The Social Animal (14 page)

Her general presumption was that while she’s trying to teach English, every single boy in her class is secretly thinking about masturbation. Every single girl in her class is secretly feeling lonely and cut off.

Ms. Taylor would look out over a sea of faces in her classes. She’d have to remind herself that those placid and bored expressions are deceiving. There’s mayhem within. When she puts a piece of information in front of a student, that kid’s brain doesn’t just absorb it in some easily understandable fashion. As John Medina writes, the process is more “like a blender left running with the lid off. The information is literally sliced into discrete pieces as it enters the brain and splattered all over the insides of our mind.” “Don’t exaggerate the orderliness of their thoughts,” she’d tell herself. The best she could hope to do was to merge old patterns already there with new patterns from what she was trying to teach. As a young teacher, she ran across a book called
Fish Is Fish
. It’s about a fish who becomes friends with a frog. The fish asks the frog to describe the creatures that exist on land. The frog complies, but the fish can’t really grasp what he’s saying. For people, the fish imagines fish who walk on their tailfins. For birds, the fish imagines fish with wings. Cows are fish that have udders. Ms. Taylor’s students were like that. They had models, imposed by their experience, which caused them to create their own constructions of everything she said.

Don’t think the methods teenagers use to think today are the same methods they will use tomorrow. Some researchers used to believe that people had different learning styles—that some people are right brain and some are left brain; some are auditory and some are visual learners. There’s almost no credible evidence to support this view. Instead, we all flip back and forth between different methods, depending on context.

Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

She didn’t so much teach them as apprentice them. Much unconscious learning is done through imitation. She exhibited a way of thinking through a problem and then hoped her students participated along with her.

She forced them to make mistakes. The pain of getting things wrong and the effort required to overcome error creates an emotional experience that helps burn things into the mind.

She tried to get students to interrogate their own unconscious opinions. Making up your mind, she believed, is not like building a wall. It’s more a process of discovering the idea that already exists unconsciously. She wanted kids to try on different intellectual costumes to see what fit.

She also forced them to work. For all her sentimentality, she did not believe in the notion that students should just follow their natural curiosity. She gave them homework assignments they did not want to do. She gave them frequent tests, intuitively sensing that the act of retrieving knowledge for a test strengthens the relevant networks in the brain. She pushed. She was willing to be hated.

Ms. Taylor’s goal was to turn her students into autodidacts. She hoped to give her students a taste of the emotional and sensual pleasure discovery brings—the jolt of pleasure you get when you work hard, suffer a bit, and then something clicks. She hoped her students would become addicted to this process. They would become, thanks to her, self-teachers for the rest of their days. That was the grandiosity with which Ms. Taylor conceived of her craft.

Harold found Ms. Taylor absurd for the first few weeks and then unforgettable forever after. The most important moment of their relationship came one afternoon as Harold was moving from gym class to lunch. Ms. Taylor had been lurking in the hallway, camouflaged in her earth tones against the lockers. She spotted her prey approaching at normal speed. For a few seconds, she stalked him with a professional calm and patience, and then during a second when the hallway crowds parted and Harold was vulnerable and alone, she pounced. She pressed a slim volume into Harold’s hand. “This will lift you to greatness!” she emoted. And in a second she was gone. Harold looked down. It was a used copy of a book called
The Greek Way
by a woman named Edith Hamilton.

Harold would remember that moment forever. Later, Harold would learn that
The Greek Way
has a tainted reputation among classicists, but in high school, it introduced him to a new world. It was a world alien yet familiar. In classical Greece, Harold found a world of combat, competition, teams, and glory. Unlike in his own world, he found a world in which courage was among the highest virtues, in which a warrior’s anger could propel history, in which people seemed to live in bold colors. There was little in Harold’s milieu that helped him come into his own masculinity, but classical Greece provided him a language and set of rules.

Edith Hamilton’s book also introduced him to a sensation that he had not experienced before, of being connected to something ancient and profound. Hamilton quoted a passage from Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Harold did not fully understand that passage, but he sensed that somehow it carried an impressive weight.

He followed Hamilton’s book with others, reading on his own, in search of that sensation of connecting with something mystical across the ages. He had always studied and paid attention in the manner of a professional student, in order to get into the sort of college he would be proud to mention at parties. But he began to read about Greece in a different way, with a romantic yearning to discover something true and important. He read this material out of a sense of need. He went on to read popular histories. He saw movies about ancient Greek life (most of them bad), such as
300
and
Troy
. In a high-school fashion, he dipped into Homer, Sophocles, and Herodotus.

Ms. Taylor watched all this with exuberant attention, and one day they met during a free period to chart a plan of study.

It started, of course, under bare fluorescent lights, in a normal classroom, while she and Harold sat at desks slightly too small for their own legs. Harold had decided, or been cajoled, into doing his senior honors paper on some as yet undetermined aspect of ancient Greek life, and Ms. Taylor was going to be his faculty advisor. So Harold sat there listening to her as she went on excitedly about the project ahead. Her enthusiasm was contagious. It was fun to talk with her one-on-one. Studies of language acquisition have found that the quickest learning comes from face-to-face tutoring. The slowest learning comes from video- or audiotapes. Plus, there was something alluring about having a smart, attractive older woman talking about a mystery of intense interest to him.

Ms. Taylor’s theory about Harold was that he was a popular, athletic high-school boy who also showed flashes of idealism. She’d noticed it in their classroom discussions—a desire for loftiness, a desire to be part of something higher than normal life. Ms. Taylor had originally given Harold that Hamilton book because the ancient Greeks offer boys a vision of greatness that seemed to inspire them. When they met, she suggested that Harold write his senior paper linking classical Greek life to some aspect of high-school life. Ms. Taylor was a big believer in the idea that creativity comes when two disparate fields crash in one mind, like two galaxies merging in space. She was a big believer in the notion that everybody should have two careers, two perspectives for looking at the world, each of which provided insights into the other. In her case, she was a teacher by day and, less successfully but not less important, a singer-songwriter by night.

The first stage of Harold’s project would be knowledge acquisition. Ms. Taylor told him to keep reading books about Greek life and bring her back a list of five he had read. She didn’t give him an organized curriculum; she wanted him to find these books the way adults find books when they get interested in a subject, by browsing Amazon or the bookstore—by word of mouth and by chance. She wanted him to get information from different kinds of books and different kinds of authors so that his unconscious would actively work to weave it all together.

In the first stage, it didn’t matter if Harold’s research was a little dilettantish. Benjamin Bloom has found that teaching doesn’t have to be brilliant right away: “The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.” So long as Harold was curious and enjoying his quest, he’d be developing a feel for Greek life, a certain base level of knowledge about how the Athenians and the Spartans lived, fought, and thought. This concrete knowledge would serve as the hook upon which all subsequent teaching would be hung.

Human knowledge is not like data stored in a computer’s memory banks. A computer doesn’t get better at remembering things as its database becomes more crowded. Human knowledge, on the other hand, is hungry and alive. People with knowledge about a topic become faster and better at acquiring more knowledge and remembering what they learn.

In one experiment, third graders and college students were asked to memorize a list of cartoon characters. The third graders had much better recall, because they were more familiar with the subject matter. In another experiment, a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds who had been classified as slow learners and a group of adults with normal intelligence were each asked to recall a list of pop stars. Again, the younger, “slow learners” did much better. Their core knowledge improved performance.

Ms. Taylor was helping Harold lay down some core knowledge. Harold read about the Greeks whenever he had the chance. At home. On the bus. After dinner. This made a difference. Many people believe you should set aside a specific place to do your reading, but a large body of research shows that people retain information better when they alternate from setting to setting. The different backgrounds stimulate the mind and create denser memory webs.

After a few weeks, he came back with five books he had read—popular histories of the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, a biography of Pericles, a modern translation of the
Odyssey
, and a book comparing Athens to Sparta. These books, willy-nilly, filled in his picture of the life, values, and the world of ancient Greece.

In their second session, Ms. Taylor praised Harold for his hard work. Researcher Carol Dweck has found that when you praise a student for working hard, it reinforces his identity as an industrious soul. A student in this frame of mind is willing to take on challenging tasks, and to view mistakes as part of the working process. When you praise a student for being smart, on the other hand, it conveys the impression that achievement is an inborn trait. Students in that frame of mind want to continue to appear smart. They’re less likely to try challenging things because they don’t want to make mistakes and appear stupid.

Then Ms. Taylor told Harold to go back and look over everything he had read so far, starting with the Edith Hamilton book that had been his first entry into Greek life. Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to automatize his knowledge. The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. The first time you drive a car, you have to think about every move. But after a few months or years, driving is done almost automatically. Learning consists of taking things that are strange and unnatural, such as reading and algebra, and absorbing them so steadily that they become automatic. That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Automaticity is achieved through repetition. Harold’s first journey through his Greek books may have introduced him to his subject, but on his second, third, and fourth journeys, he would begin to entrench it deep down. Ms. Taylor had told her students a hundred times that it is far better to go over material for a little bit, repetitively, on five consecutive nights than it is to cram in one long session the night before an exam. (No matter how often she repeated this point, this was one lesson her students never seemed to automatize.)

Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to slip back into the best learning rhythm. A child in a playroom instinctively understands how to explore. She starts with Mom, and then ventures forth in search of new toys. She returns to Mom for security and then repeats her ventures forth. Then it’s back to Mom and out again to explore.

The same principle applies to learning in high school and beyond. It is a process of what Richard Ogle, the author of
Smart World
, calls reach and reciprocity. Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless. Ms. Taylor wanted to slip Harold into this rhythm of expansion and integration.

Harold groaned when she told him to read everything again. He thought he’d be bored out of his mind, going back and reading the same books he’d already finished. He was stunned to find that the second time through they were different books. He noticed entirely different points and arguments. Sentences he had highlighted seemed utterly pointless now, whereas sentences he had earlier ignored seemed crucial. The marginalia he had written to himself now seemed embarrassingly simpleminded. Either he or the books had changed.