Taking Notes: A Mind-Splitting Practice

Habit's a funny thing.

I went through school and college like everyone else, writing down what teachers and professors had just said while listening to what they were saying now. My hand-brain lagged a few seconds behind my listening-brain. And my looking-brain kept track of what was on the blackboard... Like everyone else, I could do this, and I did it, decade after decade.

I noticed that this wasn't necessarily a good way to learn from my students, not from my own learning. I realized how much time I spent waiting: "Hold on, Mr. Sagarin. I'm not done copying from the board." "Yo, Mr. Sagarin, what did you just say?" "Can you say that again?" Not to mention the bizarre collection of misstatements and misunderstandings that crept into their work--less over time as I became more adept, but still...

So I've evolved a different approach. When I'm lecturing, I ask students to listen. Just listen. No note-taking. (Yes, they can doodle--see previous post.) My students started calling this "Storytime with Steve." One wrote a theme song.

The next day, I present a concise summary of the previous day's lecture. I write notes on the board, including proper spellings and dates and other necessary information. Students can copy without having to listen, without missing or mis-hearing. Sometimes, this process takes ten minutes or less. Sometimes it provokes a discussion that takes most of the period. In general, although I was worried that I'd lose time, I gain it. We cover more material more accurately. Student anxiety is less. Student attention is greater.

I don't use Powerpoint or email notes; I use students' memories to help me. Often, their phrasing is better--more concise, more accurate--than mine would have been. New angles and interpretations jump out of this review, insight that would have been lost if I'd simply rehashed yesterday's news.

What I've described is my ideal. Weekends, class time, project pressure, absence, and any number of other distractions keep the ideal at bay. Still, this way of working works for me, and I believe it's better for my students, for their comprehension, and for their retention.

I can't believe I didn't think of it years ago.

Puppets Speaking in Hollow Voices: Children in a Cloud of Pop Culture

“Want to see me make a pencil disappear?”

This is a quotation from a gruesome scene in “The Dark Knight,” a violent Batman movie, involving the Joker, a pencil, and a victim’s eye socket. When you hear a third grader quote this line and then announce that he’s seen the movie twice over the weekend, you may wonder, again, what’s wrong with some parents.

I am observing a third grade teacher, a good caring teacher with a class of sixteen sweet students. But yesterday, a rainy Monday, nearly half the class entered jittery, speaking in hollow voices, and acting out movie scenes and video game scenarios with which they had spent the weekend.

Most of them were boys. One seemed to be a puppet, suspended by invisible strings in a cloud of pop culture, unable to use his voice or body without reference to the mostly violent images in his mind. Another was passive; his handshake reminded me of the dead fish handshake of a profound alcoholic I used to know. Another couldn’t approach a classmate without kicking at his groin, smacking his bottom, or slapping his face.

The students who had not spent the weekend this way watch, closely, learning second-hand—I think of the effects of second-hand smoke—about a culture for which none of them is ready. I’m not sure I’m ready for it—engaging with it requires developing calluses on my soul that I increasingly begrudge.

It may be tempting to think of these boys as brats or brutes, but they’re not to blame. They can’t help themselves. And they seem in other ways to be among the more sensitive students in the class—tougher home lives, more delicate constitutions. They--and their parents, who could know better--are the victims of a natural selection (or unnatural selection) for insensitivity.

I wish these students’ parents could sit in the back of the room, as I am doing, and watch. I doubt they see this at home. There’s no audience, no expectation of school-appropriate behavior. They can always order a child outside, or to his room. They can always turn the TV on again.

Life may be faster, more complex, and more challenging than in the past, leaving parents and teachers feeling at a loss. But perhaps life isn’t actually faster or more complex. Perhaps its simpler and not challenging enough. Maybe there are hours and hours of nothing real to do, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of real demands.

Another illusion of the apparent pace and complexity of life is the illusion that ethical questions are harder and more complex—perhaps too complex for normal people and better left to academic or government experts. But, just as education is, at heart, as simple as the relationship between a teacher and a student, ethical questions are, at heart, as simple as the choices that a person makes and doesn’t make.

This is not to deny the thorniness of stem cell research and abortion and gun control. But their thorniness is due to our uncertain knowledge and understanding, not to our inadequate ethics. Guns in the abstract may seem to pose moral and political dilemmas, but a gun in my hand involves absolutely clear moral choice.

By Tuesday, the effects of the weekend are less noticeable. The teacher tells me that by Friday she feels like she can really teach again. And then the kids go home for the weekend.

Destiny: Coming at You Three Ways

To become more fully who you are meant to be, you confront your destiny, which arrives in your life in three forms. First, you are born into what Johann Sebastian* Sartre called the “facticity” of your life, into circumstance that you did not consciously choose and that you cannot alter, at least not easily. I am a large, white man who was born in New York. If I chose that, I don’t remember it. For Sartre, how you respond to this "original choice" determines, in large part, your existence.

But this view is too blunt. You also meet persons and circumstances in your life with which you have to form a relationship, with which you have to contend. When you confront these circumstances, you--and I--make choices about how we act toward each other. The circumstances of our meeting were, at least consciously, unplanned, but what we make of it is up to us. (Sartre tries to collapse all subsequent choices into our original choice of being or choice to be, but, to me, this view too easily erases important distinctions. All choices are of a whole, but this does not mean that they are the same.)

Further, perhaps more important and more mysterious, we may choose a destiny that, at first, is known only to us. We may choose to use our strength and will and moral imagination to change the world. If we do not do this, no one will fault us, no one will be the wiser. Only we know what we choose to do or what we might have done. To outward appearance, we may be a good mother or father or spouse, a good teacher, a good citizen; we can fulfill all expectations of a good life, but leave undone what might have been most fulfilling to us and most helpful to the world.


*I know his name is Jean Paul, but Ignacio Goetz calls everyone "Johann Sebastian," as in "Johann Sebastian Plato" and "Johann Sebastian Maimonides." I think it's cute so I'm borrowing it.

By Their Amazon Recommended Categories Shall You Know Them

Here are the categories in which Amazon wishes, based on my purchases over several years, to sell me books and CDs:

Bach, Johann Sebastian; Beethoven, Ludwig van; Chamber Music; Christianity; Classical; Debussy, Claude - Works by Debussy; Dickens, Charles; Experimental; Historical; History; Humanities; Islam; Nocturnes; Nonfiction; Philosophy & Social Aspects; Political; Research; Social Sciences; Sociology; Sonatas; Sonatinas; Suites; Theosophy; Young Adult.

I’ve ordered music CDs, and my taste in music is clear. Subtract these to learn my reading preferences.

I’ve ordered books for my teenage daughter, who has no credit card; subtract these.

I ordered the Dickens for another teacher at school. Subtract this.

I'm left with this:

Christianity; Experimental; Historical; History; Humanities; Islam; Nonfiction; Philosophy & Social Aspects; Political; Research; Social Sciences; Sociology; Theosophy.

I’m surprised not to see “Education” as a category, but it turns out that “Experimental” refers to the kind of books on education that I read, as does “Philosophy and Social Aspects.” True enough.

I’m sort of surprised to see “Christianity” and “Islam” there, but then I recall that I spent several months contemplating a book on the separation of church and state as the concept applies in education, and I also spent some time contemplating writing about fundamentalism as a modern condition. Books in these categories are on my shelves but don’t represent ongoing interests.

The rest makes sense but, seen as a list, paints me as a dryer, more academic reader than I think I am—and I realize that I get all the fiction I read by reaching across to the night table on my wife’s side of the bed. And the books I buy in Amazon’s categories, I buy for specific, usually research-related, reasons.

Which is to say, Amazon's list paints a one-sided view of me, and I’m unlikely to buy from Amazon’s recommendations because I’ve gone there to purchase one specific book. Amazon’s view of me—the thoughtless, algorithm-generated “view” represented by no actual human being—is true as far as it goes. But I’m happy to recognize that I’m more than Amazon “thinks” I am. For now.

You Can Get What You Need (A New York Story)

I was in New York, upper east side, to evaluate a prep school for accreditation. Our team met after dinner with the trustees. I returned to my European-style hotel around 10 p.m. “European-style” means that I had a suite to myself but the front desk had no amenities. So, at 10:30, when I discovered that I had left my comb at home—I pictured it smugly lying there on the sink—the front desk had nothing to offer. “There’s a pharmacy around the corner; they might be open.” They weren’t. I took to wandering the streets, heading for light. The third place I found, blocks away, was open.

A panhandler shook a cup in front. “Spare some change?”

“Maybe on the way out,” I said, thinking I’d have change from a comb purchase.

A few of everything was on the wall behind the cashier—chapstick, batteries, condoms, lighters, nail clippers… But no comb. “Sorry,” she said.

Outside. “Couldn’t find what you need?” The panhandler.

“No.”

“What you need?”

Why reply? Who knows. “A comb.” I looked at him for the first time. Everything you’d want in a panhandler; layers of coats and dirt, a grizzled face and a halo of gray hair.

And there it was, in his filthy hand, under the lights of the store entrance. A comb. I didn’t reach for it, and my face must have betrayed my wariness.

“Come on, man. Take it. Some old lady gave it to me.”

I hesitated.

“Come on. It’s brand new. You think I comb my fuckin’ hair?” I looked. No, it did not look like he combed his fuckin’ hair.

I took it and gave him two dollars. I boiled it in my European-style suite kitchenette. I used it and I still have it in my ditty bag. When I’m traveling, I use it to comb my fuckin’ hair.

Quick Change: Teen Computer Use

I just had a 17 year-old student ask me what “Web surfing” is. He’s really smart, more than 700 on his verbal SAT. He uses computers as regularly as any teenager, which is to say, constantly. He was reading our school’s computer use policy, which does not allow Web surfing during school hours. The policy was written five years ago when we moved to a new building and installed a wireless Internet router. Back then, issues of concern included surfing, downloading music, incessant email-checking, and occasional outbreaks of instant messaging. A few students had laptops, but most weren’t wireless.

We’re revisiting the policy. Now, most students have wireless laptops. They spend their time on Facebook or other social networking sites, playing multi-user games online, and make each other laugh playing YouTube videos. That’s about it. Email is boring and for stuff like homework. Everyone texts, no one IMs. We don’t allow iPods or cell phones in school, so texting and music downloading are less of a challenge. And, apparently, in the age when you can Google anything, web surfing is unknown.

The question occurred in the context of a student-teacher forum to discuss revising our policy, and I have to give the students credit. We hammered them hard with Weizenbaum quotations about how computers are a solution in search of a problem (especially in education), about how if you spend your life, "Wall-E" style, in front of a screen, earbuds firmly in place, you and your genius will not mature. They bought all of it. They use computers more than we older folks do, but they're less enamored of them. We say that computers are tools to remind ourselves that this is true; students know it and so they don't even have to say it.

Howard Gruber, Practical Idealist

“Of course, Plato was an authoritarian,” Howard Gruber said. As a materialist Marxist, which Gruber was in the softest and most humane form, this is a common interpretation.

I had just read Plato with German philosopher Helmut Peukert, however, reaching for an understanding of Plato as a champion of human freedom. So I respectfully disagreed.

Gruber didn’t let it go. He stopped the class. I thought I was about to be chastised or challenged, but Gruber said, “Mr. Sagarin and I will meet during office hours this week. We’ll compare passages in Plato and report to you all on our findings.”

We did this. I showed him where I though Plato was a champion of freedom, particularly, I believe, in Book VIII, where Socrates discusses democracy and freedom. I don’t remember which passages Gruber highlighted, but I believe the concept of “guardians” left him a bit cold. We saw each other’s point of view, agreed about some points, and agreed to disagree about others. In class, Gruber reported and gave me time to report.

That a professor would take such time and interest in a student’s point of view, unrelated to the topic at hand (the course was in the development of creativity, Gruber’s specialty), was a shock. I learned that his respect for ideas was profound, as was his respect for students, as was his humility. There was no divide in him between lofty ideas in the academic world and practice in the real world; he was, through and through, a practical idealist.