Well, Susan and I are about to embark to San Francisco for two
weeks of grandbaby spoiling time. Anyway, as I found myself doing my Gene
Kelly act and walking in the rain, I started thinking about an exchange I
had with a student that took me to my core. Maybe "embroiled" is a better
description of this engage. Soon after the semester ended, she was on the
internet "demanding" a grade change. While leading ignorance of the
reasons for her low grade, she started pulling out all her guns to lay a
guilt trip on me: I alone am keeping her from entering a professional
program; I alone am the cause for the loss of her Hope Scholarship; I
alone am going to keep her from returning to school for lack of funds. I
alone am the cause for the strain on the relationship with her boyfriend.
Gosh, you'd think I was also the sole cause for world hunger, natural
catastrophes, world conflict, and global economic depression! Our e-mail
conversation that went on for about two weeks had been a process of she
demands, I ask questions about her performance, she keeps making
accusations and demands without answering the questions, and I keep asking
more specific questions in response to her accusations and demands.
After a week of this, we had a series of short machine-gun burst
exchanges.
In a fit of annoyance, she "screamed" at me, "GRRRRR!!!!! I AM SO
EXASPERATED. YOU WON'T ANSWER ME!!!!"
"Yes, I am."
"No, you're not. All you do is ask me a lot of damn questions
about why I did or didn't do this or that and why did I feel about this or
that. How the hell do I know why. You want me to come up with the answers
to my own questions?"
"Yes."
"If I had the answers, I wouldn't be asking you."
"Hadn't you already decided not to believe me before you first
wrote to me? You have to ask the questions from someone whose answers
you'll believe."
"And who might that someone be, smarty pants?"
"You."
"Me? I don't have any answers."
"Yes, you do! And, you're the only one whose answers you're going
to believe. You have the answers, if you're truly honest first with
yourself and then with me," I quietly answered with a tone of finality.
"Now, when you want to stop shouting at me and start answering your
questions yourself--honestly this time--write me again and I'll listen."
She answered and I listened. Over the next week, slowly, oh so
slowly, painfully, agonizingly she reluctantly "opened up" to herself and
to me. I found out stuff I didn't know about. She found stuff to which
she finally admitted. We amicably agreed to resolve the issue in what
I'll call a unique and creative way. And, I'll leave it at that.
This discussion with her has gotten me thinking about an insatiable
and driving habit I have, my habit of questing, of asking questions. It
has long history and aged roots embedded in the soil of my home.
My father was born in the first decade of the twentieth century,
the son of an immigrant brush maker whose small store was on Houston
Street in the Lower Eastside of Manhattan. Technically, my father was
first generation American born, but he still had a lot of the old world
immigrant in him. Three of the seven children in his family--the only
three--would go on to get an education. He and two of his brothers had
gotten LLB's. Unfortunately, they had the misfortune of hanging up their
shingles during the depression. He couldn't make it. Unlike his
brothers, he had an alternative livelihood. He was lured into my mother's
family antique business. However lucrative the business may have been,
there he was treated--tolerated is a better word--as a brother-in-law,
like a less than fully respected second son not destined for any
inheritance of lands or title. Maybe worse. I think he lived with a deep
sense of failure. We didn't talk of such personal matters.
Anyway, what we did talk about was questions, and it was always at
the evening dinner table. After we had moved out to Rockville Center on
Long Island in 1948 and until the declining family business finally
collapsed around 1954 and my father had to work late into the night to
make ends meet, our family had an evening ritual. Those were my formative
years of 8-14. My father would commute home from New York City on the
Long Island Railroad. We would wait his arrival and be called to the
dinner table. As soon as we sat down to dinner, the ritual would begin.
Education was important to my father. My father had a lot of
faults, the consequences of which I, as the second son, bore until a
little over a decade ago. What I call his "golden hands" was not one of
them, nor was what others would clinically call his "critical thinking
skills." He was a master fixer-upper from whom I learned how to work with
my hands and with tools. He combined this ability with a confident,
curious, imaginative, vice-like, razor-sharp, penetrating, logical mind.
If he was going to repair or build something, he always said something to
effect: make the decision to do it, ask the questions about it, see the
problems, solve them, and do it. It was an organic combination of
knowing, thinking, doing, and feeling. Without hesitation he went--and me
with him--into new experiences that opened new worlds: tearing down
automobile engines and transmission, building stone patios, constructing
new rooms, laying concrete, drawing electrical wire, repairing small
applicances, painting and wallpapering and plastering, puttering and
tinkering, planting a garden, making home movies, playing the organ,
whatever.
He was an avid reader. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, LIFE, LOOK, POPULAR
MECHANICS, POPULAR SCIENCE, COLLIER, NEWSWEEK, TIME, even READER'S DIGEST
were strewn about the house like surrealistic clocks in a Dali painting.
NEWSDAY, THE TIMES, and the HERALD TRIBUNE were on our door stoop each
morning and afternoon. Our den had walls of bookshelves crammed with
encyclopedias, dictionaries, magazine back issues, and books in all
disciplines (my heap of comic books were confined to the kitchenette
corner cabinet).
When we sat down by the dinner table, before anything was served,
I, especially, would be asked about school. My younger sister was too
young and my older brother was off somewhere. The eldest son followed a
different set of rules. Anyway, my father wouldn't ask what I had learned
that day. He would ask what question did I ask that day and why had I
asked it. If I hadn't asked the teacher a question he would question me
with a "why not? Did you understand everything?" If I answered that I
had, I would get a "tell me all about it." When I invariably stumbled, he
would pointedly say, "You should have asked a question." If I replied
that I did not want to look stupid, that I was embarrassed to ask, and/or
that I was afraid of what others thought about me, he would say over and
over and over again, "You won't learn anything that lasts if you don't ask
questions."
Once, in my defense, I told him that I didn't have to ask a
question since I silently had solved the problem, fully and correctly
answered the question, the teacher gave to the class. He came back, shot
back is a better description of his response, with the explanation that
all I had done was to solve the teacher's problem, answered her question,
and gave her her answer. I had to learn to see the problem on my own when
no one was around to point it out. And, I could only do that by asking my
own questions about her question or her answer and come up with my own
answer.
Of all the words, I most vividly remember from those schoolday
evenings at the dinner table, the one that is branded on my soul, is
"WHY." He would always admonish me with a "Why didn't you ask 'why?'"
And so, at the dinner table the challenges would be made. The string of
"why's" would be asked. The discussions would start. The arguments would
rage. The voices would rise. Invariably, the paternal proclamation would
ring throughout the house: "Get out the books." Dishes and glasses and
tableware would be pushed out of the way. The tablecloth would be
wrinkled back like an accordion. Opened encyclopedias and books and
magazines and blank sheets of lined paper would be scattered about.
Fingers would point. Pencils would scribble. Only after we had settled
the issue--which always meant my father's way-- would we hear, "Now let's
eat. Helen!" It was a family joke that at night we always had heated
discussions and cold meals.
As I look back, my father's method was far closer to that of
Socrates than what I call the present day question-and-answer
"neo-socratic method." That was a magnifcent gift which I surely did not
appreciate at the time and for a long, long time thereafter. Heck, I
didn't even realize or acknowledge until a decade ago that he had helped
me---sometimes to the annoyance of my teachers and friends-- become what
I'll call a "quester." Asking questions and questioning answers--except
his--became second nature to me. For me, problem perceiving--not merely
problem solving--asking questions, being a quester, is not an activity.
It is a way of seeing and feeling. It is both a head and a heart
exercise. It's a sharpening and invigorating and moving way of living.
It is a paying homage to curiosity and imagination and creativity. It is
something that I cannot leave either at the edge of the campus or the
classroom threshold. It is a living in my imagination and making it and
inseparable part of my tangible world. It is something that causes me to
move from mindlessness to mindfulness, from dull to keen, from casual to
rigorous, from passing to rich, from missing to noticing, from slumber to
awakening, from blaise to thrilling, from gloss to meaning, from
superficial to essential; to go beyond mere "looking at" to being "aware
of" and then onto "seeing." It is a something for constant "reimagining,"
whether I am in a book, in the garden, in a repair, in a meeting, in a
discussion, in a classroom, in wherever and with whomever.
A Haiku master once said something to the effect: do not seek to
follow in the the footsteps of others before you, seek what they sought,
seek truth, honesty, and meaning. Questing, then, creates the opportunity
and challenge to look at the same thing and the same person--the same
reality--from a different angle and in a different context and with a
different perspective. Questing is not for the timid. To practice
questing, you figuratively have to leave home for unknown places. You
have to break away from the crowd or the mob. You have to stand out and
often stand there by yourself. It can be a fearful and challenging
venture into the unknown. At the same time, it feels like a pilgrimage
that refreshens and renews, that can be a thrilling journey which broadens
horizons.
As I told this student, we learn most to understand what we have
learned and what we need to learn by questioning. Lessons are where you
learned to look with your own questioning eyes. We are not what we
proclaim to know; we are what we proclaim we don't know, what we
question, and from what and whom we are willing to learn.
As I told some people the other day, questing can drive me up a
wall! Questing has the characteristics of quicksilver. First, it creates
a mood of personal--and exciting--restlessness. Second, there is a
constant need to feel something deeper than the surface glare and gloss.
Stuff pours through my pores that I never imagined. I can't read anything
without making marginal comments that are more often than not in the form
of questions. It's like being unable to quiet the voices in my head and
heart. It's brain swelling and heart swelling stuff. It creates what I
call "organized chaos." I'm always packing and unpacking my bags, always
changing, always on the move, always developing, always growing. And, I'm
not sure I feel that the destination, if there is a destination, ever gets
nearer. The truth is never reaching; it's always evolving. Things are
always different from what they might be, as Henry James would say, and
never what you wish or expect.
And yet..... Qusting is not an obstacle. It is a motivation with
a payoff. It serves as an exhilarating on-your-toes antidote to the matte
rigidity of certitude, that is, thinking that you already know it all.
It demonstrates your ignorance for your own good. It is like being a
constant wanderer in the desert, going where you're not sure you're going,
probing to the edges of the unpredictable, renewing the passion for
stepping into the unknown, confronting difficulties and dangers, and
returning home with new understandings of themselves and of the
world, cultivating new abilities to see and listen, talking or thinking the
way to a new understanding, summoning the courage to articulate new
visions. It develops a welcomed hunger for risk-taking and a willingness
to seek out new ways to develop and change. I have found that unless I say
goodbye to what I hold, unless I travel constantly to completely new
territories and meet new people, I can expect atrophy, a long wearing away
of myself, an eventual living extinction, and being reduced from living to
mere existing.
Today especially, with information flowing at a whitewater pace,
with change carrying us as a raging torrent, we should be more mindful
that unchange is unnatural. Lifelong adaptation and adoption are
critical. Learning, then, is mandatory. Unlearning, that critical
process of cutting bait, of letting go of outdated ideas and ways, is a
critical mindset to cultivate. Unlearning and learning means moving out
of our comfort zone and trying out new behaviors. If we're not willing to
take some risks, we're unlikely to grow. And, if we're not growing, our
work itself is at risk. It's not a matter of tolerating risk; it's a
matter of welcoming it. Each of us needs to develop a hunger for
risk-taking and a willingness to seek out new ways to develop and change.
The Sufis say, asking good questions is half of learning. In that
spirit, I ask one big question, especially of myself, each day.
In my closet, on a neat looking navy blue sweatshirt designed by
the publisher of the first volume of collected Random Thoughts are printed
my words: "Education boils down to acquiring the desire, confidence, and
courage to question the answers." I believed it then. I affirm even
more now that authentic individuality and true independence lies in the
heart of a quester, and that the purpose of a teacher is to help students
help instill in themselves the Euripidean spirit of becoming a "prudent
skeptic."
Thanks Dad.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /~\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\ / \ / /~ \ /~\__/\
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