Teaching Life - A Conversation with Todd Shy

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The other thing about teaching is it takes a long time to become good at it. It really does. And so you're in something that takes years to become good at. It's undervalued. And if you're not receiving some sort of inspiration about what you're doing, like why—

that's not surprising that people Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week I've been talking with Todd Shy about his recent book, Teaching Life: Life Lessons for Aspiring and Inspiring Teachers, which was described by the founder of the Academy for Teachers as an eloquent love letter to to teaching and to life. Todd has taught for more than 25 years in Cary, North Carolina, San Francisco, California, and New York City. He's currently the head of upper division at Avenues: The World School in New York. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Raleigh News and Observer, where he was a regular contributor, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Salmagundi, and numerous other publications. In 2008, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Citation for excellence in reviewing. Feel free to reach out to Todd and you can find ways to contact him in the links in the show notes.

Hi, Todd.

Hi, Tim.

How are you doing?

We're good, thank you.

I mean, it's brilliant to be able to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this conversation after reading your book Teaching Life, which is— I'm hoping this is a kind of a slightly sideways look at education compared to what I normally more analytically doing in the podcast with different people, because there's loads of amazing rich narratives and stories about the life of teaching in your book. So thank you for joining me first.

Thanks for having me, Tim.

So yeah, if we could start maybe just with the inception of the book for you, because obviously writing's been a theme, as I understand, throughout your career and your life, but you start the book in Lesson 1 with, with a letter to your daughters. Katie and Emily, right? And maybe we could start there, just if you just can give a little bit of an overview of where the idea for the book came from, or your need, your purpose and urgency about writing that kind of book about education.

Yeah, so it did begin— several things were converging right at the time my oldest daughter declared her intention in college of becoming a teacher, and then later my middle daughter did as well. My middle daughter's teaching right now. Right about that time, I'd been about 20 years in the classroom, and I was exploring and ended up making a move into school leadership. And so both of those things at once made me think about kind of the arc of my teaching life and what I had learned and had this idea of how could I synthesize all of that as, uh, in some ways as a gift to my daughters and people like my daughters who were starting into teaching. But the other thing, Tim, is over the years, I just had this strange experience as a teacher that I'm guessing most people do, that when I told people I was a teacher, their responses were, I mean, people sort of shuddered. The responses were uninspired. People would say things that were the equivalent of, "Well, I could never do that," or, you know, "Better you than me," "Thank you for your service," "Thanks for taking one for the team." I had a colleague who graduated college, started in finance, and all of his friends in finance, when he decided to go into a classroom, their response was, "Good for you, man. Good for you." And it, And it struck me, you know, so the memoirist Frank McCourt said— he was a teacher for a long time before he wrote Angela's Ashes— and he said, teaching is the downstairs maid of the professions. So there was that narrative of kind of this underappreciated work that nobody envied doing. But then when I asked people to tell me about a teacher that they had, a formative teacher, like, it completely changed. People would lean forward and light up. They were inspired by teachers, but the idea of teaching just felt uninspiring to them. And so I wanted to explore that paradox and also kind of reclaim the nobility of what it is that teachers do, because people recognize that in their own teachers, of how their teachers change them.

Yeah, but they'd rather somebody else did it rather than themselves.

That's right. That's right.

But I think that's— it's such a kind of pertinent message right now, isn't it? Because you know, we've got again a few different things converging. There's clearly a lot of teachers leaving the profession right now, and we've seen that in all the statistics recently. And then also, I think, you know, a lot— in a lot of my work, I come across this narrative which is well-intentioned about the future of education and the future of learning and what it, what it might be and need to be to respond to some of the massive problems and, you know, issues that we're faced with as a as a species, et cetera. But the kind of unintended consequence of that narrative sometimes is to undermine the role of the teacher because actually a lot of the narrative is about learning, educational technology, all of those things. And actually the teacher's role is seen as often this much more traditional and backwards-looking figure. And, you know, as you talk about in the book, there's this cliché of the sage on the stage and the guide on the side, which, you know, such a horrible cliché now, but the idea of this sage on the stage is associated with this traditional approach that we just need to move on from and all wake up because we've realized that that's just a ridiculous idea. And clearly, that's a major caricature, and there are major issues in that narrative that undermine the social value and the philosophical value of the teacher's role. So I'd love to kind of get into some of that with you, because clearly, I mean, that's really what the book is about at its heart, right? It's kind of a love story to the role of a teacher, is what it felt like to me.

Yeah, if I were writing it again, I might change the title to The Romance of Teaching, because I do think there's a kind of a romance to it. So yeah, the problem with the critique of the sage on the stage, there's an appropriate humility in that critique that's nice, but it's a critique of the stage, and the problem is we do need sages in the classroom, and if you think of sage on the stage as a bad model, that The risk is you throw out the wise figure, and you need so much wisdom and artistry to be an effective teacher. You need a lot of sagacity. You need a lot of ingenuity. You need a whole lot of judgment and intuition. The skill set you need to do the job really well is enormous. And so if we downplay who the teacher is in the classroom, then what we risk is attracting the kind of person who has that big full skillset and we just can't afford to do that. Yeah.

It's interesting because what I want to do with the conversation is honor the narrative and the story in your book and not just kind of analyze it too much. So, because one of the characters I loved in the book was Diogenes. Yeah. And who's one of your previous teachers. And maybe we could start there and just, if you could give a bit of a description of some of the things you do in the book of him, because that kind of resonates with that idea of the sage on the stage. And then you actually actually needed, uh, was it Bill? Yeah, support, because the sage was pushing you too hard sometimes.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. I, I mean, Diogenes is this wonderful example of an unforgettable— and, and I, I wouldn't trade the experience of being in a classroom with him for anything, but he was flawed, and, and we needed other things. But Diogenes— I went to Princeton Seminary with a bunch of big questions about the world and myself and meaning of life and all those things. And Diogenes was a formative encounter I had there. He taught philosophy of religion. He walked into class dressed kind of like an Oxford don. He suffered no fools, and he was fully inside of what he was teaching in a way that it was electric, but you had to go where he was. Like, he was wrapped up inside this vision of what the right questions to ask were, and he provoked those questions in us and I think what I admired about Diogenes over and over was every classroom, it felt like so much was at stake. Like the big, big things were at stake all the time. And that's really important, but because you couldn't dial it in, in that class. I mean, he called people out all the time. And one of the things I write about is, you know, teachers are generally really kind, student-centered folks who like to affirm students and sort of draw them out and Diogenes, if a student gave an answer that was off, he would just say, "Nope, nope, that's not it," and move on. Like, he wasn't trying to make people feel warm or good. He was trying to get us to understand some really big things. And it drove some people away, but for some of us, his mind was just working at a level of— so many important things were at stake.

Interesting. I liked you said at one point about him, "It was the life moving inside him reaching out to the life stumbling inside us," which I thought was a brilliant quote. To kind of to that point of the students are these stumbling figures and, you know, clearly we're not making the case that Diogenes is the be-all and end-all of teaching, right? But we're trying to pull out what the aspects of that character that are so kind of alive and important about the teacher's role. And I think that vitality that you also talk about is so important. And again, the quote that you use linking to Tolstoy, that the school should do what Tolstoy said art should do, make people love life.

Yeah.

And I think that's both of those things I really felt in the figure of Diogenes.

Yeah, he, he seemed to have thought through the questions that I was asking myself and was a little farther down the road. And, and so I wanted to follow down where he had been. And, but he was, it wasn't just that he was paying attention to my questions, it was my sense that he had lived and inhabited those same questions and explored them at a deeper level. I remember people got agitated in Diogenes' class, and people would go up to him at the end. And I remember standing at the margins one day while people were kind of arguing with him, and it was a kind of a postmodern critique of his very kind of traditional view. And he looked at one student and he said, "You need to read the Church Fathers," and because the student was talking about all kinds of contemporary things, and the student got agitated then too and said, "What am I going to find there?" And he said, "Let them show you." what to ask. But that was sort of Diogenes' way of like, I'm way down this path here. If you want to come, come with me, here are the kinds of questions we're going to ask and answer. And, you know, Tim, you're right to frame this. It's like, he wasn't the complete package. He was pointy. He was lopsided. But he was fully alive. And it instigated life in me, even though I moved on from Diogenes too, which is, you know, good teachers, students should move on from them and go their own way, which I did.

Yeah, because I've thought about this quite a lot. When you talk about the teacher's role, there are so many things, as you said at the beginning, there are so many different skill sets and different elements to that role going on. And because then you talk about Bill, who was then coming with the ladder to help you all climb up to the level that Diogenes was at. So you needed the inspiration and the vitality of Diogenes, but you also needed the ladder and the, as you said, kind of affirmation of Bill to support. And so he was a teaching assistant, right? To support the students. So it's like, I think we can decouple sometimes some of these different elements of the role that they don't necessarily all have to be within the one perfect package.

That's right. I mean, you have something like, I counted at one time and I, and the number's not at the tip of my brain here, but a kid will have 50, 60 teachers in their life. And so it's, if that's an orchestra, then, you know, Diogenes is brilliantly playing his violin, but you need other instruments in the orchestra too. And I think, you know, the argument for allowing some of that lopsidedness is that kids experience so many teachers. And if you collectively have great teams of teachers who are balancing and providing that whole kind of orchestral needs, then that's okay. But I wouldn't trade Diogenes for anybody. I just, if all you had was that sort of virtuosic violin, you would have a limited range of things you could do, but you need them. I needed them.

Yeah. And obviously there are different people coming with different needs or interests or passions, or, you know, as you said, some people would've been totally switched off by a Diogenes and just thought, well, you know, this isn't speaking to me at all. It doesn't resonate. I don't understand where this guy's going. He doesn't inspire me. And that's one of the other challenges of being a teacher, isn't it? Is because you have such a diverse group of children, students, learners, whatever. In front of you, that's a challenge.

Yeah, that's the piece, you know, Diogenes wasn't effective at this, but Thoreau says we receive only what we're ready to receive. So one of the roles of a teacher, I think, is figuring out what students are ready to receive. And so it becoming the artistry of great teaching is every new group of students you get, you're trying to figure them out too, to see what they can receive and what they're ready to receive. And then adjusting your— what you need to present to them, or like what the goals of your course are. But it's that dynamic of if you want them to actually receive and internalize, you've got to figure them out too first. And that's why you need the sage in the classroom.

Yeah, it's interesting that you even just using that word actually, like actual and potential, and that's kind of that Aristotelian idea, right, of the making of the actual out of the potential. And, you know, everyone's got a different, they're bringing a different set of conditions with themselves when they come into your classroom, right? Another point you talk about a teacher as a gardener, an instigator, facilitator, creating optimal conditions for growth. I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about there, right? You know, different people will require different conditions.

That's right. And then you have to open yourself up to surprise. You know, I think I take that image from this, that great book by Alison Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter, which is she's targeting parents, parents, but it applies to teaching too, of not being too much of a carpenter. Here's my blueprint, I'm going to make this thing, and students are those things we're making, but gardeners. And part of gardening is you do have to attend to the conditions of growth. It's not arbitrary, but there's still surprise, and like the thing that grows is its own living— students in your classroom are living beings. And so creating conditions in which you exercise enormous influence but not control You know, so that you're letting students come into themselves and surprise you with where they go, what they respond to, where their interests take them.

Nice. And I mean, that whole idea of artistry, I think, is an important one, particularly at the moment, because my feeling is there's an increasing level of technocratic kind of new public management. You know, let's define all of the end products. Let's use the blueprint. Let's engineer backwards from what we want to get this. And obviously we know all the factory model metaphors of education, but even when we change the language, maybe it's about competencies and skills rather than academic knowledge, it's still often, it's still a language of engineering and carpentry, as you say, rather than looking at the conditions of reality, facing reality like a gardener has to, and then just working with the conditions as they shift and change. That's right. I think the artistry point is really important now to kind of counterbalance some of the engineering language.

Yeah, you know, I want all of it. We need to sort of see with binocular vision, but I think you're right that if you tilt too far towards the engineering, the design, the carpentry, you can lose the life. I mean, my favorite example of that, and I talk about this in the book too, but John Stuart Mill's autobiography says John Stuart Mill's father determined to educate him— in light of the time, 19th century understanding of knowledge and rationality, and put him through a systematic education young that burned John Stuart Mill out. I mean, at age 3, he was reading Greek, at age 8, Latin, and by the age of 12, he was this little prodigy and a successful prodigy. And at the age of 18, he had a breakdown. And his line from his autobiography is great. He said, I was a well-equipped ship with a rudder but no sail. So when I think of that balance, like, you do need like all the equipment of a ship to travel on a sea, but if you're just that— and what John Stuart Mill described as the sail, the wind, the animating force— he was rescued by reading poetry, reading Wordsworth. It sort of balanced, it inspired him and filled him in a way that, you know, the technical education that he'd had didn't and he recovered and became this influential, important philosopher. But I always think of that of like a well-equipped ship with a rudder but no sail to catch the wind. And so I ask myself, you know, what is wind in a classroom? And what are the— how do you put sails up to catch that? And wind is less predictable than the design of your ship.

So yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, that kind of makes me think of Gerhard Biester's conversation I had with him, which I know you've heard, but the idea of the subjectification, you know, meeting and allowing the student to bring their own wind or, you know, whatever you call it, but bring themselves into the space. So it's always the answer is both and, right? It's always. And so often we get pushed into deciding whether it's this or it's that, and it's, we need both, right? You need, as you say, you need the structure and the planning, of the engineer to some extent, but—

Well, yeah, and it's not a perfect balance that we're trying to achieve. I think like it's okay to rock back and forth a little bit. Tolstoy, as you know from reading the books, one of my heroes, and thinking about school, because Tolstoy was a— he was a pretty good writer, was also a pretty good teacher. But Tolstoy said we've got to be careful, teachers, of being like bad sculptors who like shave a little bit off over here to even things out and then realize now we got to go over here, now we've got the balance off. Now I've gotta like trim over on this side and then go back and trim. We're just like trimming to get the exact balance, right? And Tolstoy said, you know, that's, that's a bad model for teaching. You're not correcting all the time. You're not fixing. And you know, his examples of how he interacted with kids show, show the opposite. But I think it's the binocular vision. It's like we are thinking about shape and design and what we can control, but we're exquisitely aware that when dealing with human beings, we don't control them. Yeah. We enter into a relationship with them and, and because we're a little bit farther down the road, we point them to things and instigate their attention and their life towards those things. And that's what we're doing. Yeah.

No, absolutely. And I'd love to talk to you about attention, cuz you talk about that a bit and that's an interest that I've got as well at the moment, but just struck me as you were talking there, because as you said, one of the converging forces was you moving into leadership. How is that kind of bringing together multiple characters, you know, in order to create some balance? So if you look at it rather than from the classroom perspective, but from a whole school perspective, has that kind of given you any pause in relation to how you support others and lead a school or bring different people into your school?

Yeah, well, I thought teaching was hard. It's, I mean, school is a glorious, beautiful enterprise that's as complicated as any human community. And from a leadership seat, I think I'm just more attuned to all the layers of complexity all the time, which is different from the complexity of building a community in a classroom, which I did for 20 years. It's now, it's thinking about all the pieces moving together. And so the design, the orchestration, the, you know, maybe that's, it's an orchestra conductor rather than the violin player and thinking about how do other people need to be successful. So it's as complex as reading a room of students, that Thoreau, that for students and for teachers, you receive what you're ready to receive, but that's the adults too. So where are we as a community and how are we gonna determine to move forward and grow?

Absolutely, exactly. When you are a community with different characters and characteristics, and as you say, you might have Diogenes, but then you might also have Miss Acuff, right? Your other hero of your teacher. Maybe you could speak about her a little bit, but you've got both of them in your team. We want to create a really mutually supportive and great community that gets the best out of everybody ultimately for to serve the students, right? That's right.

Yeah. And I mean, I think at every level as a teacher, as a school leader, policymakers have this too. This is a really appropriate humility in the face of working with young human beings. And I mean, they're coming of age. The glorious thing to me about teaching and my pitch to people who are looking around and considering what they're gonna do with their life. I mean, I think that the appeal of teaching is you're around coming of age all the time, and it's miraculous to see. It's the most vivid time of life— childhood and adolescence going into adulthood. Every stage of life is interesting, but those are the most vivid, and the transformations that are happening, and you're witnessing that, and, and you're catalyzing it, and, uh, that's the glory of the work to me. Are we going to talk about Miss Aikoff? You saw me, right?

Yeah, again, as I said, I want to— I don't want to be too analytical. It would be nice to have some story. And so yeah, tell me about Miss Aikoff.

Yeah, so I was a junior in high school and, you know, launched the year in English class. It was an AP English class. I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains, not in a great school system, not a great school. Not a lot of inspiration. And I was stumbling through high school with a little bit of cynicism and probably a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. And I was in Miss Acuff's class and cynically, I was just flipping to the back of the book. I thought what we were reading was boring. We, you know, it was a big anthology and we were reading, uh, you know, William Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier and glorious in their time, but it just didn't get a lot of traction. And I was flipping to the back of the book and I was reading the modern stuff. And there was, you know, joy in that, but also a little bit of cynicism of like, I'm moving ahead from where we are. But Ms. Akuff kept me back from class one day and surprised me as she reached behind her. And she was this non-charismatic teacher. I described her as spending most of the class just sitting on a stool in front of the room, had a sweater over her shoulder. This was back in the day when teachers hustled off to the teacher's lounge to smoke between classes. And she had kind of cigarette breath and had coffee in her hand and very quiet and very methodical and not the kind of teacher you would think would instigate this sort of awakening, but she was paying attention to me. She was just paying attention and she held me back after class one day and she just pulled a book off her shelf, said, I think you like this book. It was a collection of short stories. It wasn't in the curriculum, uh, based on something I'd done in an assignment or in writing. She said, "I think you'll like this book." I mean, it's still— I mean, vividly remembering the moment, and it's a— I was playing on the basketball team at the time, and we had an away game that day, and I took the book, sat at the front of the bus so I could be out away from everybody else, people crowding in the back, and I was reading this book on the way to this away game. We had a 2-hour bus ride up into the cold country, and I was riveted. And I remember holding it— it was dark on the way home, obviously— but I remember holding it in my lap just holding it because it was like the thing I had been reading. To hold it was to hold on to the associations of that. And it built a relationship with Miss Aikoff. So I told her about it and we started having conversations about writing and about books. But it was that recognition and the magic and life-changing magic of holding me back after class and just saying, I think— and it's, I think you will like this book. Not just anybody, but you. And it located me in a way. And it's, I think I said in the acknowledgments of the book, it was heartbreaking for me that I wrote this book and my thing I wanted to do was sort of present this to her, you know, as a gift. And she passed away a couple years before I was able to finish it, but she's right in the center of it for me. And she was not Diogenes. But what every teacher can do, every teacher can do is pay attention to the students who are in their classroom when you see them. But the thing that you do then as a gift to them. You're not just a therapist for them, you're not just holding them, although you're doing that too, but you're seeing what's a possible next thing for them, like an extension for them, the thing they don't know about. And that's what she did. It's like, try this writer because I know you and I know him, so I'm going to connect you to him. And then I was off, you know.

Yeah, that's so good. And I think that really speaks to that idea of attention that I want to get onto because she, as you say, she is noticing, she is paying attention to you, specifically to you. And then she's matching what she can see in you. She sees some essence and she kind of leads that somewhere else and she directs your attention to this next thing. So it's the idea of the teacher paying attention to the unique lifeworlds that she's got in front of her, but then also the role of then directing the student's attention on to the next thing. And I think that is such a powerful part of what teaching is about.

That's right. Yeah, it's all— I mean, it's almost the whole of it. It is. It almost is, really. And then, you know, I think warmth and grace and all of that too. There's— I saw— so I kind of collect teacher stories, and I saw this documentary about George Balanchine as a teacher. So I went to see it to see what his students said about him, Balanchine, the ballet choreographer, and they interviewed him. He had a line like this, he said, "I love these students, you see, this neck is bent a particular way, this leg is lifted a particular way," and his students talked about that too, like the way he saw them as individual dancers and then sort of pushed them forward from where he saw that they were. But it's the same thing that we're talking about in a classroom.

Absolutely. And it also reminds me again of herzliches Grüße, this conversation about that idea of just the role of the teacher directing the attention. But you also talk about William James on this, and there's a lot of the psychology of attention. And I think I've been thinking a lot about this recently, that we have this kind of quite a limited understanding of attention as to like a spotlight. We use the metaphor of a spotlight shining and there's so much more going on as I'm Understanding it. We, and I think the dominance of cognitive science in education as well has kind of perpetuated this idea that it's just this, you know, we're shining this spotlight around, but actually there's this kind of attention of multidimensional attention that is way more profound than the idea of just here's a spotlight, let's point it at this, this piece of knowledge and then the next thing and the next thing. It's, there's, there's something much richer going on, which I don't really have the words for necessarily, but yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, well, I mean, James gave us the language of stream of consciousness, which became so sort of central to literary description of literary achievement. Yeah, I think that's right, Tim Logan. I mean, what that makes me think of is the sort of parts of us that are always inaccessible. Like, we're not utterly transparent to ourselves, and so it's not like— so our inner world is spotlighting over here, we need to turn the spotlight over here. It's a swarm of things. You and I, I know, both share an affection for Montaigne. I mean, that's one of the things that I take from him, this— no one has examined themselves more carefully and thoroughly, but in the end he realized he was a mystery to himself too. His inner world is— there's some things that feel accessible and some that feel inaccessible. And I'm charmed by his attention to sleep, where, you know, he wondered like, what's going on? Where am I when I'm asleep? What's going on? And he had servants come and wake him up, to disturb his sleep so he could watch like that coming out of sleep mode to understand himself better, which is kind of wonderful.

No, absolutely. I mean, he's a bit of a hero of mine and I'm not, it sounds so pretentious to say it, so I very rarely say it to anybody. There you go, now it's open. But he's, you know, he was the mayor of Bordeaux. I live in Bordeaux. He's, I go, I regularly go to his old château just out about 40 kilometers outside of Bordeaux. And there's something, yeah, very present here for me about him.

But I completely agree.

I think, that reflective and humble approach to constant self-examination is a real inspiration. And the other thing I thought was the connection, because you mentioned Montaigne a couple of times, but also even the structure of your book, you know, Montaigne, his essays was the first version of that format in the sense of just try something, try writing some things down and see what happens and come back to it and then revisit it. And it felt like there was the format was also kind of connected in the way that you wrote your book.

Yeah, thanks for saying that because I did want to avoid and actually intentionally have a nonlinear— I worry that our approach to teaching kids is too linear and the idea that everybody's at point A and then in this course and this year I'm going to get them to point D. And so with, let's all jump to B and then let's all jump to C and that, and we'll get to D, we'll be successful. And I just think that one, our lives are more various and unpredictable. Than that. And also it's part of the delight of how we inhabit ourselves. It's not in this sort of tight linear way. And I agree Montaigne showed us how to do that in writing and enjoy that, you know. And it's clear in my book Emerson is a hero as well, and not worrying about tight avoidance of contradiction and marching through blueprints or instructions.

But I think that's also so interesting because you also make the connection that this constant future orientation that we have in education is planting the seeds for midlife crises.

Yeah.

That's what you say in the book. And I think, I think that's so true that we have this obsession with the future and we're constantly leading in this linear way. As you say, we're trying to lead somewhere to this distant future and get to this idealized future state that we've planned down to the nth degree to get there. And somehow we don't end up there. Of course we don't end up— we were never going to, right? And it was, yeah, maybe you could just speak to that, that idea of planting seeds for midlife crises.

Yeah. I mean, I think the John Stuart Mill story comes back to me. I mean, he had his early— I mean, at some point you have to figure out what's an end in itself. Yeah. What isn't a means to an end at some point. And so that's hard when you're 11 or 12, but we can begin to live and explore and practice that. But at some point, you're orienting yourself towards what counts as an end to your life. And if everything is a means, you will crash or, you know, you'll live robotically. And so it seems to me that simultaneously, and, you know, Garrett's— your interview was great with him, his recent book is great, World-Centered Education. We're equipping students for sure to be able to navigate the world, but they're navigating it as an individual unique subject who has to establish their relationship to that world and their subjectivity. And I just think that has to be part of school too, all of it, but developing your own sense. It's not just about you because it is about other people in the world, but you have to establish like, what's your relationship going to be to other people in the world? And doing that early also is not a linear, you know, here's how to do that, but it needs to be part of our program and our thinking that at 18, 18-year-olds have meaningful lives and 25-year-olds do too. And it's not just about 18, it's not just preparation for being 35.

Yeah, it's chasing this mirage that's always a little bit further than you, and you get there and it's just, you're still just you. But you have to figure out who, who you are, and that's part of the process. What do you think is important? What do you value in life and what, you know, what do you find beautiful, right? You know, it sounds— maybe it sounds pretentious, but, but actually, what do you appreciate about where you are now rather than, you know, in this kind of state of being, rather than constantly chasing this having of the next thing? And I do think particularly— I mean, you're there in a very accomplished, quite elite school in New York, right, chasing this Ivy League perfection, often in this narrative. And I mean, it pervades a lot of education, I think. And there is a danger that we spend a lot of time focusing on trying to obtain this state of measured perfection that will then allow you into the next phase or, you know, that will bring happiness, but not yet.

That's right. I mean, that's David Brooks. He organized his whole book around this idea of resume virtues versus eulogy virtues. Yeah. Like the things that you're doing in order to have a resume versus the things you're doing in order for how people talk about your life. That's kind of nice too.

That's really nice.

Yeah.

I like that a lot. Brilliant. So, I mean, we've, you know, definitely heard a few characters. There's Dr. Caps as well, who came in towards the end of the book. But one of the things that we've touched on in a way a little bit, but I suppose we're focusing more on the how of education, but you do address explicitly in the book the what of education, like, you know, what should we teach? And that's clearly, I know at Avenues you've had a lot of conversation around, sometimes contentious and difficult conversations about what should you include? What should you leave out? You know, depth versus breadth, et cetera. But one particular thing that struck me in the book that you engage with is how much of the real world should we let in when we decide on what we're teaching? You know, are we teaching— I mean, obviously we're sitting here today with, you know, atrocious events happening in Ukraine, and that's kind of an example of how much of that real world that is dark and is highly complex and all of those things. How much of that should we let into the life worlds of young people, 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 9-year-olds? That's a difficult question, I think.

Yeah, it is. And it's again, where being a great teacher requires so much judgment and wisdom and, you know, intuition. And so I think the right posture is openness to both the world and to your students, because you are trying to connect them. And what you're not trying to do is get your own, establish your own interpretation of the world and make sure that students get that, but you're paying attention to the world and you're paying attention to your students and looking for those points of connection. But I, I've also been spending a lot of time recently thinking about indirection versus direction, like the power of indirection in growth and in education. There's a little example from the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer where the little chess prodigy gets an elite mentor to teach him chess, but the first thing they do is they play the game Clue, and they're like playing baseball in his bedroom and building towers, and they're not doing chess, they're doing other things. And I do think, you know, the pace of that attention to the world is worth considering, and then allowing for some of the preparation for students going out in the world to be indirect. And I— the book that I spent the most time with through the pandemic the last 2 years, I reread Walden. I read it a couple of times, and I started a lot of things around Thoreau and around that book, but it made me think like where are the versions of kind of indirect instruction and inspiration that you can learn about the world at the— on the side of a pond, or in a walk, or playing Clue with your chess mentor. So those things are on my mind, Tim, and I appreciate that you recognize that the book is not trying be a handbook of answers for these big questions, but in an attempt to show teaching living inside of them. But the thing on my mind recently is living inside of them and thinking indirectly as well as directly and head-on.

That's really fascinating because as you say, there are other ways to learn about something than actually directly looking at that thing. Yeah. Right?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, just take the example of peace and conflict, you know, you can learn in terms of understanding interrelationships and what you value, what you find important, what you find so important that you're willing to argue about it or discuss vehemently with somebody else about who may disagree. You know, there's so much in there that you can learn in all sorts of different ways. You don't necessarily have to look directly at, for example, a case study of a conflict or whatever. Clearly there's a role for that explicit learning, but I, yeah, that's an interesting thought. Some kind of a sideways glance at the thing that you're trying to learn.

Yeah. I'll quote a line that I got from Diogenes to bring that full circle, because one day Diogenes walked into class. We were reading David Hume. We spent a lot of time learning Hume's arguments about religion, but he walked into class one day. He said, I'm going to read you something. This doesn't have anything to do with what we're doing, which was typical Diogenes too. And he opened a book and he read Wittgenstein, a little book called Culture and Value, and he just read that. And he said, that didn't have anything to do with anything else, but you need pay attention to that. And so I went and got that book. I mean, so this is like the teacher who's instigating you. I'm like, okay, I need to— now I need to read that book too. But there's a line in that book that I use all the time, and I give that book away too. I owe Diogenes for that. But Wittgenstein says, if the rock you're trying to move won't budge, try moving some of the smaller rocks around it instead. And that seems to me a really wise line about lots of things, but including school. Like, if I think about a student, I'm like, well, this isn't working. Like, And so I can keep pushing, but what's the thing around that stuckness that I might be able to pull and move? And so that mindset captures that indirectness to me. Like sometimes the direct is effective and compelling, but when it's not, like get creative, like get indirect and think about the other, the little rocks around it.

Yeah, that's interesting because I think that that also connects with me, the idea of flow. And you know, because You can try and carry the water uphill, but actually it wants to flow downhill, right? You know, but you can spend a lot of energy trying to cart it uphill in buckets, but actually it just wants to flow downhill. So sometimes as a teacher, you have to, you understand where things are flowing and you don't need to push actually. And that's the art of that kind of adaptive approach in a classroom as you've got 25, 30 children there, all with different needs, different characters, et cetera. Yeah.

Super nice. Yeah. Love that.

One of the things I'm also interested in about that concept is how much opportunity we give young people to inhabit that state themselves of flow. Not that's moving slightly conceptually differently. I suppose it's not about flowing, but it's about them finding that optimized kind of channel of flow where they just feel like it's a Montessori idea where they just lose themself in an activity. And we just, in a way, it's it also connects with that indirectness. We don't allow students, children, that time to do that, or those spaces in which to do that, because we've planned out their day in such regimented boxes.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and then William James says— so he's all about that too. Like, you've got to capture interest and attention and nourish that. And then he says, when you do that, then you complicate it, which is also nice. Complicate the interest.

Yeah, well, that's Miss Acoff, right? She's— then she sees you and then she says, right, now I'm going to complicate that further. But that complication is going to have real salience for you. It's going to really engage you because you— it connects with that point that you're at.

Yeah, fascinating.

So if we kind of bring it back around to the beginning and your, you know, your daughters Katie, Emily, and as you say, one of them's teaching already, right? And the other one's still training. Clearly, as I said at the beginning, there is a real issue with the view of teaching in society's eyes, and in the US I've seen some horrible statistics about teachers leaving the profession. So I just wondered what your thoughts were in relation to something more instrumental, I suppose, but you know, what, what might we do? And I hope people really do read your book because it brings the richness of teaching, but on a more pragmatic level, what could we do? What might we do in order to proclaim the exciting aspects of teaching, that we need more vital people in the profession, right?

Yeah, 100%, and I don't have all the big answers. You know, the Department of Education is not knocking on my door, and that's okay.

Well, they should read your book.

They can read my book. I do think— so another book I really love is Martin Bickman wrote a book about 20 years ago called Minding American Education, and it's a little bit of a historical overview of like the tradition of active learning and progressive learning, but he does something, uh, one of his chapters that I think was so energizing and so right, like he quotes long passages from education books and says, you know, the concepts are right, but the writing is so stultifying, and he's calling for books to be written about education and about school that have more kind of literary and artistry in it. So my, my little oar in the water is we just, we need to write about and talk about schools and teaching differently and in ways that is more animated and more reflective of like the life between teachers and students, the experience of school, not the goals. So we need that and we've got a lot of that, but we don't have a lot of books that celebrate the experience of being a teacher. Mark Edmondson's memoir about his teacher, called Teacher is a great example of that, but we need like a forest of those and we don't have them. And so I, my oar in the water is let's talk about the experience of teachers and kids, and let's talk about it in a way that feels big and poetic and feels like literature and life and not just blueprints. John Dewey, you know, through famous essay, The Child and the Curriculum, it talks about the difference between a road trip and a map. And says, yeah, we need maps, and they're actually really useful because they make our journeys efficient, but it's not the same as the road trip, the journey. And so school is like these road trips with kids, but we don't write about it like that. We have a lot of maps. And so the library just needs to be more balanced between the accounts and experiences of the actual journey of being teachers with kids, and it is vivid. And heartbreaking and beautiful and glorious, and we ought to tell the anecdotes, the humanness of it more. So my last plug on that is I think Sam Swope's Academy for Teachers in New York is a really great attempt to elevate and ennoble the teaching profession too. It treats teachers like real professionals and real artists and people with creative, interesting lives and celebrates them in the context of workshops and publications. So I admire and celebrate Sam's work in the Academy for Teachers. But we just need more, more of that celebration of the actual stuff that teachers do.

Yeah, that's great, because I think this whole conversation about engaging with educational research and why teachers perhaps aren't doing that as much is often because it's about— it's a language issue. It's the coldness of the language that they don't want to engage with, right? But then there's also this language of training. So there's kind of this language of explaining, and then there's this language of training, which is about professional development, but that's still quite cold. I mean, what is it, Emerson, cold and hopeless, right? It's all, it's all just, it's a bit pragmatic and a bit technocratic, just a bit dull. But actually we need this third set of stories, which is just about the kind of raw, real human example of the, all the interactions and experiences and emotions involved that aren't the negative ones. Because I think there's quite a lot of stories that are the how to deal with difficult, naughty children and all those kinds of of horrible narratives around the difficult experience of working in a classroom. And of course, the challenges are there, but there are 100,000 times more stories of amazing positive human interactions than there are just the, those kind of particular peak challenging moments.

Yeah, I agree. There's a little teacher anecdote that I like from Jerome Bruner, and he tells the story of a teacher that he had, Miss Orcutt, which sounds remarkably close to Miss Acuff. But he tells a little anecdote about her. The summary is she was a human event, not a transmitter of knowledge. She was a human event. And I love that image. And, and that's what we need is the books about classrooms as places of these human intense, wonderful— I mean, I am just having a chance to talk to you about Miss Acuff. Like, I, I am 40 years removed from that, and I am— I feel it swelling. I mean, when I was talking about her, like that encounter with a teacher 40 years ago was a real event and people have them and those we ought to capture those and celebrate those and tell those.

No, that's brilliant because I think the— it's not just the language that we kind of empty out, it's also the professionals as you said, like I think in the way that we talk about teaching sometimes we not only deprofessionalize teachers, but we also take the humanness out teachers in trying to create this, you know, perfect model of the teacher, the pedagogue, the assessor. Yeah, and it's just this list of attributes that we want them to have, but being human is not one of them, right?

That's right.

I mean, we want teachers to inspire students. If we're not inspiring teachers, the work is so hard, it is not remarkable that people leave the profession in large numbers. It's hard and undervalued. And the other thing about teaching is it takes a long time to become good at it. Like it really does. And so you're in something that takes years to become good at, it's undervalued. And if you're not receiving some sort of inspiration about what you're doing, like why— that's not surprising that people leave, but that's something we can do.

Yeah. And I mean, obviously there's structural barriers and structural conditions that would also need to improve, I would say, just to add that in. It's not just about humans being more human and developing this inspiration. There's other things going on, obviously, but no, I think your book is a real contribution to that. And I thank you for writing it. And it's just a real pleasure to be able to read it and then to be able to talk to you about it. It's brilliant.

Thank you so much, Tim. It's been a pleasure.

Amazing.

All right.

Thank you, man. Thanks, Tim. All the best.

Cheers. Bye. Bye-bye.

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