Search Results for: log book

The teacher as gardener

Friday, September 15, 2023

John Holt in 1983, talking to WBOS-Radio, on how teaching is like gardening:

The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way.

So where do teachers learn to teach?

You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?”

Filed under: gardening, John Holt

I am fond of Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that good writing is an act of “sociability.” He said he tried to teach his students “how to be a friend to a reader so the reader won’t stop reading” and “how to be a good date on a blind date with a total stranger.” (From The New York Times, 1999.)

Being a good date to the reader requires a kind of humility, I think, and an understanding that nobody really wants to read a book. (Or a newsletter or a blog post, or whatever.)

Perhaps paradoxically, Vonnegut suggested that one way to be a good date to a total stranger is to try to write for one specific person you know: “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Mary Karr writes something similar in The Art of Memoir:

You might ask, though, who are you writing for? Lots of people say, ‘I write for myself.’ I am way less cool. I tend to imagine a writer pal I look up to, maybe a former teacher; or my son; or even my dead priest. That helps me think clearly about what order information goes in… if you were telling a therapist or a friend at lunch, you’d know right away what data went where.

Here’s Stephen King in On Writing:

Someone—I can’t remember who, for the life of me—once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of the story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?” For me that first reader is my wife, Tabitha.

Vonnegut said that in hindsight he realized that he wrote everything he wrote for his sister, just trying to make her laugh…

(Come to think of it, this is why I suggest in Keep Going that if you’re stuck, you might consider making something for somebody specific in your life.)

Never waste your midlife crisis

Monday, July 10, 2023

I turned 40 last month and spent three weeks reading Don Quixote, so the mid-life crisis has been on my brain.

“Never waste your midlife crisis.”

That’s advice I heard while listening to a podcast interview with John Higgs, author of William Blake vs. The World. (One of my favorite reads of 2022.)

Higgs was saying that the artists he admires are people like David Lynch, “People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.”

He continues:

There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.

It was when I made the decision to attempt to become a full-time writer — knowing full well the absurdity of it given all the business models of writing — there was a sort of act of faith that if I just did it, people who read my books would start to appear. And slowly over time, I’d build people who would go, ‘Oh, that guy’s interesting, I’ll read his next book.’ Just enough to support me.

You sort of create the niche that need. It’s not like the world was going, ‘Oh, there’s a real need for books by John Higgs, where are they?’ But if you do them, the world sort of reacts around them.

“It’s always on an edge of never working out properly,” he admits, but it’s working so far, and it all started when he turned 40 and made the decision to go for it:

You should never waste your midlife crisis. You can do great things with a midlife crisis. If you just waste it on like a car, it’s just a lack of imagination. Mine was the decision to write books and attempt to make a living there.

The options seemed to be: If I went for it, I’d be penniless, and if I didn’t go for it, I’d be bitter. I’d be bitter going forward. Penniless certainly beats bitter. So I made the decision. And that was ten years ago! And I’m still going.

Loved this. Never waste your midlife crisis.

(I’m currently listening to his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche while playing Zelda. He points out that James Bond was basically Ian Fleming’s mid-life crisis.)

Joan Baez on drawing

Thursday, May 18, 2023

Some advice on the art of imperfection, courtesy of Joan Baez:

If I really don’t like what’s happening, I drop the drawing in the swimming pool. If I’ve gotten too precise about it, the imperfection brings it to life. One of my friends said, “Tell me just one thing that will last. Make as many mistakes as you can.” When you’re trying to make it perfect, trying to make it exactly what you want it to be, then it’s time to drop it into the pool.

That comes from Amanda Petrusich’s recent interview with the singer-songwriter about her new book, Am I Pretty When I Fly? An Album of Upside Down Drawings.

In the introduction to the book Baez writes about her life of drawing, how she “hated school” and “drew my way through the torture.”

In her seventies, Baez started painting more and making collages. Decades ago, she says, she arrived “by chance” at making drawings upside down.

Somewhere in my teenage years, probably out of boredom, I taught myself how to write backwards, starting with EINAOJ ZEAB, my new name. I worked my way through the Greek alphabet: AHPLA ATEB, AMMAG, ATLED, and so on. I still write backwards as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack. It’s as though the appropriate wires cross my brain when I write backwards, which allows information otherwise unavailable to surface.

Later, I began drawing with my left hand instead of my right. Like writing backwards, using my nondominant hand opened a different compartment in my brain. I discovered the results were less restrained and more fluid, and therefore more interesting to me.

She then writes about discovering the “tightrope-walk thrill” of blind contour drawing.

From *Am I Pretty When I Fly?* by Joan Baez. Copyright 2023 by Joan Baez and used with permission of Godine

Here’s how she describes her upside-down process:

I start moving my pen or pencil around upside down on the paper — napkin, tablecloth, scrap — as thought the drawing is being made for someone sitting opposite me at the table. Sometimes I have an idea of what I want to draw, but often I just let the pen or pencil start swooping around the page. Once I start to see what’s developing, I begin embellishing, often adding randomly the human form, a floating fish, a flower.

Eventually, I turn the drawing right-side up and see if it needs anything to make it feel complete, in which case I reverse it again and add bits and pieces.

Back right-side up again and the real magic happens: I listen for what the drawing says to me. When a phrase (usually a pun) comes to my mind and resonates, I turn the paper one more time and write the phrase upside down.

Reading all this, I began thinking about Leonardo’s Brain, how he was left-handed, but also ambidextrous, and practiced mirror writing — and how for right-handed people, the left hemisphere controls the right hand, but the right hemisphere controls the left hand.

Baez says she knows there is a neurological explanation for her method, but she says she’s not interested in that. “We don’t need an explanation for every damn thing,” she writes. “There’s a lot to be said for letting go and doing something simply because it feels right… Why tamper with magic?”

Related reading: “Turn it upside down”