooms. And then we’re going to have people rate them and guess whether you’re on the left or the right.” And it turns out—I don’t remember what percentage, but people are somewhat better than chance [at guessing correctly; Gosling, S. Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Basic Books, 2008]. And the reason is because different personality types are attracted to the left and the right. Conservatives tend to be higher on conscientiousness … You know, I talk to all kinds of groups. I speak at organizations on the left and the right, but if the event is going to start on time and the food is kind of boring and predictable, and a lot of the men are wearing jackets and ties, I know it’s a right-leaning group, whereas if it doesn’t start on time and the food is more varied and there’s no dress code, then it’s probably a left-leaning group. And Sam Gosling found the same thing in the dorm rooms—not exactly the same thing, but like, conservatives had more calendars and postage stamps, and liberals had more world music and, you know, novels or something like that. So the big finding is that people on the right are more conscientious and … oh, the big one is an openness to experience. People in the left are more curious about the world, the world beyond their local environment. Conservatives tend to be more parochial, which is not an insult. It means they are more rooted. They care more about their community. They’re not going to say that they’re “citizens of the world,” they’re citizens of their town before that.

HORN: I like that you highlight, you know, conscientiousness, as one of the positive aspects of for example, conservatism, because you contend that as a starting point for more civil exchanges, it’s very helpful to recognize where liberals and conservatives each bring strengths to a moral conversation. And I want to say that also you’re very careful in your language that, for example, liberal does not equal necessarily just “the left,” or what we would consider the left right now, in terms of U.S. politics, and conservative on the right. Rather, you’re talking about these kinds of general tendencies for example, as you said, marked by “openness to experience”—would be one of those things. I noted when you were talking a few years ago with Krista Tippett, you said, “What I would like to see is a revamped civics curriculum, where we teach, very explicitly, the long tradition of left-right,” [paraphrasing] to teach what each side’s strengths are, where their excellences are, because “both are essential. One without the other creates an unbalanced American civic order. You need a party of progress or reform and a party of stability and order.” So just wanted to see if you’d be willing to riff on that for a little bit …

[12:03]

HAIDT: Oh yeah, I can riff for as long as we got on that one! So, I mean, I guess I always like to step back before I answer a question and bring in the relevant psychology. The relevant psychology here is that our minds, our thinking, our reasoning did not evolve to help us find the truth necessarily; they evolved to help us adapt and survive in the complex social worlds that we’re in. And those worlds are very structured by relationships and teams and intergroup conflict. And so, we are very, very good at finding reasons to support our team or ourself. As soon as somebody accuses you of something, your mind goes into overdrive, finding reasons why you are innocent and your spouse—if that’s the person accusing you—is guilty, or is guilty of hypocrisy as well. “And why does she say this? And yesterday, she just did that!” So we go into legal mode automatically. And when we are considering any kind of policy issues—Should we raise or lower taxes? What should we do for our immigration policy?—whatever it is, we don’t say, “Hmm, what are the arguments on both sides? What’s the evidence?” We tend to start by preferring one solution or liking one side. If it’s a politicized issue, it’s the one that our team has already staked out for us. And then we’re really good at finding evidence to support what we believe. And we’re really good at batting away any counter evidence. And this is why you can’t change people’s minds just by giving them reasons. You yourself are surely open to reasons and reasonable, but you know, all those people you talk to and argue with on the other side, they’re just so pig-headed! All right. So that’s the relevant psychology. It’s called motivated reasoning or confirmation bias. Given that, if everybody in a community shares the same politics, I can guarantee you, they are not able to think clearly about a complex issue. They will be experts in certain aspects of it, but they will be completely blind to other aspects of it. And that is why you need, in certain areas, you actually need a kind of an adversarial system, or at least you need other people who can challenge your confirmation bias; they don’t share it. And that’s why in our legal system, we instantiate the idea that there’s going to be somebody, you know, one attorney on one side, looking for evidence to defend the client. And then there’ll be a prosecutor looking for evidence to convict the accused, whoever it is. So we need other people to question, to challenge our confirmation bias. Journalists understand this. They try to get both sides of the story. You can’t understand something if you just have one side. All right. So that’s the relevant psychology. Now back to your question about a civics curriculum. So I was always on the left growing up. I’m a kind of a, you know, stereotypical, you know, I’m Jewish, raised in the suburbs of New York. I went to Yale, so I never had a conservative thought in my head, nor did I ever meet a conservative person that I knew to be conservative. I’m exaggerating. I mean, there were a couple of conservatives at Yale, but very few. And it wasn’t until I began studying political psychology in my forties at the University of Virginia when I set out to teach a graduate seminar on political psychology. And it’s only then that I actually set out to understand conservatives and I began—I subscribed to The National Review, I watched Fox News, I tried to meet conservatives and talk with them. And what I discovered is that talking to people who didn’t share my worldview was the most enlightening thing I could do. I learned more from that reading and conversation than I could from any ten issues of The New Yorker and The New York Times put together. So we actually need other people to help us see the full story. And the long tradition of left and right can be defined almost in this way: the people who sat on the left side of the General Assembly in Paris during the Revolution were the ones who wanted more change. And, you know, I don’t know if they said, “Kill the King,” but you know, “Let’s knock down this rotten structure and we need progress!” And the people who sat on the right side are the ones who said, “No, don’t rip up everything! There’s value in tradition, there’s value in order!” And that’s a perennial debate in every society. And it’s an essential debate in every society. You need a left and you need a right. Now I’m not saying that the two parties in the United States now are equally sane or equally correct. I’m just saying that if you just have one view represented, I can tell you in advance where this is going to go wrong, what kinds of excesses there’s going to be if there are not people and institutions on the other side pushing to get a balance.

[16:36]

HORN: You’ve even noted that in talking about how essential this is— Well, I have two questions. One is about our cognitive bias toward confirmation, toward finding evidence that supports our own view, but overlooking, you know, kind of cherry picking to overlook the data that that could disconfirm it, right? What would be the evolutionary advantage of that, to your way of thinking about it?

HAIDT: So let’s look at our sense perception, which is extremely good. Our eyes, our ears are amazing, and, you know, it’s not adaptive to misjudge the thickness of ice that you’re walking on or to, you know, not see a, a tree that’s in your way. So our visual systems, our auditory systems are superbly tuned to aspects of the physical world that are really there, that matter for us. Okay. But what about our social cognition? Is it essential that we understand the true nature of immigration? Or gender, is that really essential, or is it more essential that we not get kicked off the team or ostracized? The penalty for deviance is not traditionally death, it’s traditionally ostracism. You kick people out. I’m reading a lot of Roman history and the Stoics, and you know, it’s true: the emperors would sometimes demand that somebody be killed, but more typically they just say, “You’re banished! You have to go off to a little island someplace.” So this is the ancient human thing is that people who are deviants, we get rid of them and that, in the old world, meant death. So, our prime directive is not to find the truth. Our prime directive is stay popular, manage your reputation, don’t get on the wrong side of the powers that be.

HORN: That makes a lot of sense. Again, on confirmation bias, you noted that there has even been research trying to train people how to question their own assumptions, but that nobody’s really found a way to do it that works. It’s very hard to train people to do it. So, in fact, if you’re going to try to understand an issue fully from a number of different vantage points, really, you do need other people.

HAIDT: That’s right. There’s research on—the psychological term is de-biasing. Can we train people to overcome their biases? And there’s a review paper on this by Scott Lilienfeld [Lilienfeld, S. O., R. Ammirati, and K. Landfield. 2009. “Giving Debiasing Away: Can Psychological Research on Correcting Cognitive Errors Promote Human Welfare?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4:390-98.] And my recollection of this paper from 10 or 15 years ago was that there was no technique that has been shown to really work. You know, you can train people to see all kinds of biases and boy, can they detect them in others! But we’re just not good at detecting them in ourselves. We don’t want to, there’s not really any payoff for it, and so the only really reliable way is another person, and another person that you have some relationship with so that you’re not going to just reject them. So the internet, in theory, hooks us up to the world. We have the world’s information at our fingertips. It could be great for this. Unfortunately, interacting with strangers in short-term environment … Twitter is the worst possible environment. You have just, you know, 240 characters, a person who may not be using their real name, and it’s in front of an audience, so there’s a lot of incentive to do moral grandstanding, virtue-signaling. So let’s bring it back to the educational context now. If you don’t teach critical thinking, ability to evaluate evidence, and all the other skills that educators have known for so long—if you don’t teach those, people are not gonna come to them on their own, generally. These are hard skills that need to be taught, but as I understand it, the research on critical thinking—there was a lot of it in the ‘80s—I remember it didn’t come up with a lot. It’s very hard to teach these things. And so I, as a social psychologist, I tend to say, well, often the solution is not to be found in cognitive psychology. It’s to be found in social psychology. If you really want to make people into critical thinkers, don’t teach them, you know, modus ponens arguments [e.g., if P implies Q and P is true, Q must also be true], or don’t teach them six different, you know, fallacies or syllogisms. Teach them humility, teach them that you’re wrong far more than you could ever realize, teach them that it’s actually fun to learn. And the best way to learn is to approach people with an attitude of curiosity, not hatred—curiosity. Teach them a habit of seeking out other people for conversation. And that will create a person who ends up getting much closer to the truth.

[21:11]

HORN: I was naive maybe when I was teaching high school about the time—I’m going to say when I was 30, so this would be like 2005—

HAIDT: Well, what did you teach them? What did you tell them to?

HORN: Well, this was the thing. I thought if I taught kids how to construct effective arguments—it’s pretty much what you just said, like how to spot logical fallacies, you know, because it’s very difficult to teach effective reasoning in a positive direction. But if you can recognize some of the ways that reasoning is liable to go wrong, whether it’s hasty generalization or a post hoc [ergo propter hoc, i.e., this thing happened after that thing, so that thing must have caused this thing] fallacy. If you can recognize those kinds of things, then it’s possible perhaps to work backwards.

HAIDT: Right, yeah, for a different species it would be! Just like when we, you know, when my wife and I teach our kids about healthy eating. Does that have an effect? No! Because they’re not motivated to eat healthy. They’re motivated eat sugar. And salt and fat.

HORN: Well, here’s how it turned out, and we did do some of what you were just talking about, in terms of trying to find reliable information, and that includes navigating the dizzying array of internet sources. But this metaphor that you use, which is probably one of the first places in The Righteous Mind where I was like, “Oh man, that’s me!” It’s something you alluded to a few moments ago, that we all believe that we are scientists just looking for data, you know, that we believe that we have this rational mind where we go out and [seek evidence]. But in fact, what we’re doing is lawyers making cases postpositively, you know, for what we already think is true and we are establishing those justifications afterward.

HAIDT: Yep, that’s the heart of The Righteous Mind. That’s the first principle of moral psychology. That’s right.

HORN: But what I did find that helped when we would do a unit on rhetoric and argumentation was the environment that had already been established in the classroom. And so that we framed it, you know, I was very careful because high school kids in particular, if they’ve been through a certain—this was in an English classroom, I should say—you know, after they’d been through enough social studies, they can start to think that anytime you call something a “debate,” it is about, you know, points, scoring points—

HAIDT: And winning …

HORN: And losing face. But so it would always be a kind of argumentative “discussion” or “conversation.” We would use that form. But then I found that it was really the comfort level, as you said, the relationships between the kids, because it was a place—and you know I also tried to make very sure that they weren’t also trying to say things that they thought that I would agree with, because I laid out that’s the opposite of what we’re talking about here, though that’s a heavy lift, as I was talking about with Jon Zimmerman a couple of months ago, when you’re the teacher and you have the grade book and so forth—but to the extent that people were able to do it, they were able to do it because they trusted that they wouldn’t be piled on, that they wouldn’t be ostracized, there wouldn’t be ad hominem attacks coming in their direction and that we’d keep it to the ideas, but that is not something, as you said, that you can just walk up and do with somebody. It depends on a relationship that you have and some kind of trust that it’s going to be okay to do that. Cause it’s hard.

HAIDT: That’s right. And what year were you teaching? Tell me again, the years you were teaching?

HORN: They did [the rhetoric and argumentation unit] from like 2005 to, I’m gonna say up through 2015. About 10 years.

[24:46]

HAIDT: Okay, so actually, let me ask you, because the social media changed radically between 2009 and 2012. Before 2009, Facebook, MySpace, all those platforms, it was just like, “Here I am! Look at all my friends, look at the music groups, the bands that I like!” In 2009, Facebook introduces the LIKE button and Twitter copies it, then Twitter introduces the RETWEET button and Facebook copies it. And so so suddenly social media is much more engaging, addicting. They’ve got massive information about each user. They use that to algorithmatize the newsfeed. So 2009 to 2012, we go from social media being pretty benign to it being an outrage machine, facilitating call-out culture. And these are exactly the years when American teens flood onto social media. If you look at data, on what percentage they were using it—like Facebook, we know what percent were using the social media site. Every day in 2009, it was much less than half of high school students were. But by 2011 or 2012, it was a large majority were. So that’s when everything changes. And when I go around speaking at high schools, middle schools elsewhere, I always ask the students about call-out culture and they all recognize it. And they all hate it.

[VO]: For those fortunate enough not to be familiar with call-out culture, it refers to a form of public shaming that takes place online, usually on social media, especially Twitter. Call-outs often aim to hold individuals and groups accountable for objectionable statements and actions, but they usually end up raising the level of outrage for all parties.

HAIDT: So for a generation that’s been raised where one word out of place—or even not out of place, just anything you say can be taken out of context and blown up and someone can put a spin on it and put a meme next to it. So you can be socially destroyed at any time. And I do think this is part of the reason why anxiety takes off, especially for girls in 2012, because that’s exactly when they got on social media. And I think the girls really suffered from it much more than the boys. Boys are mostly doing video games, more than social media. So to bring it back to what we were just talking about, you can try to teach critical reasoning skills, but I would guess that teenagers, high school kids, are vastly more concerned about the social dynamics on social media than they are about detecting a fallacy in somebody’s argument.

[VO]: For more thoughts on establishing a classroom environment where students are inclined to develop the trust necessary for deeper conversations, check out Point of Learning episode 003 with guest Paula Roy. Also, I’m proud to announce that Point of Learning has been inducted into Lyceum, a new platform for education podcasts. Here’s 30 seconds about that from the founder of Lyceum, and then we’ll get right back to my conversation with Jonathan Haidt!

ZACHARY DAVIS: Hi, I’m Zachary Davis. I’m the host of two podcasts: Ministry of Ideas, which explores the philosophy behind everyday concepts, and Writ Large, a new podcast about the books that changed the world. I love educational podcasts. I love listening to them and talking about them. I want everyone to have that chance. And so I’ve built a new platform called Lyceum, which makes it easy to discover great educational podcasts and have conversations about them. There are more than a million podcasts out there. We’ve done the hard work of sifting through them and finding only the very best education shows to listen to, shows like the one you’re listening to right now. So if you love learning, download Lyceum today on the App Store or Google Play, or visit us at lyceum.fm.

[28:35]

HORN: So one of the things that I was trying to figure out, I think just as social media was getting nasty, was trying to think about, well, what kinds of devices would be okay to bring into the classroom, if we can’t afford yet to have a laptop on a 1:1 basis? What would it be like for kids—this is like 2013, all right—for kids to have, you know, their phones or like an iPod Touch was one of the options that some kids already had, to see how they could connect with internet media and other sorts of platforms on what was then called “2.0.” We experimented, but I kept asking students what they thought about it, what was working for them. And they were actually very honest saying that the phone is a distraction. “It is hard for me to use in this way.” And especially since hearing some of the data that you have discussed, and written about, presented on, it just becomes overwhelmingly clear that a strong case can be made for not allowing phones in particular in school during the school day. Another one of your points is of course, keeping kids off of social media before they get to high school. But I confess, this is one of the things that I was thinking about as a teacher years ago, trying to say, well, how can we take advantage of some of this new technology and some of these new ways of learning that are possible while there is this noted downside too?

HAIDT: Yeah, so let’s, talk about two different downsides. One is mental health problems and the other is distraction and learning. On the mental health side, until recently there was a big debate as to, you know, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation? Is screen time causing the rise of depression and anxiety?” And so I got into that debate because Greg Lukianoff and I covered it in our book, and we focused on social media. But when we wrote the book, we did say that limits on screen time [may be warranted because] these devices are magical. And if you let a kid have unlimited access to them, it’s gonna push out other activities, so there’s a lot of concern about screens and phones, but as I’ve dug into the debate and as I’ve engaged with critics who said, “No, you know, let’s look at the evidence,” it turns out that the number of hours that one spends on a screen every day does not predict depression or anxiety. Screen time is not the enemy in terms of depression and anxiety. Social media is, and it is overwhelmingly for girls. Does it lead to depression in boys? You know, maybe a little bit, but it’s not so clear. For girls, across different kinds of studies, it’s pretty consistent. It’s not a huge effect, but it is clearly, I believe, clearly a contributor. So there’s a really, really strong argument to be made for trying to keep kids, especially girls, from even getting a social media account until high school. They’re supposed to wait till they’re 13, but when my son entered middle school at age 11, he said, “Everybody else has an Instagram account.” Everybody just lies. This is a really, really bad idea because I think it contributes to the mental health crisis for girls. So anybody out there, especially if you’re working in middle school, remember the parents can’t just make the decision themselves because, your kid says, “But everybody else is on it, I’ll be excluded,” and no parent wants their kid to be the outcast. So we all need help from administrators, especially middle school principals and teachers to say, “Parents, please don’t even let them get an account until high school.” Right, so that’s the mental health. But what you’re talking about is more of the distraction issue and what I can report there is that I’ve always in my courses at UVA and especially here at NYU-Stern where I’m teaching MBA students in their twenties, I’ve always laid out, “Here’s the problem with distraction. We all think we can do multitasking, but we can’t. So I’m going to let you have your laptops or devices, as long as you all say out loud this pledge that you will not use it for other than class activities, that you will not shop, you’re not going to do email, you’re just gonna use it for class activities.” And I, and I’ve always done that because I want to trust my students. But only a few years ago did I think to ask, and it turns out they don’t want it! They all—not all, but you know—when I put it to a vote and I say, “Okay, how many of you think we should have just a No Devices policy?” Most of the MBA students say yes, because they know if there’s a screen in front of them, they can’t pay attention to the lecture. And even if they’re trying, the person next to them is now multitasking and they go, “Okay, why don’t I do that too?” And that’s for 27-year-olds! Think about being a 15-year-old, and this is laptops we’re talking about now. A laptop, of course, it gives you access to everything, but a touch screen gives you a reward faster. A touch screen is more immersive, more engaging than as a laptop. So I think it is really important for K-12 educators to do everything they can to keep kids away from, especially from their devices. There may be reasons why you’d need a computer at times, of course, but if they have access to their own phone, how can they possibly resist? There are so many psychologists in Silicon Valley who are experts in keeping that kid on his phone.

HORN: The “attention economy,” yeah.

[33:55]

HAIDT: So it’s crazy that schools let kids have phones in their pockets or even their backpacks. If they’re there, they’ll use them. They’ll use them during class breaks, they’ll sneak into the bathroom. So I feel very strongly about this. We need really good, clear evidence. I want schools to do clear experiments. In one school, you have a permissive policy or, you know, in five schools, in a school district—five high schools, you have permissive policy, and in five schools, you say, “No, you don’t get access to your phone except when you arrive and when you leave.” We need good data on this.

HORN: I really applaud bringing kids in on the conversation and the discussion, you know, as opposed to— There would be some administrators whose temptation would be like, “Oh, this is bad, so we’re going to ban it.” And kids wouldn’t understand why, or what was going on. They wouldn’t have heard about the evidence, let alone been involved in any kind of participatory action research that might, you know, help them understand, “Okay, well, this is what’s happening here,” because of course, if we’re trying to think about their making better decisions, but also participating as citizens in that school community, in the classroom and in the school community as agents there, I just—you know, my bias is toward trying to involve the students, especially at the high school level, as much as possible. “So this is what we think is right, and here’s why.”

HAIDT: Yes, I think it’s so important to bring the students in. One of the really good things that I’ve learned about Gen Z is that they are not in denial. I’ve spoken at a number of middle schools and high schools and of course at colleges, and you know, I lay out, “Look, here’s what's going on: high rates of depression, anxiety, fragility, overprotected, risk-averse.” You know, it’s a pretty damning portrait of their generation. I don’t blame them for it. I explain how this happened. You know, that adults following good intentions were trying to help them, protect them. So I’m not blaming them, but it is a pretty negative portrayal of their generation. And at the end of the talk, I generally say, “Okay, you know, if you’re born after 1996—if you’re a Gen Z student—what do you think? Did I largely get this right, is this a mis-presentation of your generation?” And it’s overwhelmingly—it’s almost, it’s usually around a hundred percent say, “Yes, this is right.” Because they recognize that they’re suffering from anxiety and depression. They recognize that social media and call-out culture is damaging them. They hate it. They recognize they’ve been overprotected. They don’t want to be so overprotected. And so if you bring them in on it and you say, “You know, here’s what the evidence says. What are your goals? Do you want to learn, or do you want to stay connected on social media all day long?” As long as everybody else is off. They’re like, “I wouldn’t want to be off if everyone else is on, because I’ll be left out, but if everyone is off …” And so I think we have to recognize kids are caught in a lot of—economists, call them “social dilemmas” or “cooperation games” where everybody’s better off if nobody does this behavior, but each person is better off doing the behavior. So you know, the classic example: if you graze your sheep on the town commons, you are better off. But if everybody does it, then the commons dies. And so kids are trapped in a lot of those things and you know what, in Silicon Valley, they know that and they engineered it that way. That’s the way they can get everybody on. And it’s up to us, parents and educators working together, to create a path by which the kids can get out of it. If you bring them in, it’s a great chance to explain, you know, economics, to let us explain social science concepts, if you bring them in on it and say, “Okay, let’s craft a healthy media environment. Let’s craft a healthy learning environment.” I think they’ll generally be very supportive.

[37:38]

HORN: So, rising rates of depression and anxiety, particularly in girls; the dangers of social media. These are a couple of the topics that you discuss as some of the intersecting strands at work in The Coddling of the American Mind. I wanted to talk about another one. I’m very interested in the link between free play and democratic skills, especially at this moment when we seem particularly inept at working through disagreements. So this is one of the phenomena you talk about. First, what is free play?

HAIDT: So free play is what mammals do. Mammals—all mammals—play. And if all mammals play—you know, bunny rabbits play and develop the skills that they’ll need as bunny rabbits, and wolves play at the skills they’ll need as wolves. They all play chasing games, and the wolves seem to prefer being the chaser, and the rabbits seem to prefer practicing their fleeing skills. So when I was a grad student, I lived in a neighborhood in South Philadelphia with a lot of families. And I’ll never forget one day, I was in my mid-twenties and I, you know, I’ve always loved kids and I’ve always loved playing with kids. So I was known as like the, you know, the grownup that they could play with. And I remember one day, some of the kids came, they rang my doorbell and they said, “Mr. Jon, will you chase us?” They wanted this big adult to come chase them. That was fun because they were practicing their fleeing skills.

HORN: Interesting.

HAIDT: All mammals, all mammal species practice play. It’s essential for our development of basic adult skills that we’ll need as members of our species. Okay. So, as is well known, if you give young kids a present, they might find the box more interesting. They might find the ribbons more interesting—because they’re creative, they’re taking things, they’re working it out, both with the object and with the other kids. And this is really important. One of the most essential human skills is shared representations. We work with other kids to develop like, “Okay, let’s pretend that this is the spaceship.” “Okay, yeah, and then a giraffe comes …” “No, it can’t be a giraffe!” So so they’re working out these shared representations with other kids, and this is play. And so, you know, I don’t know how old you are. I was born in 1963, and there was a gigantic crime wave from the 1960s to the 1990s. And during that crime wave, all kids went out to play. When you were seven or eight years old, you went out to play. And then, something weird happened. The crime rate plummeted in the 1990s. (There are a lot of reasons for that.) But the crime wave sort of ends in the 1990s. And just as the crime wave is ending, Americans freaked out about child abduction and we thought “Stranger danger! If you let your kid outside, she’ll be abducted.” And it’s true that a few were, but almost zero. I mean, in a country of 350 million people, there’s only about a 100-150 true kidnappings every year. It’s almost zero, but we freaked out about it just as life was getting safe. And we said, “No more unsupervised outdoor play. You have to stay where I can see you.” And at the same time, we had rising competition to get into college. And so we had—especially for the middle class and [higher incomes]—this idea of what’s called concerted cultivation parenting: your childhood is a group activity for our family to get you into the top college, which means after school, you’ve got lessons, you’ve got activities. So for a variety of reasons, unsupervised free play largely vanished for younger kids, especially, and supervised structured activities, exploded. What happened? We took young mammals and we deprived them of the activity they most needed. What they most need is not math. And it’s not violin lessons. It’s unstructured time with other kids deciding “what should we do today?” “I don’t know. What do you think?” “Well, let’s go down to the Village and see what’s going on,” or, you know, “Let’s go play ball in the park.” We took away the most nutritious activity for human development, which is unstructured free play, and we replaced it with stuff that isn’t so healthy. Soccer practice: it’s good. It’s good to do soccer practice, but there’s a coach telling you what to do all the time. It’s not free play. And this we think is one of the big reasons why the mental health of Gen Z has deteriorated so quickly. In fact, we’ve got quotes in the [Coddling]: Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College and there’s also a Norwegian researcher Sandseter. Both of them have articles around 2010-11 saying, “You know, folks, free play is declining. We’ve got to let kids play. And if we don’t let kids play, there's going to be a rise of depression and anxiety.” They literally predicted this around 2010-11, and a year or two later, boom, the rates go skyrocketing. [Gray, P. “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents. American Journal of Play, 2011; Sandseter, E., and L. Kennair. “Children’s Risky Play from an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences. Evolutionary Psychology, 2011.] 

[VO]: To learn more about how to counter the culture of overprotection for kids in elementary and even middle school, visit letgrow.org. There’s a link on the show page.

[42:37]

HORN: And so as far as the working things out aspect, you know, you noted [paraphrasing Peter Gray] that free play is always voluntary, and that anybody can quit at any time, which would disrupt the activity. And because of that, children need to pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going, as opposed to the coach saying, “Hey, you stay in there.” Right? So they’ve got to work out conflicts over fairness on their own. No adult can be called upon to side with one child against another.

HAIDT: That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. What is it the kids most want? What is it they’re most afraid of? They most want to fit in. They’re most afraid of being ostracized or kicked out. So if you’re the kid who can’t cooperate, if you’re the kid who’s always demanding to get your way, guess what? Other kids aren’t gonna want to play with you. So you learn to get along with others, you learn to self-control, you learn to regulate your demands. You learn to read other people’s faces. So the most important social skills, the skills we need, the skills we want to see in college, the skills that employers want—all of those are learned in free play. But what happens when instead of free play, they’re always in a structured environment with a coach or a teacher? What happens when there’s a conflict? Who do you go to in that situation? Kids practice skills of reporting, that is, they learn to make the best case they can to the adult that so-and-so broke the rules. “She’s wrong. I’m right. You judge.” And so this is what we’ve seen in college. This is what happened. It really swept in around 2014-15 this culture of students reporting each other for speech violations to various deans and it’s just put us all on eggshells. We’re all now much more afraid. We’re very careful what we say in class, because if we offend someone, there’s all kinds of reporting mechanisms and they were raised to do this. It’s not good for democracy. It’s not practice for a complicated, diverse society. It’s “fomenting an attitude of victimhood” is what some people say.

HORN: I can distinctly remember in kindergarten—this happened exactly once, and it was a recess. This is 1980-81; I’m 45. And it happened exactly once, because this was supervised [recess] only in the sense that if somebody starts bleeding, you know, somebody would notice or whatever. I mean, there’s somebody nearby, but who was not interacting. I decided, wouldn’t it be great when we’re playing superheroes if I could be a superhero that did not exist called the King of the Superheroes who had all the powers of every other superhero. I came up with this idea after somebody else had claimed Batman and Spiderman and so forth. I came up with this idea, and it did not go over well. And that was it. That was the end of the idea, you know, like I did not try that again.

HAIDT: [laughing] They schooled you!

HORN: I was like, “Yeah, I guess that could have been better considered …”

[45:47]

HORN: You’ve written about changing your mind quite a bit. This is a wonderful capacity, like compromise, that we don’t talk about very often. But you’ve changed your mind quite a bit since your upbringing or your growing up as a secular liberal, in terms of how you thought about morality, politics and religion. And I wanted to ask you about somebody that I’ve seen and heard you write about and speak about who helped you with this. Because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I often ask guests about a teacher who had a strong influence on them, but in your case, I know that you’ve said some very impressive things about Richard Shweder, the professor at University of Chicago who was your postdoctoral advisor. What was it?

HAIDT: Sure. So I went to Penn [for my Ph.D.] and I had some wonderful professors there, especially Paul Rozin, a general psychologist who just had a love of learning, a love of psychology, just a rampant curiosity. And then also Alan Fiske, an anthropologist who first introduced me to cultural psychology. Fiske was the first person who assigned me to read ethnographies, full portraits of other cultures. So Rozin and Fiske really started the process and really started opening me up to the joys of psychology and cultural psychology. And both of them had worked with Richard Shweder, a psychological anthropologist at the University of Chicago. And my dissertation grew into a study of whether Rick Shweder was right in his debate with Elliot Turiel over the nature of moral knowledge. Is the moral domain limited to issues of harm, rights and justice, or is it broader in some ways? And so for a variety of reasons, I ended up applying for a postdoc to go to Chicago. And I worked with Shweder for two years. And during that time, because I was working with Shweder, he had really good research contacts in Bhubaneswar, India on the east coast of India, the capital of Odisha province. So I got an award, a grant, to travel there, and I did three months of fieldwork. And what Shweder taught me was first how to think about pluralism, that is, it’s not that there’s one morality, but it’s also not that there’s no morality or that everybody is right. Shweder’s view is pluralism: there’s more than one right way. And Shweder was very influenced by Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher. And I think those skills, the thinking about how can you live in a world where people have different values without retreating to relativism or nihilism; I learned that from Shweder. The other thing that I learned from him is how to appreciate a community that has a broader and more binding morality. Shweder wrote about the ethics of autonomy, which we all know in the West, but there’s also the ethics of community. It’s sort of a parochialism: everybody do your assigned job; it’s very clear in Hinduism. And [he wrote about] the ethics of divinity: norms about purity and pollution and how you have a sacred essence within you that you must guard, which are at the heart of almost all the American culture war issues around sexuality, drug use, flag burning—all sorts of issues that seem where the right seems irrational to people on the left. I mean, it’s often because they have a broader moral domain. [People on the right are] thinking about issues of loyalty, respect, duty, sacredness, purity. So Shweder really opened my mind to different moralities. And here I was very much on the left. I hated Republicans, I hated conservatives. And here I was now going to India, trying to understand a society that was traditional, gender- segregated, very hierarchical, very religious, and they were really nice to me! And they made it easy to like them, and in that way, they opened my heart to really listen to them. And I’d done a lot of reading, also; I was trying to understand their way of life, and Shweder really helped me with that. So when I think about my intellectual biography, and all the great teachers I had, from social studies teachers in middle school, through through my AP history teachers in high school, through wonderful professors at Yale, grad school [at Penn], and then onto Richard Shweder, they all ultimately prepared me to step out of my own moral matrix, my network of beliefs that I got from being an American progressive in the 1980s. Let’s say it all prepared me to step out of my own moral matrix and enter into the moral matrix or moral worldview of other people. And that’s a skill that has been enormously valuable, especially as American society fragments, as our culture war heats up, as we descend into increased conflict. It’s made it harder for me to be a full-throated member of any team, but I think I at least have an understanding of what’s happening to us and why we’re descending into madness. We’re not crazy. We’re not insane. But we are normal creatures who evolve for tribal intergroup conflict who had the benefit of living in a society that was able to progressively dampen down those ethnic identities and other identities—obviously not perfectly, but boy! the trajectory of late 20th century sure was a good direction. Things got better decade after decade. And now, for a lot of reasons, the benefits we had, the factors that gave us more cohesion in the 20th century, a lot of them are falling away. So anyway, I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying it’s really exciting to study moral psychology right now, because at least I have the pleasure of trying to figure out what’s going on rather than just the despair of seeing our society go to hell.

[51:37]

HORN: We started talking about the difference between liberals and conservatives, again, in these general categories. You’ve used this very interesting metaphor, and this is going back to The Righteous Mind, whose subtitle is Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And one of the things that you helped this liberal understand is, through your metaphor or comparison to taste receptors on a tongue, being aware that there are different kinds of things, different kinds of flavors that speak to different groups, and whereas everybody, liberal and conservative, can respond to ideas of care and fairness, liberals can often stop there; whereas in addition to that, there are these other values of autonomy, loyalty, authority, purity / sanctity that are available to people on the more conservative side. And so a couple of things come from that. One is that, given the kind of bias of media and culture toward a liberal perspective, conservatives are pretty comfortable with the “liberal world.” They know where liberals come from. But so many conservative ideas don’t really make sense to liberals because they tick in these other places that are just—when you were talking about, you know, sanctity related to purity in India that was something that was difficult for you to grasp at first. And then it made sense and things began to open up because you’re looking at something that is pretty different. And so I was struck with what opens up as a result of thinking about these kinds of things, that there are different kinds of strengths or excellences that these different groups bring. But I also want to [consider] some of the images of this past week [5/28-6/3/20]: you have a Black Lives Matter slogan; certainly that talks about care and fairness, whether you’re talking about equality or equity, but then you have Blue Lives Matter responding to that, which gets at some of those same things, but also brings in this value of authority, like “we need law and order!” I’m just trying to think about some of the things that we’ve seen, you know, including our president standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, clutching that Bible by his fingertips, you know, as if he had just read like Ivanka’s diary, unloading about her narcissistic dad or something. He didn’t really seem to want to touch it, but the symbols there were very powerful.

HAIDT: No, that’s right. Yes, and I think that whenever we have a big blow-up, whenever we have a conflict that pits left and right in the United States, generally speaking, you will find the left is drawing on language and concerns about fairness, justice, equality, and also care or [its opposite] violence. So, you know, the moral language of the protesters and Black Lives Matter is incredibly powerful. It’s accessible to everybody. [From my office] I look out on Washington Square Park right now, and somebody has spray-painted on the arch “BLM. Stop killing my people.” And so it’s a language everybody understands. Now conservatives also understand [care]. They care for their children, they care for their dogs. So it’s not as though they don’t have that, but conservative morality tends not to be built on care and compassion. It tends to be built more on notions of personal responsibility and duty and respect for authority and tradition. And there are many kinds of conservatism and many kinds of liberalism. So we have you know, the spectacle of Donald Trump, who is not a religious man, who has not lived anything like a Christian life, holding up the Bible as a marketing tactic to speak to his core audience and to assure them, “I’m on your side.” So, you know, there’s a lot we could say about the ugly politics of the moment and the moral and political entrepreneurs who simply exploit it for messaging rather than actually enacting it to create a better society. I guess if we’re talking especially to educators, maybe we could wrap it up by saying, this is the messed-up world that your students are all going to graduate into. And so, to get back to your question about a revamped [civics] curriculum, I think it’s vital that we focus on educating students for democracy, which means appreciating that democracy is important and valuable and fragile. It doesn’t come easily. We thought it did in the 1990s because America won the Cold War and there was no alternative. We thought that if we just let Russia and Iran and Saudi Arabia, North Korea—just let them get market economies, let them rise in wealth, the people will demand liberties and they’ll become liberal democracies just like us. Well, we were wrong about that. It turns out democracy is exactly as hard as the Founding Fathers said. They said it was hard. In fact, they didn’t want democracy. They wanted a republic with democratic features, and they warned us about demagogues and the way that a demagogue will come and speak to the passions. So we have to educate for this complicated hybrid democratic republic. And part of that is going to be, I think, educating for some sense of moral and intellectual humility, that you don’t know everything, that your group can’t possibly know everything, that we’re all deluded by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, that we actually need engagement with people who are different from us to improve our own thinking. At any rate, I guess we’ll just close by saying that democracy is incredibly hard, and as hard as it is to believe, that you might benefit from listening to people on the other side. Often it is hard to believe that, because often the people on the other side really do some loathsome things or at least some people on the other side do loathsome things. And then we hate the whole side. I guess I would just urge that in K-12 education, especially in high school, lie the seeds of redemption for our country. We are in a very bad state, headed in a very bad direction, and we’ve got to help the next generation learn to handle this difficult democracy and thrive in it and improve it.

HORN: Jon, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

HAIDT: Peter, my pleasure.

[58:17]

That’s it for today’s show! Once again, my great thanks to Professor Jonathan Haidt for joining me. Together with co-editor Richard Reeves and artist David Cicirelli, Dr. Haidt has developed a lively new version of some of philosopher John Stuart Mill’s classic arguments for viewpoint diversity and free speech. That’s called All Minus One, and it’s available as a free download at HeterodoxAcademy.org. There are links to that, and many other resources on the show page for this episode, including two of Jon’s phenomenal books, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, co-authored by Greg Lukianoff. All music for today’s soundtrack was composed and performed by Shayfer James. Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating, and reviewing this podcast, all of which makes it easier for people to find. If you like what you heard today, please take a moment to share this episode with just one person you think would dig it. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. My name is Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with a fresh episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then! 

Shakti Yoga Transcript (026)

Shakti Yoga 2.0 with Michelle Gigante (5/29/20)

JENNIFER E. BREVORKA: Greetings! This is Jenny Brevorka, a trial lawyer and yogi based in Houston, Texas. You’re at the Point of Learning with my friend, Peter Horn. I grew up in Buffalo, and I have known Pete since childhood. When he returned to Buffalo and sought a yoga home, I told him the real deal exists at Shakti, Michelle Gigante’s studio on Grant Street. I had the honor of meeting Michelle during a tough period in life, my first year at law school. Through Michelle’s grace and yoga teachings, I changed my relationship with uncertainty, loss, and constraint. Man, these qualities seem to permeate our lives right now, so I’m super eager to hear Michelle’s insights and wisdom. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, a 5,000-year-old healing modality:

MICHELLE GIGANTE: To me, the practice of yoga is coming into oneness: coming into union with where we are, with the current occurrence; with how the body might ache, or the mind might jump, or the heart might yearn.

[VO]: What it means to practice during a global health crisis:

MICHELLE: We’re all just learning how to sit in the eye of the storm, which means we allow it to be stormy. And the practice is how you relate to yourself during your own storm, during your own inner turbulence; how to embrace that, rather than feel like there’s something that you need to get out of, and that there should be a result that is better than the one you’re in right now.

[VO]: And the stakes for all of us if we don’t find some way to take care of ourselves!

MICHELLE: If we do not take care of the self, we are unable to take care of anyone else, and we will be unable to handle this crisis.

[02:19]

[VO]: Zoom, the nearly ubiquitous conferencing platform that many of us are using for everything from classroom instruction to work meetings to virtual cocktail parties, has only been with us since 2011. Yoga, on the other hand, has been helping people to center themselves for 5000 years. When the director of my yoga studio here in sunny Buffalo—by her own admission no big fan of communications technology—decided to start offering sessions over Zoom during the pandemic, I got pretty excited about the possibilities of this new point of learning. I know yoga isn’t everybody’s thing, and it’s popular enough that most people already have some idea about it. My hope for my conversation with Michelle Gigante in this episode is that even if you already have a yoga practice, you’ll hear something new—or remember something ancient. If yoga isn’t something you do yet, right now may be the perfect time to try. In either case, I can’t recommend Michelle's online sessions highly enough. We’ll be talking about those in just a little bit. Master teacher Michelle Gigante has been guiding people toward energetic openings through a blend of yoga, breathing, and mindfulness techniques for nearly 25 years. She has an extensive background in theatre and dance, which contributes to her ability to execute classes with clarity and precision, improvising sequences that are creative and playful. Michelle founded her studio, Shakti Yoga, just over 10 years ago. The word shakti suits the creative energy that abounds in her studio, which during non-pandemic times regularly hosts musical performances, dance parties, and lectures, in addition to yoga classes. Michelle is also a Reiki master and Qigong practitioner. Like yoga, these are both healing practices that open energy channels: Reiki is Japanese, developed about a century ago, and Qigong is the Chinese grandmother of Tai Chi. Though yoga does help people become more fit, and some yoga centers do focus on fitness, for Michelle the ancient Indian practice is first and foremost a healing modality. In her 20s, Michelle was living in NYC running a theatre company, working 14-hour days with no days off. After she got so exhausted that she literally passed out on the streets of New York, she knew it was time to get well. So began her yoga practice.  

[05:03]

PETER: So we’re recording in mid-May, 2020 at a point when unemployment levels rival those of the Great Depression. Many people have a little more time on their hands, but many others have less, as they struggle to juggle working in essential areas or learning how to work from home, plus childcare and/or teaching their kids who can’t go to school. How do you make the case for carving out time to take care of oneself?

MICHELLE: Well, I mean we can ask that question any given day, whether it’s a crisis or not, right? It’s such a great question. You know, to make the shift in the mind’s eye. And I really do think it is up to us to make the shift in the mind’s eye, that only we can do that, from [A.] living in a state of survival and just simply getting by—right?—kind of having the lion chase you and you running as fast as you can with all of the balls up in the air and no time for anything else other than survival, to [B.] living in a much more productive, energetically efficient time of creativity. And once again, the rational mind can certainly challenge that, right? “There’s no time for creativity right now! We just have to get through this crisis!” But if our attitude is to just get through it, we are going to be spinning our wheels and we are going to be exhausting ourselves. So we have to just stop. We have to just drop everything and attend to the instrument, attend to the self. And as we start to do that, we notice that we have more energy, more availability to not only handle the crisis but to assist others. I really truly believe we can only assist others if we have taken the time to really address the self first.

PETER: It’s maybe a trite image, but I do think sometimes about the advice on airplanes to put on your own mask on first, before you can assist anybody else.  

MICHELLE: Yes, that’s what we have to do in order to survive in a situation like that. You using the airplane as the example—and if we just apply that to daily routine, to daily scheduling:  just stop and take care of the self first. And when we hear that, at first it sounds selfish, but if we do not take care of the self, we are unable to take care of anyone else, and we will be unable to handle this crisis.

[08:06]

PETER: What do you wish more people understood about yoga?

MICHELLE: I’d have to say that I wish more people understood that it was okay to be where they are. To me, the practice of yoga is coming into oneness: coming into union with where we are, with the current occurrence; with how the body might ache, or the mind might jump, or the heart might yearn; to really come into oneness with that; to allow oneself to be fully present to whatever it is we are feeling or thinking. Our culture is so addicted to bypassing those things as if there’s something wrong with us, and just, you know, get to the result of feeling better, feeling good all the time, you know, feeling good! And we often misinterpret the practice of healing for the practice of just feeling good. Usually, the practice of feeling good incorporates a bit of an escape. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with that and we all need that. But the practice of yoga gives us a chance to really be in and with our stuff. And then we learn; we learn how to address it. We learn how to take care of ourselves when we practice yoga.

PETER: So if one way to translate yoga is “union,” that has to do with the relationship that you’re establishing with yourself. And that includes all of it. The stiffness, the anxiety, where you’re feeling off. Just kind of accepting that, being compassionate about it. You know, I loved when we were talking once and you gave an example about the practice of yoga, saying, “Suppose you’re doing a balance pose. The practice is not ‘Can you balance?’ ‘Can you hold tree pose,’ for example, ‘for this long.’ The practice is ‘Can you relate to yourself while you’re attempting that?’

MICHELLE: Yes. There’s so much life that can come through when we’re on our mat. There are so many life lessons, and what we do on our mat can potentially come with us off the mat and, you know, learning how to embrace the wobbles that are so natural, that are so incredibly natural to what it means to be a human being walking this planet on any given day. And, you know, particularly during crisis, why should anyone of us expect to be able to hold balance during crisis? Right? We’re all just learning how to sit in the eye of the storm, which means we allow it to be stormy. And the practice is how you relate to yourself during your own storm, during your own inner turbulence; how to embrace that, rather than feel like there’s something that you need to get out of, and that there should be a result that is better than the one you’re in right now.

[12:07]

PETER: Coincidentally, you happened to meet my mother this morning because she showed up at one of your Zoom yoga sessions. It was nearly 20 years ago that she gave me a book by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now, which took the top of my head off for a number of reasons. Drawing on a number of faith and philosophical traditions—

MICHLLE: I love that expression, Peter!

PETER: Oh, man! Well, that’s, you know, that’s Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry—or one of them. She said, “you know, if I’m reading something and I feel as though the top of my head has just come off, then I know it’s a poem.” So yeah, I throw that in from time to time.

MICHELLE: That’s brilliant!

PETER: She certainly is! But back to Tolle: All right, so drawing on a number of faith and philosophical traditions, one of his big claims is that the only real moment is the present moment. This really prompted me to consider—and again, that’s not original to him, and he doesn’t claim that it’s original to him, but he’s really trying to make this point. And looking at, you know, for example, how much of U.S. culture in particular—maybe partially because our culture is often very invested in selling us something—how much of it pulls us away from the present moment so that we’re hoping for, or worrying about sometime in the future maybe, or regretting something or rehashing something that we did in the past. So as a remedy to that, one of the things that I value most about yoga is its emphasis on the here and now. Again, in today’s class, for example, a refrain that you happened to use was “life as you now know it.” Breathe in life as you now know it; breathe out life as you now know it. It was a real emphasis on life as we’re experiencing it, as you’re experiencing it right now—not as it should be, not as you’d like it to be. So I wondered if you’d want it to riff on the idea of the now for a moment.

MICHELLE: Well, bringing it into the practice of yoga just for a few moments, there’s so much that we can learn through the body. And what I mean by that is the body is the thing experiencing the present moment, right? The body is the one that is seated on the chair in the living room in the house on the West Side of Buffalo on May—whatever day of May it is—

PETER: It is March 70th, March 75th, right? Sorry.

MICHELLE: The body is the one that is experiencing the temperature. The body is the one experiencing the sunlight, et cetera, et cetera. As well as just very human conditions like hunger or yearning or aching, right? And we learn about the life we’re living in the present moment through the body, through this instrument, through this conduit. So being able to stop and pay attention to where the body is and to how the body is feeling is schooling us into the moment. It’s a wonderful way to become present. And we often think about the body as, you know, how we want the body to look when we’re done with the fitness class, the yoga class, the this class, right? That we can touch our toes or that we have the tight abs or what have you. But you know, in actuality the body is really the link to the now, and the mind will be more apt to join it if the mind is paying attention to the breath. Right? So the breath is also another tool, another link into the moment. If you just really stop and think about it, you know, every second is a breath, is an inhale, is an exhale. So if we can just stop and bring the mind into the breath, we’re giving ourselves the chance to be in the present, to be in the now, the power of the now. How is it powerful? Why is it powerful? I mean, I don’t, you know—I’m not really sure I can answer that. I think it’s very, very individualized. You know, how we filter these moments that we’re living: how we see, how we smell, how we taste, how we feel. It’s all a very personal experience. But when we allow ourselves the chance, by way of the body, by way of the breath through the mind, by way of the mind through the breath, to come into the now. It really is a gift to feel one’s heart beat. To hear the birds sing, to feel air brushing the skin, things that we just, you know, walk through the day not paying attention to. The things that we take most for granted: being alive in the now. Right now.

PETER: You talked about how the breath facilitates that, so I’d like to talk about breathing for a second. Most classes I’ve ever taken at any yoga studio begin with attention to the breath, and continue to attend to breathing throughout practice. You’ve said that intentional breathing can help to extract unnecessary thoughts, stagnant energy, tension, insecurity. How does this work?

MICHELLE: The breath is a buffer. So the breath just simply helps us handle whatever’s coming through. The breath is like a cushion, a little buffer pillow between you and reality in such a way that you can tolerate; that you can tolerate your reality with more peace and more ease, and the softness that comes through when we inhale, the relief that comes through when we exhale, you know, just by paying attention to it and allowing it to correspond and correlate to the thought and the sensation. And once again, it’s yoga: it’s the union. When the breath comes into the experience of, you know, the sensation or the thought that comes to infiltrate the mind, when the breath is there, it buffers the sensation and the thought in such a way that we can handle it, that we can tolerate, that we can be with whatever is occurring. The practice of yoga incorporates a kind of a skill of breathing, if you will, where we are continuing to train the brain to go into the breath.

[20:32]

PETER: You suspended classes at your studio, Shakti Yoga, here in Buffalo, in mid-March, and by the end of March, with the help of tech guru, Christina Stock, you were leading centering meditations on Facebook and yoga sessions on Zoom. You do accept donations, but you’re quite clear that if people can’t afford to contribute right now, that’s fine. Okay, first, thank you! You know, six days a week, these sessions help me to structure and center my day. But there’s another thing that occurs to me and that’s thinking about the difference between participating in one of these live Zoom sessions, you know, even with my mic muted and my camera off for most of it as I generally do, versus, say, moving along with a yoga video on, for example, on YouTube—there was one [video] I used to do to start my day every morning before I would go teach at school. There’s a seven-minute video out there that I must’ve seen a thousand times! But so one difference is that you as the guide are different every day, so there’s a nice variety to what you ask us to do, just as there would be in a live class. But I wanted to ask: for you as the teacher or as the guide for this practice, how do you think differently about the classes that you improvise for a Zoom connection as opposed to what you do what you’re used to doing in a face-to-face connection?

MICHELLE: Well, I think first and foremost, it’s very much the same. So, you know, I show up, I hook into my breath, and the breath creates a tapping into creative energy: the word shakti. And I just simply offer from there. I never have a plan. I never have a script. It’s always an intuitive offering. So in that way it’s the same, and it’s proven to be very helpful, because I’m really getting a sense from the people tuning in that they are having a fairly unique experience, regardless if it’s through technology or not. So that pleases me greatly. You know how it’s different, I suppose the most obvious thing is that we are just not all physically in the same space at the same time. And there’s a bit of a thriving of energy, a sharing of energy that cannot be replaced. You know, it makes it dramatically different to do this by way of, you know, screen and camera, if you will. But the benefit I feel is the same, which is, you know, you’re tapping into your breath awareness and letting your body move in a very intuitive, expansive, experiential way. And we are all there to support you in doing so. And the little kind of council that we hold at the end is just one of the many ways to celebrate that community being together. So that’s how it’s very different from say a YouTube video where I just kind of shoot it and put it out there and you watch it at your own convenience: we’re all going through the experience together. You know, alone together, if that makes sense. Right? Everybody’s in their homes doing it alone, but yet there is a still a sense of community that is being shared. And that’s one of the nice things about being able to offer through the through the Zoom platform as we’re doing it together.

PETER: And it’s one of the facets of your teaching that I admire, and that I think is a great practice for any teacher, is to ask participants, to ask students, “How is this going for you? What’s working for you? What could be better? What suggestions do you have?” And it was in fact a student’s suggestion to say, “Well, what if we un-muted our microphones for the oms, [the chanting of the syllable om] at the beginning and the end?” I mean you don’t necessarily want people’s mics on all the time. There are a lot of dogs in people’s homes and lots of small children come in, so it wouldn’t be great to have the mics on for everybody all the time, but at the beginning and at the end for the sacred sound of om, yeah, that’s gotta be something to hear that from all the places that you’re hearing it!

MICHELLE: Yes. And you know, when we started doing Zoom, before we did the un-muting for the oms, you know, I would hear it like through my imagination, I’d hear it deep inside the well of my heart and kind of, you know, imagine what it would sound like, you know, but this is, it’s just awesome. And you know, as those oms come through, you do hear people’s environments. You do hear the dogs and the television and it’s just awesome. And in a new-found way, and in a way where it would normally sound—where the critical mind would normally be like, “Ugh, this is chaos!” And it’s just the most joyful sound ever to hear the union of us coming through technology.

PETER: For me, one of the aspects of the Zoom version of Shakti, of your studio, that I love is being able to practice with friends of your studio who are now living in California or Colorado or Boston or Spain. We heard from somebody in Florida today. One of the questions that I have been asking, in my work as a consultant and researcher, one of the things I’ve been talking with teachers and school leaders about in recent weeks is whether there are—despite that it’s hard, you know—

MICHELLE: Right. That’s a given.

PETER: This is obviously hard, and harder in lots and lots of ways that we’d like it to be. But also, is there anything that opens up? Is there anything that you’ve been forced to look at a different way, or to try something that has been a positive?

MICHELLE: Yes, I’m extremely grateful for the “have-to”s. The stuff that I have had to do during this crisis has opened me up as a human and as a facilitator in a new way that is so unexpected. You know, I can be pretty stubborn. I’m pretty set in my ways. I’ve been doing this for over 20—like 25 years now. And I am very consistent, perhaps to a flaw. I am so grateful for having been “forced” to take on this new form of expression, this new form of communication, this new form of holding space. And it’s been a true pleasure and a great gift. And I know not just for me but for many others that that can actually occur, that we can share energy, that we can feel connected through technology, from and with technology is just extraordinary because I’ve always been against, you know, technology. Technology is the thing that is tearing us apart as, as humans, as far as being connected, right? There’s such isolation—

PETER: I think it’s all these damn podcasts!

MICHELLE: [laughing] I mean, of course there are positives, but you know, the kids that are on social media, you know, it serves as their way to communicate, and then creates great isolation. Yet here we all are giving thanks, giving thanks for that very thing. You know, it’s pulling the community together, and it is how we show up for each other. It is how we have to communicate. And I will probably continue to do so when the crisis is over, because there are students, my West Coast students—there’s, like you said, people in Europe, people in the South, they want to stay connected to Shakti. So, you know, I got the kick in the pants and now I gotta keep going, I guess.

PETER: Yeah. And I think that’s another thing about showing up. You know, I often think about the difference between like a team sport and an individual practice. There is something about, you know, even when you’re not feeling like it at all, you know, that 3:30 practice starts or whatever, and the other people are going to be there, you know, you’ve got this community that you’re working with—putting on a [theatre] show, you know, the same sort of thing. But I sometimes can’t make it to the 12:45 session, and I do think, “Well, you guys are there” in a way that I never would think, “Well, that YouTube video’s out there, and I’m not going to be able to watch it.” I mean, there is a community that I could be a part of and there’s something that I’m kind of missing out on by not showing up.

MICHELLE: Yes. Showing up for each other. Right.

PETER: Yeah, it’s different.

MICHELLE: It is.

[31:06]

[VO]: As a companion offering for this episode, I’ll release a short YouTube video cut from an actual Zoom session with Michelle, so you can get a little taste of a few of the elements that have been typical in her online classes six days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays tend to be lower-impact, often involving a stint on a chair, for instance, but all classes proceed with compassion for what people may be living through right now. Every class, I should also mention, is preceded by a 30-minute centering session involving meditation, breathing, and mindfulness. Those happen on Facebook Live. The mini-session I’ll share includes a breathing exercise, child’s pose, and a gentle body shake that comes from Qigong.

PETER: Breathing we’ve talked a little bit about already, so I’m wanting to go with the child’s pose for a second and just talk with you about it. So, along with downward-facing dog, I think this is one of the poses that many people who have even just a passing acquaintance with yoga may be familiar with. It’s a kneeling forward-bend pose, and there are variations, but essentially you kneel and bend forward with your head to the floor and your arms at your sides, or sometimes extended in front of you. But you’ve said that you personally have gravitated towards this pose during this time. And I wanted to just to ask, what’s that about for you?

MICHELL: Yes, it’s about—you know, I never think my way in, like, “Hmm, what would be the good pose to do today?” I have been gravitating toward child pose probably more regularly than in the past. And I think it’s, you know, it’s a response to the current crisis. And the shape to me is one of two beautiful things. One is it’s a genuflection, it’s a bowing. It’s an honoring, so it immediately hooks me into to higher power, higher source: a real honoring; honoring of this process, and a surrendering to this process through that genuflection where you lay the waist upon the ledge of the thighs and you bow inward. And secondly, you know, the posture speaks refuge. I feel like each posture has a beautiful kind of language that is whispered through the body and I feel like child's pose speaks the language of refuge, of protection, of shelter, of inwardness. But inwardness, you know, not in a way where we’re barricading the world out, but just really allowing ourselves to drop in to some inner depths of the self.

PETER: And it’s literally a grounding. Of course, maybe that’s too on the nose, but you know, I realize I asked you if you gravitated toward it, and of course it does bring you down to the earth. There’s just something about the name in English—and of course, all these poses have Sanskrit names that come from a 5,000-year tradition. In some cases, they’re that old. But in English, it’s also sometimes called “wisdom pose.” Is that right?

MICHELLE: I just love that! Yeah, yeah.

PETER: Yeah. As a teacher, I love that. Another name for child’s pose could be wisdom pose because there’s a lot about, of course, the wisdom of children that adults could stand to learn from. But I wondered, why do you love it? Like do you have a thought about that, or the connection between those, because sometimes they’re presented as antithetical, like the opposite of “wise” is “kids,” and like that.  

MICHELLE: Right, right. Yes. Once again, it just blasts your mind open when you hear something like that, that child’s pose is also called wisdom pose. And I think the link is, you know, what you’ve already said, that as we bow in, as we take this genuflection, it’s a gesture of humility. So it allows us to have the mind of a child, and you know, to really seek the innocent mind, the mind that is not yet tainted, the mind that does not think it knows everything about everything. Right? And from that the wisdom comes. That wisdom is something that we experience through the course of time. And to be able to continue to take oneself back, to kind of undo the workings of the mind and just to be present. Right. So now we’re kind of going back to perhaps one of your first topics that you brought up a little while ago: the power of the now can come through when we let the mind just really drop—to drop the junk out of the head, and to perceive life with the eye of a child. And there’s such wisdom in discovery. You think about children and how they discover, they come upon for the first time what a tree looks like, what a tree sounds like, you know? Right. And we always feel like we already know and we miss so much in the assumption that we already know everything.

PETER: And then there’s this gentle shake that I don’t personally recall seeing in other yoga settings. As I said, I’m looking to release a short companion video for this segment so that people can see it. But how would you describe what you’re physically doing, for people listening?

MICHELLE: Right. Well, what has been cultivated over the past 13 years of me offering in my own space at Shakti Yoga is a mixture of yoga, of breath work, of meditation, and of Qigong, which is basically the Chinese form of yoga. And some people perhaps know the word Tai Chi and it’s a very similar healing modality. So I try—no, I don’t try. It comes, it just seems to come naturally where I blend all of those aspects of physicality and of breathwork and of mindfulness together so that we can really tap into an energetic flow, and that gentle shaking that we’ve been doing through this crisis and through the virtual offering of yoga, it’s really just come intuitively as a little piece of medicine for each and every one of us to be able to drain the lymphatic system and keep the energetic body efficiently opened. You know, it opens the energetic channels essentially. It’s to be able to let the breath move through the whole body from the feet to the face with this very, very passive shake, this gentle pulse of the entire body for one or two minutes. And where people get a little hung up or perhaps they stray away for a few moments is they often will think of the shaking as if they have to shake out their tension or get rid of their stress. And it’s really a way to shake your way into your own circulatory system in a very, very passive way, and really sustain it for a good solid minute or two. And it seems to be assisting people and perhaps a new way of, of finding that flow, finding that flow inside.

PETER: Yeah, I totally love it. And I’ve seen you many times at the beginning of class doing it yourself—this is back in person at the studio—doing it yourself before you begin to lead a class, maybe to maybe get you in the zone a little bit. I don’t remember ever doing it in class, but I do remember when I asked—I was talking to you about performance, because you have this strong background in theatre. I was talking to you about finding my energy before I come on in a particular scene. This was for a show I was doing in December, and you recommended this as something to do in the wings before coming on stage. I realize I don’t know if I told you that I did do it.You may have assumed that I would. I did do it and it was very helpful, because you can do it for quite some time, but it just kinda gets you there—I mean, wherever there is, but it helps to kind of clarify and keep you from getting too tense. It just kind of gets things flowing, so it’s not surprising that it would be something that would come back to you as a kind of daily medicine in this time.

MICHELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I always assume that whatever I tell people to do, they will do, Peter! [playfully] I can only offer it out then it’s up to you! But secondly, I think that one of the things that has excited me about this experience that we’re in by way of crisis is that yoga is being utilized perhaps as its truer essence, which is medicine. You know, not a medicine that cures but a medicine that heals, right? And we all need to heal from this experience, whether we have the virus or not. There’s major healing that needs to be done in the current moment, and when this eventually resolves itself. So I feel like the traditional roots of yoga is perhaps gaining more potency during this experience. I mean, you know, disciplining yourself to do chaturanga dandasana [low plank] and you know, fitness yoga right now is only going to take you so far. And then that’s not really much different than if you were in the studio three months ago to now. And we have to always be adapting to the now from the practice. The practice helps us adapt to the now, and the now is we need healing, right? Globally. The planet needs healing, and every single human being on the planet needs healing. So here we are in the practice of yoga, in this modality that allows the channels of the body to open.

[43:40]

PETER: I wonder about this fitness part, because I think one of the things that—you know, when I talk with people about yoga and they ask what I perceive as some of the benefits of yoga, one of the things that I’m very clear about—you know, after I do a little short commercial for Shakti—is that every studio is different. Each one has a different feel to it—

MICHELLE: And the voices in it.

PETER: Just as every house of worship is different. I mean you can be a Presbyterian, but this church is not going to be just like that church over there, even if they’re both Presbyterian. So, it stands to reason that yoga classes—sometimes they have different aims. And especially in the U.S. it seems like a lot of people can be driven toward a kind of fitness-based approach. And it’s not that if you do yoga consistently, you won’t become more fit. But that’s kind of imposing this other aim upon it, this kind of goal-oriented rather than this process-oriented, rather than this being-oriented part that, to me, is the real magic and power of it. It’s reminding me that it’s not about what I’m going to look like later on. It’s not about what I’m going to be able to lift, or how I can stretch. And we’ve talked about this a little bit, but there are some times that I think yoga goes into a category of exercise. There’s certainly the exercise dimension, but it’s more than just physical—

MICHELLE: Well, it makes sense. I mean, because that’s what sells, right? Everybody wants to have a better body. Everybody wants to look better. Everybody wants 10 more years added to their existence and that’s a very normal thing for us as humans, right? And the practice of sitting and being in the now, and really being present with your own aches and addressing them as they come up, it’s less appealing! It doesn’t quite have the high industry market, right? You know, so thus far it might be safe to say that in the U.S. that’s how it’s gone—thus far. But I really think the norm is broken. And I talk about this on the Facebook Live [centering session] segments pretty regularly. The paradigm, the norm, the structure—it’s all broken. Whether we’re talking about religion or the educational system or government. This is a real opportunity as we allow that norm to just completely be broken, to dissolve. We are giving ourselves a chance to have a new approach with life, right? A new relationship to some sort of new norm. And I believe that this crisis is bringing more and more and more people into the reality that every human being is fragile, that we can all get this disease right now, this very novel virus. There isn’t anyone that is immune to it, right? So that’s an enormous wake-up call to be able to preciously embrace that, to really hold space for one’s vulnerability, to really be able to hold space for the practice that can heal us. You know, rather than “I’m going to continue to do the fitness work, making myself as strong as possible and blocking out the reality that this thing could touch me. It can touch each and every one of us, no matter how many chaturanga dandasanas [low planks] you learn how to do, right? So I really believe this is an enormous wake-up call for us as humans. And it’s not just the U.S. or Western culture. It really is us as the pack of humans coming to realize that there is work to be done on addressing, on really addressing one’s vulnerabilities, in working with them from a very compassionate place, rather than a false sense of security that often the fitness industry can present. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with having a practice that makes you fit and that promotes a healthy wellbeing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that it might not really be taking us deep enough into the core of who we are.

[49:07]

[VO]: That’s for today’s show! If you want more information on either the Facebook centering sessions at noon or the Zoom yoga sessions at 12:45 every day except Sunday, visit shaktibuffalo.com. Thanks to Ravi Padmanabha for permission to use musical selections from his 2018 album Meditations, available on Bandcamp. Ravi has performed and accompanied sessions at Shakti many times over the years. My great thanks to Michelle Gigante for spending some time with me via FaceTime audio. I’d also like to name some of the other outstanding instructors who have guided my yoga for nearly 20 years now: Nicole Mode, Magda Caraballo, Brittany Messuti, Debbie Diver Kephart, Kristalee Hites, and Abby Spindelman. Grateful for all of you, and all y’all other yogis and non-yogis alike. My favorite translation of Namaste is “I honor the divine within you,” and I mean that. It means so much that you listen, especially right through to the credits, and I will have a little something special for you at the very end of today’s episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for letting me use instrumental versions of his songs for intro and outro. If you’ve ever wondered what his voice sounds like, stick around—which, I guess, is a pretty big hint about the surprise bonus: it’s a hidden track, you guys! I’m Peter Horn, and Point of Learning is recorded, written, edited, mixed, and produced by me, here in sunny Buffalo, New York. Please take a moment to rate, review, and share this episode with just one other person you know who might dig it. It will mean most coming from you. I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can, with social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, author, most recently, of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. See you then!

Case for Contention Transcript (025)

The Case for Contention with Jonathan Zimmerman (4/13/20)

MICHAEL C. JOHANEK: Hello, this is Mike Johanek, Senior Fellow at Penn’s Graduate School of Education. You are at the Point of Learning with my friend and sometimes research collaborator Peter Horn. During our first conversation way back in 2011, Peter and I talked about how to engage students as citizens. It’s been a through-line in many conversations ever since, so I’m looking forward to hearing Peter and my colleague and friend Jon Zimmerman discuss why to teach controversial issues in U.S. schools. I know you’ll enjoy it.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, education historian Jonathan Zimmerman on the teaching of controversial issues:

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN: It strikes me that what we’ve done is we have radically limited— beyond where it should go, beyond what’s educationally and pedagogically proper—we’ve limited the free speech rights of teachers to the point where it becomes risky for them just to do their jobs.

[VO]: We discuss the book he co-authored with Emily Robertson, which distinguishes between actual controversies and pseudo-controversies …

ZIMMERMAN: We wrote this book before Trump was elected president, and now if we wrote it, we would spend much more time on that distinction. I mean, I never thought the question of “What is a fact?” would become the most important question in our political culture, but it absolutely has.

[VO]: And the difference between teaching and indoctrination … 

ZIMMERMAN: A teacher’s duty is never to persuade you of something, except, perhaps, the need to create environments where everybody is allowed to speak, hear, listen and decide on their own.

[VO]: … as well as what’s at stake in this work. 

ZIMMERMAN: Every important claim provokes or offends somebody and raises difficult feelings. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not that important.

[02:25]

[VO]: Jonathan Zimmerman is one of the foremost education historians working today. His work examines how education practices and policies have developed over time, and the myths that often cloud our understanding of teaching and learning. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, he has a particular interest in how political and social movements come to shape education. In addition to prize-winning research published in academic journals, Zimmerman has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. He is also no stranger to smart late-night television. Shortly after I had him as a professor in grad school, he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and advised John Oliver of Last Week Tonight for a feature exploring sex education in schools. Professor Zimmerman came to the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania after 20 years at New York University, where he served as chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and won the university’s highest prize for teaching. I was delighted to sit down with him in his office at Penn GSE to discuss his book The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, which he wrote with Emily Robertson of Syracuse University. We spoke in late February 2020, which I mention for two reasons. First, I generally try to design podcast episodes that are not bound to a particular moment in time because a.) it takes a long time for me to put these shows together; and b.) I try through this podcast to showcase important ideas about what and how and why we learn that I believe will stand the test of time, so that, for instance, what Aja Monet and Meghann Plunkett shared about poetry two years ago will still pop whenever new listeners check it out. Second, our world is now enduring the hard, surreal pandemic of COVID-19. Just a few weeks after we spoke, Professor Zimmerman and I wouldn’t have been able to sit in the same room, and we certainly wouldn’t hear relentless Philadelphia traffic outside his office window. I frankly miss lively city sounds so much right now that I’ve made almost no attempt to bring those down in the mix. On that note, and with a sincere wish that you and and your loved ones are safe and healthy, I hope you enjoy these highlights from our conversation. Jonathan Zimmerman has written books on the history of sex education, alcohol education, culture wars, American teachers abroad—even the myths and facts surrounding our hoary notion of the little red schoolhouse. His newest book is due out this fall. Called The Amateur Hour, it’s about the history of college teaching in the U.S. So I began by asking Zimmerman how it was that he chose to specialize in the history of education. 

ZIMMERMAN: Well, like so many things in life, it was not planned. I knew from the youngest age I wanted to be an educator. And so after I was done with college, I joined the Peace Corps and I taught in Nepal. And then what I did was I moved to Vermont to be with my girlfriend (who became my wife) and I taught in Vermont. And then I followed her to Baltimore to teach in the schools there. And I was a great success in Nepal and in Vermont, and I was a failure in Baltimore! I just wasn’t prepared for it in any way. I tried to do things exactly the same way I had done in these other environments and I wasn’t successful. And the only thing I knew was I wanted to continue as an educator and I wanted to learn more history.

HORN: You were teaching history?

ZIMMERMAN: Social studies. Although in Nepal I taught English, but in Vermont and in Baltimore I taught social studies. So don’t try this at home: I applied to exactly one doctoral program. This is madness. But that’s what I did.

[VO]: They were in Baltimore, so he applied to The Johns Hopkins University. 

ZIMMERMAN: The way I got into educational history is that I had a real mensch for an advisor, which was also luck. After I applied—and Peter, I had no idea what I was doing, in any way, shape or form. But after I applied, I was grading papers one afternoon and the graduate secretary from Hopkins called me and says, “We received your application, but it was incomplete.”

[VO]: Turns out, he was supposed to apply to not just the graduate program, but to a particular faculty member in that program who might become his adviser. So Zimmerman has this secretary from Hopkins calling him on the phone, pressing him for the name of the professor he’d like to work with. I like this story! 

ZIMMERMAN: So this is well before the internet. And I freak out. I say, “There’s somebody at the door” and I say, “Can you hold on please?” And I go and get the paper catalog they had sent me and I started going through it furiously, seeing who teaches social history, history of race, history of immigration, labor … R. Walters, gender unspecified. I have no idea who this is, but I get back on the phone and I say, “I’d really like to work with Professor Walters. You know, I’m a longstanding admirer of Professor Walters’ work.” And Ron Walters became my advisor and he was just a mensch. And to get to your question, how did I get into educational history, because I had been a school teacher, I had somewhere in the back of my mind that I wanted to figure out where these institutions came from and how they developed over time. Hopkins was a very conservative department at the time, not politically, but in a dictionary sense: very old-school. And most of the other people that I bounced this off said things like, “Jon, do you want to eat? Like food? And if you do, why would you ever willingly put the word ‘education’ next to your name? Don’t you understand that in the United States you subtract 50 or 500 status points? Why would you do history of education?” And Ron said to me, “Is this what you’re interested in?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, great, then do it!” That was all he needed to know. I’ve learned a lot from that. In this teaching relationship, it should not be about you. It should be about the student. And Ron could see that I was curious and passionate about trying to figure out how these institutions had developed over time, and that was all he needed to know. So that’s how I got into it.

[09:19]

[VO]: I asked if there’s a key concept from his study of the history of education that might be of use for your average citizen to know, but that they probably don’t.

ZIMMERMAN: I think there are many. It’s hard for me to rank them, in import because I suppose it depends on the concerns of the listener, of the audience. But I would say that one really important one that most Americans don’t know is that we’re putting a much greater burden on education than we ever did before, especially as a tool of social mobility. So, for most of our history, formal education was not a sine qua non for social mobility. When we lived in Baltimore and when I was in graduate school, our next-door neighbor was a guy who had worked at Beth Steel his whole life, at Bethlehem steel, which was just south of where we lived. He had an eighth-grade education and he owned his home. So Pete, that’s never gonna happen again in the history of the United States, but it happened a lot.

HORN: I grew up in Buffalo, right next to Lackawanna.

ZIMMERMAN: Yes, exactly. And I think that because we lack historic perspective, we often forget how close we are to our current situation where formal education has become a sine qua non for not just social mobility, for self-sustainability: that is, except for your occasional pro athlete or pop music star, nobody with an eighth-grade education will ever own a home again. And this is not, by the way, because people back then were so awesome and we’re not awesome, or schools back then were so great and now they’re not—

HORN: I think it’s because they walked to school every day in the snow—

ZIMMERMAN: Five miles, right, no shoes. No feet!

HORN: They had no feet. Little known fact.

ZIMMERMAN: No, there’s just a much greater burden on our schools now than we ever had before. Schools have become a necessity in ways that they were not for most of our history.

[11:27]

[VO]: I reminded Professor Zimmerman about a moment from the class I took with him—a moment I once blogged about—in which he asked my colleagues and me to prioritize a set of values for our respective schools. Here were two dozen school leaders, principals, heads of school, superintendents and so on from diverse education settings all around the country, and Zimmerman asked us, “How many of you said you want your school to produce democratic citizens?” Three of us raised our hands high. “Oh no you don’t,” he challenged. “Yeah we do,” we said. Sensing an opportunity for solidarity, more classmates chimed in: “I didn’t put citizenship first, but it’s high on my list.” Zimmerman chided, “You may think you want it, but you don’t actually want it. Engaged citizenship is messy and time-consuming. You want kids protesting all the time, sitting on the Board, writing curriculum? School isn’t set up that way.” 

ZIMMERMAN: Well, just to be clear, obviously you’re talking about a class where I was trying to provoke people, and I was not literally saying they didn’t want that. But what I was saying is that I think it’s a minority viewpoint. You know, if you went up to most people, especially most parents, and you said to them, “Do you want school to teach your kids to question everything, including everything you have taught them?” I think most citizens would say, “No! What I’d really like is like for my kid to be ready by the time I need to go to work, or for my kid to develop a couple skills that they could use to, you know, get a reasonable-paying job.” And it’s not that people are opposed to that citizenship ideal. I just think it’s far down people’s lists of priorities. The other thing that I’ll say is that it’s much harder to do, especially for teachers in a society that doesn’t award teachers a lot of cultural authority. So you know, if you really take that ideal seriously, the kids will question everything, including you. How many teachers want that? How many really want that? And I know the answer is some, right, but that makes life ever harder. So if I could just share a story that I often share with my students on exactly this subject, when I got back from the Peace Corps, I went to Vermont to be with Susan. And randomly I started substitute teaching at the high school she’d attended some six years earlier in South Burlington. And by that time it’s March, and in U.S. history, we’ve gotten up to the New Deal, to the 1930s. And  I come in there, you know, Mr. Just-Back-Peace Corps Volunteer and I put all the acronyms that you had to memorize for your APUSH class on the board, the CCC, the WPA …

HORN: Was this AP United States History?

ZIMMERMAN: No, it was just regular U.S. history, but, you know, the CCC, the WPA, the PWA and so on. And I said, “Okay, look, I’m not going to make you memorize these because you know, I think that you’d forget them and I don’t really care, frankly, how much of it you remember. What I want you to do is I want you to open up your textbook, I want you to find out what they are, and then I want you to tell me three alphabet agencies that you would support today and how you would pay them. So let’s go, let’s start.” I said, “I’m not interested in you telling me what CCC stands for—”

HORN: Civilian Conservation Corps!

ZIMMERMAN: Very good. “I want to hear what you have to say. I want to hear what meaning you’re making of this.” So we start doing it and it was slow, but we kind of got into it and it seemed to be going pretty well. And maybe two days in, one of the kids we used to call ‘stoners’ raises his hand, and stoners in the 1980s, you know, they were often the most able students. The reason they were stoners is they were so—

HORN: They were bored.

ZIMMERMAN: —alienated by the bullshit of school. So he raises his hand and says, “You know, Mr. Z, I’ve been listening to you all week about us, like, making our own meaning and coming to our own conclusions. Well, I’ve come to my own conclusion: You suck!” And I would suggest, as I suggest to my students that there was, there was more wisdom in his comment then even he realized in his marijuana-fed haze—

HORN: How do you mean?

ZIMMERMAN: —that the claim that was smarter than he knew. Of course he was trying to yank my chain, because that’s what adolescents do. But he was onto more than he realized. And this is what he was on to: if you really take this sort of dialogic and critical thinking seriously, the students may decide that you suck. And most people don’t want that. I know I don’t. I don’t want my students to think that. So how do you ask a group of professionals that are awarded very little authority in their culture to take the kind of risk—that’s really what we’re talking about—that this teaching involves? I think it’s a hard sell. That’s not to say I don’t want to sell it, because I do. I mean, that’s the wrong metaphor, but I’m a proponent of it. But I think all of us have to be realistic about the social and cultural circumstances under which this occurs or doesn’t.

[17:02]

HORN: I do begin to judge books by their cover, especially nonfiction. After reading the title, The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, which you co-wrote with Emily Robertson of Syracuse University, I’m not surprised that much of the book frames this case, but you also spend some pages arguing for excluding issues that are not truly controversial. Can you say some more about that?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, we wrote this book before Trump was elected president, and now if he wrote it, we would spend much more time on that distinction. I mean, I never thought the question of “What is a fact?” would become the most important question in our political culture, but it absolutely has. We try to draw a distinction between what’s a real controversy and what’s a pseudo-controversy. A real controversy is one where fully informed people disagree, and a fake controversy is one where fully informed people do not disagree. So let’s take the example of evolution and creation. I understand that there are millions of my fellow citizens that do not believe that we as human beings share DNA with other creatures. I will say, Pete, I believe it’s their right to believe that. I would lay down everything for that. I don’t believe they should be compelled to think otherwise. I think they should have every right to scream that to the hills, but I will not have that question debated in my classroom. And the reason is it’s a pseudo-controversy. It’s a pseudo-controversy in the sense that there are no fully informed people that deny the fact that we share DNA with other creatures. I would not want to debate that question in my classroom because there’s only one right answer. And that’s not a debate. That’s a pseudo-debate.

HORN: If we shift to climate change—

ZIMMERMAN: Yes.

HORN: —for example, and I’m glad that you make this clarification. The book came out in 2017, but of course that means, of course, it was written earlier—

ZIMMERMAN: It was the 19th century!

HORN: It was like a billion years ago, because one of the things you did do, you know, was, bring out that oft-quoted quip that I’ve mentioned myself—

ZIMMERMAN: [Former NY Senator Daniel] Pat[rick] Moynihan.

HORN: “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts.” You say this is an essential element of democracy, but of course we’re in this moment right now where it seems like diametrically opposed sets of facts exist not just for people watching Fox and CNN, but because of the algorithmic magic of Facebook—which I understand operates on some level of outrage [i.e., more outrageous claims and articles and/or topics that get people more outraged get more traction]—but it can let me, you know, look at my newsfeed and get an entirely different sense of what’s happening in the world from my next-door neighbor. I just wanted to say, I was at a party a couple of weeks ago where somebody said to me—this was right after Mr. [Rush] Limbaugh was awarded the—

ZIMMERMAN: Presidential Medal of Freedom.

HORN: Right? A smart person said to me, with a straight face, “Well, you know Obama gave the Medal of Freedom to Jeffrey Epstein.”

ZIMMERMAN: No, he didn’t!

HORN: I know! And this was where my jaw dropped open, and so that was my response. Uh, but you know, I went to check this out and the first thing when I typed in “Obama Epstein Medal of Freedom” [my search engine] was like, “No, he did not give it …” because of course my Google is set up to go to, you know, fact-checking organizations. But it was amazing that just on this basic point— This wasn’t offered like, “I think Obama may have …” This was like, “Well, you know about Obama,” like “… what Obama did.”

ZIMMERMAN: Well, look, it seems to me you’re raising a bunch of real challenges for us. I mean, one has to do with the media environment that we live in. My students are often shocked to hear that when I was growing up, there were three channels. You know, and now there are 900 and nothing’s on! But the larger point is that of those 900 channels, you have ones that are tailored to your particular predilections and biases. And then you have this thing called a news feed, which is a horrible metaphor, that curates this so that you just get information that fits your biases—

HORN: Horrible [metaphor] or maybe perfect? It may be a little too on the nose!

ZIMMERMAN: Well, it’s awful. I mean, right, exactly. “It’s time for your two o’clock feed now!” And you know, I think we know from a lot of evidence that pleasure centers in your brain light up when you see things that confirm what you’ve believed. The kind of education that I want is in a way unnatural. I want to expose people to things that aren’t them. You know, to me the most depressing literature coming out of political science shows that since the ‘70s when I was in high school, we’ve segregated ourselves in every way ideologically. Bill Bishop wrote this book called The Big Sort a couple of years ago and it’s still very relevant. He just looks at numbers from the ‘70s. And the question is, you know, “Do you have a neighbor of a different political party?” “Do you have a friend of a different political party?” “Do you have a lover of different political party?” “Would you be okay with your kid marrying somebody of a different political party?” And Pete, you look at all those questions and it’s a straight line down, just a straight declining vector.

HORN: Over time?

ZIMMERMAN: Over time, since the ‘70s, yes. We have segregated ourselves into ideological bubbles and the media environment is a big part of that, but it’s not the only cause of that. And there are all kinds of, I think causal loops here, but that’s a big part of the story. So then the question becomes, as educators, what do we do? And to your point about Limbaugh, I think the first thing we need to do—and people are trying this, it’s a heavy lift—is to teach people how to consume media. So you might’ve read about Sam Wineburg’s project out at Stanford. One of the things he’s doing is he’s studying Stanford students to see if they can identify fake and real websites. And the takeaway is they can’t! And these are arguably the most privileged kids and the best-educated kids in America, right? And so what does that say about other people who haven’t had the same privileged education? It seems to me that’s one challenge that all of us have. And the second challenge is to expose people not to alternative facts, but to alternative perspectives. You know Dr. [Kellyanne] Conway said that there are alternative facts about Bowling Green.

[VO]:  You may recall president Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway making this assertion.

KELLYANNE CONWAY [from interview with Chris Matthews 2/2/17]: I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green [KY] massacre. Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.

ZIMMERMAN: There aren’t alternative facts about [the] Bowling Green [“Massacre”]. Bowling Green was a scam, just like there aren’t alternative facts about Obama and Jeffrey Epstein, or about Obama being born in Indonesia, you know, or about the moon landing being a fake, right? But there are alternative perspectives on almost everything. So you began the question with climate change. One of the things I say to my students is, “If the question is ‘Has human behavior contributed to warming the earth?’ that’s not a debatable question.” Again, I understand that there are millions of Americans who say that human behavior hasn’t contributed to global warming. Again, I believe it’s their right to say and believe that, but they are wrong, all right? However, if your question is “What should we do about climate change?” or “Should we be in the Kyoto or the Paris Accords?” there, that’s not a matter of alternative facts. It’s a matter of alternative perspectives. The question of “Should we have stayed in Paris?” is not a fact question. You do need facts to debate the question, but the question itself is a normative question.

HORN: Yeah, that’s a policy assertion.

ZIMMERMAN: And those absolutely should and must be debated.

KELLYANNE CONWAY [from interview with Chuck Todd on  1/22/17]: Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck! What is it— You’re saying it’s a falsehood and they’re giving— Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is …

[25:39]

HORN: Since we’re getting into the way that this can play out in the classroom, I was interested that a theme that runs through your book The Case for Contention is that lots and lots of schools and districts—you’re focused on public schools—lots of public schools and districts pay lip service to the idea of engaged citizenship, and as a facet of that, exploring controversial issues. It’s stated in some way in many policies and maybe even some mission statements. But as far as the way that plays out in the classroom, to the extent that it actually happens, or to the extent teachers are actually protected if they try to engage in controversial issues … if they feel comfortable with it—and I would add, if they’ve established a classroom environment where you can do this and not have it feel like a debate, and not devolve into ad hominem attacks, you know, where there’s a respectful environment and you set that up (and of course that takes time to do)— even if all those things are in place, they may not have the protection if a parent, or a coalition of parents or, you know, whoever … community members get upset about it, right, it can very quickly [become untenable].

ZIMMERMAN: So it seems like what you’re alluding to is just a massive disconnect between the stories that we tell about education and the way we practice it. And there’s always going to be that disconnect. If you want to go very existential, you could say that it’s part of the human condition: all of us say one thing and do another, to some degree. I do think in the zone we’re talking about here, the teaching of controversial issues, the gap is particularly sharp. So, you know, if you look at policy, lots of school districts have their explicit policies about how they support and endorse the teaching of controversial issues. And it’s often cast in quite eloquent, sometimes flowery, small-r-republican rhetoric. You know, “We need this to create citizens. … We need this to protect and advance the republic … We need young people with the skills and habits of democratic practice.” And that’s all true. I think it’s 100% correct. I’m glad that you have those policies, but anybody who studies policies understands that you don’t enact or implement them by snapping your fingers. It’s quite different to say “We should have controversial issues taught in schools” and to teach controversial issues in schools. The first one is an ‘ought’ statement and the second one is the actual practice. And we did find in our book, there’s an enormous divergence here. So when you actually send people to classrooms and you look to see the degree to which they’re engaged in controversial issues, it remains quite low. This is why our book is so skinny. Because I’m Jewish, I can make this joke: I put it in the same category as Great Jewish Sports Heroes. Um, you know, it’s very small, and the big reason is there’s been so little teaching of controversial issues, and the question is why. I think in your question you alluded to some of the reasons. One of them is that teachers are already overburdened with lots of other things, including preparing people for standardized tests. Also, they’re generally not exposed to how to do this in their pre-service training, so when you interview teachers and you say, “In your preparation to become a teacher, did you receive instruction or practice in the teaching of controversial issues?” Most say no. So why would we expect them to do it, right? I mean, I don’t play squash. If you put me on a squash court, I wouldn’t know what to do. So, given that we don’t actually explicitly prepare people for this task, it shouldn’t be surprising that often they don’t do it. And then what you alluded to earlier, Pete, at the very beginning, was often, despite all the rhetoric about the teaching of controversial issues, teachers actually don’t really have the right to do it. And when they engage in it in different ways, they’ve been penalized, disciplined, and sometimes even fired. The courts in recent years have radically narrowed teachers’ leeway in their own classrooms. Just to give you the most important case, it comes out of the early aughts. There was a teacher in Indiana named Deborah Mayer, and she was teaching a lesson from the district-sanctioned current events magazine, Time [Magazine] (for Kids). This was in 2003, right before we invaded Iraq. And if you remember, during the buildup to that, there were various protests when it became clear that we were going to, including a very large one at the National Mall.

HORN: March 3rd. 3/3/03. It was worldwide.

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so there was an article in Time (for Kids) about that, about the protest, including a picture of the protest at the Mall. And a kid in the class, fifth or sixth grade says, “Ms. Mayer, have you ever been to a political protest?” And she says, “Yes. As a matter of fact, I drove by one in Bloomington”—this is in Indiana—“recently and I honked my horn in support. And also, I think that human beings should try to settle their differences peacefully rather than with violence, which is why I’m also the advisor to the Peer Mediation Club of the school.”

HORN: Sounds like a menace.

ZIMMERMAN: Fired! Yes. More precisely, she [i.e., her contract] was not renewed, and she sued and it worked its way up to the federal circuit court, the highest court except the Supreme Court. And the court said she just doesn’t have a right to say what she was saying, that schools are the employers of teachers, and they get to dictate what teachers say.

HORN: Yeah, this is one of the things that you explore, that, you know, as a citizen when she’s speaking as a citizen, she has a certain freedom of speech. But as a public school teacher, and particularly as a public school teacher, she is kind of an agent of the state.

ZIMMERMAN: Right, but should it be is our point, you know, and they [teachers] have become, according to the courts, ventriloquists of the state. But you can’t prepare democratic citizens that way.

HORN: Correct. I would agree.

ZIMMERMAN: Just being a mouthpiece for the state, you know, you’ve got to model a different kind of behavior. Now Pete, let me be clear. No right is limitless or should be, including the free speech rights of teachers, right? I can imagine all kinds of things that a teacher could say in a classroom that would earn discipline or being fired. What if the history teacher told her students that the Holocaust never happened? I don’t think that person should be teaching in a school. So is that a limit on her speech? Well, of course it is, right? In the same way that, you know, you can’t call the White House and say you want to do violence to the president, or that I can’t sexually harass my students. These are all limits on my speech and it strikes me that they are legitimate limits on my speech, but, it strikes me that what we’ve done is, we have radically limited—beyond where it should go, beyond what’s educationally and pedagogically proper—we’ve limited the free speech rights of teachers to the point where it becomes risky for them just to do their jobs.

HORN: I think that’s one of those things that many people would not be aware of, that many teachers would not be aware of. They might assume— look, you know, one of the ways that you discuss in the book talking about controversial issues is with some level of disclosure, to say [as a teacher addressing students], “Look, since you ask, this is how I came to think about this, and these are my reasons for it. But my job here is not to have you believe what I believe. My job is to help you to come to your own conclusions, but based on reasons. We want to think through these things, so I’m going to disclose this a little bit.” I think most people might assume, “Well that seems, you know, that seems so reasonable. That’s not indoctrination. This person’s a professional. Also there is a certain civic obligation, you know, and on and on and on.” I think most people would be surprised that if push came to shove—and let’s be clear, there are many, fine administrators who would support that teacher, and school boards as well, who would support that teacher. And it wouldn’t always necessarily go—but if it did go to a court that, I think a lot of people would be surprised that teachers are not protected.

ZIMMERMAN: Given current court doctrine, I think what you’re saying is right. Also, I mean, I appreciate your point that there’s enormous diversity across school districts. So if Deborah Mayer had done what she did in, you know, Greenwich Village of New York City, I don’t think he would've been disciplined. She would’ve been teacher of the year.

HORN: She would have been [progressive educator based in NYC for two decades] Deborah Meier!

ZIMMERMAN: Exactly. Right. So obviously, because American education is so irreducibly local, it’s context-specific. But you know, I do think the distinction that you raised earlier is at the heart of our book, which is the difference between teaching and propaganda. And, you know, in the book we invoke Alexander Meiklejohn who is, in our view, the most important philosopher that Americans know the least about, and really until the Cold War, the leading civil libertarian in the United States. And he said that he felt that teachers should be able, indeed should be enjoined to disclose their views, provided that they make it absolutely clear that these are their views and that nobody else in the room is enjoined to share them. And we don’t go that far. I mean, we don’t think the teacher should be required to share their views. We think it should be part of their professional discretion, right? Depending on the context, again, depending on the atmosphere, they should be allowed, if they think it’s pedagogically wise to share what they believe. But in the same breath, they have to make it clear that nobody else is required to agree with them. And that’s also a heavy lift because they’re the adult in the room, they’re grading the people in the room and evaluating them. So you know, I think again, we have to be realistic, not just about how frequent this is, but how difficult it is, difficult to do well.  

HORN: Well, I would say, because here’s one of the things. For me, in a hierarchy of classroom behaviors, facilitating a discussion where people actually talk with each other, where it’s not just this serial, kind of, “I’m going to ask you a question and then you respond to me,” but when people are actually discussing— I think there isn’t anything in the classroom pedagogically that’s harder. And that’s if you’re talking about a poem, you know, or an article or how you came to a particular proof—

ZIMMERMAN: Let alone building a wall on the Mexican border!

HORN: Yeah, it’s super fraught.

ZIMMERMAN: It is, it is. Yeah. And they’re taking cues from you. But in a way, that’s Meiklejohn’s point. You know, one of his famous aphorisms was “Slaves can’t teach freedom.” He said, look, if as a teacher you’re pretending that you’re sort of this neutral, Olympian figure standing up on a mountain above the fray, first of all, you’re lying! Okay, but more than that, you’re not giving students a model of democratic engagement. You’re a political actor, you’re a political figure as a citizen. And so you should model that by being quite clear about what you believe and why, so students can get a model of civic and democratic engagement. But to your point, especially in a discussion situation, it’s hard to do that and also create an atmosphere where students feel free to disagree with you.

[38:09]

[VO]: If you’re interested in thinking about how to establish a classroom conducive to discussing even the most challenging topics, check out my conversation with Paula Roy in Point of Learning episode 3. Ok, so toward the end of the interview with Professor Zimmerman, I asked one of my go-to questions, which is “Is there anything you would have liked me to ask that I did not?” 

ZIMMERMAN: I think there’s an interesting line of objection to the kind of argument I’ve been making that you didn’t raise, which is fine because it’s a short interview—

HORN: Well I don’t really disagree with you is the problem, probably!

ZIMMERMAN: I think the most powerful line of argument against what I’m saying now has to do with race and racism in the United States. I’ve had plenty of people say things like, “Look, you know, we can’t engage in the kind of discussions you want about certain subjects because people in the class are going to be injured by that discussion because they come to it with a certain set of experiences and perspectives.” And you could see this in our book, in the conclusion which we wrote about Ferguson. So after Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, there were protests all over Missouri and the nation. But when we looked at the local schools, most of them—not all, but most of them were evading or avoiding the subject. And there were a number of reasons for it. But what a lot of educators in majority-minority schools said is, “You know, the kids have already been traumatized by this. And we can introduce the subject because it will retraumatize them. It will create so much psychic discomfort that it will inhibit learning, rather than promote it.” And I would say that I think the research base for those claims is quite small, which should matter. But beyond that, I would also say, and my basic retort to that is “You’re right and you’re wrong. You’re right that a lot of these matters are deeply personal. You’re right that many of them strike at our most fundamental identities as human beings. And you’re also right that they can provoke strong negative emotions. You are right about all three of those things. But you are wrong if you think those things can or should be a bar on discussion. Why? Because every important claim provokes or offends somebody and raises difficult feelings. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not that important. So just one other anecdote: you probably know the name Mary Beth Tinker, who was the 13-year-old girl who wore the armband to school in Iowa in 1965 to protest the Vietnam war. It worked its way up to the Supreme Court, to the iconic case Tinker v. Des Moines, where the court declared that neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. Mary Beth Tinker is not that much older than I am, and I’ve become friends with her.

HORN: Is that right?

ZIMMERMAN: Yes, yes. She’s a totally lovely, dynamic, fascinating, superb person. She’s come to my class a few times here at Penn. She came a couple semesters ago to tell her story. And the first question, a student said, “Look, you know, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight. You were fighting the Vietnam War. This Milo Yiannopoulos clown, this Ann Coulter bozo, this Charles Murray person—they just hurt people. Why should we allow them to do that?” And she said, “Look, at the school I went to in Des Moines, there were kids who had fathers and brothers that were dying in Southeast Asia. Do you think they weren’t hurt by this snot-nosed kid wearing this emblem to school, saying that their loved one was dying for a lie? If you think that didn’t hurt them, you’re not thinking. Of course, it hurt them. It absolutely hurt them, as important speech always does. If hurt is going to be your rubric, there’s not going to be speech at all.” So I am not denying that a lot of these issues cause hurt. They do. But that cannot and must not be a bar on us as citizens talking about them.

HORN: I could think of somebody who is ill-prepared to have the discussion, you know, after Ferguson and actually, you know, letting things get out of hand and make it worse.

ZIMMERMAN: Of course.

HORN: But I can also think of a place where if you have a kind of structure, you know, like something that’s used in SEED—serial testimony, where you’re just going to speak for a minute, or pass, or not speak, but nobody’s going to disagree with you. Nobody’s going to interrupt you. But now we’ve at least made a place for establishing that “We are in the real world. We are in this town where this happened and we’re not going to judge anything that anybody said and we’re not necessarily— We’ll just give it some space …” but like, you know, there are different ways: It’s not just, “Are you with the cops or with Michael Brown?”

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, and the devil is always in the details.

[43:39]

[VO]: You may know that the “SEED” I referred to a moment ago when I was talking about the practice of serial testimony is short for the National Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity Project. If you want to know more, I’ve got an episode for that! My most recent one, in fact, called SEED Folk. As a final highlight from this conversation to share with you, here’s Jonathan Zimmerman on how important it is, regardless of how passionately a teacher may believe something, not to cross the line into indoctrination. 

ZIMMERMAN: A teacher’s duty is never to persuade you of something, except, perhaps, the need to create environments where everybody is allowed to speak, hear, listen, and decide on their own. A teacher should be trying to persuade you of the importance of that environment. Not everybody believes in that. And I will say that I try to indoctrinate the evils of indoctrination. I don’t really admit dissent on that score. I think that as a teacher your prime, indeed your only responsibility is to help people make up their own minds. And I will not brook, and I will not allow anything in my classroom that I think is going to inhibit that.

HORN: You just offered about six great closing lines in a row. Are you gonna try for anything else? That was great. Sometimes people begin a paper like three times and so you’ve got three introductions. Those are all great, like buttons.

ZIMMERMAN: [chuckling] All right, good. Good.

[VO]: My great thanks to Jonathan Zimmerman for sitting down with me to talk about one of my favorite topics: how we learn to discuss difficult issues. I’ve written a few pieces about this, so I’ll share some of those on the show page for you. Thanks to Drew Azzinaro for laying down guitar for the instrumental takes of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” for this episode. As always, Shayfer James supplies intro and outro instrumentals for the show. If you’ve ever wondered about the words to those songs, Shayfer is performing live each Sunday night at 7 Eastern throughout this period of social distancing from his home in Jersey City. You can find his weekly concerts on Instagram @shayferjamesmusic. That’s Shayfer with a y. Finally, thanks to you for listening, sharing, rating, and reviewing this show. When people you know curious about what and how and why we learn ask you for podcast recommendations, please tell them about Point of Learning, which is recorded, written, edited, and mixed by me here in the City of Good Neighors, Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I will see you again just as soon as I can. Until then, stay safe and take care of yourself. 

S.E.E.D. Folk Transcript (024)

NAOMI RAQUEL ENRIGHT: This is Naomi Raquel Enright, educator, equity practitioner, and writer; author of the new book, Strength of Soul. You are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. I am very excited for this episode about the National SEED Project, an incredible organization that completely transformed my life when I trained with them in July 2015. Without SEED, Strength of Soul would have never come to be. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, the National SEED Project. For over 30 years, this unique teacher-led professional development program has cultivated multicultural teaching and learning across the globe and around the U.S. On today’s episode, we’ll hear the voices of four SEED folk. First, Dr. Willa Cofield: 

DR. WILLA COFIELD: I’m working for change, I’m working to reduce racism and sexism and all those other biases that plague our society, and when I got to SEED, I felt that I got new support and new ideas, and skills, and ways of continuing to do that work.

[VO]: We’ll discuss a couple of the ways that SEED sows equitable practices, even in its modes of discussion. Here’s SEED Founder Dr. Peggy McIntosh:

DR. PEGGY McINTOSH: Sharing of time, when you talked about your own experience, had a magical effect on a whole group. Making our lives parallel like that, one after another and all equally worthy. It felt wonderful!

[VO]: Longtime SEED Co-Director Emily Style will note what this project for more inclusive education is not: 

EMILY STYLE: So this isn’t watering down the curriculum for straight White kids. This is making straight White kids more human, stronger, more fluent about the fish they are in the sea. It’s the nature of fish that there are many types.

[VO]: And we’ll hear about a couple of hard, real moments that are difficult to imagine taking place among colleagues in any other setting. Here’s Nancy Rucker Livingston:   

NANCY RUCKER LIVINGSTON: And when the George Zimmerman verdict came down, we ended up having a staff meeting well into the night, trying to figure out what we were going to do about it. I didn’t even remember saying this, but Emily said to me that she would never forget that I said that I didn’t feel capable of taking care of White people at that moment. I mean, what a gift to be with a group of colleagues where you can sit in your pain and you can say, “This is what’s happening to me right now,” and still stay there, and they stayed there with me. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before.

[03:25]

[VO]: If you heard episodes of this show from last year featuring Peggy McIntosh and Emily Style, who co-directed the National SEED Project for its first 25 years, you may recall that I’ve been promising to do an episode on SEED for some time now. (SEED is in all caps, by the way. S-E-E-D stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity.) Over the past nine months, as I continued to read about SEED and explore essays by SEED participants, and re-listen to raw tapes of my interviews with fascinating SEED folk, I started to get a little scared about the complexity of the task. Over the past three decades, the National SEED Project has trained nearly 3,000 K-12 and college teachers from 42 U.S. states and 15 other countries, engaging 30,000 teachers in SEED leaders’ schools, who in turn have influenced more than 3 million students through wider and deeper curricula, and more inclusive classrooms. As a podcaster with a staff of just me, I was stuck about how to put this show together. Until I remembered something Emily Style said when she led my SEED group in New Jersey. This was at the end of our yearlong training, and we were developing individual plans to make our classrooms and school more reflective of and inclusive of all students. “Don’t try to do everything,” she advised. “You can’t, and you’ll burn out, anyway. Do the next thing. Take your next step, whatever that is.” Today’s show, then, is my very partial but passionate introduction to the most important program of personal and professional growth that I know about. I’ll include some SEED notes from my conversations with Peggy and Emily, but I’ll also feature interviews with two veteran members of the National SEED staff, Nancy Rucker Livingston and Dr. Willa Cofield. To start us off, I asked them to say how they might respond to someone who says, “SEED. I think I’ve heard of that. What is it?” Here’s Dr. Willa Cofield, who joined SEED when she was already an experienced educator and activist, at age 60. That was 31 years ago! 

WILLA: SEED is a teacher professional development program, and it works with teachers from all over the country and with teachers from outside the country. It prepares them to go back to their home districts or schools and lead seminars with their colleagues to help them look at their classrooms and their school to see how inclusive those classrooms are, how much they include all the children in the school without regard to race or gender or class or whatever. And it has spread. People love SEED. People come to SEED and experience what they call transformation, that their lives are changed, because the training in National SEED, the New Leaders Week is very carefully constructed to help people look at their schools and at themselves and to see things that they hadn’t suspected were there and to begin the process of change.

[VO]: Here’s how Nancy Rucker Livingston describes SEED. Nancy has been facilitating SEED seminars for teachers for over 25 years, in New Jersey as well as for the national training—New Leaders Week—which Willa just mentioned. 

NANCY: I see it as an opportunity for teachers to learn themselves, both about themselves to reflect on their own schooling, to remember and examine what was good and not so good about the way that they were educated. How do we avoid doing the things that were negative in our own situations? How do we avoid doing those same things to our students?

[VO]: Nancy grew up in a family of political activists. She says they didn’t talk politics all the time, but she grew up in a home with plenty of books about civil rights and African American history. A New York native who grew up in California, she had experience teaching in both of these states before landing in leafy Princeton, NJ, where she spent most of her career as an elementary teacher in the public schools.   

NANCY: I didn’t expect to teach in a place like Princeton. I was part of the National Teacher Corps in the 1970s and was trained to teach urban kids, and I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. I think when I landed in Princeton, having had that experience, I think I was already predisposed to thinking a lot about education and justice, and intertwining the two somehow. Landing in a place like Princeton, it’s not as obvious as when you’re in inner-city Los Angeles, where I was, or inner-city Syracuse, where I got trained. So that’s something that I’m not sure I’ve talked too much about.

[VO]: We get back to the assumptions it’s easy to make about a place like Princeton in just a second, but I asked Nancy first to say a little more about the power of SEED as she sees it. 

[09:16]

NANCY: I think a really important component of it for me was the idea that an expert isn’t coming into my school and telling me as a teacher how to meet the needs of the children in front of me. Once I became a trained SEED leader, I was in that building all of the time, and in that district all of the time, so the work wasn’t confined to a workshop once a month where we talked about “Diversity.” It was talking about what was happening with our students every single day. It was examining as a group of teachers who became very close friends through this process about how we can do things better and differently and raise issues in our district. We became change agents in our own district.

[VO]: So here’s one important way that SEED sows change in the schools in which it takes root: honoring the expertise of teachers as professionals who know their kids and families better than anyone who can come in from the outside with a PowerPoint slide deck and a set of prescribed solutions that may not fit the problems a given school is actually facing. SEED leaders undergo intensive training, but then they come back to facilitate real conversations with their own colleagues in their own schools about better teaching and learning for their own students. 

PETER: You mentioned that your SEED cohort functioned as change agents for the district. Can you give an example of that?

NANCY: I think the most common thing was they would start to question decisions in the district and were able to bring real classroom examples and explain to the powers that be why a certain decision might not be best for children. I think very often people who are making decisions are so far removed from what goes on in the classroom, and as teachers we are already overwhelmed just going day to day. But when issues would arise, I found that people in the SEED groups were the ones raising their hands and saying, “Wait a minute. This is what we need to look at before we make that kind of decision.” Or, I have students in class who are kind of the stereotypical—or what people expect a kid from Princeton to be, with all the advantages that money can give you. But in that same classroom—and I had actually had this occur—you have a child whose father is a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and in that same classroom is the child of the person who cleans their house. And so what I found in Princeton that was really interesting, and it was a growth edge for me as well, was recognizing that we need to talk more about class and we need to figure out ways to make it all right for all of the kids to talk about their experiences, not just the ones who went to Paris for spring break—which is what I found when I first got there. There were many opportunities and platforms that celebrated that kind of childhood, but not much publicly that gave an opening or space for children whose lives were very different from that. Every student that walks into that room has a story. I don’t know that I gave enough time to hearing those stories before, and I made it a part of my practice.

[VO]: Nancy gave some props to the learning program called Responsive Classroom, which uses a practice called Morning Meeting to help keep students engaged with a positive sense of their learning community. 

NANCY: Every morning I had a meeting with my students when they first came in the room. We talked, we learned how to listen to one another.

PETER: Was there a standard [discussion] prompt for that?

NANCY: It changed every day. And it involved doing a greeting that was sometimes serious, sometimes silly, whatever, to say, “Okay, our day together is starting.” There would be a day where kids had time to share news from their own lives. There were games that we played. It just made for—it was kind of a sacred place to say, “This is how I’m doing today and what’s going on in my life today.” And it was maybe 15, 20 minutes—not long. But I learned so much!

PETER: It paid huge dividends.

NANCY: Absolutely.

PETER: For the other kids to learn about each other, too.

NANCY: Absolutely. One of the kids in the class was an amazing basketball player, a young woman, and she had some struggles too, and we had an assembly once where one of the Harlem Globetrotter-type people came, and when he wanted a volunteer, my whole class said, “Pick her! Pick her!” because they knew that about her and they really wanted her to be the one to get picked. So that kind of thing happened because of their closeness to each other, I think.

PETER: That’s great. When you said SEED folks in your school—people who were in your group—were particularly apt to tell the truth about what’s going on, and sometimes that involved speaking truth to power, do you think that part of what SEED does is enable people to practice that? I mean, it’s like a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, that the people who might be drawn to SEED are more inclined to want to do that as well. But it seems that, you know, part of what you do in SEED sessions with each other is practice saying the truth. “This is what’s really going on in my classroom. This is what I’m really struggling with. This is how I really feel about how the stuff that goes on in this school.”

NANCY: I think it also helped people who may have had their own thoughts about a social justice issue, for example, but hadn’t felt … So, say a White teacher who had always cared about these things but didn’t feel empowered, or felt they weren’t the person who should bring it up. One of the things that I hold really most dear about our interactions with each other was that I felt like as one of the very few people of color in my building on the staff, that I didn’t always have to be the one to raise issues about race—because of SEED. It gave White colleagues not only the permission, but they knew it was their responsibility. You know, I think when there are maybe three people of color in a building, whenever there’s a race issue, everybody turns to you. And that didn’t happen as much because there were other people who were stepping forward and saying, “This matters to me too.”

PETER: Just another reason to feel exhausted at the end of the teaching day.

NANCY: Yes. I have a friend who used to call it a “cultural tax.” And it’s true.

PETER: Yeah, makes sense.

[17:33]

[VO]: Nancy’s experience of what took root in her elementary school in Princeton provides some examples of the difference SEED can make for teachers, students, administrators, and families. Let’s take a minute to consider some of the philosophy baked into SEED practices. 

PEGGY: In SEED there are rules about not arguing with other people in the course of SEED seminar, and instead testifying to your own experience.

[VO]: Once again, that’s SEED Founder Dr. Peggy McIntosh, the feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar and speaker with whom I had the opportunity in episode 021 to unpack the notion of White Privilege. That is the subject with which McIntosh is most commonly identified, and while her White Privilege papers are staples of SEED curriculum, she is also widely known for her exploration of fraudulence and the complexity of our plural minds and souls, as well as Interactive Phase Theory, which she has posited as one model for change in bringing women into the liberal arts curriculum. I hasten to note that all these ideas are well worth your time, and beautifully introduced with fresh letters to the reader in the volume that was published by Routledge just after our episode dropped last year: the essay collection is called On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning. Buy a copy for yourself and one for a school near you, if you can. Aight. I became convinced I wanted to devote an episode to the National SEED Project when I attended a speech by an education professor and activist I admire so much I’ve gone to hear him speak three times. My point is he’s good, and always more than a little inspiring. However, in the Q and A following a speech last spring, someone asked him what could be done to help teachers feel less isolated in their classrooms, to have meaningful opportunities to engage with and encourage colleagues. The professor didn’t have a great answer for that. I found the questioner afterwards, and suggested he check out the National SEED Project website. So here I am trying out a theory about teacher isolation with Peggy, who gently disabuses me of my assumption.

PETER: You’ve said you believe virtually all the teachers you’ve met have felt isolated, except perhaps in a SEED seminar, because there’s almost no place you can go to talk about your feelings on your teaching, your thoughts about what’s really working. Is this one of the things that inspired you to want to create something like SEED, and what SEED has become?

PEGGY: I didn’t start with the understanding that that teachers feel isolated until I found that sharing of time, when you talked about your own experience, had a magical effect on a whole group. Making our lives parallel like that, one after another, and all equally worthy. It felt wonderful, and it wasn’t until I did it in groups that I began to ask, “Why didn’t we do it before?”

PETER: You’re talking about an example of Serial Testimony when you say that?

PEGGY: Yes.

[VO]: Serial Testimony is a disciplined mode in which each participant has the opportunity to respond in turn, and be listened to, uninterrupted, for a fixed amount of time, maybe 60 seconds. A timer is important for this procedure, but more about that later.  

PEGGY: And it wasn’t until I felt how wonderful it was to be in a group where you could talk about your teaching without feeling judged and without judging other people that I knew then that we had been working in isolation, just having to imagine what it was like in other people’s classrooms but not knowing and probably often thinking they were doing better than I in their classroom. I taught as a teaching assistant at Harvard when I was in graduate school and the strain of teaching was such that I had to go and lie down after each class. You don’t know what other people are doing. You’re not sure you’re doing it “right.” You think they’re probably doing it better, whatever it is. You’re not thinking about the students. You’re wondering, “How am I doing?” That’s very tiring—neglecting the students. It’s very exhausting because they are there but you’re probably at some level afraid of them, or mystified by them. But in any case, it’s not a community. It’s not a community.

[VO]: She stresses that the traditional model of schooling, where the teacher transmits curriculum to the students, does not just isolate teachers from colleagues in other rooms … 

PEGGY: But about the isolation of teachers: they’re isolated from the students as well as from each other. So, you might think it’s a highly sociable job, that every teacher is seeing dozens of people every day, maybe even hundreds, but the teacher is isolated from the students through not having created any interactivities among them, nor any relationship with him or her. And the teacher is isolated from other teachers.

[24:05]

[VO]: So part of what SEED cultivates is relationships between teachers by means of interactivities such as Serial Testimony, that can then be employed by teachers with their own students, reflecting those teachers’ understanding that, as Nancy said, every student has a story. That story isn’t to be debated or argued with or dismissed. It’s to be heard and valued alongside everybody else’s. Peggy notes that several of her assumptions about teachers from the 1980s have proved to be durable as the National SEED Project flowers into its fourth decade. The following paraphrase is based on p. 170 of her book [On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning], if you’re following along at home: 1.) Teachers, like all citizens, have been wounded by inequitable systems, hierarchical structures that prize certain kinds of experience over others. 2.) Understanding these wounds and these systems can help to create teaching and learning spaces where all students feel they belong and can learn. 3.) Teachers are capable of addressing power dynamics explicitly as they appear in the curriculum and in ourselves. If we can recall and examine inequitable experiences in our lives, especially in our school years, any of us can lessen inequalities within our practices of education. 4.) Teachers can lead this work on educational equity and diversity, provided they have the experience of sharing discussion time quite consciously. Teachers can become their own counselors and equity leaders, if they can be immersed for a time in a carefully designed, multicultural, residential program with other educators. In SEED, this is called New Leaders Week, and for over 30 years, it has been held each summer in California. (This summer, there will also be two sessions in Seattle.)

[26:16] 

EMILY: I trust the model. The model feels very sound, very organic in terms of both the scholarship in our selves, the textbooks of our lives, and classic and contemporary academic scholarship [which Emily often calls “the scholarship on the shelves”] so that, you know, this is a sound way to do adult development, to do human development, to do leadership.

[VO]: That’s relational scholar, educator, and writer Emily Style, who co-directed National SEED for its first 25 years. Here’s her overview of New Leaders Week and the way it fits with what then can germinate in a SEED leader’s own school:  

EMILY: To bring people together for a week in the summer to be with others, some of which are others with a capital ‘O’, and engage in the kind of baptism of conversation that that week-long immersion is, with regard to intersectionality, the different dimensions of identity that we explore.

[VO]: Such intersectional dimensions of identity include, as you know, race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religious affiliation, physical ability, and so on.  

EMILY: They have come knowing that that’s just the prelude to going back to create a self-selected group of volunteers, 10 to 20 colleagues who will meet once a month so that wherever the conversational edges are in their workplace, in their local school, they will extend them organically, not because they go home with a big manual that says “Meeting 1,” “Meeting 2,”  “Meeting 3,” but because the week-long training further builds their capacity and authorizes them to use their very own creativity as a teacher, as a colleague, to gather with a sense of pacing and artistry once a month for three hours over food. Not for shame, blame or guilt, but because it’s the nature of human of community-building and alas! ordinarily in institutional community life like school life, there have not traditionally been these spaces. Because people are human beings and they’re together around the water cooler, and when someone dies or someone is born—some of these moments happen inadvertently where people are bonded, but there’s not designated space that says, “This matters to us. This is fundamental to our mission as an educational institution: to be in as hearty relationship to each other and to our students as we can.” And so designating space to work on that is really fundamental, and it’s a matter of rigor and excellence way beyond test scores and an understanding of “standards.”

[30:17]

[VO]: SIDEBAR: The Timer. One characteristic of SEED seminars that some SEED folk find disquieting, especially at first, is the regular use of a timer to keep speakers from exceeding a designated period in which to share their experience. It’s one way that equity is baked in not only to the project of SEED, but also the process. You might be recalling messages from your childhood about how to be a girl or a boy, for example. Sometimes you have one minute, sometimes three, but when you hear the chirp of the timer, it’s no longer your turn. Peggy likes to call this “the Autocratic Administration of Time in the Service of Democratic Distribution of Time.” [On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning, p. 35] The timer provides a conversational harness responding to the reality that some people feel more comfortable speaking first, speaking longer, speaking without raising their hand, and so on. This is a dominance trait, so certain groups of people tend to exhibit these behaviors with greater frequency. When I’m observing classes in a new school—not SEED leaders’ classes, it’s important to note here—if I don’t have a specific set of questions that otherwise preoccupies me, my default exercise with my notebook is to track surreptitiously which students speak, and for how long, and how often. Will you be shocked if I report that the most frequent and lengthy speakers are most often males, most often White ones, and usually the ones wearing the most expensive clothes? In this light, the timer used in many SEED exercises makes perfect sense. Every teacher knows that certain students in any class take up more than their share of shared time, so here’s a straightforward, unassailable digital referee to keep things moving along equitably. However, I mentioned that for many SEED participants, this takes some getting used to. In fact, there’s an infamous anecdote involving a summer training session years ago that Emily was leading—

EMILY: So we’re in Southern California, and we’re outside meeting and this person was just so angry, and they just come at me and grab my timer and they just threw it right over the edge!

[VO]: Right into the trees below. Some months later, the angry participant did come around, Emily takes care to note. 

EMILY: And then like in February, when I’m doing newsletter collecting, when I’m talking to that person on the phone, reminding them, they say to me, “I don’t know if you remember, but I was so angry about that timer. I grabbed it out of your hand and threw it over the edge.” And I say, “Yes, I do remember!” They said, “Well, now I understand—”  

PETER: —because this person had begun to lead seminars of their own!

EMILY: Oh yeah. So by February—and here’s where time is a character in the drama—by February, that person—it was a woman—had begun to understand the importance of the timer as a way to manage dominance. And so she said, “Now I understand why the timer is so fundamental.” She said, “But I hated the timer. That’s why I just grabbed it out of your hand and threw it over the edge.”

[34:01]

[VO]: Having explored some of the philosophy and mechanics of SEED sessions, let’s check back in with Nancy, who reflected on a few hard, important moments she doesn’t believe would have occurred outside of a SEED setting. 

NANCY: I was co-facilitating a small group with Willa, and there was a White woman, a middle-aged woman in our sessions. And in those years, we would show the entire video of The Color of Fear.

[VO]: The Color of Fear is a 1994 documentary by director Lee Mun Wah featuring eight men—two African Americans, two Latinos, two Asian Americans and two Whites—coming together in a room to discuss race relations in the U.S. You can find clips from it on YouTube. The participants’ frank, unfiltered dialogue makes for a film that hits hard.

NANCY: And in our next small group meeting, this woman came, but she was unable to speak. She physically couldn’t speak, and she kept coming to every small group but she didn’t say anything. You could see that she was physically affected by what she had heard, and when she was finally able to speak, what she said through her tears was, “I can’t believe that I lived this long and I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that there was this kind of pain in the world, in this country.” And that always stayed with me, for couple of reasons. One, what I learned from Willa about facilitating in a moment like that.

PETER: What did she do? This is Dr. Willa Cofield.

NANCY: Yes. What she didn’t do was get angry with the woman and say, “Well, it’s too bad that you’re hurt. You know, people are going through this all the time!”—and I’ve seen people do that in trainings—rather, to welcome her back to the group every single time and to recognize that there was learning going on. Would it have been wonderful if she had been able to speak sooner, so that all of us could hear from her? Absolutely. But to me it meant the difference between that woman deciding to stay for the rest of the training or deciding to get in her car and go home because really there was nothing keeping her there but her own determination to see it through.

[VO]: I asked Willa how she recalled this SEED session from the early ‘90s …

WILLA: I’m not so sure that I was the deciding factor. I think both of us tried to be very supportive to that woman. We tried to understand and not judge, and to be very patient with her and know that, you know, we felt she was being completely honest, and this was her reaction to this film. That she had just never quite encountered that kind of frank display of emotions regarding racism. And you know, she’s not the only experience that I’ve had with people who were pretty shocked by what they saw!

[VO]: Back to Nancy …

NANCY: This past summer in one of the trainings, there was somebody who had a physical, almost a similar reaction. And it didn’t frighten me this time because I knew that we could help him. I knew that we could keep him engaged, and he stuck it out and he was able to—I mean, we had a phenomenal small group who also supported him in a really wonderful way, and he was able to verbalize in some ways what was happening to him, and what he was planning to do going forward. So all these years later, you know, people are still—depending on where they come from, where they’ve grown up—some of these things are still new to some people. And I’ve heard this said in SEED training a lot: We’re all at different places on this journey. And if we really mean that, we have to embrace all of that. I mean, it doesn’t mean letting somebody off the hook, but I think we have to make it possible for them to stay in it. And sometimes it’s easy to get angry and not allow that. We had an interesting situation when the George Zimmerman verdict came down during a training in California and we ended up having a staff meeting well into the night, trying to figure out what we were going to do about it. And I didn’t even remember saying this, but Emily said to me that she would never forget that I said in that small group meeting that I didn’t feel capable of taking care of White people at that moment. I don’t even remember saying it, but it was so painful. It was so painful! So I mean, what a gift to be with a group of colleagues where you can sit in your pain and you can say, “This is what’s happening to me right now,” and still stay there. And they stayed there with me, you know—I wasn’t alone in this—but I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before, where I felt empowered to speak and I also felt held by the people in the room. For me anyway, that’s been a uniquely SEED experience.

[40:33]

[VO]: As you’re hearing, SEED attracts some pretty amazing people. I was honored to talk to everyone I did for the making of this episode, but my conversation with Willa Cofield was especially meaningful to me, as it brought me back to Plainfield, New Jersey, where I lived from 2001 to 2018. Dr. Cofield is well known in town as a social justice warrior, though she’s far too modest to admit that. At the age of 91, she’s currently completing her second documentary about the history of Halifax County, NC, where she grew up. As with all these SEED folk, I could go on and on about Willa, but here’s just one fact you might especially appreciate, especially if you’re a teacher who’s ever protested and not been fired for doing so. After Willa was non-renewed as young teacher working at a segregated high school in 1964, allegedly for some minor disciplinary violations, but in fact because she had supported her students in organizing against the racist forces in their town, she appealed her case to the 4th Circuit, and won a legal battle [Willa Johnson vs. Joseph Branch 364 F.2d 177 (4th Cir. 1966)] cited in at least 125 subsequent cases that I was able to dig up, as well as numerous law review articles dealing with academic freedom, due process, freedom of speech and association, discrimination, and the nature of civil rights protections. 

PETER: Is there something that you like to stress when you’re training, or when you have trained facilitators, something that’s very important for facilitators to keep in mind, especially because you’re dealing with these difficult topics such as race and class?

WILLA: Well, I think the sense of trying to connect to people, trying to make people feel comfortable and safe, and that they’re not expected to know everything when they begin their training; that there are things that we as leaders don’t know; that we try to empathize with them, you know, and try to see the goodness there, and the possibilities for people to learn and to grow. And I always felt that at the beginning of the SEED seminar, having people feel that they are safe and that they can share what they feel, they can be honest and they’re not going to be shot down, that the people who are in charge are going to be protective and to help them at the pace they set. So I guess that’s, you know, that’s always in my mind as a very important piece of the experience: helping people to feel that they can be safe. And the small groups that we have in the training—usually there’s a larger room where people are given new information or they do certain things, and then they retreat to the small group. And the small group would have no more than eight people and two leaders. And there, there was this sense of being intimate and that you could take a chance, that you could say things that you might not say in a large group, and that your leaders were going to be supportive and they were going to see that you were protected.

[VO]: I want to conclude with Emily, my former colleague and good friend from Westfield High School, who first introduced me to SEED, and subsequently to the other guests you’ve heard today. If you heard my episode with her from July 2019, you’ll recall the important formula at the top of this excerpt. 

[44:30]

EMILY: Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students. [See WINDOWS AND MIRRORS WITH EMILY STYLE (022) for a fuller treatment of this concept.] And I come back to the importance of that for students of all stripes and colors and sizes and shapes with regard to the dynamics of domination and oppression. Unless those of us who occupy some of the dominant dimensions, like Whiteness, like being cisgender and heterosexual, claim a fluency with regard to this dimension of identity—not to dominate, but to engage the conversation—the burden of conversing stays on the targeted group. And while they are certainly up to the task, it’s an uneven, it’s an unfair burden.

PETER: It’s exhausting—for one party.

EMILY: Yes. And it diminishes all of us. So: my joy at the wholeness, the goodness of this kind of curriculum understanding for all of us. So this isn’t watering down the curriculum for straight White kids. This is making straight White kids more human, stronger, more fluent about the fish they are in the sea. It’s the nature of fish that there are many types in the sea. So let’s get smarter and wiser, and on we go!

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! For more on the National SEED Project, explore nationalseedproject.org; that’s nationalseedproject—one word—.org. My great thanks to Willa Cofield, Nancy Rucker Livingston, Peggy McIntosh, and Emily Style for hours of great conversation. I’ve already plugged Peggy’s phenomenal book On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning, so get that, but while you’re shopping, go ahead and also pick up Strength of Soul by Naomi Raquel Enright. You won’t have to read too long to see the influence SEED has had on her life’s work. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for music; instrumental versions of his songs were featured throughout today’s soundtrack. And thanks to you for listening, sharing, rating, reviewing, and subscribing to Point of Learning. Interviews for today’s show were recorded on location in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but Point of Learning is produced right here in sunny Buffalo, New York. I do the recording, writing, editing, and mixing, and my name is Peter Horn. See you again just as soon as I can with another edition all about what and how and why we learn.  

Love's Labour's Lit Transcript (023)

Love’s Labour’s Lit (10/9/19)

LISA LUDWIG: Hello, this is Lisa Ludwig, Executive Managing Director of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, one of the largest free outdoor Shakespeare festivals in the country. Our stage is located in a beautiful Olmsted park in Buffalo, New York, and we proudly just celebrated our 44th season of free Shakespeare. You are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn, and hopefully you are going to learn everything you ever wanted—or didn’t want to know—about Shakespeare in Delaware Park and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Take it away, Peter!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show we ask the 400-year-old question: Are you ready to get Shakespearienced? We’ll hear from actors who return year after year to this unique Buffalo festival …

REBECCA ELKIN: Shakespeare in Delaware Park is for everyone, and you feel that.

[VO]: We’ll hear how the magic started in 1976 …

SAUL ELKIN: He said very casually, “Who’s doing Shakespeare in Buffalo?” And I said, “Nobody really. The colleges do it, but nobody’s doing it professionally. He said, “Start something!” I said, “How do I start something?” He said, “Well, call the mayor.” I mean, I grew up in New York City. Calling the mayor meant calling Mayor LaGuardia!

[VO]: And why this happening is not quite like any other.

STEVE VAUGHAN: It is the only Shakespeare festival that I know of that doesn’t have a fence around it. All the other festivals throughout the country that I’m aware of, the audience’s experience is tightly controlled. You come in, you get into a line, you wait behind a gate. When they open the gate, you can come in and then they control the seating. It’s free still and they pass the hat, but there’s no spontaneous chaos like we have!

[VO]: We’ll hear from some of those who work hard to pull it off—

MELISSA LEVENTHAL: One of the joys about theater is that it’s live, and it shouldn’t be the same show from night to night. We had people that came to see the show five or six times, and I think every show that they saw was just a little bit different. And that’s because we always worked on these characters. We never left the feeling of it stop.

[VO]: —and some of why we believe it matters.

REBECCA: To give the gift to a small kid of their first experience with Shakespeare being one that is accommodating of their needs, and open and welcoming and fun and live. It’s just so cool!

[2:52]

[VO]: If you’ve listened to this show for a while, you know I’m fascinated by the power of theatre to engage and connect, to challenge and delight. Last February I showcased Epic Theatre Ensemble and its work to provide a platform for NYC high school students and their ideas about the world; in March of 2018, I talked with Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater about the ancient relationship between drama and democracy. If you haven’t heard this show in a while, it’s because I spent most of the summer collaborating with a group of talented actors, designers, musicians, directors, stage managers, and interns in what is now one of Buffalo, New York’s great public art traditions, Shakespeare in Delaware Park—specifically, working on a play called Love’s Labour’s Lost. If you’ve only seen or read a few Shakespeare plays, this probably isn’t one of them—nor should it be, probably. The main plot is four rich guys who swear off food, drink, and sex for three years, or until four rich French ladies show up, about 15 minutes later. There’s misplaced letters, love triangles, and wisecracking clowns of many kinds, plus a strange turn at the very end where a king that the audience never meets dies and so prevents the rich kids from getting married. So weird. Plus, there’s wordplay and puns that even this old English teacher isn’t quite sure he understood completely, even after hearing or saying them four dozen times. But none of that kept a seven-year-old girl in the audience from being spellbound the entire time. I’d say she was in the front row, except that this is Shakespeare in Delaware Park, so there aren’t rows per se. There are blankets and lawn chairs, coolers and cheese trays, and one or two thousand people who showed up to watch some free theatre in one of the most beautiful spots in the city. As founder Saul Elkin likes to say, someone once described this festival as a huge picnic where a play happens to be going on. The sun is just starting to set on the lake to your left, and overhead some geese are nudging each other into a proper V. Not everyone who finds themself on Shakespeare Hill on any given summer night in Buffalo planned to attend a play; sometimes runners or longboarders or strollers in the park’s gorgeous rose garden just float on over, attracted by the spectacle on stage—or, if they can’t see the stage yet, whatever it is this crowd has gathered to see. But this seven-year-old girl didn’t show up accidentally. Her folks got here early enough to stake out a spot just five feet from the stage. As an actor in the performance, I am totally thrilled by this kid who seems utterly captivated from the moment the live music starts, and the king and lords of Navarre arrive on stage to tell us about the oath of abstinence they’re about to take. You may guess I’m going to claim that this child was at the point of learning—in this case, learning Shakespeare. You’re right about that. But so, I think, were those of us on, and behind the stage, putting the play together. I want to spend this episode unpacking some of the magic of this unusual experience in theatre by introducing you to some of the people who made the magic happen, but before we get into that I also want to note that this summer adventure was particularly deep to me, as it bookended my first full year back in my hometown after 25 years in New Jersey. As a little kid, some of my first memories of Buffalo, New York took place on this hill, when my parents, who were called here in 1978 to serve First Presbyterian Church, brought my brothers and me to see Shakespeare in Delaware Park. My dad in particular loved Shakespeare. A year before he died in 1998, he came to see me play some minor roles in a college production of Hamlet. There were four performances in total, and he came to see all four. Of Hamlet: not a short play. I said, “Dad, you don’t need to come every night, you know.” He said, “Son, when you’re bored with Shakespeare, you’re bored with life.” There wasn’t a sunset this summer on that glorious stage that I didn’t remember his words. Let’s start with Rebecca Elkin.

[7:40]

REBECCA: My name is Rebecca Elkin, and I played the Princess of France in this production of Love’s Labour’s Lost.

[VO]: Rebecca knows a thing or two about being a kid on this hill …

REBECCA: Shakespeare in the Park is definitely my favorite place in the world. It has been since I was a tiny kid.

[VO]: … because it was her father who founded Shakespeare in Delaware Park.

REBECCA: I’m told when I was three months old, my mom and dad brought me to the Hill, and I guess my dad held me up, Lion King-style, to introduce the Hill to their new daughter.

[VO]: Even if you’re not a little Simba, you don’t need a ticket for this festival. There’s just a free-will donation, so if you can find a place to sit, you can see the show.

REBECCA: There is such a magic in being able to share what is special about Shakespeare in the Park with anyone who wants to be there—and not just the people that can afford a ticket to a play, or not just people that are used to, or comfortable being in a theater. It is unique because Shakespeare in Delaware Park is for everyone, and you feel that. Being a kid that grew up on Shakespeare in the Park, there is not a summer of my entire life—not just my childhood, my entire life—that I haven’t spent either as an audience member or on stage at Shakespeare in the Park, and that has such a huge impact on who I am as a person.

[VO]: During the school year, Rebecca works as a drama therapist with high school students in New York City.

REBECCA: One of my favorite things now when I go back is seeing kids on the Hill and seeing some that are glued to it, like I was as a little kid, but also some that put their attention on it and then go run around on the grass for a while on the side. And the fact that both of those things are totally okay and both are welcome—to give the gift to a small kid of their first experience with Shakespeare being one that is accommodating of their needs, and open and welcoming and fun and live, it’s just so cool! And my favorite moments when I’m in a show are when a little kid comes up to me and wants to ask questions or wants to take a picture, or just wants to connect and say that they like what they saw and they like being here.

[VO]: Let me speak as somebody who has taught Hamlet, for example, to 18 years’ worth of high school seniors: Shakespeare doesn’t always feel like a gift to young people.

[10:27]

STEVE: Many of us had to read Shakespeare in high school and, and truly there’s nothing worse. Maybe a root canal would be worse, but there’s not much worse than trying to read Shakespeare when you’re 16 years old.

[VO]: This is Steve Vaughan, who directed this year’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Steve has taught at Niagara University, the Eastman School of Music, and directed many high school shows. He’s now at SUNY Fredonia, and works as a fight choreographer and director in theaters throughout Western New York. His style is a little unorthodox …

STEVE: There’s only two reasons for going to high school that I can think of. One is theatre, the other is football. Everything else is optional. That may be somewhat opposed to your perspective, but for me and my friends and for what I enjoy now, those are the only two reasons that I would even go.

[VO]: But his passion is sincere.

STEVE: The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was direct plays—of that I am confident. You know, in all the bizarre things that I do in my life, that’s the thing that I could not live without.

[VO]: We are narrative creatures—suckers for stories—which is, I’ll bet, part of what that little girl is tracking, wide-eyed on her blanket. Steve sees the job of director as putting the story first. 

STEVE: One thing that I always work very hard for is to make sure that when people come to the Hill, they’re not going to be put off, or be afraid of, or get a bad taste in their mouth, or feel lectured to by the material.

[VO]: Steve believes if we do our work as a play on stage, people will have a much more pleasurable time watching than, say, reading it on their own. 

STEVE: It’s very difficult to wade through the imagery, the—I call it the linguistic gymnastics of Shakespeare and his ilk. It gets to be pretty tedious very quickly, but! someone who cares about the audience’s experience can take those words and bring them to life in a way that is totally understandable and totally accessible. And my job—at least the way I approach the work—is to guarantee that the audience has a good time and walks away with something to think about in their life as well as watching these old characters. One of the most fascinating things for me as a student of dramatic literature is to come to grips with the concept that we have not changed at all—a tiny fraction of a millimeter—as human beings since the Greeks began writing plays down. You study the Greek plays and you’ll see the same people that we are today: the same characters, the same character defects, the same spiritual joy, the grandiosity, the immortal side of all of us, the divinity in all of us. You will see those heroes, you will see those  villains from literature from 5,000 years ago. We say, “Oh well, we are so evolved. We have iPhones! We can take video on my telephone. We’re so much smarter!” We are nothing. We are nothing! We are exactly the same as man and woman 5,000 years ago. The plays are the same. The conflicts are the same. The joys, the sorrows, the fears—they are the same. It’s very important for me to make sure that when an audience member leaves Shakespeare Hill, they’re able to relate to that; they’re able to understand that “Wow! All those big fancy words, he’s just talking about: This guy hates that guy. That’s all we're talking about.” And so I work very hard to try to distill the language. I love the language. The language is beautiful and it is truly, truly inspired writing. But the story has to come first. And if the story is compelling, then the language takes on the beauty that I can understand, that I can accept. When we’re working in rehearsal, I will often stop and ask the actors, “Now so what are you saying? What is it that you’re trying to say? You’ve got this long string of adjectives and adverbs, but what does that mean? What is it you’re trying to say?” And I’ll make them tell me simply in, you know, two words, what are they trying to do, and then go back and insert that—intention is the acting word— “What is your intention?” Insert that intention to drive this string of poetry. The poetry comes from an intensified way of performing, an intensified way of feeling and loving life, so if a normal person would go, “Oh, that’s great,” a Shakespearian actor would have to go, “Forsooth! Magnanimous! Extraordinary!”

PETER: It’s the difference between “She’s hot!” and “O, but she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

STEVE: Precisely. Very well said, thank you. Much better Shakespeare than mine, so thank you.

PETER: Well, I’ve got a podcast.

STEVE: It’s true. You would never get the kind of talking that we see on the Shakespeare stage, and in fact, in most theater. It is a heightened reality. It is bigger than life.

[VO]: Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost sets up a kind of contest between country life, represented by the servants, and life at court as lived by the Spanish playboys and ladies visiting from France. Steve himself came up a little bit country.    

STEVE: Where I grew up, we had a school farm. We milked cows and took care of the pigs and the chickens and horses. And so that, that I enjoyed. We got to drive tractors and fix tractors—that I enjoyed very much. But theatre and football, that was it; the rest was optional.

PETER: Where was that, growing up?

STEVE: This is Harford County, Maryland, right on the Mason-Dixon line, north of Baltimore.

PETER: Gotcha.

STEVE: And you know, the nearest neighbor was half a mile away. It just so happened where I grew up milking cows, there were a string of three- and four-boy families all within a two-mile radius. And so we had our own private army of boys who were all the same age, who used to hang out together and do the shows and play the sports and raise holy hell and terror in the neighborhood. We were monstrous juvenile delinquents, but country juvenile delinquents. It’s different than city juvenile delinquents. I’m doing West Side Story now, so I think of the city juvenile delinquents and the things that they would do compared to the things that we would do. Very different, very different growing up.

PETER: It’s true that cow tipping is not actually a thing, right?

STEVE: You can, but it’s really not anywhere near as fun as other activities, like driving pickup trucks through people’s lawns and shooting mailboxes with shotguns and—

PETER: Who needs baseball bats?

STEVE: No, we had shotguns and dynamite. We had dynamite—

PETER: [overlapping] Uh-huh. So I just want to get to the bottom of this. This is not going to be the—dynamite for the mailbox?

STEVE: Well, you use small pieces of dynamite.

PETER: Like your M-80?

STEVE: An M-80 or black powder. My father was a muzzle loader, so we always had black powder around the house, and we would steal small amounts of black powder until we had enough to make a nice bomb and blow things up—

PETER: —like a mailbox—

STEVE: —or Coke machines that robbed us … A lot of these things I’m not proud of, but at the time they were a teenage expressions of angst and anxiety.

PETER: Do you feel that this agrarian basis, your rural background—do you think it predisposed you to favor some of the country characters [in Love’s Labour’s Lost] as opposed to the royals? You did describe Jaquenetta, our milkmaid, as the only person [in the play] who actually does work.

STEVE: That’s correct. I think that Shakespeare was predisposed to the rural, to a pastoral lifestyle. If you study As You Like It, or even A Midsummer Night’s Dream, many times you’ll see that Shakespeare is decrying the terrible behaviors at court, the arrogance and the sophisticates at court, and the bumpkins come out on top in terms of their cleverness, their ability to cope, their serenity with life. I think the Shakespeare was totally drawn that way. And I suppose, now that I think about it—thank you for the question—I think I do the same; I think I’m drawn that way as well. I love the city. I love urban life for the sake of the arts , where I can hear a symphony or I can go to the library, an art museum, or see theatre. I just got back from New York City, where I spent four days there doing urban delights. But the first thing I did when I got back is went out into the woods and cut firewood, because I can’t—I could never live either place solely. I have to have trees and woods around me. I have to have solitude, and I also have to have the art of all humans, not just my own art. My own art is not sufficient to live a fulfilled life.

PETER: This actually could be a very nice segue because here with Shakespeare in the Park, you have a cultural offering that to a lot of people feels very highbrow—just the idea of a Shakespeare play, right?

STEVE: True.

PETER: But then you offer it in this most democratic of settings,  and it’s not just this beautiful outdoor setting, which is, you know, stunning. Getting to work in a theater when you watch the sun set on Hoyt Lake. And—

STEVE: And the geese!

PETER: Yes, the geese! I mean, you know that part is beautiful, but also it’s this very democratic experience where people can just come and show up. People who may not have any idea that a play is taking place, just they’re going for a walk or kind of exploring, and then they see this crowd, or they hear something and they come over, and they can just sit down and be part of it. There’s no waiting in line, there’s no ticket to get. If you can find a spot on the Hill, you can be there, which is one of the things that for me is most exciting about it, and I appreciate it in a different way as a performer this year.

STEVE: It is extraordinary. It is the only Shakespeare festival that I know of that doesn’t have a fence around it. All the other festivals throughout the country that I’m aware of, the audience’s experience is tightly controlled. You come in, you get into a line, you wait behind a gate. When they open the gate, you can come in and then they control the seating. It’s free still and they pass the hat, but there’s no spontaneous chaos like we have, when you know, when crazy people or people under the influence come staggering down the Hill—

PETER: Most of whom are not the actors—

STEVE: Most of whom are not the actors—

PETER: —in that show.

STEVE: Most of whom are not the actors in that show. That’s true. We’ve had streakers. Dogs escape, babies cry. We’ve had dogs get up on stage before. I remember once we had half of an audience that was full of Pokémon treasure hunters. I don’t know whether you know—

PETER: You mean like Pokémon Go?

STEVE: I don’t really understand it, but it’s some kind of treasure hunt where you look at your phone and the phone tells you where Pokémon are—whatever that means. And then you follow the treasure map around the city, and these, all these people were staring at their phone and wandering around in the park and all of a sudden, they looked up and were like, “Oh, there’s a play!” And they all sat down and started watching the play. Our theater is a hill in the park, wide open. And you know, whatever happens is what’s going to happen, so if you’re an actor in the show, you get used to dealing with the spontaneity of a live audience that is uncontrollable, which we make no attempt to control.

[VO]: Let’s meet some more of the actors who thrived in front of the park’s lively audience.

[24:59]

DAVID WYSOCKI: This is David Wysocki. I’m an actor playing the role of Lord Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost. I was performing in a space for an audience that was on a wider, massive scale. And when you’re performing outdoors, it’s just incredible. The audience—you’ll always see the audience, from the late afternoon until the dark of night. It was intimidating because they were present there, but also exciting because you get to continuously get their involvement and their interaction, and their reaction is just thrilling.

MELISSA LEVENTHAL: My name is Melissa Leventhal. I played Jaquenetta in Love’s Labour’s Lost, otherwise known as the country wench.

[VO]: You heard Steve and me reference the milkmaid Jaquenetta during our conversation. To prepare for a role that’s part love triangle/part clown, Melissa drew inspiration from everything from commedia dell’arte to Stephen Sondheim musicals. Commedia dell’arte was a fad in Italian theatre 300 to 400 years ago, but its stock characters—its go-to characters, its straight-from-Central-Casting characters—still feel lively. For further examples, consult your sitcom of choice. 

MELISSA: I took a look at some stock commedia dell’arte characters, in particular the Colombina character. She is the harlequin’s mistress, so she’s one of the servants and one of the clown characters in commedia. And I took what I had learned from Niagara University when I had to take the physical theatre classes, and we studied commedia and how to portray stock characters like that to focus on how to portray Jaquenetta. Petra from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music: she has a song called “The Miller’s Son,” and to me that kind of embodied the essence of Jaquenetta’s character, which was to enjoy all of the men that she was able to, because life is too short and too sweet to waste it. Life’s meant to be enjoyed.

[VO]: Melissa knows what she’s doing on a big stage.

MELISSA: So historically I was originally trained for large theatre, and the use of facial expressions, and especially makeup, is a little bit different. When you’re working with a large stage, you have to be a little more pronounced. And I just really enjoyed the entire experience. Jaquenetta was just fun and flirty, and the way that she was portrayed as someone that enjoyed life in all of its shapes and forms is something pretty remarkable. To be a plus-size actress in particular, showing the body positivity, which I think is very important in today’s society, and was also very important to me, too. To be able to portray someone that’s not, you know, a stereotypical “beauty,” if you will, or size—to be shown as something worth desiring. It’s very important to me, and a privilege and an honor to be able to portray that as well. [Charles Wahl, singing as Moth: By this you shall not know/ For still her cheeks possess the same/ Which native she doth owe.] It was an absolute joy to work with everyone on this show. The level of professionalism, and the level of fun that we had as a cast was pretty unique. And we never let anything get really stale. We tried not to. It’s very important, I think, as an actor to continue to work and develop your character even on your 22nd show as much as you are on opening night, and trying to find different things that you can play with, and feeling the audience and being engaged with them and with your fellow actors on stage and what they’re doing. It’s a treat. It’s a treat to work with people that don’t let the work get stale, because it shouldn’t. One of the joys about theater is that it’s live, and it shouldn’t be the same show from night to night. We had people that came to see the show five or six times, and I think every show that they saw was just a little bit different. And that’s because we always worked on these characters. We never left the feeling of it stop.

[VO]: In a minute we’ll hear from the founder of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, but before that, one last actor, who played Don Armado, another Shakespeare creation based on the commedia character Capitano, a guy who talks tough but doesn’t really like to fight. Involved in the love triangle with my character, the wry jester called Costard, Don Armado won the affection of Jaquenetta every night for the three and a half weeks we performed, but I bear him no ill will. In fact, I’m grateful he takes up the question actors may get asked most often: “How do you learn all those lines?” 

[30:36]

TOM LOUGHLIN: Hi, my name is Tom Loughlin, and I played a Don Adriano de Armado. I think what I had to learn in order to do Love’s Labour’s Lost was not so much learn something new but relearn something I thought I already knew how to do. I’m the oldest cast member and I’ve noticed that as my career has progressed through the years, one of the things I have trouble with now is learning lines. When I was a younger actor, I used to be able to go to rehearsals and go to blocking rehearsals and rehearse the dialogue with my fellow actors. And then when the time came to drop the scripts, the lines would just be there, without any further effort on my part. But I have noticed that as I’ve gotten older, the brain doesn’t fire the same way. The brain cells don’t have as quick a little mechanism in their synapses, so I’ve had to make an effort to relearn how to learn lines. The trick that I picked up perhaps one or two shows ago is recording my lines along with somebody else so that I would record an entire scene. Someone else would read all the lines of the other characters in the scene and I would read my own lines, and I would record that scene and then play it over, listen to it, and I was able to do other things. I was never very good at cold memorization, which is just looking at the script, reading the lines, trying to memorize them, putting the script down, trying to say them out loud, reading the script, and so on. That always frustrated me. But this way I can take them, listen to them, I can hear the scene, I can hear the other parts being read to me and I can say my own minds over the recording that I have checked for any errors and continue on. And this helped me a lot in Love’s Labour’s Lost, because I actually came into rehearsals a week late, so I had to come in with my lines pretty much already memorized to keep with my fellow actors. In terms of the rehearsal process, it’s a part of aging. Your brain doesn’t fire very well. You forget where you put your keys on and so forth. And in my case, it’s a matter of where I put that line. But this process has been a real big help to me in relearning how to learn lines.

[33:00]

[VO]: Let me take a quick intermission to say that if you’re just joining us, it’s probably because the driver couldn’t stop listening to Point of Learning just because they picked you up. I don’t blame them, frankly. These are important ideas, carefully curated. If you like what you hear, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, or share this podcast with somebody you know curious about what and how and why we learn. You’ll be able to fit it in because I can only produce a show every 6 or 8 weeks. They take a while to make because my goal is that whenever you listen to it, it’s the best thing you heard that day. That’s the goal, anyway! Highlights from my interview with founder Saul Elkin are coming right up, but let me suggest that if you like this peek behind the theatre curtain, you might also like episode 019 about Epic Theatre Ensemble and episode 011 from the Public Theater in New York City. So how did the magic begin? Meet Saul Elkin.

[34:10]

SAUL: Whatever it might be when it begins, by the time the sun begins to go down and the city noises begin to abate, it becomes a theatre. And if you’ve had the experience as an audience of seeing Shakespeare or if not, suddenly you are invested in ways you weren’t—maybe you were worrying about picnic that you brought. Maybe you were worrying about getting the bottle of wine you brought open, but by the time we get to a certain point in the play, we’re all in a theater together, and the quality of attention to these plays has been extraordinary, I think. You would think in the park, in the open air, with a diverse audience, that it would be difficult—but it’s not. Things get quiet and things get very focused as well.

[VO]: Last month I got to sit down with Saul Elkin, actor, director, and giant of the theater scene in Buffalo. In 1976, when he founded Shakespeare in Delaware Park, he was a professor and chair of the theatre program at the University at Buffalo. Forty-four seasons later, he’s still the artistic director of the festival; he directed The Tempest earlier this summer, for example.  When I asked him to share some background about the origins of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, I assumed that it had been inspired in part by Joe Papp, the visionary founder of not only the Public Theater in NYC but also the New York Shakespeare Festival, now most often called Shakespeare in the Park. Joe Papp’s festival began in 1954, some two decades before Shakespeare in Delaware Park, so I assumed there was some kind of Papp connection—but I had no idea that Saul had once auditioned for Papp.

SAUL: For a production of Richard III. I had no idea that George Scott had been precast and I thought certainly it’s—

PETER: George C. Scott? That George Scott?

SAUL: Yes, that one, that George Scott. And I thought for sure that the part was open and I could do it. I had called for an appointment for an audition, and I was told to come to that little outdoor theater at the foot of Grand Street in Manhattan.

[VO]: This was before the New York festival moved to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which opened in 1962.

SAUL: I was told to memorize a two-minute speech, which I did. So I took something from  Richard III, needless to say. There were about 20 people then my name was called. [Joe] Papp was sitting there, and a couple of other people. I did the speech, I started to go, and he said, “Wait a minute.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s a good sign.” He said, “Sit down.” So I did. “Tell me something about yourself,” he said. So we began to chat and it turned out that we were both Jewish, we were both the children of immigrant parents. It got very warm, and the more we talked, the more I thought, “This is going somewhere really terrific!” And finally at the end of which he said, “You know, I think I can offer you a non-speaking role.” And  my heart sank, and I said, “Can I get back to you?” I don’t know if anybody in the history of Joe Papp’s existence as a producer ever said to him, “Can I get back to you?”

[VO]: He never did get back to Joe. Saul already had an acting gig lined up in Vermont for the summer, so he took that, and avoided making the call to tell Joe he wasn’t interested in the non-speaking part. 

SAUL: Flash forward about 12 years. I’m now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and I’m told that we’re going to have guest lecturers for this one course I’m taking, a course called Problems in Theatre Production. And there are about a dozen of us sitting around a table and in walks the chair of the department with Joe Papp, who was the first lecturer. And I thought, “He can't possibly remember me. There’s no way he can remember me.” So he invites us all around the table to introduce ourselves. And I do, very quickly. And he says, “Wait a minute. I know you, don’t I?” And I said, “No, I don’t think so.” “You were going to get back to me,” he said. Now this is 10 years later.

PETER: Wow.

SAUL: And I said, “I’m sorry, Joe. Something came up.” And we got very friendly. And eventually, when I decided to do a PhD dissertation on Shakespeare, there was no one in the department who felt ready to do that, to take that on with me. And the chair suggested Joe Papp. So he was back in New York, but at this point I talked to him on the phone and he said, “Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll do it, but I won't come to Pittsburgh. You’ll have to come to New York.” And I said, “That’s cool.”

[VO]: Joe Papp advised Saul on his dissertation, and as if the two directors were starring in some Shakespearean buddy flick, years after the awkward start at the audition, they become friends. Saul earns his PhD from Carnegie Mellon and starts at UB in 1969. A few years later, Joe calls to ask whether Saul might be interested in taking a crack at a new play by Myrna Lamb called Apple Pie, loosely based on the life of Bess Myerson, the first and—as of this taping—only Jewish Miss America (I know!). Myerson later served in NYC government and on several presidential commissions.

SAUL: Anyway, he sent me the play. I liked it. I produced it here in Buffalo with local actors. He came to see it. He loved it;  he eventually produced it in New York, not with me directing it, but somebody else. But I knew that would happen. While he was here for the final rehearsals, we went out to have a drink together. And he said, very casually, because he had helped me do this Shakespeare dissertation, “Who’s doing Shakespeare in Buffalo?” And I said, “Nobody really. The colleges do it, but nobody’s doing it professionally. He said, “Start something!” I said, “How do I start something?” He said, “Well, call the mayor.” And I thought, “That’s sort of interesting.” I mean, I grew up in New York City. Calling the mayor meant calling Mayor LaGuardia! The very idea of calling the mayor was beyond me. I said, “Well, what do I say?” He said, “Tell him you want to start a Shakespeare festival!”

[VO]: It seems that Joe Papp’s take on Better Call Saul was Saul Better Call. A week later, Saul calls the Hon. Stanley Makowski, who served as Mayor of Buffalo from 1974 to 1977. 

SAUL: And here’s the interesting thing about Buffalo. I called and got his secretary to ask for an appointment. She put me right through to him, which is rare. I mean, this will happen in no other city, and I was unprepared. “How can I help you, professor?” he said. And I said, “Well, I’m interested in starting a Shakespeare festival and uh, I’d like to come in and talk about it.” He said, “How about next week?” And I had really thought very little about it, but I said, “Yes, of course!” We made a date. At that point I took a walk in Delaware Park and I found that hill, and I thought, “This is the spot!”

PETER: Wow.

[VO]: Buffalo audiences for this episode know full well what a gorgeous setting this is, the spot Saul imagined that day as what might become Shakespeare Hill, but if you haven’t visited yet, the park was designed just after the Civil War by the same dream team of landscape artists, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had designed Central Park in New York City just before the Civil War. Aight, back to Professor Elkin and Mayor Makowski. 

SAUL: So I went in, I marched into the mayor’s office with semi-plan, and he liked it. And he was very clear to say, “We can’t give you any money, but we’ll give you all the help we can.” And you know, for 44 years, the city has been very, very helpful. They store our stage, they truck it to the park for us, they pay the electric bill. … But immediately we got audiences. I mean the very notion of doing Shakespeare in a beautiful park … and that location attracted people. And so my plan was to do one year. I was teaching acting at UB and I thought, “This is a way to teach classical acting without offering the course in the academic year.” Which is exactly what happened. Most of the actors were stude nts. I used the money that I would normally have used to hire a summer faculty to hire actors. I had auditions both here and in New York, and I hired a core of professional actors. I started with The Winter’s Tale. I was afraid to do one of the more popular plays. I was afraid to do Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet because everybody would know it. So the plan was to choose to play that nobody knew, and that turned out very well. And we did a very interesting production of The Winter’s Tale. Lots of people came, and we went on to a second year, and then a third. And here we are, forty-four years later.

[VO]: In the early days, the festival had a reputation for edgy productions. For example, here’s Saul on Hamlet [1977, Season II] influenced by a production that Joe Papp had directed in New York City.

SAUL: That Hamlet was my first shot at really taking the play in a direction one would not expect with Shakespeare. When Hamlet first appeared, a coffin was wheeled on stage, and the lid flipped open, and Hamlet sat up wearing earphones, with pictures of the Beatles inside the coffin. The coffin was wheeled to the foot of a bed in which Claudius and Gertrude were sleeping. I directed it and also played the Ghost [of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet] in Hamlet. I did a couple of things where Hamlet sat in my lap and I was a ventriloquist: I did the speech, and Hamlet would move his mouth. We had a rock band. We got to the end of the play in rehearsal and I realized that we couldn’t end with swords because we were very modern; that somehow that final scene in Hamlet—where Hamlet duels Laertes and they both die—had to be done another way.  So I invented a duel with pistols, a duel that was sort of like Russian roulette. And then it boiled down to one pistol that Hamlet had, and he would hand it to people. There was one bullet in the revolver, and he would turn it so that people would point at people and it would either shoot or not shoot. And it boiled down to the stage was littered with bodies except Hamlet. And he needed somebody to play Russian roulette with him. So I had him go out into the audience every night and he found somebody who was willing to come up onto the stage and shoot him. And as he brought the person onto the stage, he explained what that person had to do. He gave the person the pistol, stood him over on stage left. He went over to stage right. He said, “Okay, point.” He had turned the revolver so that the gun wouldn’t go off. The guy pointed the pistol at Hamlet—click, click, click—it didn’t go off. Hamlet thanked them very much, took the pistol from him, walked him back to his seat, ran back onto the stage, tripped,  and the gun went off! Confetti, and the orchestra played. And Hamlet said, “the rest is silence,” and the play ended that way. So it was very popular with young people. There were young people who came again and again to see this version of it. And it sort of led me into doing a variety of things with the plays that I’m not sure I would do anymore. You know, in a way, I went through a period where every crazy idea, we did. If there was an actor in the [company] who said, “Why don’t we try this?” I would say, “Let’s try it!” And then somewhere along the line, I began to think maybe I should trust the plays a little bit more. Maybe I don’t need to fiddle with them the way I have been. And I remember my wife saying, “Why don’t you do the plays that were written, so they get off your back?” There were letters to the editor about why I was fooling with Shakespeare. So in recent years, the plays I’ve directed, the other plays that we’ve done have tended to stay closer to the script, to the plays that Shakespeare wrote.

[VO]: One of the features of the festival that Saul instituted at the start was the internship, a kind of apprentice role for student actors. It’s changed over the years, but internship is still very much a feature of Shakespeare in Delaware Park. This year nine extraordinary young people helped to make the shows happen, on and offstage. Most were in high school; Vince had just finished 8th grade.  

[47:20]

VINCENT CONNOR MURPHY ROBISON: Hello, my name is Vincent Connor Murphy Robison, but you can call me Vince, Vinny … I’ve been working at Shakespeare in Delaware Park as an intern for two years. And what an intern does is more or less, you know, take care of the stage. We prep the stage, we take stuff on and off, and occasionally we’ll have small parts [in the show]. And I’ve been working as an actor, so to say, since I was in fifth grade, and I’m 14. I was inspired to really start acting by Shakespeare in Delaware Park. When I saw them in it, I was like, “Why can’t I do that?” And I decide to start, you know, doing small parts in the fifth grade when I first had the chance, but now I’m working with Shakespeare in Delaware Park, and it’s good because, you know, they’re giving me a chance to really work with professionals. And that being on my resume can help me with getting other professional work. But really what the interns do other than prepping the stage, taking stuff on and off and having small parts is that about two o’clock at [SUNY Buffalo State College] Tuesday through Friday, we take classes on acting about like improv, punctuation, and other great stuff. And traditionally on the last Friday of each show, we put on a show of our own at about six o’clock but however, this year we have to do it on Saturday the 17th.

[VO]: The interns’ show last month was particularly fine—they did a one-hour version of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and all of us in the audience nearly lost our damn minds they were so good. All the live music—or more precisely, music recorded live—from LLL was taped for this podcast (with permission from the composers—full credits at the end) by the man who did all the live sound from the show, Tyler Furniss. It’s part of the curse of audio engineers that most people only notice their work when something doesn’t work, like a crackly mic, or sound that suddenly drops out. But their expertise and dedication are essential if anybody’s going to hear any actor in a park that is pretending to be a theater! 

[49:47]

Hi, my name is Tyler Furniss, and I am the soundboard operator for this season of Shakespeare in Delaware park. What that means is I control all the microphones and the sound effects for the actors and the musicians. Anything that goes through the speakers is in my hands. The main thing I’ve had to adapt to is just the fact that it’s outdoors. This is the first outdoor theater I’ve worked in, and it poses a lot of new challenges. If you know a thing or three about electronics and microphones, you’ll know they don’t like being wet, they don’t like humidity, they don’t like static electricity, and all these things really fight against you when you’re working outdoors. So in this theater more than any other that I’ve worked in, it’s very important to have a backstage crew that’s gonna work with you and communicate with you when things go wrong.

[VO]: I’m so glad as well to have a representative from our amazing stage management team, because too many theatergoers (and more than a few actors) don’t really understand how critical the stage management, or SM, role is. 

NATALIE MORROW: Hello, my name is Natalie Morrow. I’m the stage manager for Love’s Labour’s Lost in Shakespeare in Delaware Park. This means during rehearsal, I do a lot of communicating, recording, and organizing. During the show, I’m in charge of everything onstage and backstage, and one of my main jobs during performance is to maintain the show and keep morale up after the director leaves.

[VO]: Natalie is studying Stage Management at SUNY Purchase.

NATALIE: The park runs very differently than the commercial theater model I’m taught at school.

[VO]: Natalie learned the importance of proofreading emails. Raise your hand if you’ve been there! Every night after rehearsal the SM writes a rehearsal report that goes to the directors and sometimes the designers. So this one time she sends out a rehearsal report before reading it carefully. 

NATALIE: I wrote, “We’re getting rid of the entire set.” Period. And I just sent it out, just like that.

[VO]: By her own account, this was close to accurate.

NATALIE: We did get rid of all of our set furniture, except for a few chairs and a table, but set furniture is not the same thing as the entire set.

[VO]: Realizing what she had done the next morning, she immediately emailed the set designer and the technical director, writing something like—

NATALIE: “Please, please, please tell me you have not demolished the set yet. We will be keeping the set. Here’s what's going on …”

[VO]: I was delighted that Natalie chose this rare misstep to share, because it really does stand as an outlier against the extraordinarily high-caliber work she and the rest of the SM team did before, during, and after the run of the show. To return one last time to our 7-year-old on the blanket riveted to the show, I’ve suggested that she connects with the free-wheeling spectacle, with the efforts to make our story understandable and to sell this old language as fresh. After all she’s 7, so she’s at a great age to encounter Shakespeare. She’s used to hearing grownups say things she doesn’t understand completely. She can roll with it in ways that older people who are a little more anxious tend to find difficult. But she also likes to laugh. Everybody needs to. Send in the clowns!   

NICK LAMA: I think we had the best job this summer.

[VO]: That was Nick Lama, who played a Keystone Cops-style constable named Dull. Here’s Charlie Wahl, who played Don Armado’s servant, called Moth.  

[53:30]

CHARLIE WAHL: You gotta laugh, especially in today’s age. You need a distraction. You know, hopefully people are aware of their surroundings and what’s going on and what’ s going on in the world, especially now. It’s not good right now. Hopefully it gets better, that’s for sure. But you know, especially with our phones, we’re just all looking at our phones constantly and just on social media. And I don’t think that we’re equipped to—I don’t think we as humans are equipped to know all the bad stuff that we know on a daily basis that comes up on social media. Because we didn’t have that access before and now, just so many bad things pop up all the time. That probably happened before, but you didn’t know about it. Not to mention the state of the world right now, which is also just awful and you need a distraction from it. So yeah, you gotta find the things that make you laugh. You gotta find—Drama is great for entertainment also because it makes you feel, but comedy, you need it. Whether it’s a comedy podcast or a comedy TV show or a night at the theater, which I hope we provided people some laughs. I think that’s just so important in 2019.

[VO]: Shakespeare’s comic characters, some of whom are full-on clowns, play an important role. Here’s Nick again.

NICK: They were the characters that oftentimes playgoers most related to. They were the ones who translated what was happening to the audience, which is why the clowns were the ones who talked to you, who came out to you eye to eye, who came out onto the Hill. They made sure that everybody was on the same page.

[VO]: Back to Charlie for the last word.

CHARLIE: You know, I think our role as clowns to make the people laugh—to make the people onstage and offstage laugh—to do that, to achieve that well, you have to have a very tightknit cast; you have to have a cast that has chemistry. I think that we really did have chemistry for this show. It was a joy to do the show because of the cast, because of the people that were involved, and we became close just by, you know, yourself [Peter], me, Nick, Tom Laughlin, who plays Don Armado. We just fooled around a lot backstage and we really became close by joking around and having fun and just improv-ing off of each other all the time.

[VO]: Our show closed each night with this ballad of Spring and Winter, so here’s a taste of that. You’ve heard Nick talk, but have you heard him sing?  

[Nick singing as Constable Dull: When daisies pied and violets blue,/ And lady-smocks all silver-white,/ And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue/ Do paint the meadows with delight,/ The cuckoo then on every tree/ Mocks married men; for thus sings he:/ “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” O word of fear,/ Unpleasing to a married ear.]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show. My great thanks to Steve and Saul, and all those who shared some of their experience working on this play. A full list of cast and crew is posted on the show page for this episode. Special thanks to the musicians, including Randy Andropolis and Jay Wollin who wrote the music for Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Jay Wollin, Keith Galantowicz, and John Landis who performed it, with singing by Charlie Wahl, Tom Loughlin, and Nick Lama, supplementary guitar by Tom Loughlin, and extra fiddle from Charlie and me. Above and beyond went Tom Makar, who let me use music he composed and recorded for previous Shakespeare in Delaware Park productions of Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Richard III, Henry the IV, Pt. 1, and Comedy of Errors, not to mention his original remix of “Weight of the World” by Shayfer James to start us off. If you’re in Buffalo, you can hear Tom Makar playing original songs and inspired covers the first Wednesday of every month at Mister Goodbar. Thanks finally to you for listening and spreading the word about Point of Learning, written, recorded, mixed, and edited by me, Peter Horn, right here in God’s Country, Buffalo, New York. Back at you just as soon as I can with more ideas about what and why and how we learn.  

Windows and Mirrors Transcript (022)

Checking Windows and Mirrors with Emily Style (7/5/19)

KINZY BROWN: Hello everybody. I am Kinzy Brown, actor, master thespian, educator, and sometimes Peter Horn’s scene partner! You just found yourself at the Point of Learning. Buckle up, because today’s guest, Emily Style, has something for everybody!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Emily Style, a visionary educator who 31 years ago laid out a simple but transformative framework for reconsidering curriculum.

EMILY STYLE: That’s the purpose of the classroom. You’re to be seen, to see others, to be in relation, to understand yourself as a person who belongs.

[VO]: She understands the deep dynamics of groups that don’t always register on teachers’ radar.

STYLE: … those kinds of moments that I believe are so deeply shaping for students in school but often are not acknowledged as occurring. That is part of the sacredness of classroom work.

[VO]: We’re going to explore three of the most useful ideas I learned from Emily for classroom work … or any time I work with teams or other groups.

STYLE: That quality of relationship-building and -unbuilding I believe occurs in classrooms every day, and I wanted as a teacher to operate with that awareness, so that we would be building each other up.

[02:15]

[VO]: Emily Jane Style is a “relational scholar.” She appreciates the intellectual dimension of ideas, but also knows that ideas matter relationally, because there are real flesh-and-blood people in any given room, people with real and complex life stories involved in any given discourse. Emily values acknowledging what she calls the “heart-to-heart dimension” of how we talk about ideas face to face, or on the page, or across the ages. My favorite tribute to Emily’s work comes from Christina Patterson Brown, an educator and activist who studied with her in 1991, and recently thanked Emily for modeling “what woke and intersectional work looked like before there was an internet.” Style began her teaching career at Eastern Christian, a high school in NJ not too different from the Dutch Calvinist schools she attended when she was growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I met Emily when she joined the faculty of Westfield [NJ] High School in 2003, but that was after she’d taught at the Evening High School and a specialized school for young pregnant women, both in Passaic, NJ, and at Madison High School in Madison, NJ. At the university level, Emily has served as a Teacher Corps Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and taught courses at NYU and Cornell. She served on the Teacher Advisory Board for the first Dodge Poetry Festival in 1986, a kind of biennial, multi-cultural Woodstock of the poetry world that continues to this day. Together with Peggy McIntosh, she co-directed the National SEED Project for 25 years. SEED, which stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, got an overview in my recent episode “Unpacking White Privilege with Peggy McIntosh,” so be sure to check that out—and SEED will get its own show in the coming months. Simply put, SEED is the best teacher-led professional development program I know about.

Though Emily is not a preacher’s kid, she spent at least as much time in church growing up as I did, hearing sermons twice a Sunday, where it was explicit that you studied a text to unpack it, but the sermon wasn’t complete unless you applied it to the Here and Now. To this day that’s how she understands text and unpacking text: how does it relate to the people, the “life-texts” in the room? In today’s conversation with Emily we’re focusing on three key concepts that she provided me language for. As I said, Emily and I met as colleagues in a high school English department, so we’re going to use mostly classroom examples, but I lean on these concepts when I work with any kind of organization or team, because these ideas matter to the sociology of group work. Regardless of the work you do, I think you’ll find them valuable.

[05:14]

The first concept is DKDK, shorthand Emily uses to refer to what we don’t know we don’t know. Emily credits her longtime colleague Dr. Linda Powell and their work together in the school district of Philadelphia and the NJ SEED branch with exposing her to the value of teachers, facilitators, and other leaders coming to terms with what we don’t know we don’t know. So, imagine a pie chart.

STYLE: And there would be the slice of KNOWN and then there would be the slice of YOU KNOW THAT YOU DON'T KNOW. And then there would be this huge slice of YOU DON'T KNOW, AND YOU DON'T KNOW THAT YOU DON'T KNOW.

PETER: What would be an example of something in my DKDK? Like, I didn’t know I didn’t know this?

STYLE: A classroom example would be when, let’s say a White student makes a remark out of his or her Whiteness that they don’t know that that’s where it’s coming from. So they make a shallow kind of statement. There may be a couple of other White students in the room that recognize that there’s an ignorance that’s just been expressed. But the student who has said this, such as, “Well, they all look alike”— that kind of obtuse generalization, but the student is being fluent and kind of speaking from the heart, so to speak. That’s where their consciousness is. But then there’s a quality of electricity in the room because some other students and myself as a teacher have registered on the level of ignorance that has just been expressed. So then how to deal with that?

PETER: It’s important to say that the kid’s not saying it to be disparaging.

STYLE: That’s right.

PETER: The kid is just kind of offering as an observation, “Isn't it true that all people of this other race look the same? Isn’t that just the way it is?”

STYLE: And so then you’ve got a teachable moment, but only if there’s a way to address the ignorance that’s been expressed in a bridge-building fashion. At least, that's often my approach as a teacher. Okay, so this ignorance has voiced itself. How can this become a teachable moment? The narrative that I love to use and would always put in place within the first couple of days of any class I was teaching at Westfield High School or Madison High School, or when I was teaching at NYU or at Cornell, is the ancient Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant.

[VO]: I’m betting you’ve heard this ancient Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, so I won’t retell it here, but as a quick refresher, the six blind men, who have never before encountered an elephant, each perceive different parts of the whole. One blind man feels the trunk and decides the strange animal must be like a snake; another, touching the ear, believes this creature must be like a fan, and so on.

STYLE: And the reason I would use that narrative is to establish the qualities of intelligence that those six characters had.

PETER: All these blind men are touching different pieces of the elephant and describe it in different ways—

STYLE: That’s right, so they each have a piece of the data in hand, and they compare it to something else in their experience, which makes them very sure of what they’re saying. And they are accurate, but only in a partial way. And the fable itself does not include go-arounds or conversing back and forth, and so they’re stuck in DKDK. So by introducing that term and using that narrative—often in my classroom work, I could use DKDK, but sometimes I would say, “I believe we were at an ‘elephant moment.’”

PETER: An important aspect is to give it a name, you know, to give these things a name. It seems to me that part of what that does is to diffuse it a little bit, to say like, “This is a thing. This is something that happens”—

STYLE: It’s to normalize it—

PETER: as opposed to saying, “Look at you, horrible child! What have you just said that’s so offensive?” And there are a number of the different ways that people can react to that, but ultimately, we want to draw people in.

STYLE: Instead of calling people out, we want to call people in. So then proactively as a teacher to put that narrative in the foreground, to normalize DKDK, so that there are for any one of us, regardless of age or “politics of location” [a phrase for which Style credits Adrienne Rich], there are a multitude of things that are in our DKDK: we don’t know, and we don’t know that we don’t know. To have that as foundational understanding, I think, makes for a really healthy teaching and learning atmosphere. To have a shorthand term that takes it away from shame, blame, and guilt and makes it kind of an ordinary part of how we have to navigate in communicating and in understanding the world, it feels like a real gift.

[VO]: Emily first wrote about DKDK in 1995 in an article called “In Our Own Hands: Diversity Literacy” for Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. [Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 64-84] It’s a very accessible piece with some good exercises that I’ll make available from the show page for this episode.

[11:50]

[VO]: The second solid gold concept I gleaned from Emily Style is that 50% of the curriculum walks into the room with your students. If you’re not teaching school, think of it this way: regardless of what specific project your team or organization is trying to knock out of the park, the better you know your team members and their stories—and the better they know each other’s—the richer the result will be.

PETER: At one point when you and I were colleagues in the English Department of Westfield High School in New Jersey, you shared with me the version of your English I syllabus that you gave out to parents on Back to School Night. You wrote, “There’s a sense in which half of the curriculum in this class comes from the students, individually and collectively. From Day One, I talk about the textbooks of students’ lives and that I see them being just as important as any other texts with which I ask students to engage.” I want to add that I find this idea of 50% of the curriculum walking in the door with students so valuable that I share it with every group of educators I work with, and probably most groups of non-educators that I work with as well, because I don’t believe it’s possible to do meaningful work with people before you have a sense of who they are, where they’re coming from, and what they have to teach me as well as each other. How did you come to this essential equation?

STYLE: In the wrestling with how to understand my role as a classroom teacher in terms of being trained in coverage—

PETER: As in “covering the curriculum”?

STYLE: Yes, as in covering the curriculum. That was my job. I had a sense of responsibility and wished to behave with integrity with regard to my role. But that template of framing my job was inadequate. It gave me a big headache to try to figure out, given that framing, how to do my job.

PETER: But I just want to observe that this ubiquitous metaphor of covering. That's one of the things that happens so often when, of course, what we’d hope would happen is that we uncover! We’d hope that we reveal, but this language lends itself to just getting through this and then, you know, “I’m going to cover all this material.” It feels like, if we think about it, it’s the opposite of what we should be doing. I just wanted to flag that because it’s used so, so often. It’s so commonplace, but I think it’s really counter-productive.

STYLE: I really agree in that it’s sort of like paving over, right? You know, as in covering, and it also keeps the agency on the teacher.

PETER: That’s right. It’s what you do [as a teacher]. You cover it.

STYLE: Instead of understanding the relational interactive task of orchestrating with the half of the curriculum that’s come in the room. In fact, it’s an orchestration, a negotiation, a conversation that you’re in charge of as a teacher—not a plowing through some version of material that you’re supposed to cover. I agree that language does us a disservice there in that understanding of covering the curriculum. So that’s where the half the curriculum came from: that headache, that wrestling with “So what is my job?” And by then I’d been in the classroom a decade, so I could name for myself that half the curriculum walks in the room and that’s why students’ names were so important, why I spend the first couple of days learning their names. The first quiz is the name quiz. We have to know each other by name because that’s the nature of the work that we do. It is personal as well as political, as well as curricular.

PETER: Was the name quiz based on pictures, or how did you give it? You're asking everybody, “Can you name everybody in here?”

STYLE: Right. And it was for my benefit as well because I had 150 names to learn. And so we would do go-arounds. They knew about half of the students in the room [already]. But the nature of my Westfield High School classroom, for example, the freshmen, they were learning each other’s names as well. And so we would start and finish each of those first couple of days by volunteers going around and saying the first name. And then I would get a chance as well. And it wasn’t until everybody was ready that we would take the quiz because the goal is that everyone got an A. So the nature of that: making it a grade that counted—that our names mattered—emphasized that this is the starting point. Knowing each other by name. And I’m just as responsible for that as you are. In fact, I had the greatest responsibility because of the number of students that I had to learn their names so that we would be in that quality of relationship with each other in the classroom.

In wrestling with the paradigm with which I was educated about what my job was and how that was insufficient, that’s where the naming that half the curriculum walks in the classroom with the students came, and then I could develop a sense of coherence of what my task was. And it had to do with the interaction between that half of the curriculum, which I needed to become acquainted with, and the half that I was already semi-acquainted with because I was the grown-up in the room and I had an education. But I still had lots of choices to make in terms of what texts we were going to engage with besides the textbooks of our lives.

PETER: I just wanted to give a quick example for people who didn’t have access to your teaching in your classroom. You know what I loved, for example that you would, I think at the beginning of the year in conjunction—often, maybe not every year—but often in conjunction with [Hemingway’s] The Old Man and the Sea, you would ask students to have a conversation with an old man.

STYLE: Yes.

PETER: Somebody 65 years or older. And at the end of the year, you would have a conversation with an old woman in their life.

STYLE: Yes. Right.

PETER: So you’ve got something that’s cross-generational, which is wonderful, you know, to prompt that kind of conversation. But also it’s a great example of a paper that nobody else can write!

STYLE: Absolutely.

PETER: Only you can write about this person you’ve selected. I’m sure often it was a grandparent, but probably sometimes somebody else, but it’s that kid’s choice, and then what they learned from that, and then you’re asking them to write about that. It’s just very different from “Give me three characteristics of Brutus in Julius Caesar and that’s going to be our essay.”

STYLE: Absolutely, and also it calls forth the scholar that I believe exists in every student to exercise with authority your capacity to listen and document what’s occurred relationally in a conversation with someone you’re related to or someone that you select from your church or synagogue that falls in this age bracket, from whom you can learn.

[20:47]

[VO]: QUICK SIDEBAR: Images of Organization. It’s fun to talk metaphors with Emily, a fellow former English teacher who is especially good at them. But the way we talk and think about our work, the images we construct about our workplace—these really do affect how we approach our work, in small and large ways. If I believe my classroom or business is a jungle, this mindset predisposes me to different behaviors than if I consider it a garden, say, or a family or a jazz ensemble or a factory. The factory metaphor for schools is regrettably beloved of policy makers who see teachers as technicians that cover curriculum in order to attain prescribed rates of student success on standardized tests.

Emily’s favorite metaphor for curriculum is a house with windows and mirrors. In fact, her 1988 essay “Curriculum as Window and Mirror” has been so influential to so many people that dozens of teachers and other fans gathered at the Wellesley Centers for Women on October 4th, 2018 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its publication. The show page for this episode has a link to the essay, but in a nutshell, “windows” are texts that enable readers to peer out and see the realities of other people, and “mirrors” are stories that reflect one’s own reality. Style argues that balance is key: all students deserve a curriculum that pushes them to view the world outside their lived experience as well as one that validates their own experience in the public world of school. I asked her how she came up with these powerful metaphors. Was it a flash of inspiration in the middle of the night, or what?

STYLE: It has to do with being seen. It wasn’t a flash in the middle of the night. It was a kind of growing awareness of the classroom as a place of belonging, of being seen, of being known by name that mattered to me. That’s what classroom life was, was being seen. And so the leap to a visual metaphor occurred in relation to the being seen and belonging. My belief that that’s the purpose of the classroom: you’re to be seen, to see others, to be in relation, to understand yourself as a person who belongs. So mirroring and looking out the window, or into the window of someone else’s eyes and life experience. That lovely “My Great-Uncle’s Horse” poem that has mattered to me for years from Lew Gardner, a New Jersey poet, about that fourth grade where the great-uncle walks past. And the students in that fourth grade are doing math. And the young person who is related to this old codger, who loves him, can hardly contain his excitement in saying, “That’s my great-uncle!” But before he can identify that relationship, out the window of that classroom, other students see a stereotype—someone to laugh at—and that laughter shuts him down. And he does not identify that he’s related to this old man. And so in the narrative of that poem that I have loved for years comes the understanding of how the division during math class that occurred in that classroom where the young person who loved the old man out the window all of a sudden became aware how others saw that loved one in a disparaging way, and how that educated his heart and mind. So he said nothing. That quality of relationship-building and unbuilding I believe occurs in classrooms every day. And I wanted as a teacher to operate with that awareness, so that we would be building each other up in the face of our DKDKs, in the intimacy of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the way that high school life happens.

PETER: Would you be willing to read the poem?

[26:47]

STYLE: I would love to! This is New Jersey poet Lew Gardner’s “My Great-Uncle’s Horse”:  

My mother's uncle had a horse. 
The best time of a deadly relatives' Sunday 
was to walk with him to the stable 
and watch him feed the quiet animal, 
to give it sugar from my own hand 
and jump back away
from the big warm tongue,
to smell the hay and manure, to see 
the white horse in the next stall, 
with tail and mane like yellow silk.

If my mother and I ran into him 
as he and the horse were making their rounds, 
buying up the wonderful junk 
they heaped and hauled in the wagon, 
he'd lift me up to the seat 
and let me hold the reins and yell "Giddy-up!" 

In the spring of 4th grade, 
one afternoon of silent division 
we heard a clanking and looked outside. 

My great-uncle! I could tell them all 
how I had held those reins! 
But everyone laughed at the hunched old man, 
the obsolete wagon and horse, 
the silly, clattering junk. 
I did not tell them. 

[©1973, used with permission]

STYLE: It’s those kinds of moments that I believe are so deeply shaping for students in school but often are not acknowledged as occurring. That is part of the sacredness of classroom work, because there’s an intimacy afoot. As I’ve said before, to go back to laying a foundation with the ancient fable of the blind men and the elephant, with DKDK, with an explicit acknowledgement that half the curriculum walks in the room with you all [i.e., students] is to acknowledge the tapestry of the terrain, which for me makes the classroom more rigorous. The rigor is relational, psychological, sociological, as well as academic and intellectual. So that’s that balance between the scholarship on the shelves that I’ve been charged to transmit to the next generation and the scholarship in their selves. And in fact, the scholarship in myself, that’s a part of the mix. That’s a really precious part of what it means to be a teacher.

PETER: And it’s a part that, as you said, that’s always there, whether we acknowledge it or not. But the extent to which we do, the extent to which we do, the extent to which we gloss over it, cover it,

STYLE: Yes. Bury it, repress it—

PETER: —or suppress it in, you know, the spirit of “don’t smile until after Thanksgiving” [a hoary piece of bad advice to new teachers]. That can be costly, but it also deprives everybody of much of the deep learning that can happen.

STYLE: Absolutely. It diminishes the dimensionality of our humanity all the way around, and so the learning isn’t as deep and wide as it certainly can be.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Emily Style for another illuminating conversation—this time on the record! Special thanks to guitarist Jason Grant, a member of my SEED cohort at Westfield High School—led by Emily—who worked up a couple Simon and Garfunkel favorites for his friend and former colleague. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating, and reviewing this show. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me, Peter Horn, and it’s produced in sunny Buffalo, NY. Please do think of one other person you think would dig it, and share it up. It means most coming from you. Back at you just as soon as I can with another fresh take on what and how and why we learn!

[32:06]

For most episodes, this is where you hear an outtake I found pretty funny. Today what feels right is a quotation from my first interview with Emily in 2011 when I was just starting to pursue my doctorate and seeking out inspiring leaders in education to talk to. I don’t have the audio anymore, so I’m just going to read it. Once again, she’s referring to a classroom context, but anybody who ever runs a meeting should listen up: Emily said, “I’m cognizant when I teach that we’re dealing on more than one plane, and one of the planes is what makes life worthwhile, the philosophical plane:  Why are we here, and why does this enterprise matter?”

Note on capitalization of racial categories.

I admire Ali Michael’s reasoning in Raising Race Questions: Whiteness & Inquiry in Education (Teachers College Press, 2015, p. 17):

I capitalize most racial categories to acknowledge them as political categories rather than mere descriptors (i.e., “White” people are not literally the color white; “White” is a political category). I do not capitalize the term “people of color” because it is a broad category encompassing many groups. I have seen the term “people of color” used to refer specifically to Black people. When I use the term “people of color,” I am referring to any people who do not identify as White in the United States. I use all these terms imperfectly, knowing that racial categories are not discrete and that most people are multiracial even if they do not identify that way. For all these reasons—and many more—my children’s generation will question what’s written here. And yet I move forward knowing that if I waited until the verbiage was perfect, these ideas would never see the light of day.

White Privilege Transcript (021)

Unpacking White Privilege with Peggy McIntosh (5/25/19)

RAMONE ALEXANDER: Greetings everyone, and welcome to the Point of Learning with my good friend Peter Horn. I’m Ramone Alexander, and I serve as the Director of Inclusivity and Community Building at Nichols School in Buffalo, New York. I’m really excited about this conversation about unpacking privilege with Peggy McIntosh. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Peggy McIntosh, who began to speak and write about the controversial concepts of male privilege and White privilege in the 1980s.

PEGGY McINTOSH: When I was first attacked by the Right Wing, I felt I just hadn’t played my cards right—and if I had played my cards right, I would never be attacked. So I read it as a failing, a shameful failing and bad strategy on my part! Now I think if you do the kind of work I’m doing, no matter how well you play your cards, you will be resisted and in my case vilified. That’s part of the commitment: to keep figuring out what you think is accurate. Continue to say it, no matter what they say about you.

[VO]: Over three decades later, her ideas still get people fired up.

McINTOSH: Some say, “Nobody ever gave me a damn thing! I grew up poor in Appalachia. White privilege doesn’t apply to me because I don't have any money.” I say, “To the cops, you’re White—even if you’re poor. That’s different from being seen as African American.”

[VO]: She’ll talk with us about coming to identify White privilege after experiencing male privilege first as a student, then as a professor.

McINTOSH: That man, like everybody on the face of the Earth, was born of a woman, and something has been done to his mind to make him think that she is extra to his existence! I began to wonder what had been done to his mind to make him think that half the world’s population is extra …

[02:39]

[VO]: The U.S. cultivates a belief in meritocracy: People get what they deserve. Whatever we have, we earned. The problem, of course, is that it’s not true. One reason is that Americans born poor–or Black, or Muslim, or with a facial deformity–begin life with a distinct disadvantage as compared to those born middle-class, White and Presbyterian with average looks. The difference has nothing to do with what is deserved or earned; merit doesn’t enter into it. The accident of belonging to one category or another prompts people to regard you differently. Maybe they assume you’ll be make a better doctor, maybe they guess you’re likely to steal, maybe you’re better at math, maybe you’re a terrorist. Unearned advantage of this kind is often called privilege. On today’s show, I’m talking with Peggy McIntosh, the person who has done more than anyone else in the past 30 years to advance the concept of privilege as crucial for understanding and dismantling our pervasive myth of meritocracy. Whether you are skeptical of privilege—a term that McIntosh readily admits is not perfect, or you wholeheartedly endorse the concept as a way to describe part of our social reality, the notion of unearned advantages and disadvantages based on aspects of identity, like race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, appearance, religion, physical ability, and so on, is part of our national conversation these days—certainly in schools and on college campuses and in politics, but elsewhere, too—so it’s worth slowing down a minute and thinking about what privilege is and is not. First, let’s meet Peggy!

[04:39]

[VO]: Peggy McIntosh is a feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centers for Women. Over the past 50 years, she has taught English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at the Brearley School, Harvard University, the University of Denver, Trinity College in D.C., Durham University in England, and Wellesley College. She has written on topics including curricular revision, feelings of fraudulence, and the professional development of teachers. Her new book, called On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning will be published by Routledge in July 2019. In 1987 she launched the National SEED Project to confirm her belief that teachers could be leaders of their own professional development. The letters S-E-E-D stand for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity. Over the past 32 years, the National SEED Project has trained nearly 3,000 K-12 and college teachers from 42 U.S. states and 15 other countries, engaging 30,000 teachers in SEED leaders’ schools, who in turn have influenced more than 3 million students through wider and deeper curricula, and more inclusive classrooms. If that sounds pretty amazing, I agree. I’ll be talking with Emily Style, the other longtime co-director of SEED on the next episode, and the National SEED Project is gonna get its own show later this summer. Today we’re focused on privilege. In 1988, Peggy published the groundbreaking essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” This analysis, and its shorter version, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” published in 1989, pioneered putting the dimension of privilege into discussions of power, gender, race, class and sexuality in the United States. More about that in just a minute! In addition to four honorary degrees, Dr. McIntosh is a recipient of the Klingenstein Award for Distinguished Educational Leadership from Columbia Teachers College. As a speaker, she has presented or co-presented at over 1,500 private and public institutions and organizations, including 26 campuses in Asia. So that’s a lot of things. However, when I asked Peggy which aspects of her biography she’d like me to play up or play down, she recalled the end of World War II. 

McINTOSH: I think my parents’ horror at the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their becoming Quakers and then sending me to Quaker school affected my life.

[VO]: When she attended George School in Bucks County, PA, Peggy experienced Quaker theology as essentially boiling down to: There is that of God in every person. She appreciated the simplicity of that. 

McINTOSH: And watching religious wars all over the place, I have decided the Quakers are really wise not to get into ritual, sacraments, sainthoods, and so on.

[VO]: A few years later, when she was about to choose a topic for her doctoral dissertation at Harvard, Peggy was struck by the power of a poet who, not unlike the Quakers, took an unorthodox approach to matters of the spirit. And when I say “struck,” listen to how Peggy describes encountering Emily Dickinson for the first time.

McINTOSH: I had been reading English writers, and Matthew Arnold interested me the most. I’d written my B.A. thesis on Matthew Arnold, but I wasn’t thrilled. Then in a course taught by Harold Martin of the English Department and the General Education Department, somebody handed out some purple dittoes, as we used to call them. And they included the poetry of Emily Dickinson. That’s all that was on this cluster of maybe three pages of poems—and the whole room disappeared—everything disappeared except those purple words on the page by this person I’d never heard of. So I decided to write my dissertation on her. The sensation of the environment completely dissipating and leaving me just with her words was very amazing to me.

[09:56]

[VO]: Okay, so here’s where we make the transition from background bio to full-blown academic badassery on the part of Peggy McIntosh. She’s fallen for a poet who, as Peggy later wrote, “created her own avenues of thought, refusing those offered by church, society, and existing language … a striking example of an alternative sensibility, a dissenting imagination, a re-creating mind” [from introductory essay in Selections from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: A Supplement to the Heath Anthology of American Literature by Peggy McIntosh and Ellen Louise Hart, D.C. Heath, 1990, p. 2840]. Problem is, this is Harvard in the early 1960s. 

McINTOSH: I had an interview with the head of the English Department and said, “I’ve found my topic. I would like to write on Emily Dickinson,” and his first response was, “Well, you can’t write your dissertation on Emily Dickinson.” I asked, “Why not?” And he said, “We don’t know her.” And then he said, “Besides, you’ve prepared in English literature and she’s American.” And I said, “Oh, I’ll do that too, then!” So I wrote on her anyway, by creating a committee that didn’t have on it anybody except the younger folks in the department. So I did an end run around him.

PETER: And of course, they would’ve all been males still because you were the first woman to be appointed as a T.A.

McINTOSH: One of the first two.

[11:34]

[VO]: Like most female students throughout history, McIntosh most often found school, especially college and grad school, to be a place where she studied ideas by men written in books by men that were published by men and taught by men. Then she got to write papers and exams that would be critiqued and graded … by men. Because I can almost hear some internet troll prepare to declare that all this is proof that men have better ideas, let’s consult the historical record. McIntosh is waging her Emily Dickinson battle in the 1960s, when the all-White male faculty she faced at Harvard was very much the norm. There had been a system-wide backlash against the women in the beginning of the 20th century who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs across the country—some of the same troublemaking group who believed women should have the right to vote. As Jill Lepore relates in her incredible book The Secret History of Wonder Woman [p. 125], between 1900 and 1930 the percentage of PhDs awarded to women across the country actually doubled, but then, for three decades, that is to say, until the 1960s, the percentage steadily fell. Why? Because women who earned PhDs found that they were systematically barred from the top ranks of the academy. One study from 1929—just about the point when the upward PhD trend started reversing—quoted an associate professor who said that when “every president and head of department insists on having only men in higher positions, it seems to me idiotic to encourage women to take the higher degrees with the thought of getting anything like a fair deal” [p. 125]. However, if you don’t focus on these systemic facts—and of course, much of the power of systems is that we don’t usually notice them; they are the water we swim in—you are especially prone to accept all this as normal, just the way it is. It took Peggy a minute to recognize what was happening, which is why her story of facing White privilege always begins with noticing male privilege.

McINTOSH: I start with observing male privilege, which allowed me to step laterally and see— though I didn’t want to see it—White privilege. So I tell audiences about how I was leading a seminar on bringing women into the liberal arts curriculum and the faculty in the seminars were men and women, and we got along fine in a group of 22 of us professors. We got along fine from about September to March, and then in the spring suddenly the two groups didn’t want to have a meal together, didn’t want to address each other much. The men and the women had a sort of falling out, and I thought I had done something wrong in my facilitation of the seminar to make men and women not like each other! I wanted another grant, but I thought I had to confess to the foundation that I lacked some facilitation skills and I would work on them. So I’m going through my notes and I am reminded of what happened. Then I begin to see it wasn’t my fault; it was something structural in the minds of the men. The way it surfaced in my notes—and in those days I took a lot of notes—was that the women were calling for courses to do some teaching about women—women’s history, sociology, psychology—sooner than senior year. They began to ask, “Can’t we put women in at the beginning? All courses should reflect men’s and women’s existence.” I made a note of the comment by one man who explained to us why you couldn’t put women in at the beginning. He said, “When you’re laying the foundation blocks for knowledge in those first-year courses, you can’t put in soft stuff.” He’d been reading a lot of a hardback books and articles from refereed journals! I’m grateful to him because he tipped his hand and showed us that regardless of that scholarship, he still felt all the stuff on women was soft. And a couple of years later—

PETER: So was this in the mid-’80s, early ‘80s?

McINTOSH: Yes, 1982 to 1985. A couple of years later the women were again raising the question, “Can’t we put the materials on women in at the beginning?” And another very nice man explained to us that “That first year the student is choosing their major. Their major is their discipline. And if you want a student to think in a disciplined way, you can’t put in extras.” And none of us women said anything! We had no language, or maybe we had no sass, but we didn’t say what I later observed: that man, like everybody on the face of the Earth, was born of a woman, and something has been done to his mind to make him think that she is extra to his existence! I began to wonder what had been done to his mind to make him think that half the world’s population is extra … And I began to put together several unpleasant things. The women of the Combahee River Collective Statement had written that White women are—they didn’t put it in exactly these words, but they meant it—oppressive to work with.

[18:24]

[VO]: The Combahee River Collective, named after the only military campaign in U.S. history planned and led by a woman—in this case, Harriet Tubman—was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. There’s a link to their statement on the show page.

McINTOSH: And I had begun to ask myself, “Are these men are oppressive, or are they nice?” I thought at that time I had to choose: either these are nice men are these are oppressive. And then when I remembered that we White women had been called oppressive, I remembered my first two responses to reading that. The first was “I don’t see how they can say that about us! I think we’re nice!” It was a kind of whining in me. The second response I had was outright racist. But this is where I was in 1980 when I read the Combahee River Collective Statement: “I especially think we’re nice if we work with them!” And then I thought, “Oh Lord, do I have to face this? Do I have to face what it’s really about—my oppressiveness because I’m born to an oppressing group?” Then mentally I let the men off the hook in this way: I said they are nice men, but they are very good students of what they have been taught, which is that men have knowledge, men make more knowledge, men profess knowledge as professors. Men run the big university presses and the best-known research universities, and they have taken in that men are knowers and knowledge itself is male. And I had taken it in too! After dithering for a couple of years, hoping that I had been so nice that the African American women hadn’t noticed how oppressive I was, I decided, yes. Of course, it did show up. I couldn’t disguise it. I had been a very good student of the ugly truth: that Whites have knowledge, Whites make more knowledge, Whites publish and profess knowledge as professors, Whites run the major university presses and the best-known research universities, and we have taken it that Whites are knowers and knowledge itself is White. And I hated thinking that way, but the evidence was against thinking my old way. So then I thought, “How can I get money from the foundations? Everybody I’ve ever dealt with at a foundation is White.” So the money system for what I want to do is on my side also. And these two things bothered me so much that I asked, “What else do I have, beside the knowledge system and the money system, that has been working for me?”—and my conscious mind would not answer. It blocked me. And I was in the habit of asking my mind questions and having it respond. I felt I was in a spiritual crisis over this, that my life wasn’t on a morally or ethically firm base. I’d been given stuff through being White. So one night before going to sleep, I did what I now called praying on it, but at the time it felt more like a desperate demand and the middle of night up swam an example. I flicked on the light and I wrote it down and I was very disappointed. I thought this was a bunch of nothing.

PETER: Do you recall what the first one was?

McINTOSH: Yes. What swam up became the first in a list of 46 ways in which I have unearned advantage through being White. It was, “I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” I looked at it with disappointment and again in the morning I thought it was a bunch of nothing. I think I was looking for the Next Big Thing. I had the knowledge system and the money system worked out, and this was just about being with people? I thought it was trivial.

[24:43]

We’re about to get to the personal examples that helped Dr. McIntosh to see how White privilege worked in her own life. Maybe it’s because I watched too many action movies growing up, but you know those scenes where Tom Cruise or somebody is trying to loot some vault protected by laser beams that are invisible to the naked eye? Nobody can see the lasers until they spray some powder in the air, then all of a sudden there’s this matrix of intersecting lines, any one of which will get you into trouble if you trip it? That’s how I think of Peggy’s examples of privilege—they are like the little particles that make an invisible system of fences visible. There are 46 of these examples in the first version of her article, and McIntosh is very clear about how she means them to be understood, calling them “ordinary and daily ways” in which she experienced having privilege, as contrasted with her African American colleagues. She emphasizes, and I quote, “This list is not intended to be generalizable. Others can make their own lists from within their own life circumstances” [“White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” 1988, p. 2]. Later she writes, “I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though these other privileging factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my [African] American co-workers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.” [p. 4]

[26:24]

McINTOSH [reading selections from the list in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” 1989]: I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. I can do well on a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the person in charge, I will be facing a person of my race. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race won’t work against me. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in so-called “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones. [Commenting:] About the negative episodes and situations in our lives, most of us have, I think, some negative situations and episodes or impressions or emotions in the course of the day. I think it must be absolutely exhausting to have to ask of each of those whether one’s race has caused the situation. I sometimes wonder why my friends of color don’t go crazy from that stress, but I feel it as a female. The institutions of the culture, the behaviors and assumptions of the people I deal with are behaviors that favor men more than women, critique women more than men, impede women, don’t take women’s ideas seriously. The daily grind, though what I feel isn’t anything like what people of color feel, still wears me down, so I admire them that they keep going. The odds against people of color are so much worse than the odds against my having a good day.

[31:43]

PETER: Hand in hand with it being so popular for 30 years are people receiving it or half-receiving it, half-hearing the term “White privilege.” I wanted to ask what are the most common misunderstandings or false assumptions that you encounter about what people think you’re saying?

McINTOSH: Well, it’s very journalistic of you to ask first “What about reaction against it?” That’s a very journalistic impulse.

PETER [playfully]: You think I just like wearing headphones? I'm taking this seriously, ma’am!

McINTOSH: No! I just want to tell you journalists do this, they look for the pushback. They want you to describe your conflicts over it, because conflict is seen as news.

PETER: I appreciate that, but also what I’d like to do is to say that you’ve heard all this before, you know what people say. For example, I spent a fair amount of time—I try not to read comment threads cause that’s where the swamp creatures will hang out, especially if they can be anonymous. But there are people who make YouTube videos and articles and blog posts and even a kind of book, though it’s not available, with the title “Debunking White Privilege.” I mean people get very exercised about this, but I haven’t seen any evidence in any of those things that I’ve been able to find and take a look at that they were engaging seriously or fully with what you were actually saying. You’re used to this and so I wanted to ask, how do people tend to, in your experience, misunderstand what you’re actually saying, or if they react to it, in what way?

McINTOSH: Okay. Well, on my own track, I will first tell you what they like about it. I get two different kinds of thanks. From White people, especially older White people: “I never thought of any of this before. I never thought of any of this before.” From people of color: “Thank you. You gave me some language for what I experience. I knew there was something there working against me and it wasn’t explicit racism, but you gave me language to describe what it is. It’s White privilege. The objections to it come from many directions. Some people think my work is about blame, shame and guilt. It’s making Whites take a guilt trip. Some people say it’s self- hatred for you to write about White privilege as a bad thing. Some threaten. When I was first attacked by the Right Wing, I felt I just hadn’t played my cards right—and if I had played my cards right, I would never be attacked. So I read it as a failing, a shameful failing and bad strategy on my part! Now I think if you do the kind of work I’m doing, no matter how well you play your cards, you will be resisted and in my case vilified. That’s part of the commitment: to keep figuring out what you think is accurate. Continue to say it, no matter what they say about you. Some people think that I spoke for all White people, about all of their privileges, whereas in fact my list is autobiographical and it’s about my experience relative to just one group of people of color who are in my building or my line of work. I’m not writing for all Whites. And so I say, “This list is about my experience, not about yours.” Some think that this list should be lifted right out of the context of the essay around it and use it as a questionnaire or a checklist. That is another way of applying it to all Whites. Some say, “Nobody ever gave me a damn thing! I grew up poor in Appalachia. White privilege doesn’t apply to me because I don't have any money.” I say, “To the cops, you’re White—even if you’re poor. That’s different from being seen as African American.”

[VO]: In one of my first classes in grad school—it was the summer of 1999, so Peggy’s conception of White privilege had been buzzing around for over a decade, but I hadn’t yet encountered her work—I was sitting with an African American classmate who was telling a story about his senior year of high school, being accepted to an elite college and having his mother immediately buy the decal for that college to stick prominently on the rear window of the car. His mother [had no doubt] that the college decal would affect how cops saw her son when they pulled him over. I distinctly recall realizing in that moment that I had never thought about a college sticker in those terms, that I had never needed to. Item 15 on Peggy’s longer list is “I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection” [“White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” 1988, p. 5]. We talked a little more about why it’s hard for us as individual people and societies more broadly to face systemic privilege.

PETER: You talk about different kinds of privilege. But for a White person to talk about White privilege, one of rules that it violates is White people don’t talk about Whiteness or it begins to lose some of its power, right?

[38:46]

McINTOSH: Well, men don’t talk about male privilege—

PETER: Most men don’t!

McINTOSH: —that is also a pretty taboo subject. And heterosexuals don’t usually talk about their privilege and colonizers don’t talk about their unearned advantage over the colonized. So I think it is a rule of thumb that if you have power, you do not talk about what it’s like to have it. You could be Machiavelli and write The Prince and say how you got it and teach others how to, but that’s very unusual. It’s like evading something in which you’re not standing firmly on the power you have. You have power you didn’t earn in any one of these categories, and there was force that gave you that power. It was force. It’s Whites’ force against people of color. So it’s as though that is intuitively understood, even if you’re not living in a meritocracy or a society claiming democracy. It’s as though you intuitively know that the ground you’re standing on isn’t your own ground. I’m interested in what makes us know that. What made all these subjects taboo? Even in Brahmin India, Brahmins don’t talk about what it’s like to be Brahmin. I think they also intuit it’s not theirs. It’s as though they know there’s a great systemic placement of them. It’s as though it doesn’t quite feel right. And at heart, they know that they’re putting on an act that has to do with their place in the power structure. There is a sense of pride in a nation or a church or a family, and discussing privilege is very embarrassing to those structures you’ve been basing on pride, because the discussion of privilege shows treating other people as if they had the value that you yourself have is very hard on the ego. And in Asia, it’s not so much the ego, but the sense of loyalty to Confucius or Allah. It’s a spiritual matter to take on the discussion of unequal concentration of power. It’s a spiritual discussion, it takes a lot of guts. It’ll interfere with your view of God. It’ll interfere with your view of your neighbor. It’ll interfere with your feeling about your family. It’ll interfere with your relation to teachers. It interferes with all the structures to posit that there may be basic inequality in the way human beings have decided to behave with each other and the structures we have chosen to build. This is what I feel about the biological thing. There is a biological tendency to make and live in pecking orders; there is also a biological tendency to make and live in symbiotic, interrelated frameworks. Western culture stresses the first: Life is war. Pecking orders are natural. Trying to be nice isn’t natural. Most of the people in the United States have become persuaded that life is war. And Trump of course, intensifies that conviction that life is war.

[VO]: As the basis for this episode (and one coming this summer all about The National SEED Project), Peggy generously spent several hours in conversation with me, two off the record last fall, and three more on the record in late winter. Because I wanted to proceed in order of urgency, this show has necessarily focused on White privilege, but she offered many other gems as we talked. I’ll close with just a couple. 

[44:33]

McINTOSH: I think that education, “higher education,” as it calls itself, trains you to make an argument and defend the argument, as though knowledge is a matter of warfare. And that’s a useful skill, but it’s not the only skill. And you, your parents and other funders may be spending $60,000-$70,000 a year to give you that skill, and it may help you to fight the economic war and make a living. But when I meet people I really like, there’s a lot more to them than the ability to make an argument or make a living. Social climbing and intellectual climbing and economic climbing is not the only activity of life, not the only worthy activity—but rather, laterally relating to other people and also in an inward way, relating to one’s alternative thoughts, whatever they are. And children who’ve been allowed that latitude to connect are pretty well anchored to make us a future that serves not just them, but everybody.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show. My great thanks to Peggy McIntosh for taking the time to speak with us about her important work. Links to her White privilege pieces may be found on the show page, but keep an eye out starting in July for her book On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning. Because I wanted especially fierce and beautiful music to underscore this conversation, I turned to Shayfer James, composer of our regular intro and outro, who graciously permitted use of instrumental tracks for several songs from his latest album Hope and a Hand Grenade, namely “Day of Reckoning,” “Boots Worn Through,” and “Ophelia.” If the music haunted you, wait till you hear him sing lyrics! Head on down to shayferjames.com and see what I mean. Shayfer and his collaborator Kate Douglas will be performing their song cycle based on Beowulf called “The Ninth Hour” at the Met Cloisters in New York City on June 28th, 2019—hope to see you there! Thank you for your curiosity about what and how and why we learn, and for your support of this show. I appreciate your subscribing, rating, and reviewing, because that really does help other people find us. If you know even just one other person who would dig it, please let them know, because it will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me, and it’s produced in sunny Buffalo, NY. Back just as soon as I can to check windows and mirrors with Emily Style!  

Cuba Transcript (020)

Lessons from Cuba with Yanna Cruzata Quintero (4/4/19)

DEREK GALLAGHER: ¡Bienvenidos a Havana! My name’s Derek Gallagher, and I’m here with my friend Peter Horn, and you’re listening to the Point of Learning podcast.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Cuba!

YANNA CRUZATA QUINTERO: It is a free education and free health care for everyone. It doesn’t matter if they are black or white, it doesn’t matter if they are poor, or they belong to the middle class or—if they’re some people who have a good living. It is for everyone!

[VO]: We’ll also touch on the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961, in which 250,000 volunteers—many of them children—taught basic literacy skills to over 700,000 people in less than one year.

YANNA: They carried out a literacy campaign. They went into the different areas here in Cuba, like to the countryside areas where people didn’t have a school, and the goal was to teach people how to read, how to write as well.

[VO]: On our last night in Havana this past January, Robyn and I were enjoying the view from the Malecón, the beautiful esplanade and seawall that stretches for about 5 miles along the coast. The Malecón is also a roadway, which is important, because about 10 minutes after we sat down to gaze at the water and sip some rum, we heard skidding, a crash. We spun around to see that a car had collided with a turning motorcycle. Crossing the roadway carefully to try to help, we were struck that nearly everyone else did too. The driver of the car that hit the motorcycle stopped, other pedestrians stepped in to help the motorcyclist to his feet slowly, to collect his watch and helmet, to direct traffic, to summon police. Almost immediately another car stopped, offering to bring the injured man to the hospital. He got in with his belongings and the car sped away. Other citizens waited a few minutes for the police to arrive, made sure no one touched the damaged bike, and volunteered their report. If this had happened our first night in Havana, I don’t know that we would have made so much of it, but after almost 10 days in Cuba, Robyn and I thought the strong sense of interconnectedness and shared struggle in these people’s response to the misfortune of a stranger encapsulated so much of what impressed us over and over again during our brief stay in the country.

[03:05]

[VO]: Yes, like U.S. history, the history of Cuba is complicated, and I’m not with this episode attempting to gloss over its harder moments. But I do want to showcase a couple remarkable facets—like the jaw-dropping success of Cuba’s national Literacy Campaign of 1961—that were news to me, especially because we’re at a moment in the U.S. where people are starting to say “socialism” with a straight face. It’s true that not many people in Cuba are very wealthy, which some North Americans find troubling, sure. But I tell you: in our visits to cities and towns in different parts of the island, I counted fewer than 10 homeless people during our entire stay. Here’s how Education Minister José Ramón Fernández explained it to Jonathan Kozol in the 1970s. He said that great emphasis is placed on rural clinics, infant health, and prenatal care. “In Cuba the store windows may not seem to be so full as in Chicago, or Caracas or San Juan, but there are no children hungry, no children sick without physicians present, nor are there schoolchildren without schools” [Kozol, Jonathan. Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in Cuban Schools. 1978. p. 132]. Also, for what it’s worth, when Robyn and I traveled in January 2019, the Government of Cuba was open for business, and its TSA agents were being paid. The U.S. government? Not so much. Cuba is a country I’ve been curious about for a long time. Only 90 miles away from the U.S., but so thoroughly isolated by U.S. foreign policy. As a child of the ‘70s and ‘80s, I of course grew up during the Cold War. I knew that Cuba was allied with the Soviet Union, that there had been some kind of missile crisis when Kennedy was president, and that Fidel Castro seemed like he would never die, even with all those cigars. It wasn’t so much that I learned a bunch of false information about Cuba in school; it’s just that Cuba didn’t come up all that much. We learned a little about the Spanish-American War, we remembered the Maine, we touched on the Revolution of 1959, but that was about it. It was really only when I got the chance to visit the country that I became totally fascinated. That’s right, you guys, I found myself at the point of learning!

[05:40]

Our tour guide for the show today is Yanna Cruzata Quintero, who was in fact Robyn’s and my tour guide for most of our visit to Cuba. Leading our small but intrepid group of three Australians, two Irish, one Scotsman (that’s Derek, whom you heard at the top of the show) and us two Yankees, Yanna kept us oriented and informed as we explored Havana, Viñales, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad. Yanna has an impressive command of history, and was eager to show us Cuban culture from the inside, setting us up as guests in casas particulares, which would be like a Cuban Airbnb, except that your hosts are also staying on the premises, and they actually cook you breakfast. A product of Cuba’s remarkable and totally free school system, Yanna repaid her country’s investment in her by serving three years as an English instructor for professionals wishing to learn the language later in life. (This kind of schooling is also free for Cubans.) I began by asking Yanna to state the most important things she’d like non-Cubans, especially U.S. citizens, to understand about Cuba.

YANNA: Education and the health system: they were the main priorities when the Revolution triumphed, because before that, people were not allowed to study, or have any access to school, or healthcare. I think it is very important that people know that once the Revolution triumphed in Cuba, people were considered like persons. Before that, poor people, they were considered like nothing. They didn’t have any rights or anything. So I think it is important that people, they know that education and health, they are the main priorities here in Cuba. So everyone will have access to them. It is a free education and free health care for everyone. It doesn’t matter if they are black or white, it doesn’t matter if they are poor or they belong to the middle class or—if they’re some people who have a good living. It is for everyone!

PETER: In some countries there’s free guaranteed education up until the eighth grade, say, eight or nine years of school that it’s free. And you're saying here it’s true through college?

YANNA: Yeah. Here in Cuba, education is free on through university. I mean that is the last point, so we don’t have to pay anything. Not even when we are the university, because the government, they provide everything for you. So, even though you are from the country area, you can go to university that is not so close to the place you are from, and they would provide a place for you to stay. They will provide food for you, and you wouldn’t have to pay anything. And you are paid, as well, just for going to the university. You are paid here in Cuba. It is not a lot of money, but when I was at the university … You know, I am from Baracoa—

PETER: On the east of the island!

YANNA: Almost the end of Cuba! And I went to the university in Santiago de Cuba, which is about 248 kilometers [154 miles] from my place. And so they had a campus there, I had a place where to eat as well, and we were also paid—I mean it was not a lot of money. It was only like two or three CUCs—

PETER: —so like $2 or $3 U.S.—

YANNA: But it was a little bit to eat something when the food was not so good … yeah, but [education] is free. And the payment back, once you’ve graduated, the payment back to the government is to work three years in the place that they need you. And it has to be in the place where you are from. So when I finished university, I went back to Baracoa. I was working as an English teacher at the university there. So there is a small department of the main university that is in Guantánamo province that is the place that Baracoa belongs to. So I was working there for three years.

PETER: You were an English teacher teaching what level?

YANNA: For people who are already professionals.

PETER: Okay.

YANNA: But they want to study another major … this is also one of the opportunities that the government, they give people once they are already professionals. For example, you could be a teacher, or you could be a lawyer, but if you want to study another major, the government as well, they give you this opportunity. They have these universities where people study on Saturdays mainly, because it is a day that people don't have to go to work mainly. I was teaching there people of different ages. I had [students] who were 30 but there were ones that were 40s or 50s. The school is for people that were already professionals and wanted to study something else. They go to the university and yes, that was where I was teaching.

PETER: And they also are not paying for this course?

YANNA: No, you don't have to pay anything for that.

PETER: So that’s the additional training that they’re— Yeah. Wow.

[VO]: As somebody who’s still paying off school loans, I wanted to follow up on a couple things.

PETER: You said you were working while you were in school?

YANNA: No, no, in Cuba that’s not a requirement.

PETER: Okay, so the job comes afterwards. And when you said 2-3 CUCs, which is $2 to $3, that’s a month.

YANNA: That was a month. I mean that was like almost nothing.

PETER: Almost nothing, but of course in the U.S. many students are taking on thousands and thousands of dollars of debt per month. So I would rather—

YANNA: That’s what I mean! Even though we didn’t have to pay anything, we were paid as well.

PETER: Cool.

YANNA: It was almost nothing, but it helped us a lot.

[VO]: SIDEBAR—Haven’t done one of these in a while, but I thought a sidebar might be the best format to gush a minute about the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961, especially the parts that Yanna inspired me to learn after I returned to the U.S. I’m not sure I had even heard about the Cuban Literacy Campaign before traveling to Cuba and reading up a little, and the thing about that is it remains the most successful literacy campaign in the history of, you know, Earth. A little context, so everybody’s on the same page: A decade earlier, Fidel Castro, who was then a lawyer and charismatic speaker in his mid-20s, was slated to be a candidate in the 1952 elections. One small problem: those elections were canceled by Fulgencio Batista, a former army official who believed that he was going to lose in the elections, so he staged a military coup in order to establish himself dictator. Castro and his inner circle soon determined that armed revolution was the only viable route. Clipping many interesting stories because I’m trying to get to the literacy campaign: After several thwarted attempts, the Revolution formally triumphs on January 1st, 1959, when Batista flees with oodles of loot to the Dominican Republic by private jet. Fast forward to September of 1960: Fidel is addressing the United Nations in New York City for the first time—there are great stories about this visit too, but I’m keeping my eye on the prize here—and pledges that Cuba will essentially eradicate illiteracy throughout the population in the coming year. He promises before the world that the roughly 1/4 of the Cuban population—nearly one million people—who could not read and write would be able to by the end of 1961. This would be a bold claim even if careful preparations were already in place with his Education Ministry back home. By all accounts, however, they too were taken by surprise! Fidel understood the link between massive unemployment and rampant illiteracy, which was a prime motivation for change. On a personal level, too, Fidel himself was a voracious reader who spent hours every day with books. (I can’t resist adding that Castro was apparently so talented and focused a reader that none other than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning novelist, would, by the end of his career, send each of his manuscripts to his friend Fidel for proofreading and fact-checking.) Big picture, though: Castro believed that a literacy campaign could connect the experience of the more literate city folk and largely illiterate campesinos in the country. That’s what he pledged to do, and many, many Cubans joined in the effort.

YANNA: They carried out a literacy campaign. They went to the different areas here in Cuba, like to the countryside areas where they didn’t have a school. They went to places where there was nothing there. So they used a method to teach people living there the basic stuff. The goal was to teach people how to read, and how to write as well.

[VO]: A broad overview goes like this: In one year, 1961—which also included major interruptions like the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs Invasion in April—250,000 volunteers taught 700,000 people how to read and write. Functional illiteracy dropped from about 24% before the Revolution to about 4% by the end of 1961. Of those 250,000 volunteers, 100,000 were children: about 40,000 between 10 and 14 years old; about 47,000 aged 15 to 17. Like the other volunteers, these kids moved from the city to go and live for a year with rural families, working alongside them in the fields during the daytime and teaching them how to read and write at night and on the weekends. This is amazing to me! First, there’s the practical matter that Fidel had to, of course, promise parents that their children would be safe—which in large measure, they were. Second, Fidel treated these young people—and the farmers they were going to be working with—like full, equal citizens: Speaking to young volunteers about agricultural products, he said: “The nation does not have these goods available because they fell out of the sky. […] They are the product of the labor of the people.” He said, “… [Y]ou are going to work for those who, up to now, have worked for you.” [Kozol, pp. 26-27] He believed the Cuban children could do it, and they did. Today in the U.S. and around the world, about the only positive things that can be said about gun violence and climate change are the ways that young people are stepping up to lead. In the case of Parkland students or students organizing on the South Side of Chicago, or the students around the world who walked out of schools on March 15 to call for action on the climate crisis, these kids are stepping up because we adults are not. In Cuba, on the other hand, the adults in the new government and in the new schools were sending the message that the Revolution needs you. You are part of this. Also, and this fact bears emphasis not just because I’m making this show at the end of Women’s History Month: Over 50% of the volunteers were female. During the Batista regime, the principal occupations available to women had been housewife and prostitute. After the Revolution, women could assume equally important roles: There’s a 2011 documentary by Catherine Murphy called Maestra, which focuses on some of the women who participated in the campaign as 14- and 15-year olds, their struggles to convince their parents, and the growth in their self-esteem in doing something they believed was so important, for example the immense satisfaction of teaching an old farmer for the first time in his life how to make the letters that spelled his name. As one woman, 58 years old when she told her story, put it, “To this day I have experienced no single thing so enormously powerful.” Unlike the U.S., Cuba is a country where equality between men and women is written into law. A volunteer named Maria told Jonathan Kozol in the 1970s: “The literacy struggle was the first time in my life, and I believe the first time in our history as well, that women were given an equal role with men in bringing about a monumental change. Today we speak of the New Woman and New Man. It is a phrase that first came into common use only in recent years, but it began to be a concrete truth in 1961.” [Kozol, p. 38] You doubtless sense that there’s more I want to tell you, but you get the idea. The more I learn about the Literacy Campaign, the more I think there are lessons not just for educators, but for anyone else who takes our future, that is to say young people, seriously. For more on this subject, check out Jonathan Kozol’s fascinating 1978 account based on his own reporting. It’s called Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools. I learned about this book only after returning to the U.S. and beginning to poke around. This is not the first time that I’ve gotten fired up about an idea and found out that Jonathan Kozol was thinking about it 40 years earlier! Aight, back to Yanna for some final thoughts. 

PETER: So part of what I try to do with this podcast is to honor the vocation of teaching. And I wonder if there is a teacher in your life or teacher who made a significant impact on you?

YANNA: Yes, there are a few. But I’m going to talk about one from secondary school. In secondary school I was only like 13 years old, 14, but it was my Spanish teacher.

PETER: Okay.

YANNA: Yeah, I really liked the Spanish language, so we do Spanish at school and this teacher, she was so good at it. The method she used for us to learn was really good so everyone could understand everything real easy. Her name was Maria Eugenia. She was really nice, and that also helped me to try to understand what I wanted to do.

PETER: What was different for you about her class then?

YANNA: She was very approachable. She also was like—because here in Cuba, we have different teachers that teach you mathematics, we have a teacher for history, or Spanish, so it is not the same teacher. It is a different teacher. So she was the main teacher of our group. Every group has a main teacher, so he’s the one that in case you are not doing so well, he’s the one that—or she in that case!—she was the one that was going to go to your house if you weren’t going to school. She was going to go to your house and see what was happening to you. She really cared about us. I remember there was a kid, there was this guy that his family, they were like really, really poor and I remember he was once operated [on]. She was encouraging us to go to his house and take him some stuff. So we went there to visit him, and we took them like some food and some things that maybe he could make because his family, they could not afford to buy anything for him. So she was not only a teacher of that subject, but she was also teaching us to treat people well, to consider people important as well, to care about people as well. So that’s why she was like really—I think everyone in our group, they really remember her. And we stayed in contact with her because she was not only a teacher of Spanish, like the Spanish language, but she was also a teacher for all the things in life, that happen in life.

PETER: A question came up at lunch because so many Cubans, I mean because music is such a big part of the culture. Is music also part of the formal education? Would music be a subject in school for young people, or is it something that if people come to be musicians, is that something they usually get from the family or do on their own?

YANNA: In Cuba we have a subject, but that’s in secondary school, when you are 12 to 15, approximately. So we do have this subject that is called music education, but we don’t really get that much.

PETER: Yeah, it’s similar to the U.S. You might have like an ensemble at school?

YANNA: Yeah. So the [students] in Cuba who want to study, they really like music or they are good at it—in Cuba we have some schools that they are for that as well. So [from the time] you are six years old, you go to that school. So if your parents say that you are good at music or you have the rhythm or your hearing is like really good, they do a test in that school and then you can go to the school that is special for that. You get some other subjects, I mean you get all the other subjects like mathematics, and history and that, but you are specialized in music so you get that. But yes, I think music is in the blood of every Cuban. That’s why it was like you don’t [often formally] study it. It happens the same way with dancing. In Cuba we don’t get any dancing lessons. It is just that you pick it up when to go to school, when they do like parties at the school and you just pick it up, so it is in the Cuban blood!

PETER: That’s it for today’s show. My great thanks to Yanna Cruzata Quintero for taking the time to speak with us. Into other conversations with card-carrying communists? Check out episode 011 and my talk with Oskar Eustis. The Cuban music you heard on this episode comes from two bands Robyn and I saw in Havana, Maguey and Novel Son. Thanks to Shayfer James for intro, outro, and sidebar musics. If you haven’t yet heard Shayfer’s new album Hope and a Hand Grenade, be about that! Details on that and much more at shayferjames.com. Thanks finally to you for your curiosity, and your support of this show. I appreciate your subscribing, rating, and reviewing, because that really does help other people find us. If you know just one other person who might dig it, please let them know, because it will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me, and it’s produced in sunny Buffalo, New Yor. Back in a few weeks to unpack white privilege with Dr. Peggy McIntosh!

Episode 019 Transcript

Epic Citizens with Melissa Friedman (2/17/19)

NILAJA SUN: Hi. This is Nilaja Sun, an actor, playwright and teaching artist who has worked with Melissa Friedman and the Epic Theatre Ensemble since 2001. You are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn—not a bad move for a kid your age!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Epic Theatre Ensemble, which has kept young people at the heart of what they do for nearly 20 years …

MELISSA FRIEDMAN: It’s a dialogue and a relationship between our mentor artists, our teaching artists, and our students, and when we work with those students in our partner schools, whether it’s in school, after school, or during the summer—as a company, we want to really help those students develop their voice and ask them to look past their personal sphere into the public realm.

[VO]: Epic takes seriously its mission to create bold work with and for diverse communities that promotes vital discourse and social change.

MELISSA: We don't have expectations that students are going to be professional theatre-makers necessarily. We want them to be leaders—whether it’s in the arts or otherwise—and caring citizens that engage in social justice.

[VO]: Plus a few student voices!

DAVION OSBOURNE: For me, I think school is more than just about education. I think it’s the first step in teaching people how to connect with each other beyond culture, beyond class, beyond race.

[02:14]

[VO]: In a moment when news headlines are literally incredible, and the inclination of different groups of people to listen to each other with anything approaching respect feels like we’re at rock bottom, I draw courage and hope from groups like Epic Theatre Ensemble, and people like Melissa Friedman, whom I’m talking with on today’s show. Melissa is one of the founders of Epic Theatre Ensemble, which opened for business in the City of New York on September 11th, 2001. Epic was the first arts program working in New York’s public schools in the days following, serving kids directly affected by 9/11. In the decades since, Epic has been honored with numerous awards and distinctions for its life-changing work, including from the Obama White House in 2009. Most impressive to me, though, is that Epic has kept students—and students’ own ideas, stories, and questions—at the center of its work for all that time.

EPIC STUDENTS: I am Epic because I like to use theatre to start a conversation. I am Epic because I use theatre to help tell my story. I am Epic because I believe in dreams. I am Epic because I create and collaborate.

[VO]: I first met Melissa and her colleagues at Epic Theatre 15 years ago, during the winter of 2004. I was working in Project ’79, the alternative education program at Westfield High School in New Jersey that was the subject of last February’s show (episode 010). At that time, Project ‘79 was looking for an intensive interdisciplinary arts experience that would allow our students to showcase their ideas about the world in new ways. Epic reached out to us because one of its founders knew about Project ’79, having graduated from Westfield High School in the late 1980s. That co-founder was Melissa Friedman. Epic Theatre and Project ’79 collaborated for three years on three productions that had our kids writing original scenes and monologues, questioning and debating ideas, and proudly performing their work before wildly appreciative and sometimes even stunned audiences. I know firsthand how Epic can challenge kids to think deeply about and then act upon their identity as citizens, not mere consumers, which is, in my view, one of the most important things we can do with and for young people. We’ll get into some of what Epic is up to these days in just a moment, but first let’s meet Melissa Friedman, who is as riveting on stage as an actor as she is in the classroom as a teaching artist. Melissa has co-starred in off-Broadway productions with the likes of David Strathairn, Aasif Mandvi, and Kathleen Chalfant, as well as performing in numerous shows outside New York, from Pennsylvania and Tennessee to California. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Old Globe University of San Diego, Melissa has studied with such theatre luminaries as Cicely Berry and Richard Seer. Melissa also credits her recent involvement with the improv program Upright Citizens Brigade as informing the work she does training not only high school students, but other teaching artists, as well as New York City teachers of history, theatre, and English Language Arts.

[05:35]

PETER: This is a show that among other things seeks to honor the vocation of teaching. And so I like to ask guests, whatever it is that the guests do, I like to ask them about a teacher who had a strong impact on you…

MELISSA: So many! I mean, my mother was a teacher. I grew up watching, observing her painstakingly prepare and really focus on the detail of her lesson and then agonize over a choice she made in class from the day, so I felt like I grew up around teaching. So, certainly my mother. I would say Paula was a huge impact on me in high school.

PETER: Paula Roy, star of episode 003—

MELISSA: Star of episode 003. The way in which she taught us literature was really meaningful to me. And her departure from the more traditional approach that I had received throughout my schooling, and her questioning some basic things like pronouns, you know. She was the first teacher to give me a book that she thought I would love, which was Beloved by Toni Morrison in the year it came out and it rocked my world. It was meaningful to me. She also talked about feminism openly in class—in the 1980s! So it was really exciting. And then I’ve had a lot of wonderful mentors and teachers along the way, including the head of my acting program [MFA program at Old Globe/USD] Rick Seer, who was very much a very kind, generous, thoughtful teacher who brought a lot of love and passion for the work in the room. And then my mentor, Richard Easton, was really impactful. He had no real teaching experience when he walked into the classroom, so it was all about his artistry, and sharing his artistry. In a lot of ways there is a part of me that feels like I’m—and then Cicely Berry, of course. So these teachers—I feel like I have a little bit of each of them in me, including my mom of course! But yes, from Cic Berry and her really radical approach to theatre, to Rick’s generosity and caring in the room, to the way in which Richard Easton brought his own artistry first and foremost into the room. And I kind of took a lot of those pieces that impacted me as an artist. But there isn’t one teacher that I am emulating, because I think the nature of authenticity is that you have to be yourself. You have to be true to yourself and you have to draw all of your experiences in the room, and you have to be present, and you have to speak truth.

[VO]: That song for Romeo and Juliet was written by Epic student Shamiea Thompson. Shameia performed it with another young Epic citizen, Kaydean. I wanted to ask Melissa about her choice in the past few years to train with the improv group Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB). It’s an unconventional move for a performer with her years of experience.

[09:07]

MELISSA: I decided to go back into training at UCB, at Upright Citizens Brigade, to train in improvisation, in long-form improv. It was something that in my early years as a high school student or college student, I kind of had written off myself as someone who could improv and I chose to follow the path of text work and going with classics and—

PETER: I’m sorry, you’re saying you believed that you weren't any good?

MELISSA: Yeah, no, I froze. I was talking about freezing in improv a lot. I didn’t do any improv in high school or college. I didn't really think of myself as funny. I mean, I knew I could play a comedic role in a play, but I was just really scared of it. And one of the first jobs I got in New York City was with the Irondale Ensemble, and I was told after being accepted into their ensemble, a year-long gig, that part of what we would do would be performing the Harold in front of live audiences, which is a long-form improv that they teach at UCB and other places. So I was like, “Huh, what now?” So I was thrown into it and terrified, and I found I really loved it! And this was nearly 20 years ago now—I would say 1999 and the year 2000. And so I started to find myself interested in that and also then began teaching it to young people and decided just a few years ago, maybe four years ago, that I wanted to train at UCB. And then I’ve been taking classes there and I’m in their Academy, which is, um, their next-level training. I’ve gone through the core training, but you know, I auditioned to get into the Academy.

PETER: Are you humble-bragging, right now Melissa?

MELISSA: Yeah, I’m humble-bragging, you know, I’m in the Academy, so it’s cool. But being a student when you’ve been teaching a long time is challenging and exciting and humbling. There are so many times when I’m in class where I have to bite my tongue. Yeah, “I’m not going to lead this. I’m going to follow,” you know?

PETER: But picking an area that you were scared to go into and said like, “You know what? This fear. This is the thing that I want to focus on.” That’s great.

MELISSA: Yes. I was scared before every single class. I was scared to sign up, I was scared before every class, from 101 to 201, 301, 401—every time. Every time I did a show at UCB, I was scared before I performed, and I think it’s a good reminder that every time I tell students to come and stand up, they’re probably scared. Every time I asked them to perform Shakespeare or their new writing or their—whatever it is, they're scared. So I need to create an environment that lays the groundwork for them to be brave. We talk about safe space, but I think it’s interesting that you know, the first thing you want to do is create safe space, but then you want to create brave space where students can—

PETER: I like that!

MELISSA: —step forward and they can take risks. But you can’t really jump into brave space right away. You can ask them to be brave right away, but brave space is something that comes after safe space.

[VO]: Now that we’ve met one of the co-founders, let’s move to Epic itself, and its important work. Epic Theatre Ensemble is dedicated to fostering dialogue about current civic, social, and ethical issues. As a sign of this commitment to dialogue, by the way, every performance they give—whether student, professional, or students performing alongside professionals—is followed by a talk-back with the audience. Epic is an off-Broadway theatre company that premieres professional productions and, at the same time, Epic is an arts education company with an array of award-winning programs for students, in-school, after school, and during the summer. It’s a collaborative of teaching artists and students who believe that participation in theatre is essential to a healthy democracy, and that this kind of engaging theatre experience should be a hallmark of U.S. education for all students.

[13:14]

MELISSA: I think the thing about Epic is it’s a dialogue and a relationship between our mentor artists, our teaching artists, and our students. The work that we make as professional artists is—really, we consider the student audiences first and foremost, but they also, those very same artists are going in and working in the classroom and after school in our youth company. And when we work with those students in our partner schools, whether it’s in school, after school, or during the summer in our youth company, we want to really help those students develop their voice and ask them to look past their personal sphere into the public realm. And so what that looks like is when we first meet our students in our public schools, we ask them to look at a play like [Sophocles’] Antigone. And they see our professional artists perform it first, and then they engage with the play, and they question the connection between Antigone and today. And in some cases, they look at news articles and in the project I’m actually working on right now, with the entire ninth-grade class at our charter school in Harlem, each class chose a different current event that they connected. One of the classes chose the woman who climbed the Statue of Liberty on the 4th of July in protest for the separation of families.

PETER: She was acquitted, was she?

MELISSA: She was, but in their version it’s a little bit more dramatic. So they took some creative liberties. And then another one took the story of the woman in Baton Rouge. She was protesting the shooting of Alton Sterling and—Iesha Evans is her name. And that wonderful viral picture—the picture that went viral, I should say—of her standing in that sundress against the police. And one class is taking inspiration from her and taking some creative liberties on that. And each class has its own vision of who is Antigone today. So when they write as a class, they divide up the responsibility: two of them per scene in a 10-scene, say, storyboard, and they each write a different part of the story that places Antigone in the world we see today. So they engage with contemporary and social questions, but they need to think about these characters in an empathetic way and in a way that includes context, but also references this classic story from 2,400 years ago. So that’s one example. Another example in our youth company about youth voice is the students have been the last few years commissioned by outside organizations like New York Appleseed and Teacher’s College and other organizations and institutions to write plays about educational politics.

SALMA HASSAN [playing a mother in an excerpt from the Epic student-written play Laundry City]: So what’s the matter?

OLIVIA DUNBAR [daughter]: They’re rezoning our school, and some of the White neighborhoods near here are going to be included in our school zone.

SALMA: And kids aren’t happy about this?

OLIVIA: Well, Abdul thinks it would be good to have White kids in our school. It’s the only way our Black school can get better funding. Lawrence, on the other hand, thinks that we shouldn’t need any White kids if that’s the only way our Black school can get funding.

SALMA: Hmm. And you?

OLIVIA: Well, I don’t care. I just want my friends to be okay!

MELISSA: And they tour all over to conferences and city halls and town halls and they perform for teachers and parents about this issue that they care about.

DAVION OSBOURNE [in another scene from Laundry City]: We need our schools to be diverse, as young people. We are going to grow up in a society that’s diverse and we need to learn how to understand each other, to know each other.

NAKKIA SMALLS: I think the worst part about segregation is that people start to feel like there’s something wrong with them. The worst part of segregation is that young people start to feel like they’re bad. They’re stupid, they’re troublemakers. They’re not worth it. That’s the worst part.

MELISSA: So they perform these plays, but they have to find their way in, and they’ve written these extraordinary pieces that use research and their own voices—

NAKKIA: There are three R’s we need to address. 1. Racial enrollment: How do you choose my school, and how do I make sure I select fairly? 2. Resources: How do you make sure that every single school has the same resources? 3. The last piece is relationships: Once we’re all in the school building, if y’all haven’t met each other yet and there’s racism in the building, we will not talk to each other and learn how to work together. How do you fund teachers to help build clubs that establish relationships across racial lines?

MELISSA: —and integrate them together into a really compelling piece that integrates comedy, as well. So it’s very funny, but also very moving. And they use the comedic game really effectively in each of their pieces.

NAKKIA [in another scene from Laundry City]: 9/11. Never forget! The Holocaust. Never forget! The Titanic! Never forget! Slavery, though? Forget about it! It’s in the past! Is it really?

MELISSA: And those pieces will be performed all over. And they lead the post show discussion, they facilitate those discussions with adults.

OLIVIA [beginning talkback following Laundry City]: So after every show we like to have a talkback discussion with the audience. A question we like to ask here at Epic is: Two weeks from now, you’re sitting in bed, thinking about Laundry City. What’s the one thing you’ll remember the most?

MELISSA: They are the leaders of this experience. That’s really important for us in terms of leadership development for them to create work, to develop their own voices, and then to facilitate discussion and not to be handing it back over to adults, ultimately.

[VO]: The example I’ve been cutting in to illustrate Epic’s process is one of the plays that the youth company has written about segregated schools in New York called Laundry City. The title is based on the stark metaphor of keeping white and colored clothes separate. Before they wrote this play, Epic students conducted interviews with 30 people, from education officials to parents to fellow students, to develop the characters whose perspectives they ultimately embodied on stage. I’ll share full credits and how to find the whole video at the end of the show, but to demonstrate some of the reflection these teen citizens have been doing, here’s a snippet of Epic youth actor Nakkia Smalls during the post-show discussion. 

NAKKIA: I came out thinking about how it’s not only a division or line between Whites and Blacks and Latinos, but it’s also about a governmental line and also like a social line. There’s just so many different aspects of—and residential lines—and so many different complexities to this one issue that you’re never going to have a complete answer. And it’s also about awareness and bringing out and showing it to people like you, and you guys will also talk about how you see this and then it’s just like a cycle, and it just creates awareness. And it’s about having discussions with everyone and others, addressing those hard topics that make people uncomfortable and stir in their seat, but also that make people agree. Why do you agree? But we’ll also put it to the people who are opposed: Why are you opposed? It’s having those conversations about those things.

[VO]: One of the organizations that commissioned Laundry City was New York Appleseed, which advocates for integrated schools and communities. Here’s what New York Appleseed Executive Director David Tipson had to say about Epic students’ work.

[21:03]

DAVID TIPSON: The Epic plays are absolutely the best tool we have for introducing the difficult topics of school segregation and integration in the communities of New York City. These plays are really the most sophisticated treatment of the complexity of the issues and the different feelings around them that you'll ever find.

[VO]: Back to Melissa Friedman.

PETER: Do you have the sense sometimes, or have kids said sometimes, or have their teachers said sometimes that this work allows them to get at, or maybe distill some thoughts and ideas about matters of justice or injustice that hadn’t come up in another way, maybe not even just in school, but that they had not considered or explored?

MELISSA: Well, absolutely. I think that sometimes there’s one or two students in a class who have a lot of knowledge about a particular issue, whether it’s police violence or immigration. And they bring that knowledge to the class, and then suddenly the class is doing more research about that and they’re writing about that and they get engaged and involved. In our 10th grade human rights theatre project, that’s pretty much universally something where they each— I bring in usually about 35 different articles about human rights violations all over the world, in this country, but beyond. And those students select one of the articles as the starting place for a play that they individually write that then is performed by our professional company at the end. And 100% of them, I would say, are writing about an issue or social justice question that they’ve never engaged with before. And many of them have gone on to become activists in those areas, you know, where they’re leading schoolwide fundraisers on that topic. Or they will tell me when they’re in college that they opened up a club about it, you know, and that they engaged in a protest over it. So that’s very exciting. Not all of them, but awareness is that first step. Just knowing about it is one thing. And then activism and becoming a changemaker becomes another thing.

PETER: There’s a temptation sometimes to say, “These teens are apathetic,” and of course all you have to do is work with or talk with students—

MELISSA: Actual teens!

PETER: —to know that that is not the case. But what is often the case is that students can feel that politics is just immense and complicated and immensely complicated. And they feel that way because it is! But if they pick an issue, you know, I mean this is the way it was for me: I got fired up about capital punishment when I was in fifth grade. New York didn’t have a death penalty at that time, so I chose to join the Colorado Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, where my father was. So, you know, I found out about that. But then, you know, that led me to be thinking about the racial inequality of it and the economic inequality of it. And I began to learn about these other things because they’re all connected to this issue. So a kid who gets fired up about dolphins or whales or the influence of pharmaceutical companies—

MELISSA: Mine was baby seals, by the way. I was in fifth grade.

PETER: Yeah?

MELISSA: Yeah.

PETER: But then in high school, didn’t you also do a little environmental action?

MELISSA: Sure. I started the Environmental Club—you’re welcome!—at Westfield High School.

PETER: God bless you.

MELISSA: And uh, it wasn’t received well. I wasn’t so warmly welcomed by my community.

PETER: You were trying to recycle in the ‘80s, was that it?

MELISSA: In the ‘80s, yes, I made a handmade sign and I screamed at several people who threw their lunch in the recyclable can. I made it very clear sign. It was super clear. But they, a lot of them—

PETER: That you then stood next to—

MELISSA: I would scream at them and say, “You know what? I have to pick through this personally.” Because I took the cans to the recycling center in my car and I was like, “I have to pick through your lunch. ‘Cause they want just cans. They don’t want, you know, the mashed potatoes or whatever it is that you threw in there!” They didn’t like it when I yelled at them. I’m sure you’re surprised to hear this—

PETER: I’m glad I’m sitting down.

MELISSA: —but I wasn't very popular in high school.

PETER: Right.

MELISSA: So, um, I mean, I wasn’t the most popular kid ever, but it’s fine. I’m over it now. Uh, so partially anyway! I think that students get very interested. I think that as long as it intersects with their lives, at least at the beginning, at the moment in which they get engaged with social justice questions, that it’s great to begin with something that directly intersects with them and their community in their lives. So, issues around immigration issues, around health issues, around education, around gender and LGBTQ questions really seem to particularly engage students, because they are connected. When our students in the 10th grade project write their human rights play, I spend a whole session on their personal artistic statement where they write a statement of purpose, of why they’re writing the play and what’s personal about the play for them. And they share it, and we sit in a circle and they each share their artistic statement of purpose. [Writing this statement] was an experiment a few years ago, and it turns out to be the most important day for the students when they reflect back on their process, other than the final day when the actors come in and perform their plays for them, which is mind-blowing and awesome. But they say, “You know, my mother went through this thing, or my neighbor went through this thing, or I went through this thing that is connected, and I’m empathizing with this issue, and here’s why I care about it.” And it really drives their process. I think it’s so important for students to have some choice. You know, I come in with ideas, but students need to have agency and choose what they write about too. And they’re often given testing and other things that are—the doors are closed and there aren’t any options. And they have to learn this set of vocabulary, and they have to learn this set of facts, and they’re asked to regurgitate those words and facts back to their teacher and back to the state.

[VO]: One of the truisms about our segregated U.S. education system is that kids in rich schools get to think about ideas, while kids in underfunded schools get to worry about skills they must master before the next high-stakes standardized test. One of the best things about Epic is that they do not accept this aspect of the status quo; indeed, they challenge it every day.

[28:09]

MELISSA: We don’t have expectations that students are going to be professional theatre makers necessarily. We want them to be leaders—whether it’s in the arts or otherwise—and caring citizens that engage in social justice. That’s what we hope for our Epic NEXT youth company. And part of how they prepare to do that is through these touring educational pieces that are making an actual impact on stakeholders and decision makers who are listening to our young people about these critical questions and then making decisions about what they’re gonna do.

NAKKIA [in a scene from Laundry City]: What is the purpose of school?

DAVION: For me, I think school is more than just about education. I think it’s the first step in teaching people how to connect with each other beyond culture, beyond class, beyond race.

SALMA: School should be used as a tool to be able to rise above your income. If you are someone who comes from a family of low income, school should be a driver of success.

[VO]: Before some closing thoughts from Melissa, let me note that “Time’s Up” is a song written and performed by Epic students Joanne, Ciara, Kassandra and Shamiea for their Epic REMIX of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, which they set in the context of the #metoo movement. Inspired by the women who stepped up to expose Harvey Weinstein, they created their own anthem. 

MELISSA: This idea of arts education being something that’s siloed and separate and departmental is something that we’ve challenged, and I wish I saw more of it out in the world. Theatre companies and schools have these drama departments that are separate. And what’s interesting to me is the integration of theatre into the fabric of an organization, or the integration of education into the fabric of a theater. So young people are at the heart of what we do, but we’re a professional theatre company. We make professional theatre. These are not unreconcilable. It’s a holistic approach. And it’s so common for professional theatre companies to talk about their professional work and their education work in a separate breath. They have their students come see their work, yes, but in terms of who is on staff and who is making the work, they’re separated. And for us, it’s all one. The artists who work on our professional stages are in the classroom, are our mentors. And I think that’s been really meaningful and important. And for students to want to go see theatre—and we have a lot of students who go and see theatre; we are helpful in diversifying the audience of the American theatre. So, in order for that to happen, they have to be at the center of an organization. They can’t be on the margins, because the students we work with spend a lot of time in the margins. So let’s not place them in the margins of a theatrical organization. I spent a lot of years as a teaching artist in organizations that did that, that are wonderful organizations in terms of their theatre-making practice. But I would love to see much more integration in holistic approach overall.

[VO]: My guess is that you might be interested in checking out an Epic performance or two yourself. Well if you’re in the greater NYC area, or planning a trip in the coming weeks, here are a few coming attractions!

[32:09]

MELISSA: In terms of what we have coming up with that people can engage with and see is we have our Youth Theatre Festival, which is going to be running March 5th through 23rd at the Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row. Over the course of three weeks, you can see the educational touring pieces Nothing About Us and Overdrive, which are both incredible extraordinary pieces of work written and devised and performed by our youth company. You can see the REMIX that is being devised and created in the Bronx on Julius Caesar or this REMIX of Macbeth set in the pharmaceutical industry in a fictional Latin American country coming up in March. And so those events are all free, and one of the things that I think is really exciting is when we have a mix of audience that are family members and also theater-going members and also members of the education community as well, all in the audience. Some people know the people on stage and some people don’t know the people on stage, and that’s important for our students to have a platform to speak to people who don’t know them. So having people attend that would be wonderful.

PETER: And they can find information about all those on Epic website.

MELISSA: Yes. And our social media. We have the Instagram and all of the things.

PETER: Insta …

MELISSA: The Insta and the Facebook and the Twitter.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! If you’ve missed March 2019 by the time you’re hearing this, just check out the Epic Theatre Ensemble website linked on this episode’s show page for upcoming Epic attractions. Thanks so much to Melissa Friedman for taking the time to talk, and to all the talented visionary folk at Epic for the amazing work you do. The play Laundry City was written by Olivia Dunbar, Vickandy “Randy” Figueroa, Jeremiah Green Jr., Melysa Hierro, and Davion Osbourne. The performance we heard featured Olivia Dunbar, Jeremiah Green Jr., Salma Hassan, Davion Osbourne, and Nakkia Smalls. For more about the ancient relationship between drama and democracy, check out my conversation with Oskar Eustis (episode 011). Thanks as always to Shayfer James for theme music, and thanks to you for listening and recommending Point of Learning to anyone you know curious about what and how and why we learn. Next stop: Cuba! 

Episode 018 Transcript

Listening Room with Jonathan Hiam (New Year 2019)

SARAH MURPHY: Hi, this is Sarah Murphy, school librarian and teacher of English and theatre. You are listening to the Point of Learning podcast with my pal and fellow library lover, Peter Horn.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, the practice of listening.

JONATHAN HIAM: You have a moment where you hear something and you know you now hear it because you’ve learned how to listen for it.

[VO]: The practice of listening to music, in this case recorded music, can open us up to all kinds of things.

JONATHAN: It’s permitting yourself to be vulnerable, which is I think, a foundational component to sympathy and I think it’s a foundational component to allowing your mind to be changed. When we’re really dealing with real problems and we’re really dealing with real human experience, we need to be open to transformation at any level.

[01:32]

[VO]: For seven weeks at the end of 2018, the Library for the Performing Arts in New York City, a magical branch of the New York Public Library on the plaza at Lincoln Center, right next to the Metropolitan Opera House, undertook a wonderful experiment in public art. The Astor Gallery transformed into a great listening room arrayed with comfortable seating, inviting everyone, free of charge, to come in, take a load off, and listen to selected recordings culled from their immense sound archives. In honor of that experiment, this episode of Point of Learning will blaze an experimental trail of our own. We’ve got a guest, Jonathan Hiam, who will come back to do a standard interview for another episode sometime in the future. Today, however, Dr. Hiam, the Curator of Music and Recorded Sound at the library, will be our tour guide for a taste of the experience he and his team spearheaded in the exhibit they called Listening @ The Library. Imagine a large room, clean and white, but very inviting. If you’ve ever entered the Library for the Performing Arts from 10th Avenue, you may know it as the Astor Gallery, but you may never have seen it quite like this: 9 immense beanbag chairs in various colors are arrayed like the squares of a tic-tac toe board on a large area rug with thick gray shag. The lighting from cans on the ceiling alternates cool and warm, with red, blue, green, and amber gels filtering the mood. Panels of gray acoustical tile six feet high snake along two sides of the wall to maximize the acoustical experience for listeners. The room is cozy and clean, public but set up for individual comfort as well as shared enjoyment. On three squat columns toward the front of the room sit two speakers and a record player that is not actually being used for playback but helps to unify the feel of the space. You may not notice at first how carefully designed the floor plan is, such that visitors who use wheelchairs can also enjoy fully what it has to offer. That’s thanks to the skill of designer Caitlin Whittington, who made sure that the room would be comfortable for everybody who visited, which was important to the curators.

[04:10]

JONATHAN: Most people feel comfortable going into a space that they can feel safe and relaxed, and therefore be open to whatever experience …

[VO]: This experience, you will notice, is not one of easy listening. While there are plenty of popular tracks in the library’s collection of 700,000 recordings, the offerings showcased in Listening @ The Library were full of surprises and unusual challenges for the ear and brain. The week I visited featured work by late 20th century genius composer-performer Arthur Russell. I want to note now my thanks to Steve Knutson of Audika Records and Tom Lee of the estate of Arthur Russell for allowing Point of Learning to use excerpts from these rare tracks. This one, called “See Through,” begins with the composer singing and playing cello—but he keeps you on your toes! Arthur Russell happens to be an artist I have learned something about and fallen in love with since Jonathan introduced me to his work last year. But the point of this library exhibit isn’t to educate through biographical facts or written words of any kind. There is a playlist posted identifying the tracks, but the focus is aural, auditory. Now Jonathan is somebody with advanced degrees in music, so he is hardly intimidated by new sounds. I asked him how he would advise the average listener to begin to get into music fairly different from what they’re used to.

[06:45]

JONATHAN: Whatever it is that stands out to you that catches your attention, that you notice, is the place to start to learn how to listen, because you can ask why did that stand out to you? What about that caught my attention? That’s it. You don’t need to—

PETER: Like when a particular instrument comes in, or there’s a sound pattern or just something unexpected?

JONATHAN: Anything! If you notice something—something just catches your ear, your whatever—you may have no idea how to describe it, so that’s the first step: How can I describe using my own terms and my own language so to understand what is it that I’m hearing, that I’m noticing? And you can take that further: Why is it of interest to me? You can just start to notice and observe the world [of the music] as you’re learning to know it. It makes a case for hope, for example, because it is a real experience you can have where things are, should be sort of ancient about it sort of revealed to you. You have a moment where you hear something and you know you now hear it because you've learned how to listen for it and that's different. And so that's like, um, what would you call it? Like a transferable skill, right? It's something you can take to all aspects of all arenas in which you're listening.

[VO]: Let’s hang out a minute in the listening room, shall we? When you enter on the second Monday in December, the space has just one visitor, a woman in her early 20s selecting the optimal Instagram filter for her self-portrait. You take a seat on one of the upholstered benches in the back. One hour later, a dance student from Juilliard across the street drops his backpack and nonchalantly flips himself onto one of the giant beanbag chairs. The young woman leaves as two 6th-grade girls charge wide-eyed into the center of the room, amazed that their trip with Mom to the library has taken this unexpected turn. You can’t imagine this is the music they normally hear, but they seem totally into it. Soon they settle into homework while Mom checks her phone. After about 10 minutes, Mom sets down the phone, leans back into her beanbag and, assessing that you over here with your clipboard and notepad are not much of a threat, closes her eyes. We’re used to hearing live music with strangers, of course. Not so much recorded music. We attend performances of recorded film together at the movie theater, but we’re divided by rigid rows, and increasingly encouraged by sumptuous La-Z-Boys with gargantuan cupholders to consider ourselves lone consumers, each on our own island. Listening @ The Library aims to disrupt this feeling. This is designed as a public space dedicated to the practice of listening.

[VO]: Featuring recordings from the New York Public Library’s Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, among the largest and most diverse sound archives in the world, these playlists are drawn from .7 million recordings of spoken word, radio broadcasts, field recordings, live performance, and music found in the Archives. According to the mission statement posted where you enter, Listening @ the Library argues for the “reinvigoration of a communal listening experience, one which encourages the safe and free exchange of ideas through sounds and embraces the simultaneity of diverse worldview brought to the room by any given listener at any given time.”

[11:55]

JONATHAN: I think the premise of that is simply to make space for people to listen in groups simultaneously, and listen to recorded sound because it’s a different experience than live performance. Bringing people together, having a physical space to experience the things that we take care of at the Library in particular, and to have these kinds of open dialogue, subjectless dialogues, unproblematized sound. An open free space just gives people a place to have a communal experience with strangers in a way that’s different than a communal experience with strangers online, for example. Think of the most basic example is how we put it in this context, how we consume commercial music. Okay, so in 1975, you’re still pretty likely to be listening with your friends in your room on a stereo system. You would listen in an open room to music with other people as an activity. People still do this, of course, but it’s more likely that people are consuming music through their headphones or—this isn’t meant to be a snobby thing—or they’re listening through speakers off of their phone or their laptop that so distort what the audio really can do. It’s been reduced to a very singular experience in a way that doesn’t necessarily interact with larger groups of people. So the notion of the hi-fi culture that existed: that experience was about open rooms with big speakers, creating the highest quality playback sound that was meant to be enjoyed in the open with others. Or by yourself, but you know, that was just because those guys are in their basement a lot.

[VO]: We’ve been hearing some of Russell’s piece “In the Corn Belt,” a 25-minute vamp featuring vocalist Julius Eastman. For this last segment, I want to go back to “City Park,” the ensemble performance we started with, recorded from a live broadcast on WKCR in December of 1973. This is an early piece by Arthur Russell, which his composition teacher Charles Wuorinen described as “the most unattractive thing” he’d ever heard. I mention this comment, because it points to one real benefit of hanging out and listening to something that at first we don’t think we like. It is absolutely, as Jonathan said, “a transferable skill,” one very helpful when we’re talking politics or other areas of shared concern.

JONATHAN: It’s permitting yourself to be vulnerable, which is, I think, a foundational component to sympathy, and I think it’s a foundational component to allowing your mind to be changed. I think that that is a risk that we don’t take very often, for all kinds of normal sorts of reasons, you know, but I think when we’re really dealing with real problems and when we’re really dealing with real human experience, we need to be open to transformation at any level.

[17:06]

[VO]: I asked Jonathan to compare the skills involved in really listening to music vs. really listening to people.

JONATHAN: I think listening to people is more advanced. I think to truly listen to somebody, they have to feel as if you’ve really listened to them and that’s— I don’t know how else to describe that, but I think many people probably have had that experience. You know when someone’s listening to you.

[VO]: We’re gonna be just a couple more minutes here, after which I’ll provide fuller gratitude, but let me take a moment now to thank you for joining us on this quick trip Listening @ The Library. Whether or not you choose to set up a listening room of your own for a day or a week at your office or school or next conference, I wish you many new sounds and good ideas worth your careful attention in the new year.

[Phil Kline performs credits for WKCR radio broadcast of Arthur Russell’s “City Park” in ensemble performance, December 1973]

[20:28]

JONATHAN: That’s what we came up with. Something simple, something inviting, something that people could come in and no matter what was playing, they could— It didn't matter! They can sit there and listen, because it’s meant to just let people sit there and be themselves and listen to this. And sometimes they interact, sometimes they don’t, but everybody’s able to sit there, and nobody beats anybody up or screams or turns their back on them. So, there’s something to that.

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show. My great thanks to Dr. Jonathan Hiam, and all the leadership and staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Props to designer Caitlin Whittington and the building staff, security guards, and everyone else who made this possible. Special thanks again to Steve Knutson of Audika Records and Tom Lee of the estate of Arthur Russell for allowing Point of Learning to use clips from these rare tracks. To hear more Arthur Russell, check the links on the show page. Thanks as always to our resident composer-performer Shayfer James, who lets us use instrumental versions of “Weight of the World” and “Villainous Thing” for intro and outro, and thanks to you for listening, sharing, subscribing to, and rating Point of Learning. Please tell one friend curious about what and how and why we learn just what we’re up to round here. Back soon with my interview with Epic Theatre Ensemble co-founder and co-artistic director Melissa Friedman. You’re gonna love it!   

Episode 017 Transcript

On Moose River Farm with Anne T. Phinney (Thanksgiving 2018)

KRISTEN RHOADES HORN: Hi, I'm Kristen Horn, owner and chief dognanny of Dognanny in Buffalo, New York. I thought I had the dream job until I learned about Anne Phinney and Moose River Farm. Here's a little bit more about that today on the Point of Learning podcast.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s Thanksgiving special: Anne Phinney, who has been crazy about horses for nearly as long as she can remember.

ANNE PHINNEY: There is some special moment when that enormous, that long face and those beautiful eyes and that gorgeous mane and for lock that grows out between the ears. It hits like a drug. I mean, it is like the first time that you take some kind of addictive drug that is going to affect you the rest of your life.

[VO]: These days at Moose River Farm, which she and her husband Rod run in the Central Adirondack region of upstate NY, Anne offers sessions in equi-reflection, opportunities to connect with horses in deep ways.

ANNE: You’ve heard the term breaking a horse. When we do that, we evoke fear and we make them fearful of us. But if we learn to use our body language to communicate with them the way that they communicate with each other, it is a powerful connection that is established between the horse and the person.

[VO]: For 25 years as an elementary and middle school teacher, some of Anne’s favorite moments in the classroom meant the difference between kids learning about animals and learning from animals …

ANNE: I can pull out a book and show them, okay, this is how you take care of an iguana, and we’re not going to have an iguana, but this is what you would do to take care of an iguana. It would certainly not have the same impact as going into the classroom and handling the iguana that you love so much. You know this animal. You go home to your dinner table at night and share stories about that animal with your family. Your family now becomes involved: “How is Spike today? What did he do? Did you get to walk him in the hallway?” The iguana has provided that extra extra nugget, that extra kernel that we are always looking for an education to really hook the kids together, to make them work together as a group and I'm so grateful for that experience.

[VO]: All this, plus my trek with two beautiful llamas through the woods, coming right up. So much to be grateful for! That I should make my way to Moose River Farm, about 50 miles north of Utica, NY, in the Adirondacks, was suggested to me by my friend and mentor Paula Roy, star of episode 003. I only needed to hear a little about what Anne had done with animals in her classroom before I was very interested in talking with her. But that was just the beginning! Anne has written a memoir about the fascinating journey from her childhood in Jenkintown, PA, just outside of Philly all the way to Moose River Farm with her husband Rod and their many chickens and geese, five llamas, two dogs, three goats, two donkeys, two tortoises, seven horses, and one glorious Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Fiona. (You’ll hear from Fiona in just a minute.) In the memoir, Anne tracks her development from a girl who had a fairytale love of horses to an accomplished horseman, with deep knowledge as well as love of horses. When she was teaching at the Town of Webb School in the village of Old Forge, NY, she believed firmly in integrating animals into the class routines of students, holding that animals can be powerful co-teachers at least, and when it comes to learning empathy and compassion, maybe the best teachers. Anne’s book is called Finding My Way to Moose River Farm. Subtitled Living with Animals in the Adirondacks, it was published in 2013. (There’s a link on the show page, when you want to check it out.) To paint a picture of her routine in the barn each morning, I asked her to read from the end of the first chapter. Before she retired from teaching in June 2018, this is a glimpse of what she did each day before heading to school to work a full day with elementary or middle school students. As promised, a star player in this passage is Fiona, the Phinneys’ Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.

ANNE: “With my coats, boots, hat, and gloves in place, I’m also ready to go outside with Fiona. After her breakfast, she stops to clean up stray seed under the bird feeder. Then she and I make our way out to the barn. The cold air blasts our faces. I can’t wait until spring. I act as Fiona’s plow through the several inches of snow that have accumulated overnight. By walking first, I lower the height of the snow so her belly will not freeze. She grunts softly with each step she takes behind me.

“At the barn, I reach for the light switch, and am greeted by a high-pitched whinny from the last stall on the right. Sandi, a small Trakhener gelding, is hungry. He reminds me not to forget him back there in the far corner. Some of the other horses greet me with low rumbles, indicating that they too are hungry. I begin my ritual distribution of hay to each stall. This is when I make my daily inspection of each horse's condition, and appetite, indications of how they're feeling today. When I lift the lid on the grain bin, Fiona is at my side, as if on cue. She grinds her snout into my ankle, a signal for me to drop a handful of sweet feet on the floor for her. The horses’ grain is already pre-measured from the night before to save precious time and to assure prompt service. I am relieved to witness each horse dive into the grain with a healthy appetite.

“Next, I hear a soft bleating from the eleventh stall. Three goats jump up to peer over the door. They are hungry too. After feeding them their own ration, I close the bin. Fiona has finished her handful of grain and is now making her rounds, checking out the stalls of the horses who sling feed out of their bins. I hear her protest with high pitched squeals when Easau, a bay gelding, lowers his head to sniff at her.

“I check the clock to assure myself that I am still on schedule before I begin cleaning the first of ten stalls. Mucking stalls is, for me, a form of meditation at this hour of the morning, just ninety minutes before I begin my professional day. The mindless chore allows my thoughts to simmer as I plan for the coming hours at school. Before I know it, I am emptying the wheelbarrow on my final trip to the manure pile behind the barn. I check every water bucket to make sure it will last the morning and split up a flake of hay for the goats.

“‘Have a good day, my loves,’ I sing before turning off the light switch and heading back to the house.

“Fiona, who is still busy cleaning up bits of grain on the barn floor, begins to mumble in short contented grunts. Left in the dark, she trots to catch up with me. The bitter cold forgotten, I have had my barn fix, as satisfying as a hit that calms the hard-core drug user. The difference is that my dose results in an appreciative and healthy high.

“Across the driveway, I see the sun hoisting itself up over the trees. Its arrival begins earlier each morning now, a true sign the days are heading towards spring. A mourning dove calls overhead, breaking the eerie silence of the past three months. I smile thanks to God, who has blessed me with these gifts. I deeply appreciate where I am today on a beautiful horse farm in the Adirondack woods. My childhood dreams have come true. It is no accident that I am here. Years of hard work, determination, and blind faith have paid off. Still, I am amazed at how my life has turned out.” [pp. 12-13]

[VO]: Anne Phinney reading from the opening chapter of Finding My Way to Moose River Farm.

PETER: One of the experiences you offer here at Moose River Farm is called equi-reflection. What does that mean?

ANNE: Equi-reflection is a term that I coined because I feel like my whole life I have looked at my reflection in my interactions with horses. Equi-reflections, physically, are non-riding sessions with horses. The person remains with feet on the ground and they use their body language to interact and communicate with the horse. Horses seem to accept that we are not going to prey on them. Occasionally that predator fear surfaces: if we throw a saddle on a on a young horse that isn’t properly trained, and we tighten it up and we chase them around, if we try to break their spirit. You’ve heard the term breaking a horse. When we do that, we evoke fear and we make them fearful of us. But if we learn to use our body language to communicate with them the way that they communicate with each other, it is a powerful connection that is established between the horse and the person. Mine is not the only program. There are lots of people that are using this kind of interaction to provide therapy for people with post-traumatic stress—

PETER: I was going to ask, because I’m familiar with equine therapy, I mean I’m aware that it exists—not that I’ve seen it in practice. The idea is that the horse by its presence can—

ANNE: —soothe. Exactly. Well, I think that it’s that same ingredient that horses have that inspires girls to nurture them. Nurturing makes you feel good! The research shows that endorphins are released, including oxytocin, which is the love hormone. They make you feel good. So if you’re a person with post-traumatic stress or if you’re grieving the loss of somebody, if you are depressed … If we can provide a hiccup, an interruption in that devastating emotion that actually makes you feel good, there’s hope. All of a sudden, you have felt hopeful, and maybe it enables you to seek other therapies that can bring you out of your despair.

PETER: And the kind of communication that you would do … Is that touching. Is it eye contact?

ANNE: People who engage in equi-reflections learn the language of the horse. I put them in a position to be the head of the herd. I give them the tools that they need to be the head of a herd of horses, and those tools are expressed through their body. They are standing on their two feet. Now what I’m explaining comes several sessions in, and it really depends on how much horse experience you have. If you’re somebody who’s never been around horses, we’re not going to do this the first time. You’re going to learn how to handle them and just be in their space and not be fearful of them, to stand with them and understand that they’re going to move around. They’re living things, so they might move into you. They might move away, and for some people that’s several sessions: just being in the presence of the horse and trying to calm your fear of them. You’re not a leader if you’re fearful of them, so we can’t go to the next step until we break through that. Eventually, what I am trying to get people to the point of being able to do is to go into my arena with the horse loose, and they are going to kick up the energy between them and the horse. So to do that, they either take a lunge whip, which makes a cracking sound, or a big plastic bag, and they chase the horse around the ring. It’s very playful. It’s galloping and the horse is. It’s playful. It’s sheer joy. They are reacting because horses react to loud sounds and snapping, so we’ve raised this energy level—

PETER: But your horses are also well trained enough to know that they’re not really trying to scare them or hurt them.

ANNE: Exactly. However, this is something that would work with a horse who’d never had this done before. So I try to convey that it’s not really a training thing. We’re just tapping into—and as much as I love horses, their brain isn’t that big! And so it’s not really a training thing. We are getting them to react by encouraging them to do natural behaviors. But what they are simulating when they stand in the middle of the ring and they chase the horse, they're simulating a wild herd. What happens in wild herds. Wild herds are mares and babies. They have one stallion that protects this band and he’s just on patrol. He’s just making sure that there’s nobody else coming in to steal his girls. But the family unit is down in the mare and babies, and one of those mares will be the head mare. If there’s a little baby, a—usually it’s a male, a little stud colt who’s misbehaving (mounting other mares, kicking at mares, kicking other babies), the lead mare will take it over. The head mare will take it upon herself to chase him on the perimeter of the herd. Well, it’s dangerous out there! So that’s what we’re simulating. We’re keeping the animal moving and we're not allowing him to connect with us. That’s what this mare and the wild herd is doing. She keeps him out there. It’s like discipline time-out. But it’s scary out there! If you're not behaving yourself, we won’t protect you and you're not allowed back in here. So that’s what we do out in the ring. We just keep the horse chasing around. And eventually what happens is the horse starts to signal some things. They’ve turned their ear in towards the person. They’re looking, they’re trying to read. As soon as the person chasing sees the ears start to turn towards them, you know that you have their attention. So now you have to concentrate on your body language. And so, what I instruct people to do is you have to stay. You have to be a leader. You have to stand straight and look confident. You can’t do this [slouches] and you have to maintain eye contact with them. Just keep looking at there and until they are really looking at you. You get an ear, then you get licking and chewing. You can really see the horse: they lick their lips and they’re chewing and you can see that in their profile as they go around. I’m really simplifying. There is really a lot more to this, but these are the big moments, the milestones in the session. Then the horse will eventually start looking at the person with two eyes. They’ll be galloping around, but they keep turning their head. And at that point we reduce the energy. We “quiet the whip,” I say, or quiet the bag, and you just wait. Some horses will gallop around for another minute or so, but eventually they slow down and they stop, and they turn and they face the person and they will walk to the person. It is a magical moment. I get choked up when I talk about it. People are not prepared. This prey animal walks over to them. They completely understand, “Okay, I’m safe with you. You are going to protect me. You are the leader.” And the horse will come over and stand with the person. The person touches them, feels them, smells them. It’s a connection. It’s a connection that is so beautiful. It’s not like the connection with your dog. Dogs are liars. They love us no matter what. They’re not looking for body language. They just want to be all over us. They don’t care what kind of day we’ve had. This horse is an animal who’s reading, who’s saying, “Okay, I trust you. I can trust you now.” And that’s a very powerful moment, and from that moment on, the horse stands at the person's side. They walk around in the ring together. The horse follows them. It’s very amazing and I have seen children, they carry this with them in their daily lives. They work with this big animal, and the animal bonds with them. They walk around and then they’re able to take those skills into their relationships with humans. It really does have a profound effect. It doesn't replace traditional therapies, but it takes that human worry “Can I trust you?” If a horse walks over to you? I mean, nothing says “I trust you” more than the horse approaching and then you being able to lead the horse with no lead. I mean there’s no lead rope.

PETER: And then by extension that you are trustworthy.

ANNE: You are worthy, you are worthy and, and people feel good. I tell people my only goal is to make you feel good, to make you leave here with a big smile on your face and know that you did something: you communicated with an animal that we are really not designed to communicate with!

PETER: At one point in your book Finding My Way to Moose River Farm, you write about your high school English teacher, Mrs. Mosley, who seemed to know you well. She knew you loved to write, she knew you loved your horse Promise, and at a critical point she asked whether it might be possible to bring that horse to college with you, a transformative suggestion for you at that point in your life. Because this is a show that, among other things, seeks to honor the vocation of teaching, I like to ask guests about a teacher who had a strong impression on you.

ANNE: Mrs. Mosley was the most interesting Quaker lady, and I only bring up Quaker because my education was at a Quaker school, and she was a Quaker teacher. She was the most down-to-earth … a very sophisticated, intelligent woman, but a woman also who lived very simply. And I remember that’s what made an impression upon me. She was not a woman who needed to have makeup to be beautiful. And yet I thought she was the most beautiful woman that I’d ever met, because she was just so lovely, so inspiring, so caring. Really cared about me. And I’ve never forgotten her. In fact, I just heard from her maybe two or three years ago. About my book. Somebody—one of my classmates must have gotten my book, and because they still belong to the same Quaker meeting as Mrs. Mosley, they were able to give it to her, and she wrote me the loveliest letter. She remembered! I guess this is what made her a wonderful teacher: She remembered me. We’re talking 45 years later. She certainly had lots of students, but she remembered this horse-crazy teenager who was so fearful about leaving, going off to college without a horse. And she was probably the most real person that I ever knew at the time, at a time when girls are meeting lots of people who are not real. And girls are trying to be somebody other than who they are supposed to be. It’s a theme in my life now, and it’s always been a theme for me as a teacher to just be a real person, not try to be something to impress people. Just be your real self. And I owe that to Mrs. Mosley for sure.

PETER: Would you be willing to read a passage?

ANNE: Sure. Okay. “My friends were prettier, skinnier, and more athletic than I was, a typical teen sentiment, as I now know. But all this changed when I was with horses. With horses I exited the prison of my psyche and physique. With horses I enjoyed being in the company of creatures who didn’t care about my appearance. With horses, I was happy. I inhaled their wonderful aroma, ran my fingers through their plush coats, and brushed my lips across the soft spot between their nostrils. Horses soothed the frustration I felt at home. I lived in the moment only at the barn and spent the rest of my time counting the hours and minutes until I could return.” [p. 17]

PETER: Your relationship with horses was central to your development. In another spot you said, “At a time when many girls experience a sense of self-loathing, horse ownership elevated my self-esteem.” [p. 40] You refer to “the incredible relationship between girls and horses.” [p. 104] Unquote. As the husband of someone who was also a little “horse crazy” when she was young, and who even today has a soft spot for wallets, t-shirts, and bookmarks emblazoned with horses, I wanted to ask what it is about girls and horses. Can you share your take about what’s likely to be more special for girls than boys?

ANNE: I think it’s two things. I think first of all, horses bring out the nurturing abilities in young girls. Nurturing is something that I think is more on the surface in women than it is in men, and when you have a young child who loves animals in general, there is some special moment when that enormous, that long face and those beautiful eyes and that gorgeous mane and forelock that grows out between the ears. It hits them like a drug. I mean it is like the first time that you take some kind of addictive drug that is going to affect you the rest of your life. That’s the first thing, that nurturing component component, but it grabs hold of them because they’re not really old enough to nurture a child, or to nurture and take care of something all by themselves—

PETER: I like that you said that it was closer to the surface because of course this nurturing aspect is something that culturally gets reinforced more easily with with girls than it is with boys. It’s certainly possible with boys, but boys don’t get to have that part of them honored. It’s the part that’s like, you know, breaking stuff and hitting things with 2x4s, that’s the part that we acknowledge—a little bit rough and ready—

ANNE: And girls take care.

PETER: They show this aspect and they’ve had it reinforced, and then they have this place where they are ready and receptive with this beautiful big animal.

ANNE: That’s the second thing. This is a large, powerful animal, and girls who are addicted to them learn very quickly that you can tame and keep this animal calm, and that it really wants to be with you. Horses are gregarious; their relationship with us really shouldn’t work. They are a prey animal. They should be terrified of us coming up at them with our bi-scopic eyes that are really predator-like, and yet they want to be with us. They’ve chosen to be with us. Now present that to a girl. You can be with this animal, you can ride it, you can take care of it, you can brush it, and that’s caring for something. That’s the first little seeds of their future as nurturers, or teachers, or whatever they choose to be when they’re interacting with other people. It builds compassion, builds empathy. But in a natural way. We've provided young girls with the animal and the relationship; the horse does the rest. The horse creates this lure, and girls are just drawn to that.

[VO]: Sidebar: Trek in the Adirondacks with Some Beautiful Llamas.

ANNE: These are the ones that we trek with. I’ve started a trekking business, and people come and walk llamas in the Adirondacks!

PETER: So the guys stay separate?

ANNE: Llamas have a very interesting reproductive cycle. The females don’t come into heat. It’s the presence of the male that brings them into season, so that means that the boys will pester and pester and pester them and it’s just—I have to give the girls break!

PETER: So you have people come and then they go for walks?

ANNE: Yep. We would put a lead rope and they walk in the woods—

PETER: Is it a trail that—

ANNE: In fact we can do it. It’s actually not raining right now. I would be more than happy to take you on a llama trek. You’ve never experienced anything like it!

[VO]: As a public service reminder, I’d like to state that Point of Learning does not endorse goods or services we don’t believe in. So if this mini-segment on the llama walk seems a tiny bit infomercial, here’s the deal: to me, walking a llama on Moose River Farm is like having the chance to hang out with a unicorn. I know. Pretty cool.

PETER: So South America, so do they do any of the famous water storage that camels are known for?

ANNE: No. They do conserve water, but the thing about camels: people believe that camels are desert animals and that whole water thing, but actually they are harsh weather animals. They can deal with bitter cold and very, very warm climates. Lots of water / no water. The camel’s adaptation is that hump that’s just made of fat, and fat stores water. Though this animal doesn’t have that adaptation.

VOICEOVER: The Moose River Farm website is handy on the show page for this episode or at mooseriverfarm.com. One word.

ANNE: Oh, they’re just eager to get back to the barn. The barn’s right around the corner.

PETER: Yeah, I imagine it’s not comfortable. It does get wet, probably.

ANNE: Well they don’t feel it down to the skin. Their hair’s so thick, so it protects them against wind and wet. That’s why they do so well in the Andes.

PETER: Congratulations on your recent retirement after 25 years! As an educator, I was struck reading the parts of Finding My Way to Moose River Farm where you talked about the animals that you brought into the classroom and how you used them to enliven the curriculum. So when you brought animals into the—I think it was sixth grade you were teaching when you started—you made a conscious choice not to go for the cute and cuddly kind but you chose instead to begin with iguanas and rats, whom you called “inspiring teachers” for your students. What kinds of things did the animals teach your students?

ANNE: I was not prepared for the lessons that the animals were going to come up with. That was such a joy to watch, because I was even surprised, but probably the most important lesson that they taught was how to work together. How the students could work together to care for the animal, how to parent. They wanted to parent the animals. They wanted to protect, to provide for them. They wanted to research and learn how to take care of them so that they would live a long time, and live a healthy, happy life under the care of the students. That isn’t something I can teach. I can pull out a book and show them, “Okay, this is how you take care of an iguana. And we’re not gonna have an iguana, but this is what you would do to take care of an iguana. It would certainly not have the same impact as going into the classroom and handling the iguana that you love so much. You know this animal, you go home to your dinner table at night and share stories about that animal with your family. Your family now becomes involved: “How was the iguana today?” Our first iguana was named Spike. “How was Spike today? What did he do? Did you get to walk him in the hallway?” I mean, these are lessons that I didn’t teach. My lessons were more about the care, and what we have to do and I’m picking the person who was going to walk them in the hall that day or who was going to wash out their dishes or wash the tray that they went to the bathroom on. That was my job. But the iguanas provided that extra nugget, that extra kernel that we are always looking for in education to really hook the kids together, to make them work together as a group and I’m so grateful for that experience, because it wasn’t one I was really planning on, but that was a pleasant surprise.

PETER: Did you find that the kids sometimes developed connections with the animals that they did not so easily develop with people, with their classmates or with adults?

ANNE: Definitely. Yes. I think I can relate to that because I had that same experience with horses. I felt very comfortable in the presence of horses. I didn't worry about what I looked like. I didn't fret about the clothes that I was wearing, but I was interacting with something that I knew enjoyed me being there. We could argue: do they love people? And I know that love is a strong word. I realize it’s a human word, but they certainly were reacting to my actions, and it made me feel good, and I think that’s what children get from working with animals, or being around animals. They make them feel good because they come to them, they come into their space, they curl up on their lap, they relax when the child holds them, they give feedback to the children that they are worthy and that they, they are glad to be spending time with them.

PETER: At one point you said you learned more in the barn about teaching than in any education class. How do you think your understanding of animals has enhanced your ability to connect with students? (I’m actively resisting jokes about the less than fully domesticated aspects of middle school students, the thought of whom in class-sized groups would terrify me as a high school teacher!) What is it?

ANNE: Patience. With all animals: if you come at them with both barrels loaded and you shove all this information at them from your human point of view, you’re going to create a terrified animal who is not going to learn—can’t learn! Who is so concerned about what’s going to happen to them with this predator out of control. You can train them that way, but you will train them through fear. And that’s more explosive, more dangerous. The horse that’s trained from a fearful point of view—smacked when they do something wrong, or yelled at when they do something wrong. You might train them and get the point across, but they’ll never be relaxed around you. I think that’s how children learn too. Now, have I made mistakes? Oh certainly! But I can always relate to a fearful animal when I’m working with a child. Children need to know exactly what you expect from them. Horses need to know exactly what you’re asking. What do you want me to do? If I’m riding a horse and I ask them with my body to go from the walk to the trot and they don’t know what that means, then I might end up using a crop and smacking them and now there’s a fear involved, and do something! Just go faster and maybe that’s what she wants. That’s not the same thing as just waiting. Making sure that they understand exactly what your body is asking them to do. Well, our students are the same.

PETER: Sometimes they buck in response to that, right?

ANNE: That fear, what else can I do? I have to react somehow. I’m fearful and I’m afraid of you. I never wanted students to feel that way. I wanted them to know exactly what my expectations were. I wanted them to know what it would look like when they had completed it, how they would know that they had had succeeded and I needed to be patient to wait for them to process all of that.

[VO]: Among the lessons Mrs. Phinney’s classroom animals taught was that death happens. When one of the rats would need to be put down, for instance, it was an honor for two of her students to be selected to bring the animal across the street to the vet. I asked Anne to tell me a little about that.

ANNE: Death is going to happen to everybody. It’s the end of a life, and we as humans are actually— We can cope with it. It’s not the end of the world for us. It’s very sad. It’s devastating. It’s all these emotions, but it’s also in honor of the one who needs to die. The rat who is suffering right now. I love the saying, “We have to take her pain and make it our own.” That’s what we need to do when we take the responsibility of any animal. I have this small moment of melancholy when a puppy arrives at the house, or a new goat, or a new horse, when a new animal arrives on our property, because we keep them until the last day. There is this moment of, you know, at some point, I will be saying goodbye to you, but I can’t control it. I can’t make that not happen, so I have to accept it and I think that having animals, being closely involved with them, loving them so much … It’s going to come to an end, but you’re going to have the opportunity to get through with what you have: the coping skills. These children, when they took the rat to the vet, they would come home back to the classroom. They would tell the other children what had happened. There was healing there, there were tears, there was sadness, there was grief, but in a couple of days they had worked through that. That’s coping.

PETER: Loss is, of course, a central part of what we have to contend with as human beings. But some kids, of course, by the time of sixth grade, haven’t necessarily contended with losing a grandparent or a dog or whatever it’s going to be. Do you have a sense that this smaller experience with death helped to prepare a little more?

ANNE: Oh, I’m sure. I’m certainly not going to say that the death of the rat is even close to the loss of a grandparent, but I think that it did awaken those emotions. It awakened the process of grief, and it showed them that they can get through on the other side. And on the other side of grief are memories and smiles. Wonderful feelings when you remember the events that you had with that rat or person. So I think none of us are ever going to avoid a lifetime … without loss, so when there are opportunities to experience it safely and and with the ability to talk about it, express your feelings about it. You can’t ask for more than that.

[VO]: I can't ask for more than a podcast project that puts me in contact with people like Anne Finney, let alone the dozens of beautiful animals I spoke with, petted, hugged, and walked on a magical afternoon last month. As Anne says at the end of her book, “Moose River Farm is more than a physical space. It is a lifestyle, a church, and a state of mind.” Peace of bounds here, “and all that is bad in the world is dominated by all that is good.” [p. 258] Amen. And Happy Thanksgiving to everybody! My great thanks to Anne and Rod Phinney for showing me around their amazing home. All the animal sounds featured on the episode came from residents at Moose River Farm, with the exception of Fiona’s solos, which were voiced by a stunt pig working on YouTube. Speaking of YouTube, the video versions of episodes are not always available as soon as the audio, because they take longer to produce. This one, however, I couldn’t resist making at the same time, so check it out to see what these glorious animals look like. Better yet, schedule a visit to Moose River Farm, that’s mooseriverfarm.com. Special thanks to Jason Grant for his guitar music on this episode, and thanks as always to Shayfer James for theme musics. I give thanks also to you for listening, sharing, discussing as a faculty—I’m looking at you, Goshen!—and subscribing to, and rating this podcast. Please take just a second to do that now—five stars!

Episode 016 Transcript

Leading in Sync with Jill Harrison Berg (10/25/18)

JONATHAN SUPOVITZ: This is Jonathan Supovitz of the University of Pennsylvania. If you want to hear about where the rubber of leadership meets the road of instructional improvement, then listen to this fabulous Point of Learning podcast with Jill Harrison Berg and host Peter Horn.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Jill Harrison Berg, an educator with nearly 30 years of experience.

JILL HARRISON BERG: Just like with our students, we don’t talk about whether they’re smart. We talk about how they're smart. Every student has their strengths. When it comes to the faculty though, for some reason we feel like we have to talk about who’s a good teacher and who’s a bad teacher. Now that’s ridiculous because teaching is so complex. Nobody’s great at every single aspect of it, so why don't we talk differentially about the expertise that each individual has.

[VO]: Jill argues that leadership is influence, and there are all kinds of influence in the workplace—some influence is unintentional, some is informal, some positive, some negative …

JILL: There are all kinds of ways people are influencing the quality of each other’s instruction and the culture that affects our teaching.

[VO]: Fortunately, there’s a book for that, which we’re talking about today!

JILL: How can we help ensure that there are structures and cultures in place that help make sure that all of those influences are more positive, more intentional, and helping to move the school forward?

[VO]: I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with Jill Harrison Berg about her new book, Leading in Sync: Teacher Leaders and Principals Working Together for Student Learning. This book, published in August by ASCD, is the richest resource I’ve encountered in the last decade for people in schools who are ready to a.) build the trust necessary for real collaboration, and b.) marshal the vast resources latent in every faculty for the best possible learning outcomes for kids. This episode will be of special interest to educators now working in schools (as well as anyone interested in how schools really improve), but as I’ve re-listened to Jill’s comments over the past two weeks, I’m convinced it will take little effort in translation for anyone who works on a team, or in a business, a law firm, or a  lab—you name it!—to come to prize the pearls she presents for consideration. Jill knows what she’s talking about. Her interest in teacher leadership grows out of her own experience as a classroom teacher in public, independent, and faith-based schools, in the U.S. and Brazil. The practices that she advocates are informed by a wide range of experience as well as extensive research into what works, and rigorous thinking about why. Jill was one of the first teachers in MA to earn National Board Certification, in 1998. While she was at the Cambridgeport School, then a new public school in Cambridge that Jill helped to build grade by grade, her principal, Lynn Stuart, an advocate for affirming teaching as a profession, encouraged Jill to pursue NB certification at a time when there were only four other Board-Certified teachers in the State of Massachusetts. Beyond the immense amount of work involved in the Board Certification process, Jill recalls that this exposure to professional standards began to transform her thinking.

JILL: This whole notion that there were professional, national professional teaching standards, or that I was a member of a profession with a shared knowledge base, that there were certain key areas of knowledge and skill that I as an English teacher should know and be able to do kind of rocked my world. I was like, “Wow! You know, I’m working really hard for my students. I want to know if the effort that I’m putting in, the time that I’m putting in is the best it could possibly be. Do I know what I should know for my students?” And so that was a really transformative experience and I want to say not only for my professional practices—there were certain things that I tweaked and improved in the process—but really for my identity as a teacher. I was no longer this individual in my classroom doing these things. I was a member of a profession, and an accomplished one, according to the National Board. I found that really exciting, really empowering. And I wanted to learn more about teaching as a profession.

[VO]: After she won a James Bryant Conant Fellowship to pursue a doctorate in teaching and learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jill began to think more critically about ways that schools and districts utilize the talents and skills of their professionals—and the ways they often miss out on remarkable potential …

JILL: After I finished my coursework, I thought, well, I would like to go back and teach in Cambridge part time to keep my foot in the classroom. I really loved working with early adolescent students and teaching English and wanted to teach part time while I continued my doctoral studies, but a new superintendent had come in and the new superintendent said, “Well, you know, you need to either come back full time or quit,” and I kind of was just super curious about that decision because they had invested so much money in me. Not only the grant that Cambridge Public Schools had been given, to the dollar amount of my tuition, they paid me half my salary for several years. They also paid me a lot of money to support other candidates to pursue National Certification and now they were asking me—

PETER: Sorry. That fellowship team from the district?

JILL: No, the Conant fellowship comes from Harvard, but it only is awarded to a Cambridge Public School teacher or several—actually, I think four—

PETER: So they could have invested in somebody else …

JILL: Well this is my point! When I think about an organizational investment, if I’m the superintendent of Cambridge and Harvard says to me, “You can have four teachers come study here,” I'm thinking, “Literacy’s a priority. Adolescent literacy is a priority. Let’s have four teachers go become expert at adolescent literacy and come back to the district and help us move the needle on our biggest, most prickly priorities!” In this case, they told me I could come back and teach full time, which was out of the question because I would never have written a dissertation—that wouldn’t have been possible—or quit. And so I thought, “Well, aren’t you interested in knowing what I’ve been studying for the past several years at your expense?” Never once did anyone ask me, “What kind of classes have you been taking? What are you learning?”

PETER: I know the drill. I know the drill.  

JILL: I just thought, “Wow! If I started to add up the dollar amount that had been invested in me …” And don't say this to slight Cambridge, because I have come to learn that this is true generally. In general, school and district leaders do not know what special areas of expertise their teachers have that could be useful throughout the organization. This whole relationship between individuals’ knowledge and institutional knowledge has just been a source of fascination for me since I had this realization as I was reflecting on how Cambridge viewed or didn’t view their investment in me as an accomplished teacher and as a teacher leader, and one with a doctorate degree in teaching and learning and key areas of expertise that were directly related to what the district actually needed.

[VO]: These two areas, then, teacher quality—specifically, the quality of teachers empowered to regard themselves as, and to continue to develop as members of a profession with an important, shared knowledge base—and teacher leadership, that is, the potential influence that teaching professionals can exert for the benefit of every learner in the school—have been the focus of Jill’s research, writing, and consulting work for the past two decades. I asked whether she observed a tension between the individual teacher’s sense of autonomy, or freedom to make independent choices about teaching and learning, and a shared professional knowledge base that informs common ideas about sound practices.

JILL: Autonomy is important not only for teacher satisfaction—because we’re passionate about the act of teaching and we want to be able to tap into the different corners of our repertoires to solve the puzzles in front of us. So there’s that piece for the teacher, but at the end of the day, we’re not there for our own enjoyment. We’re there for student learning! The fact is that I feel like I’m spending a lot of time with my student who’s a seventh grader, but you know, they’re going to be going through K to 12, so I need to make sure that I’m leading in sync with all the other teachers who’ve had exposure to that student. It’s not really fair to that student for me to completely go off-road and not at least be attentive to what other learning experiences that student might have had. This is what characterizes a profession is that we’re not independent entrepreneurs. We’re members of a profession, and there is a knowledge base and some larger consideration of what’s best for kids. So we want to sort of stay within the bounds of that. And when we do move beyond the bounds of that because we feel like it’s better for kids, then let’s do that together and grow the knowledge base. I recognize that it would be limiting if we all felt like we always needed to make decisions within the current parameters the way they are now. But as we press on those parameters, as we try to go beyond what’s currently known, let’s create systems that allow us to continue communicating, trusting each other in those small experiments, and circling back to see: How am I advancing not just my own self and my own practice, but the whole community or knowledge base, the whole profession?

[VO]: How to establish systems for communicating and how to build the trust that undergirds professional communication are major topics in Jill’s just-published volume on teacher leadership, called Leading in Sync. (You may have noticed her weave that title into her response moment ago!) The subtitle is Teacher Leaders and Principals Working Together for Student Learning, which we’ll begin to explore in just a minute.

[11:16]

PETER: As you know, Jill, Point of Learning is a show about what and how and why we learn, which includes honoring the vocation of teaching. I like to begin interviews by asking guests about a teacher who had a strong influence on you—

JILL: Okay …

PETER: —positive or negative.

JILL: Yeah. So sadly, I’m sitting here because I’m thinking initially of negative experiences. I don’t want to start there. I can think of a positive one! I would say that Mrs. Eisner, who was my 10th-grade chemistry teacher, was a positive influence on me because she took us seriously, you know, she treated us like scientists. She didn't play! She got right to the heart of the work and she just—I felt taken seriously by her. I would say that there may have been other teachers who did that generally, but as one of the very few Black students in a White public school in New Jersey where I grew up, I think that I did not always consistently experience that, except for Mrs. Eisner.

PETER: Here’s the thing. You know, it seemed that a negative influence came to you first. I’m interested, because we know how this turned out! You weren’t turned off to education. You became a teacher yourself, and you work very hard for teachers and kids right now. Sometimes [negatives] are motivating experiences, or recollections that influence us to say, “I don’t want kids to have this experience.” Is there one that you’d be willing to share?

JILL: Well, I certainly had a number of experiences I wouldn’t want kids to have. Teachers who, you know, didn’t take the work seriously, or made fun of kids or whatever. When I think of a negative experience, I had a high school physics teacher who really didn’t like me in particular. I learned two things from him: one is that I would complain that we never did anything in class—to him! I was a little bit of a sassy, bold person, and I was a senior, so I felt like I could just do that. And I would say, “Well, when are we going to learn something?” And he would say, “Fine! Study chapters 3, 4, and 5. There will be a test tomorrow.” And the other kids—

PETER: Was that for everybody?

JILL: Yep. That was for everybody. And he did that to make the class mad at me. But he didn’t know that because we were all the same, you know, two dozen kids—or less, I don't know, 16 kids—in all honors classes, we were all close friends and they also were bored, and they also kind of had my back. So they didn’t get mad at me, and we formed study groups and we would do fine. We’d ace the test, because he was just going to be pulling questions out of the back of the book and we knew that anyway, so it was easy to just fake our way through that. I learned a lot about about independent study and forming study groups and teaching myself that year because he really wasn’t going to teach anything. Like literally we did nothing in the classes. But the other thing that he said to me when I got into Harvard—I decided to go to Harvard as an undergraduate at the end of my senior year—and he explained to me that I only got into Harvard because I was Black. And so he felt like that was something important for me to know. And I felt that— Affirmative action was definitely in its heyday at that time. It was 1986 that I graduated high school. And so there was certainly a lot of talk about it, but not as many critical essays being written about the impact of it on African Americans, or “minorities,” as we were called at the time in general. And I felt like that really drove me to prove that I was excellent, and that I earned a place at Harvard. I’ve always held myself to a high standard, I think, because my parents and my grandparents have always done so. We’ve always valued education as a family. But, you know, here I am. I’m over 50 years old and I'm remembering something that—a comment that he may not even remember he made so many years ago. But I’m still remembering it.

[16:06]

PETER: Well speaking of your excellence, I have had the privilege of collaborating with you on a research project scanning teacher leadership programs throughout the United States for the past year, which means I’ve gotten quite familiar with your remarkable mind, and the wealth of experience and lenses you have for looking at the complex ecosystems known as schools. I was prepared for your new book, Leading in Sync, to be very good. I was not prepared for it to be hands down the most useful resource for keeping schools’ focus on student learning that I have encountered in the past 10 years or more. As I confessed to you recently, I don’t enjoy reading many of the education books I’m asked to take a look at. They’re usually too prescriptive or short-sighted, loaded with too many assumptions about how every school must be functioning. Your book provides dozens of smart, well-designed, practical tools, exercises, and suggestions for how teacher leaders and principals can think and work together for student learning by clarifying what it is they actually want and establishing sensible approaches for getting there. As a scholar, you provide ample cutting-edge research literature to support your claims about what tends to work and what doesn’t, but your deep experience working in many kinds of schools informs a style of writing that is also accessible. We’ll crack the cover in just a minute, but I want to start by interrogating the premise of “teacher leadership.” I have a friend who is a children’s advocate who has visited hundreds of schools over the years. He wrote me recently, saying, “I’ve never wholly bought into this ‘teacher leader’ business. Most good first-grade teachers that I know just want to be good teachers! They see the ‘leader’ teachers as an import from the corporate arena.” He adds, “I tend to agree.” What do you say to that?

[18:14]

To that I say that “teacher leadership” means many different things to many different people, right? Everyone’s got a different movie playing in their head about what’s teacher leadership. Some people are thinking of, you know, the one teacher in a school who gets some kind of special privileges and maybe a stipend that seems inaccessible to others, and others are just thinking about the go-to person that, you know, you can knock on their door when you have a problem after school and talk through a student learning challenge. So there’s a really great range of ways people think about teacher leadership. There are many ways in which teachers influence the quality of each other’s instruction—of instruction beyond their own classroom. And I’m calling all of those leadership even when the ways in which teachers influence the quality of instruction beyond their own classrooms is unintentional, is informal and is positive, or negative. The example I like to give often is: everyone has been in that staff meeting where somebody, the principal maybe, introduces a new initiative and one person crosses their arms and rolls their eyes and has just influenced what everybody in the room is going to be feeling about this new initiative as it rolls out. Now that person may not realize their own body language. They don't realize that they’ve done that and that they’ve had such a powerful influence—

PETER: That guy does though. The guy with the eye rolls and crossed arms? He knows.

JILL: Sometimes the principal takes that personally because they assume that’s true! But when we zoom out and we think, “Oh, wow, there are all kinds of ways people are influencing the quality of instruction and the culture that affects our teaching!” And then we can start to think strategically about how can we help ensure that there are structures and cultures in place that help to make sure that all of those influences are more positive, more intentional, and helping to move the school forward. So when I think about teacher leadership, I’m thinking about all of that. I’m thinking about all of the informal [and formal] ways … In my work, I like to work both with teacher leaders and with principals and other school leaders, and the reason is because teacher leaders have a certain set of knowledge and skills that can help them to be more effective in these ways, in formal ways such as building their skills for being an effective facilitator, or for having a difficult conversation or for helping a group to look together at data. Those would be some formal ways. But when I work with the principal, I’m also able to help the principal to think about the cultural conditions. So, principals will often designate, you know, especially in the last decade, we’ve seen a lot of schools recognize “Oh, teachers are working in their own silos. We need to have common planning time. We need to realign the schedule so that teachers have time to interact with one another.” Well, if you haven’t actually created the right conditions, they’re not going to be having the right conversations during that time. You’ve created the structure but not the culture for the conversations that need to happen. So I talk with principals about: What are some of the pieces that you can put into motion that can help ensure that when teachers have the time and the structures for the conversations that they’re actually having the right conversations? So these are some of the tools in the book, but they are also key to my conception of teacher leadership being both very formal as well as very informal, and all of that. From that perspective, of course, everyone is a teacher leader. From that perspective, everyone has the potential to be a positive influence on the quality of each of each other’s instruction.

PETER: So it’s not just people who might have that particular formal role designation.

JILL: Absolutely not.

PETER: So even for newer teachers coming in who may not see themselves as having something to offer …

JILL: Absolutely, and I think that’s a key role that a principal has, is helping every educator— every human—to see that everyone has something to offer. I like to give the example: my husband worked with a student teacher who asked a lot of questions and I’d say, “Well, give me some examples of the kinds of questions that this student teacher asks.” And he said, “Well, he asked me, ‘Well, why is everything where it is?’”

PETER: It’s a second-grade class?

JILL: Yes. Yeah. My husband teaches the second grade. He’s a National Board-Certified teacher. He’s been teaching for 25 years. He’s a veteran educator, is a mentor for dozens of teachers in the district throughout his career. And here’s the student teacher asking him, “Well, why is everything where it is?” So he sat down and they went through everything and as they went through he said, “Well you know, the bookshelf is here because there used to be a chalkboard, but actually now they put up smart board and so we could move that around, and you know, then then this came in and that came in and as they went through the different parts of the room, they ended up really thinking critically about the impact on student learning of the entire learning environment—of each element of the learning environment—and improved the classroom! Now I would argue that that student teacher was a powerful teacher leader simply because of the naive questions that he asked, which challenged my husband to be thinking about the impact on student learning of each instructional choice he had in his classroom. I also like to give just the example of novice teachers coming into a school. Oftentimes they’re from the community, like they’re the ones who know the community better than anyone else or they have really high level—

PETER: Or the community as it is today—

JILL: Exactly, exactly! Or they have really high-level technology skills that can take parent communication and community engagement to new places or even in interschool communication among the faculty. We need to be thinking, as we think about teachers— Just like with our students, we don't talk about whether they’re smart, we talk about how they’re smart. Every student has their strengths. When it comes to the faculty though, for some reason we feel like we have to talk about who’s a good teacher and who’s a bad teacher. Now that’s ridiculous, because teaching is so complex. Nobody’s great at every single aspect of it. So why don’t we talk differentially about the expertise that each individual has?

PETER: One of the first places in your book where I said, “Wow!” I just stopped and looked at it was, I think it was page nine—

ROBYN LEE HORN [voiceover]: “Page 9. Figure 1.1.”

PETER: —where you’ve got this list of competencies, you know, things that the high school, the people in high school are expected to be able to be good at—

ROBYN [voiceover]: “range of teaching knowledge and skills required within a typical high school”

PETER: —and it’s hundreds of things!

ROBYN [voiceover]: “Understanding early adolescence; understanding young adults; understanding human development; understanding individual students; understanding special student subgroup populations in the school; gaining insights about students through partnerships with families; applying knowledge of students to build positive relationships; recognizing and …”

PETER: Just a daunting kind of challenge. And you know, when you look at that list, just on one page, you recognize nobody possibly could do all of this! I mean just in terms of the competencies that have nothing to do with subject area, right? Just this aspect of development or that—and so why not familiarize yourself with who’s good at what and what are our priorities to get better at your knowledge and pedagogy?

ROBYN [voiceover]: “… establishing instructional goals; selecting appropriate materials and resources; partnering with colleagues, families and the community as resources; designing and implementing instructional strategies; engaging students in reading and viewing a wide range of texts; providing instruction and processes; skills and knowledge related to writing; equipping students to become effective communicators; developing students’ appreciation for and the capacity to use language; developing students’ abilities to think mathematically …”

JILL: This notion that every single person within a school can’t be expert at every single area of teaching is—many people find that freeing when they start to think about the idea that among us, we could have expertise in all those areas, but no individual could. But it requires that you have structures in place that allow people to exchange that, right? Because each individual student—and here comes to the equity tie, right?—each individual student’s learning experience shouldn’t be at the mercy of what the one teacher who they’ve been assigned to knows.

PETER: So the “in sync” part is recognizing that if everybody’s got these little pieces, or big pieces, that they can contribute, make sure that, given that we’re all in this same boat, that we’re pulling in the same direction at the same time. We have to be synchronized. That’s that part.

JILL: Absolutely. And we can’t know who’s good at what until we develop our relationships, as I said, because there is a side to some people where they kind of tend to keep their strengths to their chest. They don't want to be volunteered or “voluntold” for anything. So there’s some culture work and some trust building that has to happen before people will be able to be honest about the things that they’re good at. Another piece of course, is that people don't often know what their own strengths are.

PETER: I asked about how we could come to learn about each other’s strengths.

JILL: It might have to do with peer observation and people co-teaching in various contexts that might also have to do even with just a common planning time meeting where we’re all bringing student work, so we’re seeing the kind of work that each other is doing, the kind of tasks that we're creating for our students. So that’s a window in. Oftentimes it starts there, right, with seeing artifacts of one’s teaching. And then as the trust builds, it can move toward actually seeing one another, which of course increasingly we’re doing by video. I think that one of the barriers in the past to seeing entirely each other’s classrooms was actually where you get the release time, right? Everyone’s busy teaching, so they can’t go see each other. But now with video, everyone’s got a video camera in their pocket. So setting that up and sharing that is another important way of learning about each other’s strengths.

PETER: But again, first the foundation of trust must be established. I love the way Jill put this. So here it is again:

JILL: As the trust builds, it can move toward actually seeing one another.

[29:57]

PETER: What advice would you have for somebody—now, obviously anybody working on a school leadership team, any administrator, anybody who sees herself or himself as a lead teacher already or some kind of teacher leader, obviously this book is for them. But what about if I pick up this book and I’m working at a school and maybe I pick it up out of frustration, because I believe my school could be lots better? I believe that I have a bit of extra energy and time, in addition to everything else I've got going on in my classroom and the rest of my life, to devote to this, but I don’t have a formal position of leadership as I see it. What could I do to start if I don’t feel like I have a network of support, a team structure or something. How can I begin?

JILL: Well, as we said, you know, leadership is influence and there are lots of ways people can be influencing one another, and that influence usually comes from a place of expertise. So I think that just recognizing—as an individual going around and recognizing people for the expertise that they have, by tapping into them as experts in those areas, would be an important way to start. Helping people to recognize in themselves the expertise that they have empowers them to want to be a greater influence on others in those areas. So I think that some people think, “Oh, I want to be a teacher leader! I want everyone to know I have this expertise!” and I’m thinking the opposite way around. If you want to be a teacher leader, look to others and encourage them. Ask them to be an influence on you from the perspective of their expertise. Because then you will be exponentially expanding the number of people who have this perspective and changing the culture in a way that then facilitates and supports people to feel as though, “Yeah, expertise is something that we all have in different areas and it’s something that we can feel safe sharing, and helping.” You know, sort of creating that collective response, a sense of responsibility for the students that we share in our school. Once you know who’s good at what, you can be thinking more strategically about your teams. Say you’re going to be forming an ELL [English Language Learners] data team. You can use this and decide, “Well, do I have someone there who knows data and how to analyze it and create data displays and communicate with data? Do I have someone on the team who can help facilitate our challenging conversations? Do I have someone there who understands English language development?” And so you can make sure you have the right combination of expertise on each team.

[32:54]

PETER: You mentioned data, the idea of which often makes people nervous. “Data-driven instruction” is a buzzword, in public schools at least. But many schools, districts and states have a pretty narrow conception of what counts as useful data, or they collect lots of it but either don’t know what to do with it, or use it in ways that reduce the vision of teaching and learning to better scores on standardized tests. What are some of the ways you advocate for considering collecting and using data?

JILL: Well, first of all, let’s say that the things that are most important about education are largely not measurable. So there’s just like number one: recognizing that. And when we’re using numbers— I like to think about data as more than just numbers for that reason, but when we are using numbers, we need to use them cautiously. My interest in evidence of student learning goes back to my Cambridgeport School days. I mentioned that earlier, as we were developing this K-8 school and thinking about, “Oh, what do we think represents a well-educated seventh grader or eighth grader, and what would we like every graduate of the Cambridgeport School to know and be able to do?” We created a system for graduating students by portfolio. Students had to stand up and spend an hour presenting projects that they’d spent the year creating and prove they’re ready to graduate in front of not only their parents, but some community members, some current and former teachers and another student or two. So to me, when I think about authentic assessments and monitoring and data, that is where my heart lies with that work. On the other hand, I have been in education long enough—like over 25 years—that I have seen that before we had education reform, before we had so many numbers that we were using to rank schools, there were some schools that were just unacceptable places for any student to have to spend time. And I recognize that the push for data and No Child Left Behind has put those schools on our radar and helped us to recognize that there are unacceptably low levels where intervention is necessary. I worked with some schools in the early 2000s, that were all complaining about data and complaining about the numbers like, “We don't believe what those numbers mean!” And I said, “Well, let’s just look inside some of the kinds of questions that most kids are getting wrong.” And at the seventh-grade level, one of the questions most kids got wrong in this middle school was “7 x 8 = _____.” And I said, “Data or no data— You don’t believe in the test. Okay. But what do you think about the fact that most seventh graders in our school could not answer this question?” And it helped them to recognize that, you know, there’s the politics around the tests and then there’s also thinking authentically about like, “Is there some kind of floor?”

[36:32]

PETER: We have talked about a number of my favorite aspects of the book. Is there anything else that you feel it’s important to highlight?

JILL: One of the editorial challenges we had with this book is the fact that none of this can even begin without trust. And so—

PETER: Which is Chapter 5.

JILL: Which is Chapter 5. It’s toward the end. What’s it doing way over there? I found over my five years of touring around and talking about this in a dozen different states and different kinds of contexts that people, when they want to talk about teacher leadership, when they come to this book or they come to one of my institutes or something to talk about teacher leadership, they don’t want to start by talking about trust because they’re like, well, that's not what this was going to be about. This was about teacher leadership. So we made the editorial choice to put the trust chapter toward the back. But the truth is that one cannot begin any place except with the trust because none of the strategies presented in the earlier chapters can actually get off the ground without some trust.

PETER: It’s the same in the classroom.

JILL: Absolutely.

PETER: When I work with schools who want to talk about how can we get kids to engage in civil discourse strategies, I’m like, “Well, if they think it’s going to be a debate and they’re going to be shown to be wrong and they’re going to lose face and they don’t trust that this is going to be safe, there’s nothing you can do there.” Same with classroom management and so on.

JILL: Absolutely. You know, we know this about our classrooms and our communities of students. It’s also true of our communities of adults. In education, we’ve all settled into certain roles and ways of being that feel safe to us. Why would I change that up with something so amorphous as teacher leadership—something, as we’ve said, nobody has even defined and we all have different definitions of it. Why would I take the risk of changing that up if I don’t have the kind of trust in one another? So that is something super important. How does trust actually develop in a community? What’s the developmental trajectory of building trust? Which is so important for schools where we need to know, well, what can I do differently? It’s not helpful to just say, “Okay, build trust! Everybody trust each other!” It doesn’t work. What are the steps that have to be taken? That’s what this particular chapter offers. So while it is toward the back, I continue to wonder if that was the right choice, because it really is actually the place that work has to begin.

[39:12]

Where the work begins is where we end today’s episode. My great thanks to Jill Harrison Berg for spending time with us. Her game-changing book Leading in Sync is available from the ASCD website, linked on the show page. If you work in a school, you will thank me for insisting you buy it right now! Thanks also to Mark Wright who was delighted to let me use some of his piano music once he learned that Jill is the great-niece of Maceo Pinkard, the first African American music publisher, who also composed “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Dem Dere Eyes,” and dozens of other songs. Shayfer James composed our theme musics. Thanks to Robyn Lee Horn for her voice dramatizing Fig. 1.1, and thanks so much to you for listening, subscribing, and spreading the word about Point of Learning to everyone you know curious about what and how and why we learn.    

Episode 015 Transcript

Resolving Contradictions with Brent Farrand (10/2/18)

JASON GRANT: Yo! this is Jason Grant, hippy-dippy weatherman. Tonight's forecast is dark, followed by scattering light in the morning. If you want to think and expand education, then you need to check out this Point of Learning podcast featuring my dearest friends, Brent Farrand and Peter Horn.

VOICEOVER (Peter Horn): On today’s show, Brent Farrand, a master teacher of mathematics, on what we so often miss in math class …

BRENT A. FARRAND: It's like teaching a person to be a carpenter by focusing on the screwdriver, the hammer and the saw—and forgetting that your goal is to build a house!

VO: … and what kids gain from competitive debate …

BRENT: The structure of having two opposing sides who respect each other—you have to teach that in the context of the debate, and that I'm not debating you; I’m debating the idea you're advocating.

VO: I first met Brent Farrand about a dozen years ago, when I started hanging out at his and his wife Vernell’s place in Liberty, New York, a gorgeous spot in the Catskills, because Brent loves to put on shows—annual mini rock concerts with lights, fog machines, and eventually fireworks—that his friends dubbed “Brentfest.” (If you know Liberty, NY, you know that it’s just a stone’s throw from the site of Woodstock, and not a few people who have come to Brentfest over the years are willing to share personal stories about that iconic 1969 festival.) My then-fiancée Robyn and I had such a good time at Brentfest that we asked if we could hold our wedding reception at the 2010 festival. On the face of it, today’s episode isn’t really about any of that, but I wanted to set the stage for my conversation with this man of many parts whose skill as an educator I first came to focus on when I read letters by two of his former students supporting Brent’s candidacy as a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teacher, a prestigious prize that Brent won in 1994. I want to highlight that after knowing Brent for five years and talking school a bit during that time, I only learned he won this award through my dissertation research on student perceptions of outstanding teaching. I would never have found out about it from Brent, who, in addition to being insatiably curious about everything from law to mathematics to painting to beekeeping, is also one of the most modest brilliant people I know. For this conversation in late July about the value of mathematics and debate, two of Brent’s great passions, I traveled back to Liberty, NY, where Brent grew up and has since retired. Two of my bandmates from the Brentfest cover ensemble known as Voluptuous Panic, Jason Grant and Duane Harper Grant, also happened to be hanging out with their guitars, so some of their tasty underscore will season the interview.  

[Act 1: Mathematics begins 03:50]

PETER: I have read a description of your class by one of your former students who said that you challenged them to be innovators and inventors in the math classroom. What was a way that you went about that with your own students?

BRENT: People who know me probably would find this shocking thing to say, but I was very structured in the way I taught in the beginning. I was a very good traditional teacher. And then I began to see things that weren't working the way I wanted him to. And I always was experimenting. So, I went through a period where I thought that it would be a great thing to teach high school math using the Socratic method they use in law school.

PETER: So you're just asking questions and—

BRENT: Yeah, so I would work the kid back to something that they were certain they knew and then build them up to answer their own question. So “If you know that, then—”

PETER: “Then what else must be true?”

BRENT: Right, but it's also a brutal method. And I remember I made a young girl in my geometry class cry under the pressure of Socratic questioning. And I went home—I was devastated. I went home and I thought, “If my teaching method is upsetting such a sweet kid like that this much, there's something wrong.” So I went back the next day and I asked, “I want you to write down every theorem that you don't understand, and a brief explanation of why, so I can learn what we need to do together.” Well, I got back from her every single theorem that we'd covered since the beginning of the year and under the reason why: “I can't picture it.” It was a revelation to me! That's where I measure the change, because I was at the same time doing reading about how the human mind thinks in pictures, not in words and symbols. We think in pictures, and that's why in geometry, I started making this shift to a less Euclid, more what geometry really is: the study of shapes and figures and their interrelationship, the measurement of the earth.

PETER: Literally “measuring the earth” = geometry.

BRENT: Right, so that’s where I mark the change. I'll give you an example of an inventor in the classroom. His name was Kumar Lee. We did this thing called the River Project. We got this bright idea, it was a great idea, this interdisciplinary study of river civilizations and all the subjects through the culture and the history and the intellectual life of that river system.

PETER: Okay. Because you can tie in geography, and earth science, and—

BRENT: And this kid, I never saw the brilliance in him until we did the River Project, and they were talking about pyramids and why did the Egyptians build pyramids like that. And the standard answer is because of just building up: they didn't have a way to build straight up, so they built like this [forms a triangle with his hands]. And Kumar goes, “No. Do you ever think that it might've been to reflect the sun off of the buildings so the inside was cool? The slanted roof doesn't absorb the sun. It reflects the rays off.” And the museum curator sat there and said, “Wow, that could be true!”

PETER: But did they hang out inside the pyramids? Weren’t they just big—

BRENT: Remember they felt that the dead—this was their afterlife home.

PETER: Oh I see! So the dead would be more comfortable. Okay. I had an image from your story of like a pyramid as an office building—

BRENT: Maybe we should go back to that!

PETER: I was like, “I don't, I don't remember that part!”

BRENT: So at that point, this point, I had also started teaching equation solving by the first day of class. I said, “Okay, we’re gonna play I’m thinking of a number game here. Multiply that number by three and you get 55.” Then I’d ask them to say what did they do and we’d work all the way up, on the first day of class, to pretty complex questions by me thinking of a number and doing this to it, and that's algebra. I said, “You just learned all of Algebra I, but now we're going to learn how to write it on paper. That's all we’re gonna do.”  

VO: As Brent continued to experiment with how to do math class in ways that reached the most students, he, like any teacher, had to figure out how to engage different kinds of learners. For instance, there's a type that might be called “number crunchers.”

BRENT: Number crunchers can be very frustrating to teach because you ask them to explain how they got the answer. They go, “I don't know, it just came to my head,” or “I just figured it out.”

JASON: They just crunched the numbers.

BRENT: Then they finally say, “I tried lots of different numbers.” So I’m like, “Okay, so what made you decide to try the numbers that you did?” “I don't know.” I said, “Well, did you try 100?” “That would be absolutely ridiculous,” they’d say, and then I would get them to explain why that was a ridiculous suggestion and why, and in the end what I got is the number crunchers to communicate with the deductive reasoners, and it was beautiful!

PETER: You have some teachers who seem like they became math teachers because they were used to getting the right answers as math students and so they were good at it and it was pretty easy for them.

JASON: And we called them—

BRENT: They're awesome technicians.

JASON: —technicians.

BRENT: We need technicians, but they don't necessarily make the best math teachers. They actually are for some kids, which is amazing. I had to learn that too. There are some kids that just need rules, and if you try to teach them concepts and relationships and stuff, they get really upset. I've had kids yell at me in class, “Just tell me the rule and I'll follow it!”

VO: Brent used to host us short weekly segment during his high school classes called “Math Mysteries,” where he invited kids to talk about math procedures that they regularly carried out but never understood why. I felt I had to tell him why this resonated so much with me.

PETER: I can remember doing, you know, long division in fourth grade, for example, and—

BRENT: Long division is crazy!

PETER: —and being taught, you know, what a divisor was, and what a dividend was, and what the remainder was, and how to line up these columns according to—

BRENT: Just to divide!

PETER: But I was always like, “Why aren't you explaining why we're doing this? I understand that this is a valid practice. It gets you to the right answer, but I don't understand what's really going on. Like can we just stop and think about what's going on? Why does this method work?” Because it felt less and less relevant, and—

BRENT: Exactly!

PETER: —that just increased as things got more complicated that we were doing, you know? And I could figure out how to do it pretty well, but I really wanted to understand. But then, you know, there were other things that I was more interested in. But I can remember that moment …

BRENT: Take your discipline of Language Arts and English. It would be like teaching the kids how to be stenographers but not how to write. That's what we do in mathematics. You end up with a 12th-grader taking calculus, who's got already 1500 recipes in their math box in their head, and they're juggling it around. But there's no connections between any of them, and no reason why! The whole system of mathematics is really resident in the human mind. It's an internal thing. Kids love to play with mathematics, if you let them. Counting! I mean their mind is just going crazy with mathematics inside, but we create this interface—

PETER: Just wanted to double-click on that for a second. Have you ever played with that? Like with one of your grandchildren? Do you have a quick example of a—

BRENT: I have a better example with Whitney, because Whitney has an awesome mathematical mind.

PETER: This is your daughter Whitney.

BRENT: Yes. I remember at a very young age—I don't remember when—I was having a conversation about shapes and the names of shapes and their characteristics. I mean she may have been three or four, maybe five, but no larger. So we went through a number of different ones, and I would just put the figure in front of it her and say, “Well, so what do you see here? And then attach the name to it, you know, “Well that's a circle, that's a triangle.” We came to a trapezoid, and she said, “Oh, that's an unfinished triangle.” Well now the depth of that concept is incredible, because there's so many formulas for the trapezoid that are based on it being an unfinished triangle—

PETER: ½ (big base + little base) x height, right?

BRENT: Right, exactly, exactly. And the whole locus area, the movements of points and lines and stuff of math, etc., sees the trapezoid as an unfinished triangle, right? It didn't get all the way up to the top. It stopped here [indicating plane in mid-air].

PETER: That word was one of the, I don't know, one of the hundreds of things that got me interested in wanting to learn Greek later on. When I heard it, I was like, “What’s a trapezoid? This is such a weird word. What does this mean?” And then I looked it up in the dictionary and found out that trapeza, is the Greek word for “table.” And of course, it does look like that. And I was like, “Well, that's wicked cool.”

BRENT: Yeah, it does look like that. It's like, you know, either way you flip it, it looks like a table.

PETER: Yeah. Depends on what decade you're in, I guess …

BRENT: So what I was getting to is that what we do in mathematics is we teach the interface, which is algorithms, calculative algorithms. We teach that interface as math—

PETER: And again, you’re thinking of algorithms as “recipes”—

BRENT: —and never connect it to pictures, which goes back to the story I told before about the young girl who said, “I just can't picture it.”

PETER: Which prompted you to rethink everything—

BRENT: Right, so the human mind is so naturally adapted to mathematics, but then we create this interface of algorithms that gets between the user and what really is math. Reducing that interface so that the mind and the subject can get right smack together—

PETER: It's a beautiful way to think about it.

BRENT: —is, I think, the key to more enriched mathematical teaching. Stop teaching the interface except as a tool, not as the thing! It's like teaching a person to be a carpenter by focusing on the screwdriver, the hammer, and the saw, and forgetting that your goal is to build a house—not even showing that that's what we're really focused on! We're focused on the hammer, the screwdriver, and the saw. And that we have to stop doing in education. The tools are absolutely important. I mean, you can't have a discussion about history without understanding the tools of geography, so they're critical. But if that's the limit of our vision, then we haven't really educated.

[18:01]

VO: Act 2. Subject to Debate. Though Brent’s teaching career was almost entirely spent in New Jersey, at Science High School in Newark, he grew up in and around this New York Catskills town called Liberty (a great spot for a wedding, parenthetically), which he called, and I quote, “the greatest.” Among his most important teachers was Ed Wolff, who took a philosophical approach to the teaching of mathematics that really resonated with Brent. Remarkably, Mr. Wolff was the only math teacher Brent had in high school. Turns out, Brent and his classmates requested this particular teacher each year, the school complied, and so for five years in a row, all throughout HS, Brent had a math teacher who challenged kids to think about more than the mechanics of mathematics. You may not be surprised that Brent and Ed Wolff became lifelong friends. He credits debate as what kept him in high school, especially his debate coach, Barry Talkington, who will be a significant player in this second half of the episode. “Debate was intellectually very exciting,” Brent recalls. After getting involved in radical politics at Clark University, Brent eventually decided to teach, but it wasn’t a straight shot. In 1974, he drove a milk truck; in 1975, a plumbing supply truck. Brent earned a Master’s in history and did a stint in law school. Along the way, he got certified to teach social studies, then math. Aight, so ... After applying for jobs to teach math with a few suburban NJ schools that were not a good fit, Brent feels grateful to this day that Newark was enthusiastic about his promise to establish a debate team. He began his Newark career teaching one year at a middle school, then started at Science High in the fall of 1979. 

BRENT: ’79.

PETER: And you started the debate team in the same year?

BRENT: Just as an internal debate team. You know, kids debate each other within the school. And then the second year we went out on the tournament circuit.

PETER: And how hot was the tournament circuit in 1980?

BRENT: It was big. It was incredibly intimidating for us, but I knew we could do it, and the kids knew they could do it, and we decided that we were going to emulate the best, Bronx Science. What they did, we would learn to do.

PETER: How did you emulate them?

BRENT: Research techniques, team cohesiveness, team spirit, longevity—not just building stars, but having a broad-based program. And I think we did that.

The legendary Bronx Science HS debate team was coached for over three decades by a formidable English teacher, Shakespeare lover, and Bronx Science alum named Rich Sodikow Brent and I discussed Sodikow’s approach.

PETER: How did you find find out those things about how he was running that program?

BRENT: By joining the circuit and by him actually taking our program under his wing.

PETER: Is that right?

BRENT: Yeah. Great man. My kids loved him, and one of the reasons is that we were on our second trip up to the Mid-Hudson Debate Tournament, coming up to Monticello [NY], and our bus broke down. And so by the time we got there, everybody had lost the first round. We had forfeited, and I think we left the with about one win out of six teams. And of course the bus was pretty depressed and Richard Sodikow got up on the bus and gave this little talk about, you know, welcoming them to the circuit and he was just very warm. And then he went down the aisle and spoke to each kid individually as they get off the bus. And this is a man who is running the biggest, most successful debate program in the entire United States. I mean, when you went into elimination rounds—say there were 12-16 teams that made elimination rounds—it was not unusual for 10 to 12 of them to be from Bronx Science. Most tournaments were closed out by Bronx Science. There were awesome! And he took the time to do that. And he mentored me a lot. That's terrific. And Barry Talkington mentored him.

PETER: How about that?

VO: So Brent’s old HS debate coach Barry Talkington had not only inspired Brent enough to keep Brent going to school, but he’d also mentored this legendary debate coach Rich Sodikow, who some years down the line mentors Brent in how to be a great debate coach. What’s beautiful to me about a trace of influence like this is that so often teachers are not really sure about what results from our work. We believe we make a difference, but it’s hard to quantify, very different from baking something from scratch, or making sculpture from scrap metal, say, where there are concrete, observable products of the effort and skill invested in the project. Which is why it’s so meaningful when former students circle back to say “Thank you,” or “Here’s what I’m up to now,” or in the case of Rich Sodikow talking to Barry Talkington about Brent Farrand, and I’m paraphrasing how this conversation might have gone down, “Because you showed me the ropes when I was a new debate coach, I’m paying it forward with Brent and his team at Science High Newark.” In semi-retirement, Brent spends some time these days spreading the gospel of debate to classrooms, where teachers use argumentative tools to solidify learning objectives, having kids debate about topics like who or what is the mockingbird in the title of Harper Lee’s famous novel. Based on my work in schools, I had a question about this approach …  

PETER: I want to put this question to you because, you know, the reservation when I'm working with schools about how to do civil discourse, one of the things that I can get leery about is structuring every argumentative discussion where kids have the opportunity to express their ideas as a debate, because it frames it as This is going to be a contest. There's going to be winners and losers. You have a fixed position. You know, you're just arguing your case as opposed to doing the things that you'd want for, let's say citizens to be able to do: discuss an issue of shared concern. You'd want to be able to have people have time to think and see another person's point of view, and change their mind.

BRENT: It’s another form of discourse. I think that it has things that the debate model doesn't, and the debate model has things that more freewheeling discussion doesn’t. I think the structure of having two opposing sides who respect each other—you have to teach that in the context of the debate, and that I'm not debating you; I’m debating the idea you're advocating.

PETER: And right away, you’re taking away the possibility of an ad hominem attack, right? Only an idiot would say something like that! I wanted to underscore that point because

unfortunately look at even presidential debates now. There’s not a level of respect subtending the engagement. They're just trying to score the points with their audience, which is their base out there. That’s what they’re doing. These are the kinds of models that kids are seeing now when they're thinking What is debate look like, you know?

BRENT: Exactly. But it’s not what we teach.  

PETER: So respect has to be—good.

BRENT: Because competitive debate, I think everyone who's involved in it realizes that it reaches a select span of kids who are interested in doing it at that level, because it's intense. I believe it's the best teaching approach that there is—competitive debate—what it does for an individual is just absolutely incredible, but it'll only reach a narrow bandwidth. Classroom debate will introduce that to every kid. You can have debate in art class, you can have it in math class. I used to do it all the time in math class. And social studies is just perfect for it. It doesn't always have to be—it can be parliamentary debate, which is more of each individual presenting their position and trying to form a coalition around their idea, or the all of the role-playing stuff that Jason did in his classes.

VO: Jason, once again, is the social studies teacher, guitarist, and boon pal hanging out at Brent’s place the weekend we recorded—you heard his mellifluous baritone covering an old George Carlin bit at the top of the show.

BRENT: I mean those are kind of a different format of debate, when you set up a Continental Congress or you try Thomas Jefferson for treason, and you've got a defense lawyer and a team and the prosecution team … [to Jason] Am I describing this right?  

PETER: Well I think then just shout “Fake news! No collusion!” That’s all you have to do …

BRENT: See that’s the thing! And debate teaches you how to differentiate fact from fiction, not through rules. Just through the process of you and I debating an idea and knowing that if we're going to win the debate, it has to be based on fact.

PETER: It's all variations on How do you know? How do you know that this is the case? What evidence? What warrant? What are you going to present to let me see things the way you're seeing things? How do you know that what you're saying is the way that things are, or the way that things should be?—if you're doing a policy debate.

BRENT: What is the truth? Where is the ground under our feet?

PETER: Well it's different today. A bromide that you could have relied on throughout your debate coaching career was, to paraphrase or even quote [late NY Senator] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts.” Right? I mean, people could agree on that. [We used to be] like, “Okay, we got the facts. We may look at them differently …” But now, of course, as had been observed many times, I've got my set of facts, the people who listen to that radio station have their set of facts, the people who read Breitbart have their set of facts ... And this is part of what President Obama was talking about him in his Mandela speech on Monday [17 July 2018]: I can't have an argument with you about global warming if we're not going to come at this with an understanding of here's where scientific consensus is.

BRENT: Without a common foundation of things accepted as factual, all communication breaks down. And so, being able to determine what is factual and what is not, or at least being able to consider it in a very reflective and critical way is absolutely critical in modern education. And I think debate teaches that well, because you have to have evidence for what—now, what is evidence is also in flux—but you have to have evidence to support your argument. But the evidence never does the debating. It’s the human mind of the two debaters who are challenging: in that piece of evidence, does it reflect reality? Should you as a judge vote on this piece of evidence? And that is such powerful learning for, you know, a student in the 21st century … for a human being in the 21st century. And I don't think anything but debate teaches that so well because it's two student minds, each with their own construct, colliding into each other. And out of that collision, those contradictions that develop, a deeper understanding occurs. And your best debaters don't see the other team in the round as an opponent, but a collaborator in this great symphony of argumentation and when it's over between two incredible teams, it's like, “Wow! What we created in this last hour!” It wasn’t “you won, I lost.” It was like, “God, that was awesome!”

PETER: Is there an example that sticks with you about how the experience of debate changed a kid or, you know, changed the way she could think, or thought about herself? I mean, is there is there an example that sticks to you?

BRENT: I hesitate to say “Here's how debate really changed a kid” because I think what debate does is it touches what is inside that kid. And it just comes bursting forth and finds an outlet. Debate is an art form, and debaters are artists, and they have all of the personality quirks of artists. They really do! So I don't know, maybe it changed the context in which they were maturing and therefore affected their maturing process in a profound way, but it didn't change them. It was there; it just wasn't being given an opportunity to come forward. Really, debate is two minds colliding with each other and sharpening each other through the collisions. You know, I've struggled a lot with the structure of it being a competition, and I have to come down to: the competition is very healthy, if it is managed in a humane way—

PETER: And based on respect!

BRENT: And based on respect. Yes.

PETER: That’s a huge thing. We have so many examples of winning at any cost.

BRENT: That's, you know, and I believe the vast majority of debate coaches understand this, that they on that narrow band of students, they have more impact on the development of that person probably than anybody else but their parents will have in their life. And it's an awesome responsibility. And I, I'm proud to say the vast majority of debate coaches that I know do that awesomely.

VO: It’s hard to quantify Brent’s influence on the U.S. debate scene, through Science High in Newark, New Jersey, but also at the collegiate level, through his work with Rutgers University. Let me offer this quick anecdote as an example. I’ve noted that Robyn and I wanted a rock-n-roll wedding reception at Brentfest 2010, so it happened at one point that summer that I called Brent’s cell phone with a logistical question. He answered, but said pretty soon, “I can’t talk long. I’m at the White House.” One of Brent’s debaters had won the Top Speaker award in the Urban Debate National Championships, and President Obama was honoring her and a handful of stellar peers in the Oval Office. Such presidential attention to urban debate was unprecedented, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan had become a huge proponent after he saw the difference it had made when he was superintendent in Chicago. 

BRENT: The first all-Black female team to make it big on the national stage came from Newark Science, Wakilah Felton and Diana Dunker. So years later, the local cable network did a retrospective on Science High debate …

VO: Diana Dunker went from Science High to law school. She argued three cases before the [NJ] Supreme Court, two of them precedent-setting. At the time of the interview Brent is recalling, Dunker was Chief Operations Officer for the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues.

BRENT: They asked somewhat of the same question of how debate changes you and she said it was very simple. She said through debate, “I saw that if you prepared, you worked, you thought, then as soon as that door closed and the debate began, I realized that it didn't matter that they came from wealthy homes and I came from a poor home. It didn't make it matter what the color of my skin was and what the color of their skin was in an intellectual battle. It was even ground and we could win. We could win.” And she said, “That reverberated through my entire adult life when I would walk into a legal negotiation, or arguing in front of the Supreme Court. I no longer had the fear. I knew I could do it.” But so, that wasn't like we changed her. That was inside of her. She was a voracious reader before she came into debate. She had that drive, that intellectual spark. It just opened up the door for her where she could flourish.

VO: To close, Brent had a thought about bringing math and debate together.

BRENT: I learned through constructivism that human beings learn by having a particular construct of understanding that they’ve developed from past experience and then bumping into an experience that contradicts some of their current understanding, and then the mind goes into overdrive to resolve that.

PETER: Cognitive dissonance.

BRENT: That's the learning process. We're wired to not like cognitive dissonance and to find some way to make it better. And it struck me that math is very much that system internally, because all contradictions have to be resolved. And that's the core of debate: you have an affirmative case, a particular construct of understanding; the negative pokes at it; and you have to respond to that contradiction. And the debate that is the best one is a bouncing back and forth between the two, rising higher and higher towards What is the core truth?

VO: So grateful to Brent (a.k.a. Andy) Farrand for sharing some reflections about core truths and the teaching life. Thanks also to Jason Grant and Duane Harper Grant for their contributions to our soundtrack jam session, and thanks so much to you for listening, sharing, rating, and subscribing to this podcast—please let me know you’re doing all that! Thank you for spreading the word about Point of Learning to everyone you know curious about what and how and why we learn. Back at you just as soon as we can with a fall lineup sure to keep us all sharp! 

Episode 014 Transcript

Learning in Stories with Jake Halpern (7/23/18)

KRISTEN LEE: Hi. This is Kristen Lee, Managing Editor of the New York Daily News, and reluctant sister-in-law of Peter Horn. You’re listening to the Point of Learning podcast.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Halpern …

JAKE HALPERN: It's all story. It's how do you tell a story, how do you find a character that people will care about? How do you create a challenge that has to be overcome? What are the plot points that are going to get you through it …

[VO]: We talked some about the learning his work regularly requires.

JAKE: To report a story is to be a student of something new, to learn how that world works, whether it's Freegans, or debt collection, or refugee resettlement, or searching for gold in the mountains of Poland …

[VO]: And about finding the value in rejection.

JAKE: My YA [young adult] book that became a best seller: we were rejected, I think, by about almost every publisher except the one that published it, and then it succeeded—but there's a lot of rejection.

[VO]: I’m excited to share highlights of my conversation with Jake Halpern, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has told and reported stories for a spectrum of publications, from GQ, and Sports Illustrated, and Outside magazine to The Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the non-failing New York Times. On the radio—a favorite medium for this podcaster—Jake has contributed features to All Things Considered and The New Yorker Radio Hour. His story “Switched at Birth” for This American Life is on their Top 10 list for best shows ever. Jake has also written critically acclaimed full-length works of fiction as well as nonfiction—eight books altogether. He and co-creator Michael Sloan won a Pulitzer prize earlier this spring for the New York Times comic “Welcome to the New World,” the true story of Syrians arriving in the United States on the day after Donald Trump’s election. [Correction: the Syrian brothers and their families arrive on the day of the 2016 election.] His catalog of journalism and fiction storytelling is so wide-ranging, I’ll direct you to his website jakehalpern.com to get a fuller sense of the scope of it. Plus, I promised him I’d keep my intro brief! I first met Jake in 1986, when we were sixth-graders at City Honors, a magnet school for students in grades 5 through 12 in Buffalo, New York. I want to highlight just two strong aspects of his personality that were fully in play when we were kids. First, he’s always been an amazing storyteller. His friends used to joke about what we sometimes called “Jake’s fables,” entertaining stories Jake would relate on just about any subject under the sun. Second, he’s always loved to wander and explore. The extensive international and domestic travel he has since undertaken was foreshadowed by infamous meanderings throughout the City of Buffalo, when I liked to say he was in “urban drift mode.” We refer to both these phenomena at different points in our conversation, but they’re also appropriate touchstones to introduce this remarkable journalist and author. If I had to put the intersection of his personal and professional trajectory in a nutshell, it would be wandering, sometimes getting lost, learning interesting stuff along the way, and telling stories about it afterwards. Jake and his wife Kasia are raising two sons in New Haven, CT. 

PETER: I like to ask guests at the start, because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, do you recall a teacher who was particularly influential for you?

JAKE: Yeah, I mean multiple teachers, really. I remember at City Honors [school in Buffalo, NY] where we went, Mr. Toy was our European history teacher, and he really lectured like a college professor. And you know, we were young in that class. We were like sophomores in high school, but there was a kind of seriousness about the way that he taught that class that, I don't know, that was just very inspiring and kind of instilled a real—I mean, it's so funny, there's stuff I can't remember that happened like, you know, a year ago or six months ago, but I can remember him telling us a story about the Defenestration of Prague. I remember Mr. Fitz with his, just kind of like his really great, kind of like plainspoken.

PETER: This is Mike Fitzpatrick, history teacher.

JAKE: Yeah. His South Buffalo kind of demeanor. Just the way that he broke everything in history down to a kind of commonsense street smarts. It was kind of thrilling, I mean the stories he would tell, like the story of his friend that would steal the police cars—but he would tie it in. I remember he would also—I mean, it's weird, but I remember him telling the story of—and I don't even have an especially good memory, but I remember him telling the story for the Missouri Compromise and how Thomas Jefferson said that the fight over it woke him like a fire bell in the night. And then he went into this whole bit about what a fire bell in the night meant in 1820 … Anyway, we could go on and on, but Fitz and just like one other guy, that was Mr. Duggan. There was just a general sense of someone that cared about you other than your parents. There's actually a cool little story when I found out that I had won the Pulitzer, I got a call from my editor at the New York Times. He had told me that [the awards would be] announced on Monday, but they told me, “You'll know by the end of business on Friday.” So 5 pm came and we were actually going to Spain. It was a long-planned vacation with Kasia and the boys, and 5 came and it didn't happen. I was like, “Well, whatever.” I didn't really think that was gonna happen. But then at 5:15 the call came. And when I saw it pop up, I didn't say anything to Kasia. I just said, “I gotta take this call.” And the editor said—he was a very casual about it. It was like you're waiting to find out whether you got cancer and he's telling you about your cholesterol. He was like, “Oh, how’s your day? Is your flight taking off on time?” And I'm like, Okay dude. And he was like—eventually he just said, “Hey man, I have some really extraordinary news, you just won the Pulitzer Prize.” And I got really emotional and kind of choked up and Kasia was like, “What's wrong?” She thought like one of our parents died, probably. And then I told her and then we had this—like the boys hugged me and people were trying to get past us. They're like, “Buddy, I got to get me a seat on the plane!” They didn’t care. Anyway, they said, “Look, you can't tell anyone because it's not official until Monday.” Ok look, you're going to tell your parents, right? Which I did, but there was just a moment on that Monday, like about two hours before the [official] announcement. I had my phone on me and I had service and I called James Duggan, and I was like—I hadn't talked to him in years, but it was like an impulse, a genuine impulse (and sometimes you just gotta act on that). And I called him up and I just said, “I'm calling from Spain.” And he was like, “Oh, it's great to hear from you!” And I just said, “Hey, listen, in two hours this is going to happen. I'm going to get this award. I just want to let you know, I'm thinking of you. You’re in my thoughts right now.” And it was genuine. And so it's funny, I remember the things, I remember the things that like specific things that were taught in history classes but I also just remember a few occasions of talking to him in quieter moments and just him listening and feeling that it was really important to have someone that wasn't your parent that listened to you. I don't know. I was thinking of him at that time and I was so glad I called them. It was funny afterwards, there was, you know, just this kind of craziness of social media and all the people from Facebook. And it kind of all became a blur, but I had this really nice little moment with him on the phone. So I think that, yeah, it's a long answer to your question, but I think that really, you know, the teachers that we know when we're that age affect us more than we may realize.

PETER: Well, and especially the ones who you feel know you. Yeah. I mean, that feels so poignant to me.

JAKE: Yeah, I think it was interesting. It was shortly after college I had a gig where I taught at an American International School for year at a high school. I wasn't really qualified to be—

PETER: Was that in Tel Aviv or—?

JAKE: Yeah, that was in Israel. Yeah, it was one of these international schools where people who were diplomats and people who were stationed in the service and companies that have to send their employees abroad send their kids. So it was quite international, and what was interesting about it was that I was not that far out of high school myself. I must've been like a year or two out of college. I mean, I'm sure you relate to this too—

PETER: Absolutely!

JAKE: It was interesting because you're actually not that far removed from high school at that point in time. Like the high school memories are still fresh in your memory. And I just remember thinking it actually was really helpful because it gave me perspective on high school that I didn't have at the time, which is just that we all just feel kind of very—I shouldn’t say “all,” but speaking for myself, I should say, I felt very alone and you know, kind of isolated, and keeping all your fears and insecurities and everything in. And then this is to your point that if there's someone that you can talk to that you feel not judged by, or you feel some amount of genuine care for, it's hugely rare and valuable.

PETER: As part of my preparation for interviews, I like to watch whatever I can find about my guests on YouTube. Recently I spent 45 minutes of my morning tramp on the elliptical watching your address to the American Bankruptcy Institute—you remember this?—following the release of your 2014 nonfiction book Bad Paper, about an unholy alliance between a former banking exec and a former bank robber who team up in your compelling exposé of the debt collection business. I was smiling to watch you hold forth up there without notes, telling literally incredible stories about your adventures while reporting the book. Judging from the audible reactions, you had the crowd in the palm of your hand, as well as me, there on the exercise machine—the elliptical might as well have been in your hand is what I’m saying—and I wondered, is this the through line for you? I’ve been engaged by your storytelling since sixth grade—comfortably more than 30 years now.

JAKE: The only problem is the stories now has to be fact-checked!

PETER: [Laughing] But I wondered if this is the through line because as I’ve thought about all the different kinds of stories that you've written and researched and told for NPR and the New Yorker and the and the thriving, non-failing New York Times and the Atlantic as well as the fantasy novels and full-length nonfiction books. Is it enjoying, appreciating, reveling in, and ultimately wanting to tell great stories that you would describe as your major passion and professional life project? Or is there another—

JAKE: Yeah, no, that's it. And it's funny because I don't think it really even fully occurred to me that that was the common thread. Maybe I knew, but I think at times because I've done a lot of different things … I've done radio and magazine and then I have these young adult fantasy novels about, you know, iceberg fortresses and haunted forests … At times it's felt like, “Jesus, what is this all add up to? This feels pretty ADD, like, just not focusing on doing one thing. Why can't I have a niche like other journalists? But I think that at some point I—

PETER: Because it's been travel, you know, it's been family stuff. You've taken on teen fame, you've been exploring debt collection … I mean, it's really a diverse portfolio of things that you've taken up, let alone the stuff that you've taken on in the fantasy realm—

JAKE: Well, I learned a lot from the fantasy stuff too. I mean in the sense of—it's all story. The commonality is absolutely story. It's how do you tell a story, how do you find a character that people will care about? How do you create a challenge that has to be overcome? What are the plot points that are going to get you through it? And it's weird. It's funny, you would think that it would be all intuitive, but actually, good storytelling is—I don't know. It's harder to do and define than you'd think, but that is the through line for sure.

PETER: Well, how is it different—because you've got these different genres. One of the truly impressive things, as somebody who's known you for a long time, part of what I marvel at is that you delve into these different regions. So how would you say it's different working with an idea for a novel, as opposed to something you're going to put in an in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, as opposed to what you hope will become a full length nonfiction book or a radio piece or more recently, a graphic tale? Is it the itch to work with an idea or set of ideas? Is that what comes first? Or are they the constraints that are based on the genre? Or is it different every time?

JAKE: With the nonfiction, there's a magic to it. I mean, the funny thing is as you would think that like the magic would be in fantasy, which to some extent it is, but to me actually nonfiction is almost more magical because you're delving into these worlds like debt collectors or Freegans … You’re looking around in there and you're thinking, “This is an interesting world!” but it took me a lot of years to realize that an interesting world doesn't necessarily make a story. Even an important idea doesn't necessarily make a story. The story needs a character and it needs a conflict. It needs narrative tension, and it has to have these points in an arc. And that took many years to kind of—I don’t know, it seems, it sounds so simple. One example that I like about this is that I was living in India for a bit and I was writing a story for the New Yorker about a temple where they found I think $20 billion worth of treasure, or something incredible like that. And it was a super complicated story. It had all these crazy twists: that the treasury of the temple belonged to the Deity of the temple. But because the Deity can't or doesn't speak, the old Maharaja of the province was head custodian of the Deity. And therefore the Maharaja really controlled the wealth, but some people, the devotees to the temple thought that the Maharaja was doing a bad job … It was really complicated and really interesting. But I was also lost as to how to tell the story—which is a very common and also not a great feeling of just like Oh my god, there's so much here! How do you tell this? And we were driving by the temple with my then five-year-old in the back of the car and he was like, “Dad, isn't that the temple that’s in your story?” And I was like, “Yeah.” He's like, “What's the story?” And I was like, I can’t even figure out what the story is, how am I going to tell him? He's five! How's he going to understand the story? And I was like, “Ah, it's complicated.” And he's like, “Dad, I asked you, what's the story?” It was just like, you know, he wanted to know. So I was like, alright, you got it—

PETER: You know, I'm thinking of that scene from Philadelphia where Denzel Washington is like, “Explain this to me like I'm five …”

JAKE: Yeah, totally! That was it! And so I had to break it down. That was right. That was it. I had to. I was like, “Well …” And when I broke it down to him like he was five, which he was five. Yeah. I had this weird—like, Holy shit, that's the story! You know, because like I feel like that's the thing. You should be able to explain any story to a five-year-old. It should be really simple, but we make it unnecessarily complicated. So that’s what having kids taught me and also writing for young adults taught me, which is that I'm just trying to think of the story and several beats and keep it simple. So that is definitely a through line with all these things. It was true with the comic. It was true with all these things. “What's the story?” Yep.

PETER: I want to ask about collaboration. So let me underscore first that you’ve authored dozens of pieces for print and radio as a solo reporter, which is the way that we normally think about authorship—one creator gets an idea or a lead, pursues it, then develops it into some kind of piece. But you also have extensive experience working as a collaborator. You’ve co-authored three fantasy novels—the Dormia trilogy, Nightfall, and most recently Edgeland—with Peter Kujawinski, and the project for which you just won a Pulitzer, a nonfiction graphic tale about a Syrian refugee family who arrive in the US on Election Day 2016 called “Welcome to the New World” and published in installments in the NYT. That was a collaboration with illustrator Michael Sloan. What are the blessings and challenges of collaboration, and how have you figured out ways to make it work?

JAKE: My longest time collaborator is Peter Kujawinski. I’ve written five books with him and that actually also goes back to that school that I was teaching at, the international school, he was still in Israel. He was stationed there was a diplomat, so we became friends.

PETER: Is that right?

JAKE: Yeah, that's when we met. We had a friendship before we collaborated, and in fact I visited him in Paris and we went out one night with our wives—yes, I think we were married then—with our wives and we had a lot to drink, and you know, at one point I was like, “Oh yeah, I have an idea for a kid's book.” And he was like, “Well, me too!” And I was like, “We should do this together!” in a moment of … expansiveness. And then the next morning he was like, “So when do we get started?” And I was like, “Oh shit, he's serious about this!” And you know, I was like, “All right …”

PETER: Wow! I had one of those lights too. It was in Philadelphia, but I have yet to make that happen! Wow, it’s cool that that came out of a Let's do this! And then somebody was like, “All right, let's hold ourselves to this!” That’s inspiring!

JAKE: Right. And it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. (I should say I've had impulses that were—I've seen it go the other way, too.) But with Peter [Kujawinski], we started working on this and I remember thinking to myself very distinctly, Okay, we're friends, but now we're going in basically like going into business together, and aren't you never supposed to go into business with your friend or your brother, or whatever? And then all of a sudden, you know, every time I talk to him on the phone, it's going to be like work, and the relationship … And that all seemed quite reasonable at the time and felt like a legitimate concern. What I didn't anticipate was that the work would actually create an infrastructure for the friendship. And I think that like, you know, especially as you enter our—we're the same age, you know—I mean I don't know how it is for you, but it's, it's harder to maintain friendships. It's like you can have friendships, but you know, life is busy, there's work and there's your wife and there's kids and there's, there's just a million things and, and so. But I had to talk to Peter because we're working on this. We had to talk sometimes every day, sometimes multiple times a day and we had to problem-solve like these bizarre problems of like, “Okay, there's a forest where you—”

PETER: I will observe that this is the longest you and I have talked for years.

JAKE: Totally. You know, but that's actually kind of relevant. You could think like, Oh, this is work! but this is like a small collaboration—

PETER: You know, this isn’t going on the air, dude. This is just like a ruse to get you to talk to me.

JAKE: Well done! I don't know. It's weird. I don't know. It's a weird thing about middle age where it's like we've got one friend in neighborhood who like drops over unannounced and it's like “He's the guy that drops in!” and you're like, When did I become this old codger that doesn't like people dropping by unannounced? It's just like, it's crazy. So I think this is all part of this isolating—

PETER: Dude, you used to drop by unannounced.

JAKE: Totally. I know it's a thing.

PETER: If you were in “drift mode,” remember that? That was “urban drift mode.”

JAKE: Man. I remember that. I feel like those, like, yeah, that, and my stories, “Jake's fables”—I mean I tell you, man, when I had to start fact-checking here, that really cramped my style! My point was that I realized that it kept a friend in my life and it gave me a reason to call him and talk to him. And actually, it wasn't a problem that the personal and the interpersonal bled into one another. There was camaraderie. That was what it is. It's like, you know, when you're younger and you're, you're on a sports team together or you're in a class together, you're dealing with a teacher or—even for all of our shit that we put each other through in school, just being pains in the asses to one another. There was a camaraderie. There was a sense of a kind of connectedness and of being in this together. And I think that is so much stripped away at this point in our life. And I think I realized especially with Peter, how deeply I hungered for that anyway. Just one other cool thing. I remember one time, Peter and I went to an English teacher's conference up in Saratoga Springs, New York, because this is part of the thing they have you do to promote your book. It’s a logical audience. And one of these teachers said to us, “Who is the audience that you write for when you write? Who is your audience?” And Peter went to answer the question first. And he said, “Oh, that's easy. My audience is Jake.” It was such a beautiful thing to say. And it was true. I think that the first draft he wrote with me in mind to see if like I could get him excited or if I saw problems with that. And I quickly realized, Yeah, I guess that’s right. I'm writing for Peter. And writing is such a solitary thing to be able to say something like that— It was really profound, and it kind of spoke to what a collaboration could be at its best.

PETER: And did you guys—forgive me, I think I did know this at one point, but did you trade chapters, or did you, like he would do a portion of the story and then you would take in feedback and work from there, or did you both come at like what was your rhythm?

JAKE: The truth is is that it's changed a lot over the years, but generally what we try to do is we spend lot of time talking on the phone, sketching out the story. In fact, there's times where we talk so much it's like, This is ridiculous. When are we going to start writing? But the talking is kind of how you hash out the story and the characters. But we have alternated chapters and our voices have merged a little bit more over the years. Sometimes I read it and I can't remember who wrote that. Was that him or me? And that's actually true for a lot of it.

PETER: So for example, in your most recent collaboration, when you were in the heat of writing it, would you guys be talking like a once a week, a couple times a week, once every other week?

JAKE: That book was insane! We had been writing these books at a very, very sleepy pace for years where there was not a huge sense of urgency, where we’d talk once a day maybe. What happened with Edgeland was that the previous book, Nightfall was bought by Penguin, which is a much bigger machine. And the book was briefly on the bestseller list and so the editor basically told us You need to turn this book around in nine months. And it was just crazy. Looking back, we should have been like, “No!” But it was conveyed to us that if we wanted the full might of their support that we needed to do this quickly, So this is how crazy that got: We were on the phone like five times a day and we were working on it as a Google Doc, and Peter would be working on one section and I’d be working on another and then we'd hand it to the editor, but we couldn't do it fast enough. In a traditional draft process, you write the draft and you send it to the editor and the editor sends it back to you with comments—but that wasn't fast enough. So we were writing—I was writing Chapter, say, Four, he was reworking Chapter Six and the editor was behind us on Chapter Three and you could see her cursor on the Google Doc, like basically she was kind of chasing you—

PETER: Like Pac-Man.

JAKE: It was totally like Pac-Man! And then we finished the book. I remember finishing a draft of the book and usually like, you finish the book, you like take a week off, you go out and have a dinner … I literally remember looking back and seeing Pac-Man behind me! I was going down getting a glass of water and came back up and then just immediately starting back on the introduction again like five minutes later because Pac-Man was moving through the conclusion, and we had to just immediately start the next round because she had already put fresh edits there. It was just incredible. It was not fun. I mean we did it and at the end we're just like, We're never doing that again. On some level it did beat a bit of the joy out of the whole thing. And the joy is important to having some sort of spark to it. But yes, so that was like three people simultaneously all working on the same document and you could just see where we were. Yeah, it's crazy. That was—I've never seen that.

PETER: That stresses me out. Even like on a BlueJeans conference call, you know, when there's three other people looking at the same Google Doc and we're not even doing that much, but just being there at the same time. I know it can add a little anxiety! Remarkable. So tell me a little bit—I've read there was a piece in the Times explaining how they decided to pair you up with Michael Sloan to take on this project. You know, for a paper that famously had no kind of comic presence—

JAKE: The way that it happened was I actually pitched an idea which the Times rejected—which is very common, and most of my ideas are actually rejected, which is important, and worth saying. But I pitched this idea, they said no, but it was a story about a refugee kid. And they're like, “But there is someone who's interested in doing a project with refugee kids. You’ve got to talk to this guy, Bruce Hedlam,” who was the editor. It was Bruce’s idea. He said, “I want to do a comic. I want to do a true comic about a family who are recent immigrants.” He said, “Would you be interested?” and I immediately was intrigued by the idea. I just thought it was different and in a way that really appealed to me. And so then I found Michael and then so Michael was kind of on board and then Bruce was like, “Well, now you just gotta find the family.” So I reached out to this guy that runs IRIS, which is the local resettlement agency in Connecticut, and he said, “Hey, I got an idea for you. What if you follow a family from the day they arrive like when they basically touch down in the US?” And he said, “You have to circle back to them and get their approval and if they don't want to do it then we'll find you another family, but doing it this way.” And I'm like, “Oh, that's cool! I like it.” And I sent it to Bruce, and Bruce is like, “Great.” And then—

PETER: Your editor. Bruce is the editor.

JAKE: Exactly. Bruce is like, “This is cool.” And then the resettlement agency was like, “Ooh, we have two brothers coming on election day,” which seemed kind of cool, but no one, you know, everyone thought Hillary was gonna win, so it doesn't matter.

PETER: An interesting idea beforehand.

JAKE: Yeah. No. And then of course what happens is that they arrive, I meet them, and then I get home and Trump wins, and all of a sudden I remember thinking to myself, This family landed in one country and they're gonna wake up the next morning in another country.

PETER: “Welcome to the new world!”

JAKE: Yeah. And then I was just like—that was electric for me because first of all, that was just electric for me. I just, I have to say, at that moment I felt this could be a very dynamic story and this could be an important story. And sometimes you don't feel that. That was one time where I was like—but we had to convince the Times. The Times initially was reluctant because— People think that they're a liberal organization, but they're actually conservative in the sense that they are an old institution that is used to doing things a certain way. And so I think it took some convincing that this was worth doing, and there was a two month period in between when they arrived before the Times actually ran the thing and it was very unclear during that time whether or not they were going to do it and we weren't really being paid. I should add that we didn't get paid hardly anything for this entire series. We got—I mean, it's not public, but I don't have any problem with saying it was a 20-part series in the New York Times that took the better part of a work year to do. And I got paid about 14 grand. So that's just not a lot of money for how much work it was. So Michael and I were kind of in this, and neither of us is making a lot of money. The Times is also not making us any promises on how long they're going to run this. They refused. We kept on pushing them and saying, “Give us how long. It will help us story-wise. How many episodes will you run of this comic?” And they wouldn't tell us. And Bruce finally said, “They’ll run it as long as they feel it's good,” which added like another layer of stress, which is like We might get canceled.

PETER: Yeah, how do you plan the arc if you don't know how many seasons your show's gonna run, right? And you don't know what's going to happen because you're not—

JAKE: Then things happened. The most dramatic thing that happened was that the one family received a death threat, which the FBI investigated and then eventually the family ended up having to leave the town where they were and it was really hard for them. I mean, it was like one of these conflicting moments as a journalist because it was terrible for the family, which I can be care about, but of course I'm not dumb. I understood as a journalist that it was really powerful for the story. So it was one of these hard conflicts. But so Michael and I had bonded through this because we didn't know how long the Times was going to run it and neither of us was making a lot of money, and we kind of felt like as it was going on and as the Times kept on running it and people—particularly in our neighborhood because it was a Connecticut story—started following it. And then we kind of felt like, All right, we did this, man, like, This is this crazy thing that we're doing together. And it was really great working with him and it shared the— Again, it was like the other thing in the other project I described. It shared the loneliness of the whole endeavor because we were in it together.

PETER: I want to circle back to the idea of you stressed for a second. It's important to emphasize that most of the ideas that you pitch get rejected or have gotten rejected. You want to say some more about that?

JAKE: Yeah. I feel like it's important to say even like, I think Nightfall, my YA [young adult] book that became a bestseller. We were rejected by I think almost every publisher except the one that published it. And then it succeeded! But there's a lot of rejection. I just pitched an op-ed like two days ago to the Times Sunday Review, who I just won a Pulitzer for, and they rejected it. And they were very polite about it, but they rejected it. And then I sent it to the Wall Street Journal and they rejected it, and then I sent it to the New Yorker online and I’m guessing tomorrow they're going to reject it. But the thing is that sometimes they are right. Sometimes your idea is bad, or is not fully developed, or is not good. Yeah, just plain not good. But sometimes they're wrong: sometimes your idea is good and they just don't see it, or they're too risk-averse, and then maybe some of the times you just don't know. You're like, Is this a good idea that they can't see, or is this a bad idea that I should be embarrassed that I sent to them? And you often vacillate between those two ideas. But the only thing you have to do is you just can't stop sending out the ideas because then that's death. Then just nothing happens. And so this is a good example of this: the comic that we've been talking about. I had an idea—remember I said it started off with an idea that was rejected. The idea that was rejected was there was a family, a refugee family from Syria that wanted to settle in Indiana. And then-governor Mike Pence said, “We don't want them.” And Connecticut accepted them and their kids go to the same afterschool program as my kids. And I thought, Oh, that might be something there. So I was at the soccer practice with my 10-year-old and I actually thought this thought: This is a cool little idea. Pitch it right now before you talk yourself out of it and convince yourself that it's a crap idea, because you will convince yourself that it's a crap idea if you sit on it for too long. So right there on the field with my little iPhone, I sent this little pitch to my editor at the Sunday Review and hit SEND. And the minute I said it, I was like, Oh my god, why'd I do that? That was a crap idea! And then she wrote back and she did reject the idea, but then she said, “But hey, you should talk to Bruce.” And that’s what started the comic that ended up winning the Pulitzer. So it started with a rejection. And it also started though with this little dialogue that I had in my own head, which was Send the idea off before your doubt sets in. Often these half-baked ideas are the best ideas. And somehow you have to just get over the fear that they're not going to work out, or accept that many of them are going to be rejected. Yeah, that's probably better. You know, accept it. And I don't know. I've spent about 20 years trying to deal with that mindset of just figuring out how to keep faith.

[VO]: I asked Jake, somewhat cheekily, which of the following honors he found most special—winning a Pulitzer prize, being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, or having John Oliver use a video clip of him talking about the business of debt collection on the HBO smash hit Last Week Tonight. Jake didn’t take the bait.

JAKE: External validation is like such a tricky thing because, you know, we all crave it—or I certainly crave it. I think many people do and it feels really good initially, but then it's tricky. Like it leaves you often craving more in a way that feels greedy and not really great. I think that all three of those experiences, in their own little ways relate to that. But I will say the best moment, the moment I'll never forget, is just being at the airport on that Friday before the Pulitzers were announced and getting the phone call from the New York Times and the editor saying, “Jake, I’ve got some extraordinary news. You and Michael just won the Pulitzer Prize.” And then turning to my wife and just saying, “We won,” and her hugging me, and the boys hugging me on the jetway to that airplane. That meant something. That was— And then I called my mom and I thanked her, and I called my dad and then the plane took off and then I was completely cut off for those next seven hours. And it was kind of a beautiful thing because I had shared it with the people that meant the most to me and had this moment of just feeling like— There is so much rejection with this work. And there have been many years where I haven't made very much money and there's been so many times where I've just been filled with doubt. It just really, really, really meant a lot to me to have that moment with Kasia and the boys and, and to kind of just be like, Oh my god, I can't believe that, like, this is amazing! and just enjoy that. And it kind of washed over me. Then when all the, you know, then you get a lot of messages from people on Facebook and Twitter and whatnot and it's all nice. But then it just, it was like It’s too much! you know. But that moment, that moment was personal and real, and one that I treasure. You said the greatest kind of commonality or through line here is story, but I think certainly with the nonfiction, the other through line is just learning. It’s that to report a story is to be a student of something new, to learn how a world works, whether it's Freegans or debt collection, or refugee resettlement, or searching for gold in the mountains of Poland. You know, all things like that, and you learn, and it requires a kind of humility about it like, I don't know how any of this works. I mean, I often hear myself saying, but it's actually somewhat true, I hear myself saying, “Forgive me, this is a really stupid question.” Because all my initial questions seem stupid and I'm grateful that I have a chance to learn these things because, you know, if you stop learning, then it's just, it's over, you're done. There’s just nothing more depressing than not learning new things. So I don't know, I think that like for me in a very small way, every time I start one of these things, it's that same feeling of I don't know what I'm doing. I'm lost here in this complicated world, how am I going to understand it? And feeling kind of a little flustered and like, I'm not an economics writer. I'm not a— you know—I'm not a health writer, how can I even do this? And then it'd be like, All right dude, just chill out and you'll figure it out. And, and even though it's a little stressful, somewhere along the way I’m like, This is cool, I'm learning something new and being forced to learn something new and I'm not bored. So I don't know, that's kind of rambling, but I think it's all to your point about how vital it is that we force ourselves into— We almost have to put ourselves in situations that necessitate learning.

PETER: You always have, man. I mean we were joking earlier about “urban drift mode” and stuff, but from the time I first knew you, you would love wandering, and kind of seeing where you wound up and paying attention to the interesting things along the way, and then telling stories about it afterwards.

JAKE: I know your mom remembers this because I've talked to her about this many times, and she, she definitely remembers it too. But I remember one time just like walking across the city and ending up at your house and you weren't there. Your mom will probably remember the details of it better than I would, but for some reason she had all this food, and there had been some confusion. There was a ham. It was only—like the table was set for like eight people, but there was no one there!

PETER: This is Gretchen, star of podcast number 013. Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

JAKE: Now your mom is like, you know, your mom is just great, just such a sweetheart. And she was just always welcoming and there was always that goodwill, very genuine goodwill. And you know I always had such a soft spot for your mom, and she said, “Well why don't you come in, you have something to eat?” So it was you—no it was me, and you weren't there. You were not there. It was me and your mom having this dinner at the house. And I asked, “What were you going to do with all this food?” And then she just laughed. There was a story that was lost on me. But, but I remember it was cool. I don't remember exactly what we talked about, but we talked and like those moments are so great, you know, like, I would never have been like, “I'm going to walk across the city to have dinner with Gretchen!” because that would just be weird.

PETER: No, she loved it. And I remember hearing about it right afterwards. I said, “Wait, what happened?” And I was like, “Oh, that's pretty cool. It all worked out.”

JAKE: Yeah, we had a good time. Yeah. No, it was good. It was good.

[VO]: That’s it for today! Thanks so much to Jake Halpern spending a few hours with me to record this conversation—again, check out his voluminous portfolio of writing and radio work at jakehalpern.com—and thanks so much to you for listening, subscribing, rating, and sharing this podcast with everyone you know interested in what and how and why we learn. Shayfer James wrote all the music used in today’s program; if you like the grooves, you’ll love the lyrics, so do be sure to visit his site, shayferjames.com. See you next month!  

JAKE: [referring to Mr. Toy’s European History class during our sophomore year of high school] You defenestrated his podium. Although it was only a partial defenestration because it was, it was dangling from—

PETER: Yeah, I think it was the threat of—it was an implied defenestration.

JAKE: Just for clarity, what you did—for those who weren't there—you somehow took his podium and hung it out the second floor window of the school on some sort of rope.

PETER: It wasn't, it wasn't safe or advisable. I think. I mean, I believed it was secure at the time, but probably just going too far.

JAKE: Crazy. Now I have some questions for you. Like, I want to understand like how that happened. But the, um …

Episode 013 Transcript

Mother’s Day with Gretchen (6/2/18)

CINDY ASSINI: This is Cindy Assini, proud mom and proud educator. Welcome to the Point of Learning podcast with my friend Peter Horn. [To son:] Is that so funny?

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show …

GRETCHEN MEISTER BRAND: Everybody needs to know that he or she is worthy, and he or she is cared for. We all respond to the encouragement that comes from the faith that somebody has in you, and then the request to move a little farther, to climb a little higher, to be a little better.

[VO]: Welcome to Season 2 of the Point of Learning podcast! In more and less direct ways, the 12 monthly installments of the first season explored strong early influences on me as an educator, highlighting ideas interesting, I hope, to anyone curious about what and how and why we learn. During this Mother’s Day special, I am circling back to the first influence on me as a teacher, as a learner, as a person. When I asked my mother Gretchen which aspects of her biography to play up or down in introducing her, she led with a reply that was at once surprising and totally characteristic.

GRETCHEN: I think that you should know that I was—I don't think I've ever said this before, but born to be loved. I was very much cherished as a kid. And I was born to teach, because I was the oldest of the three in the family, and at many points I got to teach my brothers. I'm not sure they would agree to that, but probably they would at least smile!

[VO]: All our mothers teach us things, if we’re lucky enough to know them. My mom taught me how to bake crusty bread and a flaky pie crust that still gets love on Facebook from friends who last tasted it 15 years ago. She was my first violin teacher. In fact, during group violin lessons she led, when I was about 11 or 12, she allowed me to do my first teaching—10-minute mini-lectures on the lives of the great composers. (So she may be partially to blame for the podcast habit I developed decades later!) She taught me how to disagree with people respectfully, which I still hold to be at the center of the civil discourse our country so badly needs right now. Some of my most popular blog posts feature ways to honor others that she modeled, not to mention dozens of the stories I’ve shared with my own students over the years. In addition to running her private business, the Violin Studio in Buffalo, New York for over 20 years, Mom has taught Sunday school, and US history, Global Studies, and psychology, in independent as well as public high schools. Still, as good as she is as a teacher, I’ve long been struck that when she was a kid, what she wanted to be first and more than anything else, was a mother, as she emphasizes in this quick story that got me giggling. 

GRETCHEN: I grew up wanting to be a mother so much that when my parents gave me a big doll—I called it my Bobby Doll. So there were the three Meister kids and this doll. And I made my mother tell the babysitter that it was our fourth child in the family, and I don't think the babysitter, Mrs. Heilman, believed that, but I was excited about having another baby in the family. [To Peter:] I didn't tell you that, you're laughing!

PETER: If she had believed it, maybe Momma and Poppa would not have left the house. I mean, right? Probably not.  

GRETCHEN That's right. You've got a good point, although I have to say by that time, I could probably have handled things. At least, of course, I thought I could, but—I had this strong matriarchal archetype, and it I think really promoted my years until I could be a mother.

[VO]: My mother Gretchen was born to The Rev. John (fondly known as “Jack”) and Miriam George Meister in Steubenville, Ohio, moments before the Baby Boom began in the mid-1940s. She grew up with her younger brothers Gregg and Peter, mostly in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a gang of preacher’s kids renowned for their kickball skills and occasionally willful dispositions. Mom notes that she and her brothers were deeply influenced by the life of service to others that they felt was their duty and mission. This was a time—the 1940s and ‘50s—when ministers and their families occupied an unusual status in the United States. There wasn’t necessarily a lot of money, but most people in town knew who you were. The role of minister’s wife, which my grandmother (and later my mother herself) held, was not only homemaker, but hostess for all manner of church gatherings, and very often counselor—to the minister, as well as at least half the congregation. We’ll get into a bit more on that in a few minutes …

PETER: I like to ask guests—because of course, this is a podcast about what and how and why we learn—I like to ask guests about a strong memory of a teacher. It could be positive or negative, and any kind of teacher. If I asked you that question, who comes to mind?

GRETCHEN: I think the person that comes to mind is Lutie Young, who was my high school teacher in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for my sophomore math experience. And it really was an experience more than a class, because I went into it thinking that she physically was challenged, and I think I was just beginning to come of age or something with how people looked and she—

PETER: “Physically challenged” in terms of just not being attractive, or—?

GRETCHEN: Well, she was she definitely was not attractive. And her eyes crossed. And I didn't like the subject, and I thought I wasn't good at geometry. Yes. And so my defense mechanism was to corral the kids in the class to help me make fun of her and to help us not pay very much attention to the subject, and I suppose we'd been into it a couple months when she called me to talk with her after school, and—

PETER: So you were kind of a ringleader. I mean, I've heard variations of this story before, you’ve shared it with me. I think I processed that you were acting up a little bit, but you were also prompting others to follow your lead …

GRETCHEN: Yes, yes. It must've been a difficult period for her, you know, period of the day, classroom period, because it bordered on impossible. You know, we giggled, we’d pass notes, we didn't pay attention. We really didn't respond to her work. And so she called me in to talk with her and she told me how— She told me first how very much she'd been looking forward to having me in class, because she was a member of the church, and she admired my parents so much, and she couldn't wait till she had Gretchen Meister in her geometry class. And right then I began to feel sad, because I felt I was letting her down, but letting Mom and Dad down too. So she said, “You know, you can do this math, you can do this. I need your help. I'd like to have us have a fresh start.” And the next day, we had a fresh start. And I went in and paid attention to her, and I actually sort of fell in love with her. I did very well in geometry, although that was really the last math I remember getting excited about, but she, eight years later came to my wedding to your father and she gave me a wedding present and she rejoiced with me, and she was there at the reception. And I really treasure Ms. Young. I'm sure she's moved on, but I give such thanks for her, because she cared so much and she helped turn me around. She transformed my experience in high school. It could have gone from bad to worse, and instead it ended up very well.

PETER: And how skillfully done! Rather than try to challenge you in front of the whole class, to pull you aside and to begin with what sounds like it wasn't a guilt trip. It sounds like it was a very sincere statement on her part, how she was looking forward, and now look how things turned out, but also treating you as a sophomore, as a young adult who could hear that, who could hear what she actually felt. Do you remember anything else that she said? I'm just curious, you know, anything that she said besides, you know, “Can we start over?”

GRETCHEN: Well, she assured me that I could handle the material. I think that on a number of different levels I was resistant. You know, I thought, “This is a strange—What are you talking about? Proofs? This is strange.” I'd been much more familiar with words than numbers and shapes, and so she assured me that I could handle it. She didn't seem to have any question about that. Maybe that was a relief. Oh, she also told me that I was a leader and that she was concerned about the nature of that class and, of course, now many years later I can understand that. I must have been able to understand it at some level then. I knew I was a leader, and I guess she made me want to be a leader for good.

[VO]: I love this approach to a discipline encounter, whether you’re engaging with a student or your child. In addition to taking the young person seriously and speaking from the heart, Ms. Young’s approach addressed the issue of confidence, which is the heart of kids believing that they can learn or do something. When learners lack confidence, they may protect themselves by acting out as my mother did, and as I myself did so many times in school and elsewhere—or they may choose to disengage entirely, which it’s important for adults who care for them to remember is also a form of engagement based on the relative power that kids perceive in the interaction. It’s up to the wise adult to take a breath, allow a little space, and circle back for another attempt at connection when the time and setting might work a little better. I loved having the chance to talk with my mom for this show while trying to stay focused on teaching and learning, but then discovering many times how my mother’s own mother kept figuring into what we talked about. My grandmother Miriam would have turned 101 on June 2nd.

GRETCHEN: I remember hearing my mother say that she very much wanted to be a good mother. And she had her hands full. She had three of us under five years old and I think her first reflex, she felt, was to scold in order to find ways to help us behave the way she wanted us to. But very early she said she realized that by praising me she got a better response, that if she could do that first, then she could turn it into whatever desirable behavior she wanted. Instead of hitting my brothers, for example. Or instead of teasing them, she would use that. She—

PETER: This would be you hitting them, right? Just want to be clear.

GRETCHEN: Yes. Me hitting them. [Laughing] I guess I did start off by saying how I taught them! But I think instead of “starting a fight,” that was one of her phrases. I wasn't the only one of the three of us start a fight, mind you, but when I would do that, or when I would tease them or somebody else or “provoke” somebody else—that's a word that's coming to me from her that I haven't recalled for a long time. She decided, I think very early on with me to show the possibility of what I could be, of how I could be liked. I could be a leader and so she brought out the best. I could help her cook, I could make things, and then it began to be “Gretchen, I don't know what I would do! I don't know how I would take care of this whole house and the boys without your help. I really need you. I really need your help.” And that's all I needed to hear was that I was needed and counted on, and I responded to that. And I think responding to that, it was part of my inner being that I would treat others that way. So I definitely think that it came as a gift from Mom, as part of her way.

PETER: When do you remember her talking with you about realizing that? You know, talking with you about realizing that you responded better to—

GRETCHEN: Oh, I think I was maybe only seven or eight when I would heard, “You know, what I've decided to do, Gretchen, is count on praise more than punishment.”

PETER: Wow, so she said it to you in those terms when you were—that’s very interesting.

GRETCHEN: Yes, she would say that she'd been “confounded.” She really had a lot on her. She was a minister's wife in the days that ministers' wives were—

PETER: —a full time job—

GRETCHEN: Full-time employed, and she felt it very keenly. She was willing to do anything to be a worthy, helpful minister's wife. And she had a huge house as far back as Sidney, Ohio. I went to it a couple of years ago and I couldn't believe how big it was! So she had that, and she had the three of us under five, so she was in a position that she had no training for either, because she grew up without a dad in the house. Her father died when she was nine months old, leaving the mother with twins, and it was the grandmother that took care of the kids while the mother herself went out to work and was a professional woman in East Liverpool, Ohio, working as the Lead Secretary for the Potter China Company. So Mother had no experience in keeping house, in taking care of little ones, in being a wife. She didn't see a wife functioning, so she was almost in over her head, and I did respond to the praise and I think really knew she meant it, she needed it, and it seemed to be a wonderful—a combining of some of my gifts.

[VO]: Gretchen was also a professional musician, who performed with regional as well as professional orchestras, including the Buffalo Philharmonic, which she joined in a tour under the direction of Russian-born maestro Semyon Bychkov. She had not played the violin for at least three years when I asked her to break out the ol’ fiddle one more time for this episode’s soundtrack. We had such a blast that every non-Shayfer James piece you’re hearing in this episode came from mother and son playing together that afternoon. If you heard the conversation I had with my brothers for the Thanksgiving special (episode 007), you know music played a pivotal part in our growing up. Mom was behind arranging all those lessons, and making sure we got there, as well as thousands of rehearsals for orchestras and bands and summer workshops over the years. Behind her, as you’ll hear, was my grandmother. 

PETER: Tell me about your experience with the Suzuki method.

GRETCHEN: Well, again, I would point to Mother talking on the phone with me about it, and an amazing concert that she saw in Philadelphia and I was living in Buffalo. We had just moved to Buffalo, and I wanted you children to have music and your brothers had started piano lessons in Whippany, New Jersey with truly a saint of this world, Ruth Snow, who came to the house to teach your brothers piano. So I knew that I wanted something for the three of you here. It was impossible to think of life without music. And your father agreed. So your grandmother, my mother, talked about seeing little children playing Mozart on the stage in Philadelphia! She said it was magical! And within a week—this is some synchronicity, synchro-destiny—within a week I saw in the paper an advertisement for an accomplished violinist who would be willing to train in the Suzuki method at the Community Music School.

PETER: A want ad, in other words.  

GRETCHEN: Yes, an ad in the paper. And I talked with your father, and I called up and I answered the ad and they were happy to have me be on the staff there and they indeed sent me, and as it turned out, all of our family to Stevens Point in Wisconsin, which was in the heyday of the Suzuki movement in this country. We may still be in the heyday, but that was certainly some of the beginning of it. And I was able to work with Kay Sloan, among other people. And then in the course of my teaching Suzuki, I was with Dr. Suzuki himself several times. The Suzuki Method is named for Shinichi Suzuki, who died in 1998 at the age of something like 98. And he designed the method for teaching music, not for creating prodigies, but to ensure world peace. His method is called Talent Education. And it's the method also named Nurtured by Love. My memory is, and I'd have to check it, that it was in 1920 and ‘21 and his family was making violins and he began to take seriously what it meant for little people to play. And little people learn to play by listening to their parents, so they were imitating. They wanted to play the same way.

PETER: There's a couple things that are really remarkable to me about that. One is that, you know, to go back to thinking about the things that Momma loved most, I would include children and music. So little kids playing Mozart would have been like her vision of unicorns sliding down a rainbow! That would've been just delightful.

GRETCHEN: Oh, absolutely! Rhapsody!

PETER: I could imagine her approaching you with that. But the other part—because we have this idea sometimes about, you know, musicians, the violinist in particular (as I've explored in episode 009). There's something unusual about the place of the violinist in our culture. We think of this talented, virtuosic person, um, you either have it or you don't, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas Dr. Suzuki’s approach was saying, “It's not about that. Anybody can do it.” How would you compare the individual work with private [violin] students, in comparison or in contrast with working with a class full of Global Studies students or psychology students in a high school setting?

GRETCHEN: Well, it's an excellent question and I'm not sure I have a definitive answer. I did think that there would be many more similarities than there were when I applied to teach in the classroom in social studies and in English. Everybody needs to know that he or she is worthy and he or she is cared for, and you don't have a half an hour or an hour of a private session with one person to communicate that. But there are other ways to communicate it, such as eye contact, such as phrasing, such as praising, such as pulling out the positive before there's a request to inch ahead on the progress. And that's true for all of us. We all respond to the encouragement that comes from the faith that somebody has in you, and then the request to move a little farther, to climb a little higher, to be a little better.

PETER: When you say “phrasing,” for example, as one of the signals that you can use to say that you care about a class, that you're there for them. What's an example of something that you might say?

GRETCHEN: Well, I can think of examples of things that are unfortunate to say because they're—

PETER: Ok, counter-examples are good too!

GRETCHEN: —unfortunate to be heard, like “No, that's not right!” or “That's wrong! I told you that before, haven't we been through this?”

PETER: So what would you do if somebody, you know, they say something, a student says something that is what might be called “the wrong answer,” or not the answer you're looking for—how might you phrase that?

GRECHEN: “That's almost it! That is almost it! So if you're putting it together with the other event that happened that year, and you know that was the breakup of World War II, you know that that must've been 1939, so you're right, that must've been when …”

[VO]: So here once again you hear my mother’s affirmative approach, so omnipresent in my growing up as to be the water I swam in. I have a sister-in-law who has chided that the rule in our family is “Praise or be praised,” which is not too far off the mark! When it is genuine, I have found praise to be highly effective in getting others’ attention. With students, or others whose behavior you’d like to influence, it’s one way to go “soft on the people” before you go “hard on the problem,” as Roger Fisher and William Ury put it in their classic on win-win negotiation called Getting to YES! (see the related post on the show page). I asked Mom if this was something she learned from her parents.

GRETCHEN: I think so. I think I would give both Mom and Dad credit for valuing the person and the self-esteem of the other person and the confidence of the other person more than any particular, exact, objective fact. I think both of them went about their lives caring for all people in such a way that we came into that naturally. We were swept up in that conviction. I do believe that all things are possible to him or her who believes. And so if the inner soul is intact for a person, then possibility is endless. If there's no confidence, and if there have been too many hits on that person, too many points of frustration, then you're at a stopped place. I think some people who believe in punishment think that punishment will be enabling. Maybe that's the best you can say about those people who believe that punishment is the answer. There has to be discipline. There has to be expectation, with students and with children, and with violin students. But there are so many ways to enable, and so many ways to crush.

[VO]: I’m very grateful for this chance to have a conversation with my most influential teacher. Before the credits today, I want to share just a few lines from a favorite mother poem that I used many times with students in May. In a poem called “Translations from the Mother Tongue,” Suji Kwock Kim writes, “I listen for your mother in your voice and cannot know/ if I find her. Not much lives on, from one generation/ to the next. Not much, but not/ nothing” […] “I want to know what survives, what’s handed down/ from mother to daughter, if anything is, bond I cannot cut away, that keeps apart what it lashes together./ And I want to know what cannot be handed down, the part of you/ that’s only you, lonely fist of sinew and blood,/ deep in your gut where cords lash bone, nerve, breath,/ the part of you that first began to sing.” Thanks once more to Gretchen Meister Brand for joining me this month to talk, as well as letting me goad her into picking up her magic violin another time. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for theme musics! Thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating, and sharing this podcast with everyone you know curious about what and how and why we learn. The next show will showcase my interview with Pulitzer prize winning journalist Jake Halpern—you’re not gonna wanna miss it!  

Episode 012 Transcript

ALL THIS: Poets Aja Monet & Meghann Plunkett (4/30/18)

PETER MEISTER: Squirrel in winter:/ A crust, at least, with my tea/ And a little nap--

PETER HORN [voiceover]: That's right. It's the Point of Learning Poetry Special. Props to my uncle Peter Meister, whose haiku “Squirrel in winter” first got me wondering about what poems could do. On today's show, two rising stars of poetry:

MEGHANN PLUNKETT [describing Aja Monet]:  She is not afraid to go there, to say the thing, to be direct, whether it's a difficult image that she just really wants to drive home, or if it's something that people just aren't writing about. What she was talking about earlier—she was saying that she is looking for the story that no one is telling, or a story that is in the world, but no one's really paying attention to. I think that that's really self-aware of her to realize that that's what she's so good at. And she's so brave in her work.

AJA MONET: When I met Meghann, I was very much in a binary world. The way I looked at the world was very binary. So, you know, it was right or wrong, God or the devil; it was black or white; it was rich or poor, like the world was just very binary. That was the way that I had learned the world, and it wasn't until I met Meghann that all of that kind of washed away and became like … everything was kind of an inverse of each other and I had to really start to question, wait, What does it mean to be right? What does it mean to be wrong? Is that possible? What does it mean to be this or that? You can't, you can't just be one or the other.

[VO]: Aja Monet is a poet, singer, and performer. At age 19, she was youngest individual to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title. That was 11 years ago, and according to Wikipedia, no other woman has done so since. Her books of poetry include Inner-City Chants & Cyborg Cyphers, The Black Unicorn Sings, and My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award. Monet has performed at the Town Hall Theater, the Apollo Theater, the United Nations, and the NAACP’s Barack Obama inaugural event. I was delighted, but not surprised to look up at the Washington, DC Women’s March in 2017 to see her glorious visage on the jumbotron as she prepared to read, reminding the massive crowds that words have electoral power. Meghann Plunkett is a poet who seems to be winning a prize every other time I check Facebook. Recent triumphs include the Missouri Review and Third Coast Magazine. She has been a finalist for Narrative Magazine's 30 Below Contest as well the North American Review’s Hearst Poetry Prize. Meghann is just about to graduate with her MFA from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where she was awarded the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and serves as an assistant editor of the Crab Orchard Review, as well as a poetry reader for Adroit Journal. Her work can also be found in Tinderbox, Pleiades, Washington Square Review, and Luna Luna Magazine, among many others. She is the writer in residence at Omega Institution and the director of The Black Dog Tall Ship Writing Retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

These two phenomenal poets are also close friends. When they were first-year students at Sarah Lawrence College, they admired each other’s work at an open mic during Orientation Week and soon realized that they were both passionate about the right words in the right order.

Aja is currently based in Miami, where she is equally invested in the community as artist and social activist. I caught up with her several weeks ago when she was back in New York City to host the finals for Urban Word NYC, a spoken word collective that played a significant role in her own artistic development when she was a teenager. We talked backstage at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem moments before the event began, so you’ll hear some hustle and bustle in the background on our end. We called Meghann in Illinois, where she had just defended her poetry thesis. They’re both so busy that it wasn’t easy to coordinate schedules, but I really wanted to interview them at the same time, because they have influenced each other’s work for the past dozen years or so, and because it was Meghann who introduced me to Aja through one of Aja’s poems when I invited Meghann in to lead workshops with my students five years ago. Here’s a taste of “What I’ve Learned,” a list poem by Aja Monet well worth hearing and watching on YouTube in its entirety. As Meghann predicted, my students and I kinda went nuts for it.  

[Excerpt from "What I've Learned" by Aja Monet, produced by Cam Be and used with permission.]

MEGHANN: That poem “What I’ve learned.” I love it. I love teaching that poem of Aja’s because it's so beautiful and subtle and so relatable. She talks about knowing how, learning how to glue a dish back together and then she further explains it. “I know how to put things back together,” which is not just about the plate; it's about her life, it's about everything. It's about her emotions. And I think that no one talks about the world better than contemporary poets—our current world. So that's why I like teaching that poem.

[VO]: I like to ask guests about their teachers.

AJA: My teachers have been pivotal to my entire life. I mean, every teacher I've come across has shaped and/or helped me understand what I wanted or what I was aspiring towards, or what I didn't want out of life. In elementary school there was a woman named Haryn Intner—and she reached out to me actually, not too long ago on Facebook—but I was kind of going through a lot of stuff at home. And I actually, I think I like stole some money from a kid in class or did something really stupid, and she took an extra interest in trying to understand why, or what was the issue, versus making me--like I was really embarrassed that I got caught, I felt horrible--but versus making me feel really bad about it, she actually spent more time with me and she took more time to show me attention and care, and she would spend time with me after school. She called my mom and like not to be complaining but to just show how much she cared and she wanted to know what was going on at home. So then she invited me to go with her one day. I guess her and my mom got cool. She started hearing my mom's story, a single mom raising these kids by herself, struggling to do so. And she invited me to go spend the night with her so that she could tutor me because I was really wanting to do more writing and I was not the best essay writer. So she was like helping me revise things at the end of the class. And then I think there was one essay or project and she let me go home with her and then I stood with her and her family, they made me dinner, and she took me around her neighborhood. And then after that I think, you know, we just always, she just always kind of like made me feel like I was important and that, you know, my schooling mattered.

[VO]: As a teacher hearing this in retrospect, I can’t help wondering what might have happened if things had gone the other way—if instead of embracing Aja and trying to figure out why she had made this mistake, the teacher had sent her to the office to be punished. God bless you, Haryn Intner! For more about this kind of approach, reclaiming students as learners, check out Episode 010.

AJA: And then there was a principal, Tanya Kaufman--she was a superintendent for a short time--at PS 183. There's articles about her, and actually what she did at her public school, which was a big deal at the time, and her approach to education, and the way that she was talking about the public school system and all this. And I would say she's someone that stood out in my life. Recently, she passed away, but she's someone that was in my life from the time I was in elementary school to the time I was in college, and consistently would call or just check in on me. Like there was a time I was at Sarah Lawrence and I couldn't even afford to finish some of my credits and randomly she sent the money and told me not to tell my mom, and she was just one of those people that looked out for me.

[VO]: As reported by the non-failing New York Times, Aja’s principal, Tanya Kaufman was the kind of educator who led a school without bells, and would replace the word UNSATISFACTORY on report cards with the description NOT YET—which feels to me like a promise.

AJA: I think what was special about growing up in New York was there was always, maybe it was just my luck or I don't know, but I felt like there was always angels around that were in the public school system, trying to use the school system to, you know, to help change the conditions of young people and like what was possible. So I think most of my educators were really young, they came from liberal schools, they were very fiery, bright-eyed people. They weren't just—I was very fortunate because they weren't just in there for a paycheck, you know. So yeah, Meghann?

MEGHANN: Wow, that was amazing. There's stories that I didn't know. I’m getting stories that I've never heard. I had some great high school teachers. I did a lot of math and science in high school, so it wasn't until I went to Sarah Lawrence that I felt like I really connected with professors that were introducing me to writing as something that was actually possible to do for your life. So I'd say that Jeff, Jeff McDaniel—who was also Aja’s professor, we had that class together—he was one of those teachers that really kind of broke things open for me. And Matthea Harvey also: she was incredibly kind and incredibly insightful, especially during a transition of high school to college. She was really supportive at Sarah Lawrence and that was really helpful to me.

PETER: Aja, you've written that “when a woman writes a poem/ she spends time with the gods/ on your behalf.” I love that. As a teacher, I favored a Emily Dickinson's definition, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That’s how I feel when I read my favorite poems by Mary Oliver or Robert Hayden, or by you two. What is your favorite description, or working definition, or non-definition of poetry?

AJA: Well, let me first say, I never thought I'd be mentioned the same phrase as Mary Oliver or Robert Hayden, so that's pretty cool. I think, I don’t know, I feel like there's a difference between poetry and a poem. I feel like a poem is more concerned with the writing of a thing. It's a piece of writing that is, you know, very literal but not literal, but it's a piece of writing that is concerned with, you know, poetic techniques and elevating the everyday language we use to create some new meaning of our human experience. So I think that there's a concern with something very specific in what you're creating, that there are metaphor, alliteration, random imagery, that all these things are kind of in that. And then I think poetry can be, it doesn't have to be a written piece of literature; it can be a song, it can be art, it could be, you know, it could be the way somebody cooks, it could be the way somebody gardens. I feel like poetry in and of itself is a little bit more universal, and it's more about a perspective or an approach to life that forces someone to look beyond what is readily visible or available to people. So I don't know, Meghann, I’d be interested in what you define ... You're probably better at communicating this than me!

MEGHANN: No, I think that that's really—I agree with what you just said, and you said it so beautifully. I do think that there is poetry in other things, not just things that happen to be crafted with words. I keep thinking of this Adrienne Rich quote where she says, “When a woman tells the truth, it opens up the possibility of truth around her ”? or let me see if I can look it up. “When a woman tells the truth, she's creating the possibility for more truth around her.” And I think that that to me is what a poem is. When, because of it, because of its existence, more truth circles around it. And I think that that's also the feeling of having your head taken off that Emily Dickinson said in response to a poem because you're opening some small little truths around this concept that you're trying to understand. And I think that that's maybe the difference between a good poem and one that's not really hitting it on the head. You can kind of tell when a poem isn't really telling the truth, or it's talking about a truth that isn't necessarily needed right now—

[VO]: Here's an example of Meghann's truth-telling that is sorely needed right now:

["In Which I Name My Abuser Publicly" by Meghann Plunkett, from Rattle 27 June 2017] 

MEGHANN: I just taught a creative writing seminar for undergrads last year and I spent most of my time trying to get my students to not be afraid of poetry, and unlearning what they learned in high school. I am a firm believer that poetry is storytelling and it should be accessible; and if it's not accessible, then it's not doing a service to its message and the people that are reading it. So it was interesting to see that that's still happening. I was lucky enough in high school to have a teacher, his name was Ransom Griffin, which is an awesome name! He introduced us to contemporary poetry. I think that that's one of the larger mistakes that maybe teachers of high school students are making: not to introduce them to contemporary poetry—because I think a lot of contemporary poetry is accessible.

PETER: Aja, would you add anything to that?

AJA: Yeah, I think it's a little bit of— What I loved— I took a physics course in high school and before I even took physics I was like, the word— I had already made up in my mind I wasn't going to get it and I had a teacher who ended up teaching me that physics was not just about like learning formulas and like all these talking points and everything, but he was very hands-on and action-oriented and he was really big on getting us to see how things were made and then explaining the physics of them, so taking like a slingshot and then breaking it down and it made—like, his excitement for physics … he was the most charismatic, excited person every time he came into class. I'm sure there were so many days he was tired, but his energy around—and his love for physics is what made me curious, to want to learn what the hell is this thing that he is so enamored with? And even if I didn't get it, I could admire his admiration for his craft and his passion. And so I think 1) We have a lot of people teaching things that don't actually love it. And that's a really big failure of our young people in the education system. I think if someone loves poetry and actually spends time with poetry and is teaching it to young people with that same level of, you know, energy and admiration for it, that's going to translate to kids. So that's one thing that's really important. The other thing goes back to what I was saying about poetic techniques. There are ways that rhythm and alliteration and personification and all these things that seem so huge show up in everyday writing material in the names on corner stores in your community, or you know, the songs that we're all listening to, or the TV shows that we're watching. So there's ways that we can pull pieces out and say, “Look, this is what we're talking about today. We're talking about personification. Let's see how personification shows up in all these different ways.” And then that's going to give somebody the ability to say, “Oh, that's what you mean by personification!”

[VO]: For more ideas about poetry in the classroom, check out Episode 003, my conversation with Paula Roy last summer. 

PETER: I've been fortunate enough to participate in seminars led by each of you, but I was also once in a workshop led by Marie Howe, who talked about what it was like slowly coming to realize that she had something to say, that her take on the world might matter to somebody else. That made an impression on me as a reader of her work, because it's easy to assume that somebody who makes poems like Marie Howe maybe always knew that she should make poems. How did you each come to believe that you could and should write for a larger audience?

MEGHANN: I think I had the desire to write long before I actually felt like I had something of importance to say. And I don't know, I think very similar to Marie—I love Marie Howe—I think that I have a similar mission as Marie. I think largely what she wants to do is tell female stories, and that is a political act in itself. I think that it took me a really long time, and it took me as a person to become a fully confident person that wanted myself to succeed. And then I started realizing, “Oh, the story is that I want to tell, the poetry that I'm making is actually worth something.” And that was, I think, within the last five years that I've finally arrived there and maybe, you know, in the next five years I'll say, “Oh no, now I have arrived.” But I think that the desire to want to do this and my ability, my feeling that I actually have something to say were two separate journeys. There was something about hearing people read poetry. I used to watch the Def Poetry Jams that were on—it was on HBO or something—in high school and I just, my heart exploded every time I heard—

AJA: Remember when we snuck into them? And we went and saw them ourselves?

MEGHANN: Yeah, we did. We got to go backstage, Aja and I, during one of the filmings in New York. But yeah, that was, that desire was totally different from feeling confident. And I think that that really was tied to my self-worth as a person, which makes me think that my poetry and my humanity are really linked.

AJA: Well, for me, I mean it's kind of ironic that we're here at this poetry slam finals for young people from all over the city. And it wasn't until I was in high school, I had done a poem—it was in a talent show. I won the talent show with the poem, and my teachers were all like in tears and they were all just like super ecstatic. And one of my friends was like, “Oh, there's this, these …” I was like, “Wow, this is a thing? I want to find more.” And then this one kid was like, “Oh, there's this organization, you can look them up, and there's more people who are doing poetry like this, young people who are doing this all around the city.” And then I found out, I googled Urban Word NYC, found out that they were doing poetry competitions. I went and did it or “fought.” That was the first time I ever did it. And I was so ecstatic to find a community of young people who cared about words and language and raps and poems and songs and all this. And so I feel like I could, I couldn't avoid—like I didn't want to go just back home. I wanted to just spend like every day after school, I was at Urban Word and I was sitting at Teachers and Writers and I was taking workshops and preparing myself and bettering myself. And so I saw that there a craft and that there was a community and that there were mentors and people who lived and made careers off of poetry. And seeing that was like a whole other thing for me. But I want to say kind of maybe not to push back on Marie Howe, but to give an alternative: I think what's really important is not just having something to say, but also having an ear for what isn't said and to listen for the voices that are not heard and the voices that are not allowed to speak has always been a big part of my journey. Which is like realizing the stories that resonated with me or resonate with people from where I was from. And realizing that those stories weren't heard, weren’t being shared. And if they were, they were skewed, or there was a certain way that they were being shared. So it was important to me that just as much as I spoke, I listened. And I spent a lot of time trying to understand What stories do I want to tell that is different from the stories that everyone else is telling? and How do I get into a place of being as truthful with myself about what's needed in that story to come across in order for other people to be motivated to do the same thing?

PETER: Aja, what do you value most about Meghann’s work?

AJA: Well, I value Meghann as a person, and so I'm invested in what she has to say and what she's working through in her poems beyond just reading them. So there's something else there: I actually love this person. I care about this person, and I've gone through things with this person. I've struggled with this person. I’ve cried with this person, I've laughed with this person. So there's so many layers. There's so much poetry to our friendship. Our friendship is its own poetic tale, you know. Regardless of whether or not it's ever written in words, we have that as a shared story or poem. But I think what I love about Meghann’s mind and just how she talks about poetry, is that she's the first person I met in my life who got as geeked as I did about poems. We would sit—and she and she helped me get even more excited about poems—we would sit in our dorm room and she would just open up a book and we would read poems to each other back and forth, and we'd be like, “Oh my god! Remember ... Let's listen to this line!” And we would just like, ah, fall over ourselves, on lines of poetry. Just like, “What are you guys doing?” We shouda be out drinking or doing something crazy, wild night out on the town. And as kids we were just like in love with poetry to the point that—I think she has also, she, because she grew up, she didn't maybe talk about this, but she, the way she grew up was very different than me, but very similar in some ways. Her dad was a really big figure who wanted her to live–he wanted to be engineer, essentially. [To Meghann] Wasn't that what he wanted? He wanted something like that.

MEGHANN: Something science-based, yeah.

AJA: And so she just had this mind that was so inquisitive, but also very calculated, and math and just all these random facts about life and science and the world and nature. And so she would just bring up, like we were just talking about something and she's like, you know, “It's due to Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, you know.” And I'd be like, “What? Who knows that? Who says that?” And she finds ways to pull these things into her poems. She reminds me of Jeff--and maybe part of it's because we both were in class with Jeff--but in the way that Jeffrey McDaniel is: he turns your mind upside down. He has a way of making you look at the world in the inverse. Just his metaphors and surrealism. It's very surrealist. So there's these ways that something is very, very mundane or whatever. She just kind of flips it upside its head. I'm like, even the goldfish poem [“Human”]: It's like this one thing that you'll see. Someone just looks at goldfish and they never really think about a goldfish’s life, you know, they don't think about what a goldfish feels, or how that's a metaphor for our life or what we feel. So Meghann has a way of really doing that so beautifully and so clearly that it inspires me to think about, well, you know, How much stranger can I perceive the world? You know, how much more science fiction can I be? In a sense, she appeals to that sensibility of me that I really value that because I think the biggest thing I learned was ... When I met Meghann, I was very much in a binary world. The way I looked at the world was very binary. So, you know, it was right or wrong, God or the devil; it was black or white; it was rich or poor, like the world was just very binary. That was the way that I had learned the world and it wasn't until I met Meghann that all of that kind of washed away and became like … everything was kind of an inverse of each other and I had to really start to question, wait, What does it mean to be right? What does it mean to be wrong? Is that possible? What does it mean to be this, or that? You can't just be one or the other. And those are the things that we push each other on, for sure. There's definitely different levels to our friendship. I think her poetry is a reflection of her person and her person is a—it's just a beautiful, beautiful person. She's an incredible person. She's an incredible human being. There’s so much I can say so much about Meghann, and I don't often get to say as much as I would like, but she's an incredible person and I think it shows in her poetry. She's also super dark, which is I thing something I should say. She's incredibly dark, and I am incredibly dark in moments. I think we kind of fulfill each other's like—you know, we've gone through a lot of shit as women and so we have a way of making light of our darkness, in a weird way, if that makes sense.

PETER: It does.

AJA: I love you, Meg.

MEGHANN: I love you too. I'm all teary over here!

[VO]: Toward the end of our conversation, Aja had to excuse herself to prepare to host the spoken word finals, so I had the chance to pose the same question to Meghann about Aja’s work.

MEGHANN: I appreciate that Aja talked about me as a person because I sometimes can't separate her from her poetry, either. I see a lot of herself in her poetry. I remember when we first met and still sometimes—I'm inherently a shy person. I rarely spoke when I was young. I was afraid to speak out. And when I met her and we would go out and, you know, talk to people or hang out with people, I was so afraid of her ability to just say what was on her mind and not agree with someone and state her opinion and argue for what she believed in. That was an entirely new concept to me as a—I think we met when I was 17. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I love her poetry is that she is not afraid to go there, to say the thing, to be direct, whether it's a difficult image that she just really wants to drive home, or if it's something that people just aren't writing about. What she was talking about earlier—she was saying that she is looking for the story that no one is telling, or a story that is in the world, but no one's really paying attention to. I think that that's really self-aware of her to realize that that's what she's so good at. And she's so brave in her work. It's crazy. But also weird and surreal: there's a poem where she's inside the womb and there's, you know, she's like tattooing the womb, her mother's womb with her words. There are moments where there's prophecy and magic in her work, while also being so rooted in reality and so, so gritty. It's this amazing balance of reality and magic, which is I think also something that I really appreciate in her as a person. I think that she's one of the oldest souls that I've ever met, and one of the wisest people that I've ever met, but also has extremely childlike wonder and excitement and energy. It's this strange paradox that she's able to exist in both places.

[VO]: We’ve mentioned that Meghann is a poet who also loves math and science. I was struck that several years ago she began teaching herself how to write code for computer software. 

PETER: I read in your interview with Muzzle magazine that you see a connection between writing poetry and writing code, and that in each domain you are striving for elegance: that's the point. I wanted to ask you to expand on that a little bit because it's hard to resist this question. You are well-versed in, it seems to me, both the oldest and the newest kinds of writing that humans do.

MEGHANN: I like that you're putting it that way. That's interesting. I never thought of that before …  Yes, I was surprised. One of the most exciting things that I learned when I started learning to code was that there wasn't just one way to do it. I thought that I was entering into something that was really similar to mathematics where there's maybe one or two different ways to solve an equation and you know, you either get it right or you get it wrong, and that's not the case. There’s so many different ways to organize something that you're building. There are so many different ways to phrase it. There’s an editing process and it's literally called—the process is to make the code more "elegant." That's a word that is used in our development teams and it really felt very similar to the way in which we write poetry, where every word is so precious and delicate and means so much and has its purpose and is placed there for a reason and carries its own load. And phrases that are intended to take you down one path and then turn you here and direct you in certain ways. It continues to feel very similar to me in that way. On a more macro scale, I think that when you're thinking about how you're organizing something, how you're going to build something in an app, that process is kind of like the pre-writing phase for me, and this may be not only with poetry but with any kind of storytelling where you're trying to organize how? what is the most effective way to tell this story? what genre? where do I start? That also was a similarity that I saw. In general, my desire to learn coding was something that is important. I'm trying to remind myself all the time that I need to always be a student in order to be a poet and in order to be a storyteller. Learning new skills—even if I'm afraid to learn them—is the right thing to do. Always. I think that we have little tiny fears pocketed around things that we don't understand. And that's when you know you have to understand it the same way. If there's something that you don't understand in life, that's the thing that you need to write a poem about.

PETER: Is there a question you would have liked me to ask that I didn't ask? Especially on the subject of learning? I like to think of this as a podcast about what and how and why did we learn …

MEGHANN: I don't know if there's a question in this, but I really do think that unlearning things is just as important. And I've spent a lot of my time in grad school not just unlearning things that have to do with writing, but also just as a person with my habits and my weird little pockets of safety that I find myself huddling onto because of childhood or other things that we learned, the mistakes that we make. I think that that after teaching those students last semester, teaching them creative writing and really realizing that this whole class is just showing them that you can do anything. I tried to never say No to them. I tried to affirm all of their instincts and just get them to write and enjoy the process. And that was the entire— I had an entirely different objective and goal before I met them. And then I realized, “Oh, I just want them to generate something and not hate generating it.”

[VO]: So here we are. The point of learning is sometimes best engaged by unlearning, a perfect turn to go out on. What a joy to be able to talk with these remarkable makers for this month’s poetry special. My great thanks to Meghann Plunkett and Aja Monet for taking the time to talk, to Cam Be, a brilliant director and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of independent film, documentary and progressive hip-hop culture, who granted permission to use the clip from “What I’ve Learned”—you do need to watch his film of the poem on YouTube—and to musician Shayfer James, who has collaborated with both these poets, and made available some instrumental tracks from his album Haunted Things especially for this episode. Thanks so much to you for listening, subscribing, rating, reviewing, and spreading the word about this podcast to everyone interested in what and how and why we learn. Back next month with a Mother’s Day special. See you then!