Loving your child's mind: Francisco and I discuss Alana's convo on Island of Blue Dolphins

Hello, Francisco. How are you?

Oh, Michael, I'm well.

How are you? I'm well. I'm well. Had you read or heard about Island of Blue Dolphins?

No, not at all.

I should have given you advance notice. Sorry about that. But yeah, it's based on a true story. So Alana described the story and this actually happened. So this, you know, young Native woman lived alone on an island for something like 20 years. So, it was really quite a remarkable phenomenon. And then the novel is, you know, largely an imaginary retelling. We don't have a lot of details on her, but you can see it's quite a story. And, you know, I loved Alon at the end. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 million.

Yeah, no, you can tell she definitely enjoyed it very much throughout. It was quite good to see. And then her emphasis on learning things and adventure, that was mostly the lens with which she was looking at things, which makes sense. But even when you try to get her to talk about the more difficult emotional aspects and the scenes that are gruesome and that are difficult, she just saw it through the lens of of learning and adventure. It was interesting.

Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, I expect that I probably did it as a kid as well. I was probably a little bit older than her, maybe, you know, 11 or 12 when I read it. But that's sort of interesting that that's how, you know, I think a lot of adults are very frightened to, you know, give kids, you know, difficult sorts of things. And I think it's not very graphic about what happened, the slaughter of the men, but you know, it is mentioned, and certainly I read a lot of war stories and so forth. Yeah, let's kind of big picture. This is the first time I've done a novel, and mostly I wanted to start by having her retell it, A, so I could remember it, but, and so people could know a little bit about what it's about, but also to see what really stuck out for her, what stayed stayed with her. And yeah, that was mostly the survival bit, but clearly it was all fresh. And then I started to go into, you know, a few questions about the story. And I'll pause there and just see what was your take on how she responded to the questions on the story.

Like I said, the beginning questions was, I guess, exploratory, it seemed, on your part, just trying to get gauge how she was responding to different elements of the story specifically, like as we had already mentioned, the emotional elements that were going on there. And yeah, and it was interesting even when she's mentioned that she would want to write a story like that on her own. I wonder if in her story, if she describes difficult situations, if she would also look at it through the lens adventure and learning, or if she then would be more aware of different emotional elements like fear and the things that you were trying to explore with her.

Exactly. Well, and to some extent, I do think there's something developmental. That is, at this age, I find most children when they write stories, they're very plot-heavy, and it's only maybe after puberty that they tend to become more emotionally layered and textured. And so I think, you know, I'm often critical of Piaget, but there's a sort of concrete sequential sort of focus that they have vis-à-vis the world. And so she's very focused on the plot details and the emotional resonances, you know, are there but not— they don't kind of stand out for her. It's striking that, you know, not lonely, you know, if I have a dog That's okay. You know, and I think Alana is a very social being who loves her family very much. I think, you know, in practice she'd be very lonely, but I think she has this relationship with the excitement of the survival and the plot and so forth. One kind of background thing I have is I have a sort of ambivalent relationship to traditional literary interpretation. On the one hand, I'll do two alternatives and see if this resonates for you. On the one hand, I think there's a very natural way, and many of us love to explore stories and their impact on us. And, you know, I think a lot of us, when we are fascinated by a story— I was going to say love, but sometimes we may dislike a story. There's a famous Kafka quote about— you know the Kafka quote I'm talking about? No, no, no. Okay, I'll look it up. But You know, there's a natural and spontaneous way that people who love stories can talk, but then there's— I think of English class in high school, my recollection is are these all these forced interpretations, you know, and that there's this literary analysis that felt completely artificial to me, a game with strange rules sort of thing. And for me, I want the experience for Alana and any student I'm working with to be kind of a natural and spontaneous wonder about the experience of the book and reading the book and the author and what the author was doing and so forth. And, you know, kind of natural and organic as opposed to now we're teaching literary analysis. Does that distinction resonate for you?

Yes, I think I see very much what you're saying. The impression I get as well is that the way most students read books now, or they are taught to read books now, is through different— two different lenses that are very detached from maybe what they really think. Either they just only look at the history behind the historical analysis, or whatever you want to call it, a Freudian analysis, a feminist analysis, etc. So it's always through these lenses, and I wonder if the reason why that's the case is that we've become detached to the why of books. Why read books? Why talk about books? And maybe you can talk a little bit more about that in this transition into talking about books with Alana. Do you have a why in mind? Is there a why that you hold on to?

That's a very interesting question. I mean, for my simple thing is I love books. I do find that reading has expanded my world so immensely. And so, for me, the whole point— and earlier, I don't know if you saw that one, but Lana, you know, Lana talked about how much she loved books, and she and I sort of share this love of books. And so, I think, you know, I'm concerned with the long-term decline of reading across society, and of course people read articles on the internet, and they read social media posts, but there's something about going into a completely different universe that the author has created and then going in and experiencing that universe, and it does feel as if it's very expansive. It expands the range of experiences I have, range of perspectives I can share, the range of things within myself that I suddenly recognize when I experience you know, this other reality. And so, for me, it enriches life, the whole point. And it's, I would say more broadly with the humanities, it's all about having a richer life. Does that resonate for you, or would you add anything to that?

That resonates very much in that books at the end of the day are, whatever you want to say about them, there are other benefits. There are also ways in which what we talked about before, your project of understanding the world. There are aids to that as well. And I wonder if one reason that is, is that you are forced to meet— when you read a book, even a novel, or most any kind of book, you are forced to meet the author on their own terms if you want to understand them. You have to really try to have an attitude of accepting the invitation to look at the world the way the author looks at the world. And that sounds very similar to a conception of dialogue that we had been talking about before, conversation. And you're just doing that with a person that's had the time and energy to create something more coherent.

Very much so. Earlier, right, we— when talking about dialogue, I believe you mentioned the principle of charity and in interpreting the world of the other. And I guess I love understanding other human beings. I love understanding humanity. And so, yeah, going into the world of a novel, it's a way to understand a different set of experiences. And so, I would also add that I see this approach to literature as akin to two things. One is, you know, the liberal arts as a freeing, a way of becoming more free. We transcend the parochialism of our own experiences and perspective, at least for a little while. And the more we read, I think more continuously. Then the other thing is a virtue culture, which again sounds terribly stodgy, but you know, for me, I don't care about what research says in a certain sense, but you know, research says that reading makes one more empathetic. But just from my own experience, I think that habitually coming to understand the world through the eyes of others does make one more sympathetic. Not, you know, there's no guarantee, it's not absolute and so forth, but it's a habit or a practice. I'm very interested in the Aristotelian notion of a practice, and if one has the habit of reading and taking books seriously— I would say that's my other concern with certain kinds of literary criticism is they're not taking the book seriously. But if we read and we take the book seriously, then we are invited into the world of the other, and it becomes ours for a period of time. And ideally, it permanently transforms who we are and, you know, how we interpret the world. You know, and just— I didn't remember any details of this book, but I'm now recommending several books for Ilana because there are books that I read as a child that I feel changed me even though I was, you know, very young and I don't remember anything about the plot details, but I felt different after having read them. You know, you're very much a reader. Say a little bit about, you know, I just assume because of who you are that you were a reader from a young age. You want to say a little bit about your relationship to reading as a child? Sure.

Well, I went to school for elementary, for part of elementary and high school in a a very religious school, a very Christian school, and I had— I still have a kind of a mixed relationship with religion, but one thing that I did gain that was very valuable was a— very early on there was a respect for the written word that permeated the entire school. I had in elementary school, we called it Bible class, every day for an hour and a half, And then starting middle school and high school, we had an even deeper text-based class, whether that be systematic theology or apologetics and all these things. And I think it made me realize that there is a kind of possibility in reading and a— that reading requires method and that it— and that reading something develops as you develop as well, that a particular text, not any text but certain texts, that they change as you change as well and that discovering that was amazing because I've always said that I'm a person of very, very few books. I like to read a lot but I like to— I prefer to read something over and over instead of reading many things.

Aha, fascinating. Just to connect what something you said with the experience with Alana, you know, you said the book changes as you change. One thing that I am careful to do is I was kind of hoping that the dialogue about the book, the interpretive dialogue about the book, would have been richer and more multi-dimensional than it was. But I also didn't want to push her, and above all, I didn't want to express any sense of, you know, frustration or anxiety about going more. I mean, I think this is really important, that especially if either a parent or teacher comes at a child with certain expectations of how the child should be seeing the world, or hopes, or whatever, or why aren't they seeing it my way, then what that subconsciously communicates to the child is, "There's something wrong with me and I'm not doing it right." And they may just have this disconnected fear, anxiety that, "Uh-oh, I'm not doing it right." And I think it's so, so important that parents or educators never, never communicate that in their interaction with the child, because that, I think that's part of why So I think, you know, the standard high school English classes, middle school too, often destroy an interest in literature because it's all about, "Oh, you didn't get it right." Like, how do we get people to love literature by that? So I'm very, very, very careful about whatever I might have thought or expected, how she experiences it is totally fine. You know, I'll add In my questions, I want to call attention to certain things. And I just want to see, oh, if I call attention to the possibility that she was lonely, how does she respond? If I call attention to the possibility that, you know, this was too harsh, how does she respond? But even though at any point I was ready for her to go more and to take it in a bigger place, she was where she was and totally fine. So again, you're such a sensitive reader and dialogue person, I expect that you perceive that, but you want to respond to that?

Yes, I would imagine that someone hearing an idea like this for the first time, one reaction they would have is to say that the goal, obviously, or one of the main goals on having conversations like this with your child is that they develop and they become more nuanced observers and that they see all the subtleties, etc., etc. So on the one hand, saying that you should not kind of suggest or force a conversation towards the subtleties and instead meeting the, the child in her own terms and how she's looking at the world One reaction would be that how would there be development there if you will be happy to stay at the level where she is giving you?

Fair enough. And so the distinction I would make is I do want to kind of present her with things, you know, sort of present her with, uh, what about loneliness, you know, what about the harshness, um, You know, is a dog enough? You know, those sorts of things. And the goal is by means of calling her attention to different things, presenting the possibility that, huh, I hadn't thought of that, I hadn't thought of that, I hadn't thought of that. And so, but my real key is while doing that, not to associate any negative emotion in the face of her response. And I think it's a tricky thing At some point, one can be more persistent in questioning and even aggressive with questioning. I think part of learning to do this is calibrating one's level of assertiveness to the audience. So, you know, sometimes I'll get— and I'll gender this— sometimes there are very kind of aggressive boys, older boys in particular, who, you know, you could hit them in the face metaphorically, of course, and they'd still be, "Rrrr." And so there I'll be much more assertive in my questioning. But with many children, and especially younger children, and Ilana is so sensitive, you know, the last thing I want to do is communicate any kind of sense of disapproval. So while putting these things out there for her and making available sort of an opportunity for her to have a new insight, yeah, I don't even want to, you know, "You sure about loneliness? Wouldn't you be lonely? No, I would be lonely. Why don't you be lonely?" You know, it's It's sort of a nuanced thing. And I might have said, I don't think I did, but it would have been fine to say, "I might have been lonely," or "I wonder if I would have been lonely." And again, by doing it then, I'm not asserting anything, I'm not implying that there's anything wrong with what she did. I'm reflecting my own experience. And so that's another kind of putting something out there. So a lot of this is making available opportunities for her to go more deeply. And sometimes she'll take them and sometimes she won't. I guess part of this too is I have deep faith based on decades of experience that simply by means of presenting children with these opportunities for going deeper, often enough they get there and develop and I think in truly remarkable ways over time. So that's the other thing is I'm endlessly patient. It doesn't have to be today that any student gets to a particular place. It's— this is the whole habit of thought thing. It's continuous opportunities for thought that bit by bit allow and encourage them to open up and blossom as an independent thinker. I'll pause there. And did that kind of respond to your concern?

Yes, that is a great bit of nuance. I have two responses to that. The first is that it's an idea that I often hear, which sounds very correct, in that curiosity for an interlocutor, for an educator, is the sign that whatever learning will happen at whatever pace is going to be, is going to be probably long-lasting, it's going to be deep. So as long as there's curiosity there, and that contrasts very much to the conventional model that you were talking about, that when a child gets to the correct answer by responding to a negative response on the educator, the only thing they're doing is that, right? They're responding to a negative response. They're just saying what they need to say in order that this negative response becomes a positive response, almost like a Pavlovian dog training thing. And that is not real learning, right? Because then they don't want to— the answers that they give are not their answers. They're just response mechanisms or defense mechanisms for taking that negative emotional situation into a positive route. Does that sound correct?

Oh, big time. And I'll be even more emphatic that I agree, first of all, that endless curiosity from the adult, the educator, parent, is a sine qua non of rich, engaged learning for the child, at least in this sort of a context. And the traditional role of a teacher, both the formal role insofar as most teachers in most contexts have a formal role to impart information and to evaluate whether or not that child has obtained the information that they are administratively required to impart. That role really has no room for curiosity in it. Maybe at the margins we could wonder, "Did I successfully transmit this to Francisco?" I might be curious as to whether or not, but there's both the role anxiety and I would say a teacher superego that puts a teacher in a position where the only thing that really matters in their role of a teacher is, did the students get the required information or not? And so, you know, again, maybe curiosity about how successful I am, but most teachers are so busy, momentarily is at best. And then beyond that, really no time for curiosity about how the child is understanding and interpreting the world beyond the narrow content transmission requirements. And so, this is one of the reasons why I am so adamantly against traditional content transmission as the primary focus in the humanities in particular. I assume you'd agree with most or all of that.

Oh, I think that's a very powerful insight that even admits restating. Let's see if I got it right, that the the content transmission role that a teacher in a conventional environment is forced to take has no room for a child's curiosity. And I think what that says to me is that the intent is not to vilify teachers. I've met very, very kind, very empathetic, very dedicated public school teachers that unfortunately were forced into a structure where learning is impeded instead of aided. And maybe that's one reason for that, is that the role that they are asked to play from above is a role that negates curiosity. So the very same person, the very same dedicated, empathetic, kind person in a different structure will deliver much, much better and much more effective results.

Yeah, totally agreed. I would add as a bit of nuance that the vast majority of private school teachers are doing exactly the same thing. That is, it's the way, it's the understanding of what education is. There's a famous book by a scholar who talks, I'm forgetting his name momentarily, but he talks about the grammar of schooling. And he's a Stanford education professor, and the grammar of schooling includes this content transmission role. And he often talks about how the reform desires to change the school, but in fact the school changes the reform. So, you know, I do know of wonderful heroic Socratic teachers who in conventional schools who manage to create a space for this. But I describe them as heroic because they have to have the confidence that they will meet their required content transmission goals. Say if they do Socratic once a week in the other 4 days, or if they're really, you know, a lot of times very experienced teachers can nail the content transmission, say in a history or language arts class, in say 2 or 3 days, and then that gives 2 or 3 days a week for Socratic. But it's because they have such confidence and commitment to the practice that they're willing to kind of push away, you know, kind of forcefully make space for Socratic in an environment that doesn't reward them for it. And if they slip up at all, like say if the principal saw them at the end of the year and the students didn't do well enough on the AP exam or whatever, and they said, "You were spending 2 or 3 days talking about ideas in this class?" You know, and that's why I describe it as courageous, because if they'd spent all 5 days a week transmitting information, transmitting information, then they're kind of secure of almost regardless of the results. Where are we doing best practices? You know, and kind of finally, one other contamination is sometimes because of this anxiety, a teacher in a conventional context will force Socratic into a content transmission mold. And for me, that totally undermines and destroys the integrity of the process. Because if I'm not authentically interested in what you're saying, you as a student, then why should I even bother talking? Why should I express my opinion? It's the same old game. I'm trying to guess what answer the teacher wants. And sadly, there are some, certainly class discussions, some of them described as Socratic, that have become, as it were, the same old game.

Yes, I think that's a very good thought, that in many cases what is thought of as a compromise between a Socratic and a normal content transmission model is no compromise at all. In fact, it— and now with our conversation, we can see maybe one reason why it is no compromise at all, because the moment you use a collaborative discussion Socratic style, to just make sure the students have content transmitted to them, then the mechanisms that are at your disposal is doing that, expecting them with negative responses, with an attitude of you're right and you're wrong, to just spew out the facts. And that can be even more scarier and produce worse results than if you had just the normal content transmission model.

Well, exactly. And, you know, in poker, people talk about a tell where, like, if you're bluffing, maybe you have a habit of scratching your ear or something. And I use that as an analog in Socratic. When I was leading this in public schools, often the students, and especially the students, kind of the brightest students in the best classes, would, if I was doing a demo in a public school classroom, would turn to the teacher in front, the regular classroom teacher, in frustration and say, "I can't tell what answer he wants!" Because I'm not giving them a tell. 'Cause, you know, most— in most discussions, oh, you know, even if, you know, you don't say anything, there's this brightness. Oh, Francisco's getting the right answer. Oh, Francisco's getting the wrong answer. And instead of having authentic opinions that they've thought through, students are trained. And often, again, it's the most successful students in school who are best at recognizing the teacher's tells. It's like, oh, I'm gonna give her more of that because that's what she wants. And for me, it's just such a contamination of the integrity of thought and experience.

Yes, very much. And it really disincentivizes mistakes. I am of the opinion— I don't know if you share— that in order to learn well, make mistakes often, repeatedly, and be very aware of them. And if that is true, then any structure in which mistakes are disincentivized are or incentivized to be hidden or as a bad thing, then that's gonna give you a very, very difficult time if you want to learn something.

Big time. And rather than explore that one, that's another fabulous point, to keep this in reasonable time boundaries, I'll wrap it up. But thank you. That's a brilliant point to land this on, and we'll, I'm sure, explore it in a subsequent conversation. Great. Have a great week, Francisco. You too. Bye-bye.