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Harry and Mary were still working at the Supreme Court Justice’s apartment when I arrived. Harry asked to see my calling card.
“My what?”
“Why, your calling card, of course. And if it doesn’t look just right, you’ve got to have a new one printed.”
I laughed and said, “I don’t have any calling card. I never did have one. Where I used to live we just didn’t seem to need calling cards, and when I got to Harvard I never bothered to have one made up..”
“Lord Almighty!” gasped Harry. How do you think you’re going to get along in Washington without a calling card? Where do you come from, boy?”
The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox
When a young man named John Knox traveled to Washington and went to the chambers of Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds, he might as well have been invisible. He didn’t bring a calling card.
In those bygone days, newcomers carried cards to introduce themselves. A calling card symbolized professionalism and stature. Without a card–preferably, an engraved card–the job seeker was considered gauche and inadequate.
These days, we use cover letters in place of calling cards. Cover letters introduce the job-seeker to the employer, with the hope of beginning a conversation about employment.
Most cover letters are bad. Bland and unfocused, they say too much that employers don’t care about–and too little that employers actually want to see.
A great cover letter offers direct, tangible proof that the job seeker can help the employer do something important, with a minimum of fuss and the potential for something great.
Almost always, the cover letter provides the first encounter between employer and job seeker. In lieu of a real, face-to-face introduction, the cover letter gives you the chance to say who you are and why you can help.
Unfortunately, most cover letters disqualify the job seeker. Bad cover letters show that the candidate lacks the professionalism, rapport, relatability, or skills to do the job. And so they go straight to the reject pile.
If the candidate is qualified, a good cover letter will prompt the hirer to look more closely at the resume–and to invite the candidate in for an interview.
The best cover letter reveals something–not everything, but something–about your essence as a person and as a professional.
The cover letter offers an opportunity to step outside the details of your career and education and accomplishments and speak–intimately, one on one–to the potential employer. You can begin to forge a human relationship with the hirer, to indicate the specific ways in which you might her life better.
What do I mean by “essence”?
The essence of something is its most distinctive qualities. After you have cleared away all the details, the timelines and projects, and all the distractions, the essence is what remains. When you see someone’s essence, you say: Ah yes, I get this person. I understand this person’s critical values and attributes.
You can find a person’s essence in a story, an experience, a project, or a relationship.
If you’re seeking a job, you want to show your essence in a way that makes the recipient visualize you on their team.
Hate to tell you, but you have lots of work to do before you even think about what you should write.
Before you present yourself, you need to educate yourself about the jobs in your field and how they align with your own background. And you need to find language that shows the obvious connections between your profile and their job.
Take a piece of paper and create three columns–one for skills, a second for accomplishments, and a third for values.
If you have a good resume, this should be easy. But don’t get lazy and reply on the resume. Create a completely new document using these categories.
Write down everything you can say about yourself for each category. Get everything down. Even if you’re iffy on a skill or accomplishment, write it down. You can cut it later.
Then translate these listings into something specific, something tangible and visual.
We have a tendency–especially in academe and the professions–to use abstractions. That’s fine; buzzwords offer a great shorthand for interacting with colleagues. But when you reach out to a potential employer, you want to help them to see you.
Let me repeat that for emphasis: When you reach out to a potential employer, you want to help them to see you. Our brains come alive when we can visualize something. If I say “social justice,” it doesn’t mean much; but if I say “run community meetings” and “conduct surveys to gather community input” or “serve on a grassroots committee on water runoff,” the reader can picture me doing these activities.
So rephrase every abstraction on your three lists. Show what that abstraction means with phrases that show you doing something. Don’t say “data specialist”; say, “At Place X, at Time X, I used Tool X or Process X to examine Trend X or Problem X.” All those X’s refer to specific things. They are visual. They allow the reader to see you in action.
Don’t just randomly search for jobs and then respond. Instead, do a complete search of all the possible jobs that you would like to win.
Start by going to the online sites. If you have a good presence on LinkedIn, try thyat. Also go to Indeed.com and Grassdoor.com.
Enter all the words that describe your skills and interests.If you’re a city planner, type words like planning, planner, geography, GIS, environment, housing, city, urban, parks, streetscape, urban village, transportation, transit, TOD, streetscape, neighborhood, and grassroots, to name a few.
Use only the terms that speak to your skills, experience, and values. You don’t want to apply for a job that would make you miserable. Don’t search “grassroots planner” if you hate community meetings; don’t search “GIS” or “quantitative” if you hate spending hours crunching data at your desk.
Save the job listings that might be interesting. The best approach, in my experience, is to bookmark the posts in a special folder called “Job Search.” (If you don’t know how, click here.)
When you have identified jobs that sound intriguing, look for the keywords in the ads. Write them down.
Now finding the right jobs is a simple matter of comparing your attributes with the job postings’ key words. Decide which jobs you might want to get. Take a job’s key words and figure out how you might want to pitch yourself.
Here’s where it gets tricky. If you’re applying for a professional job–even an entry-level job, after college or grad school–you probably have lots of interests and abilities. That’s great. But when you seek a job, you cannot list all those attributes in a cover letter. A cover letter has to be short.
Your cover letter should give the recipient a clear vision of the superpower you bring to the job. A Russian parable goes: “When you try to catch two rabbits, you don’t catch either.” If you use a cover letter to list all your attributes, you will fail to convey your essence–what makes you distinctive and special.
So identify the ONE Thing that you want the reader to see when considering your application. (For more on “The One Thing,” see this recent post.)
When you apply for a job, you almost always provide both a cover letter and resume. The cover letter offers a way to make a quick hello–and to distinguish yourself from the hundreds or even thousands of other candidates.
Many candidates are tempted to offer a complete summary of their careers. They list jobs, responsibilities, projects, and results. They often quote people praising them. Often–way too often–they use bullet lists to show the range of experiences and skills.
Some people use the cover letter to review the resume. That’s a mistake–usually a fatal mistake. Hirers can read your resume. If you have created a good, well-formatted resume, they can get a sense of your career, skills, and aspirations in a matter of seconds.
Don’t do that. That’s what a resume is for.
The best advice you’ll ever get about writing comes from Polonius, a character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Polonius, the father of Laertes and Ophelia, says: “Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.”
Good idea. Keep it simple. Keep it short. But how?
David Silverman of the Harvard Business Review says the best cover letter he ever got went like this:
Dear David:
I am writing in response to the opening for xxxx, which I believe may report to youI can offer you seven years of experience managing communications for top-tier xxxx firms, excellent project-management skills, and a great eye for detail, all of which should make me an ideal candidate for this opening.
I have attached my résumé for your review and would welcome the chance to speak with you sometime.
Best regards,
Xxxx Xxxx
That’s fine for a position that requires a simple list of attributes. It’s like advertising something by offering a simple recitation of attributes and benefits. That’s fine for many products–basic food and clothing, taxi fares, movies in a theater, meals in a diner, and so on. When you’re selling commodities–that is, goods and services that lots of people offer–this approach works just fine.
But maybe–just maybe–you are a unique person with just the right experience, skill set, and personality for the job. If that’s the case, you probably want to reveal more about who you are.
These days, most hirers want to understand your character. They want a sense of what you would be like working in their organization. The absolute requirement is that you can do the job–that you have the necessary skills and experience.
But they also want to know: Will you be bright and creative? Will you be an engaging and challenging colleague? Will you be creative? Will you identify solutions that others miss? Will you lead and follow well, depending on the circumstances?
They want to see you. They want to visualize what you will be like in the office, in meetings, working in teams, representing the organization outside the office. They want a sense of how you handle problems. Therefore, let me suggest another brief but more intimate strategy for writing a cover letter.
You can write a cover letter that fits on one page and grabs the hirer. It’s a simple formula. Let’s get right to it.
If you are writing to a specific person, say “Dear Mr. Gates” or “Dear Ms. Jones,” or “Dear Dr. Zhivago.” Don’t use first names. Show that you respect them, first and foremost, as professionals.
If you don’t have a specific name, use a general title, like this: “Hiring Manager.” Since this is a business letter, use a colon rather than a comma.
Whatever you do, don’t say “Hi” or “Hey.”
Referencing the resume, indicate how you could help the employer. Focus on the hirer’s needs and how you will fulfill those needs. Indicate something about your spirit as well.
Do one–just one–of the following:
• Reveal one aspect of your biography: Say something about your background–something unique about your story that might matter to the hirer. You can do this in a phrase.
“Growing up in Silicon Valley, building computers and participating in coding competitions, I knew I wanted a career in tech. At the same time, I have been passionate about the environment–and became a computer science/environmental studies double major at Euphoria State. So when I saw your position for a GIS expert or a major parks project, I knew I found my ideal job.”
• Reveal one aspect of your values or approach: Hint at how your values and commitments have driven you to achieve, like this:
“To manage teams, I take a three-part approach: (1) Engage the professional on my staff. (2) Set big goals with intermediate goals that advance our cause every day (3) Provide regular feedback. This approach fits the job for project manager at Acme Consulting.”
• Reveal one aspect of your results: Show how you have achieved something great, somewhere. Hint at how you can produce this kind of accomplishment to your new job.
“Since taking over as interim marketing director, Acme Widgets Inc. has increased its B2B sales by 35 percent and its B2C sales by 20 percent. Now I would like to bring my skills and experiences in web marketing to your firm’s growing marketing department.”
You might want to start the letter with your results and accomplishments. HR and other hiring agents often get hundreds of letters. Make sure they do not miss the value you would add to their team.
The goal here is to offer an enticing glimpse of your value as a team member. Don’t go into detail in the intro. Just signal that you have something real–something tangible and concrete–to offer.
Avoid all abstraction. If you cannot see it, don’t write it. Don’t say you’re a problem solver; indicate a knotty problem you solved. Don’t claim to be a great bargainer; describe a bargain you struck. Don’t say you care about equity or grassroots participation; show yourself doing something to get people involved to get a fair shake.
Be specific. Provide a vivid image. Make it physical. Put yourself and your potential colleagues in the same picture. Like this:
“At Acme Widgets, we convened the Monday Club at 10 a.m. It was an all-hands-on-deck opportunity to share our work and plans for the week. It was a way to prime ourselves to connect last week’s work with this week’s vision.. Looking back, we realize that most of our breakthroughs came on Tuesday and Wednesday–and we spent Thursday and Friday honing them and thinking about next steps.”
I would want to have that player on my team. How about you?
Now you can go into some depth on results you have achieved. Here’s where you can get narrative.
Set the stage by stating a specific time and place. Describe the problem. Then show how you made things better. Describe the specific actions you took. Describe a barrier (a deadline, resistance, a lack of resources, whatever). Then show how it all turned out.
Try something like this:
“In the summer of 2017, I coordinated a community planning process at Bronx River Park that led to the adoption of a new master plan. Working with 12 community groups, I planned cleanups, evening concerts, and fundraisers. In three months, we got on the Bronx borough president’s agenda and got media attention to the area.”
Once you have given your narrative–again, with as many visuals as possible–you can connect this experience with the job you seek:
“I hope to bring this hands-on organizing work to your agency’s environmental advocacy work.”
That’s all. paint a picture, then make the picture relevant.
This is optional. If you have shown how you achieve results, you will get the hirer’s attention. But you may want to go deeper.
If so, isolate one quality that will bring great value to the company. Provide more fine-grained detail to show yourself at work, providing value for the organization. Something like this:
“This kind of grassroots work, I think, has the potential to give greater credibility to the organizations work. When people feel part of a process, they are willing to speak up at community meetings and in local media. They also get friends and neighbors involved. It’s a win-win. We get their energy and support; they get connections to friends and neighbors.”
Show how that work led to a great result for the company. maybe close with a quick statement of value.
Restate your interest, this time with something specific about how you see yourself contributing to the company. Convey your enthusiasm. Make them what to get to know you. Be friends, without being presumptuous. Like this:
“Again, I am eager to explore ways I can help your organization. I hope we have a chance to talk soon. Thanks for your consideration.”
That’s all it takes. No groveling or posturing. Just a simple statement of respect and interest.
Be warm but professional. “Best regards” and “Sincerely” work. Avoid the overly stiff (“Sincerely”–too boilerplate) or overly familiar (“All my best”–ugh; they don’t even know you). Keep it simple. Then type and sign your name.
The template above might seem overwhelming. You want to keep your letter as short as possible. So do this: Do everything above and the edit, edit, edit. Look for ways to sharpen your main point. But don’t go short just for the sake of going short. If everything you say has value, keep it. Cut the fluff but keep the revealing information.
Consider hiring an experienced writer and editor to go over drafts. Overall, you can probably hire someone for an hour to work through all phases of writing your letter.
In an informal way, show that you know and appreciate the employer’s work. Say something specific about their organization, its reputation, its uniqueness, etc. Speak as a colleague. Like this:
“Having followed the park planning process in Queens in recent years, I know you have been a key player in raising funds and getting local experts (like architects, environmentalists, and educators) involved in the community. Your volunteer work after Superstorm Sandy was especially impressive. So I would be honored to join your team.”
Show you are one of them, with your values and insight.
Keep your sentences short and direct. Use active verbs. Avoid tangents.
Good writing often requires longer sentences. I call them “hinge sentences,” because they connect and relate different ideas with hinge words (like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so). You can use one or two of these longer sentences–if they absolutely do a better job at explaining and visualizing ideas better than short sentences. But as a rule, keep it short.
Some applicants get hesitant because they don’t think they have enough experience. They will make try to explain why their inexperience might be overlooked. They’ll say something like: “While I have only been working on GIS for a year, I have developed a strong working knowledge…”
Don’t do that. Don’t emphasize your limitations. Instead, emphasize the abilities that you do offer. Say something like this: “In my GIS work, I have analyzed the causes behind gentrification in big cities, identified possible sites for new housing construction, and analyzed the changing ecologies of coastal areas since 1980.”
The reader of that passage now has a way of imagining how you’ll fit in. If you can do these tasks, you can also do other tasks.
We live in the age of informality. Students wear PJs to class. Adults wear baseball hats to the office. People style their hair like anime characters and decorate their flesh with tattoos. Professionals open letters with “Hey.”
I’m not going to pass judgment on this informality. But hirers will.
A hirer generally wants to see you at your best. They want to know that having you on staff will not require getting a babysitter. They want to know you’ll get dressed like a professional, show up on time, work hard on company time, avoid childish distractions, listen intently in conversations, and think before you speak.
The cover letter offers a hint–a minor hint, but the only evidence at first–about your overall seriousness and maturity.
So speak clearly and simply. Be direct. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t use “bro” lingo. Whatever you do, don’t be a smart ass. Don’t crack jokes, as if you’re old fraternity brothers at a reunion. Don’t gossip or make cracks about people. Don’t be self-deprecating.
Be a pro. Speak with simple assurance and professionalism.
Don’t cut and paste your prose from an application for another job. Write each cover letter fresh. If you want someone to pay you the big bucks–and give you a desk and a computer–give them the courtesy of your complete attention when writing your cover letter.
One hiring manager complained: “Nothing gets a cover letter tossed in my trash faster than seeing another publication’s name in the ‘to’ field.” Oops.
Don’t make grammatical mistakes or misspell words. Nothing says sloppiness more than avoidable mistakes. Fairly or not, the hirer will assume you’re as careless in your job as you are with your cover letter. Even if you’re seeking a job as a firefighter or engineer or cook, the hirer gets a bad vibe with dumb writing mistakes. It’s even worse if you’re seeking a desk job that requires attention to detail–as a graphic designer, say, or a coder.
Again, consider hiring an experienced writer and editor for an hour to do this for you. Get them to read the first draft. After you make revisions, get them to read the final draft.
Writing is writing. The kinds of skills you need to master writing in journalism, fiction, or academia are the same skills you need in business.
Except . . .
Business professionals face unique challenges as writers. They usually write to produce results, not just to inform audiences or express ideas. They often use specialized language, with technical meaning, but must also connect with general audiences. Finally, professionals also operate in a pressurized environment where the priority is to produce on other, non-writing tasks.
Therefore, any good program for business writing must do two things: (1) Master the core skills and techniques of writing, which apply in all fields. (2) Adapt those skills to the unique context of professional life.
That is exactly what this seminar does. With clear, step by step guides and examples relevant to your everyday life, we explore the dimensions of writing in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.
We pay special attention to the specific kinds of documents you need to produce. Before meeting, we get an inventory of the major documents in your organization and identify its special form and style. We also provide specific techniques to apply what we learn to your work—right away, as soon as you return to your desk.
The result is a program that will improve your efficiency and creativity not just as a writer, but in all you do.
This seminar will:
Most companies—especially in technical, specialized fields or with large corporate structures—focus on their “verticals.” But whatever your mastery of the verticals, you also need to connect across the silos. McKinsey Consulting uses the T-shaped organizational structure to describe how. The horizontal bar of the T represents the connections between the divisions. When a business can provide the depth of expertise of the I’s—and then connect those I’ s with good, smart communication—the company has a chance to do extraordinary things.
The Golden Rule of Writing provides a simple and intuitive hack for all levels of writing: the sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. Using the Golden Rule—with the help of the Landscape View—provides a process for you to gain control of your writing and to “burn” good writing habits into your brain.
The sentence is the single most important unit of writing. If we can write great sentences, every time, we have a chance to write great paragraphs and whole pieces. The sentence begins with a simple core. But to gain real power, you need to master the “hinge sentence.” Also: In professional settings, writers need to be on the lookout for wordiness and jargon.
The paragraph is the most neglected element of writing—and it shows. Too many paragraphs ramble without purpose or focus. In this unit, we will use the concept of the “idea bucket” to stay focused. Using the Tabloid Headline and Landscape View, we’ll gain mastery of the second most important unit of writing.
Writing a great piece requires finding the right shape. The eternal structure of all communications is the story. But how does that work? And what are the variations on this theme? What are the different “shapes” of pieces? How can we adapt this core structure to different kinds of writing? Can we use simple blueprints to structure our work?
“Write with your heart,” Hemingway once said, “but edit with your head.” Most writers struggle with editing because they try to do too much at the same time. In this unit, we explore how to break editing into stages to focus on one challenge at a time. With techniques like the Landscape View, Tabloid Headlines, and Clutter Cutter, we can create the focus we need to do it well.
Style is the unique expression of an idea, often with surprising and delightful flourishes. But in all fields—art, music, architecture, and even science and business—style requires mastery of the basics. Using a process we call “stacking” —and building on the skills from our unit on sentences—we will explore how to transform the simplest elements of writing into your own distinctive style or brand.
Learning is never enough. What really matters is how you apply what you learn. This seminar is designed to give you a clear plan of attack—whatever you want to do as an organization or department.
Seminars for Storytelling in Business provide the core skills for connecting with people inside and outside the organization.
Research shows that people evolved as a narrative species. We pay the most attention–and learn and engage more powerfully–when we hear and tell stories.
Amazingly, you can “storify” writing in all fields (business, government, nonprofits, education), in all documents (emails, web copy, reports, proposals, and more), and at all levels (sentences, paragraphs, sections, whole pieces).
This seminar will:
A great story can engage employees, build loyalty among customers, and strengthen the culture of an organization. No matter the goal, strong leaders know how to harness the power of stories to their advantage.
This course explores the value of stories, reasons to use them, methods for collecting tales, narrative patterns, character construction, and delivery skills. During this session, participants will also learn how to plan a story inventory and begin building a library of narratives.
The group will also learn the art of story spawning and the importance of story hearkening. By the conclusion of the workshop, those who attend should understand how to leverage their stories and others’ stories for a variety of purposes.
It’s a truism that humans evolved as a storytelling species—that a great narrative can engage audiences emotionally. But it’s deeper than that. The narrative is the most basic form of thinking. Every day, we have 50,000 or more thoughts—and they take the form of mini-narratives. If we understand a basic 1-2-3 structure, we can master the art of great sentences, paragraphs, sections, and whole pieces.
Group activity: Explore the three-part structure of all perception and thinking, writing and storytelling. In a “one-minute presentation,” you will learn to tell your three-part story on the spot.
Stories are not just “one damn thing after another,” as an eminent historian once commented. It’s not enough to record a series of actions or events. Stories are sequences with change and meaning.
Group activity: Compare a set of passages—some simple and bland accounts of events, others full-fledged stories—and identify and dissect the specific maneuvers that make stories stories.
Stories are usually about lots of people and events. But they need to converge on a single idea, or else you will alienate the audience. Hollywood uses the “logline”—a short and simple statement about a story’s setup and delivery—to capture the essence of a movie. Sometimes we can’t know the “One Idea” of a story till after we have written it and struggled to find its meaning.
Group activity: Explore a process for moving from a jumble of ideas to a coherent, clear, compelling idea that will drive the story from the first word to the last.
All good storytelling begins with character. A good character evokes the empathy and concern of the reader, making the reader a hidden part of the story. Rendered well, characters not only lead a story but also dramatize and explain key ideas.
Group activity: Develop a compelling character out of thin air. Moving around the room, we will create a “dossier” for a character. By creating a character, we will take a major step toward building a whole story.
Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle identified the key elements of a story. In our time, neuroscientists and business mavens show how these elements affect the reader as she goes about her day—working, learning, caring for family, shopping, playing, and more.
Group activity: Dissect a mini-narrative from film. We will block out the beginning, middle, and end. Building on the basic story structure, we will boost the story’s power with specific moments that define characters and struggles and move the story forward to its inevitable conclusion. We will use blueprints for specific business pieces that use these story moments.
Big Data on stories—concerning takes from Sophocles to Succession—show that stories succeed best when they use about a dozen key “moments.” These moments can be found in the best ads, blogs, sales copy, pitches, and more. The challenge is not just to use these moments, but blend them seamlessly into the piece.
Group activity: Consider a series of ”fact sheets” on issues of importance to the organization. From these, we will create powerful and dynamic stories that reveal the essence of the issues at hand.
The world, as William James once commented, often seems like “a blooming and buzzing confusion.” As noted at the beginning of this seminar, the brain automatically organizes this confusion into a coherent narrative. To succeed, we need to take control of the narratives of our work and lives.
Group activity: Work with a series of “fact sheets” on issues of importance to the organization. From these, we will create powerful and dynamic stories that reveal the essence of the issues at hand.
By the end of this course, those who attend should have a solid grasp of the power of storytelling in business and how as leaders they can develop and deliver narratives to achieve wide-ranging goals.
In this seminar, you will learn a full suite of skills and techniques to “storify” all of your writing in your organizations—from emails and web copy to reports and proposals and RFPs … even speeches and presentations.
If you want a fun ride through the bizarro world of Florida, the modern spirit of destruction, and how ordinary people get pulled into wild tales of adventure, you can’t do better than Carl Hiaasen.
Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald and a bestselling author. Everything he writes offers a clinic on how to draw the reader into a story. Take a look at the opening paragraphs of Skinny Dip:
At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic.
I married an asshole, she thought, knife headfirst into the waves.
The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch, and sandals. But Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten.
Bobbing in its fizzy wake, Joey watched the gaily lit Sun Duchess continue steaming away at twenty nautical miles per hour. Evidently only one of the other 2,049 passengers was aware of what had happened, and he wasn’t telling anybody.
Bastard, Joey thought.
She noticed that her bra was down around her waist, and she wiggled free of it. To the west, under a canopy of soft amber light, the coast of Florida was visible. Joey began to swim.
What does Hiaasen do in this 169-word passage? Hiaasen follows eight simple rules of attraction, providing:
We could do worse than to follow these eight basic rules for drawing the reader into the story.
You are a writer–here and now. How do you figure out what to say about the overwhelming complexity of the day’s issues?
The human tendency, especially in public affairs, is to train the eyes forward. Look to the future. If X, Y, or Z is a problem now, think about how to address it in the future. Figure out what could happen, then devise solutions.
Speaking of the #MeToo movement, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times, note this prospective/predictive mindset. “All of us have long been told that the key to gender equality is looking to the future,” Kantor and Twokey, who published the breakout pieces in The Times a year ago. “Study and work hard. Lean in. Build the pipeline. Look to our daughters.”
But there’s a problem. To focus relentlessly on the future is to operate with blindfolds. “To move forward, we have to excavate the past,” Kantor and Twohey write.
Most people, especially people in politics, are obsessed with the question: What next? To focus on excavating the past sometimes seems like an indulgence. Shouldn’t we move on?
Most of us know people who are stuck in the past. They relive childhood dramas, family dysfunction or school or work disappointments. They cycle the old stories, over and over. In this cycling, they spin their wheels. They don’t move forward. And life demands moving forward, doesn’t it? Life doesn’t wait for you to resolve your “issues.”
But if the #MeToo has taught anything, it’s that the past doesn’t go away. Even when people try to “move on,” repressing the bad stuff in order to build something new, the past remains alive in our subconscious, in our worldviews, in the rules we accept, in our patterns and habits and routines. When we move on without reckoning the past, we get stuck in what Vishen Lakhiani calls the “culturescape.”
The past repeats itself, or at least rhymes, until it is brought into the open and addressed.
The #MeToo movement shows the power of excavation. Thanks to #MeToo, people are questioning their basic understandings about how we–men and women, boys and girls–get along. Long-suppressed memories and ideas are coming to the surface. Not only do women reassemble their pasts, but men do too. A retired Pittsburgh newspaper reporter, for example, remembers witnessing a rape as a teenager and now takes responsibility, for the first time.
#MeToo could trap us in the past, as a nation of victims and survivors. But that danger doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look back. Rather, it means that we need to look backward in order to understand the present and the options for the future.
I like the word excavate. It suggests a purposeful digging, to discover something you don’t know so you can understand the world better now. When anthropologists do a dig, when they excavate a site, they don’t get “stuck” in the past. They bring that past into our growing understanding of human culture. Excavating issues like sexual abuse, then, doesn’t mean getting stuck in the past. It means making sense of the past, so you can live in the present and create a future.
We often say that the writer’s greatest job is to bear witness–to notice what’s going on, record it, and share it. That’s true. But we cannot bear witness, much less look ahead intelligently, until we understand the past.
Before developing The Elements of Writing, I used to talk about the ABCs of Writing.
I thought the ABCs offered a good device for people to remember all the essential skills of writing. So for each letter of the alphabet, I created a cluster of skills around a major theme. A stood for Action, B for beats, C for characters, D for details, and so on . . . all the way to X for eXplaining (lame, I know), Y for yo-yoing, and Z for “zip it up.”
As I was developing the ABCs, I realized that some kind of moral lurked behind each of the skills. Maybe understanding these values — which go beyond the writing process — would help people understand and remember the writing skills. So I gathered this list:
Action—Move! Do something! Seize the moment!
Beats—Understand how both sides of everything work, together, to produce each other and something new.
Characters—Know how people matter.
Details—Specifics matter more than abstractions.
Editing—Get rid of noise and clutter. Help people navigate through complexity without undue difficulty. Don’t make readers look for the pony, unless the shit’s part of the benefit of reading.
Form—Get everything in the right shape
Grammar—Show respect.
Hanging (cliffhangers)—Keep people involved. Make them crazy with anticipation.
Into the World of the Story—Respect people’s places. Understand Churchill’s dictum that first people make places, then places make people.
Jazz Riffing—Play, but follow rules when taking part in even the wildest activities.
Kinesthetic, Visual, and Auditory Senses—Engage people’s whole bodies.
Leads—Invite someone in.
Metaphors and Similes—Show people new things with reference to familiar things.
Narrative—Bring people along for a journey.
Order and Numbers—Put first things first.
Paragraphs—Do everything with singular purpose.
Questions—Understand that questions often matter more than answers.
Research and Reporting—Go wherever you can find information.
Sentences—respect your reader enough to tell what you want her to know, directly: Who does what to whom?
Thesis—Explain what you want to explain.
Unexpected—Tell me something I don’t know.
Verbs—Be active.
Words—Be as simple as possible, but no simpler. (Thanks to A. Einstein for that one.)
eXplaining—Break things down into manageable pieces, and present them in the right sequence.
Yo-Yo—Shift back and forth from scene to summary, from sensory details to abstract ideas.
Zip It Up—Don’t tarry too long. When the journey is over, say so long.
Someone asked me to explain why learning how to write–the process and discipline–matters for people who have no intention to write.
Some thoughts:
Writing is a process of discovery and questioning, breakdown and assembly, imagination and logic.
When you can write, you have the template for exploring just about any question imaginable.
What happens when we set out to write? First, we take inventory, sort possibilities, test those possibilities, and make (tentative) conclusions about our subject. Then we imagine ourselves in another’s shoes: What do they know already? What don’t they know? Then we figure out how we might understand something, if we knew only what our reader understood. Finally, we try to gather and arrange the ideas we explored in our inventory, to suit our reader.
But that’s just the beginning. When we write, we need to see how well our words do their job. Sometimes we score and sometimes we don’t. So we fix what’s broken and work to improve what’s already good. We listen–intently–not just to our own curious mind but to others’ minds as well.
Funny, this is also what we do when we conduct scientific experiments, create a business plan, teach a class, build a cabinet, or whip up a meal.
But writing has another quality that makes it even more transformative.
When you write, you find that sweet spot between your own needs and those of others. To write is to share, but to share requires awareness; that awareness requires focused attention. When we write, then, we need to get “within ourselves” first. And as we focus, our minds travel to places we never could imagine in the beginning. And as we travel, we bring others along for the ride.
By Charles Euchner
The Boston Globe, May 13, 2015
When I heard that Mayor Martin J. Walsh had announced the city’s first comprehensive plan process since 1965, I was surprised. After all, 18 years ago I was hired to coordinate the city’s first citywide planning process since 1965.
I don’t blame Walsh for slighting Boston 400, the process Mayor Thomas Menino launched in 1997. The initiative’s 250-page report never got released.
Despite his interest in downtown development and neighborhood projects like Main Streets, Menino was not a planner at heart. The Boston Redevelopment Authority’s planning director, Linda Haar, suggested the comprehensive plan as a way to demonstrate Menino’s “vision” for the city as he prepared to run for reelection. He took a flier on the idea. If it caught fire, he would embrace and promote it. If not, it would die a quiet death.
I worked full time, with one other planner, for two and a half years. We made community input the center of the process. We held more than 100 neighborhood meetings, in addition to seeking input from professionals on urban design, open space, transportation, and economic development. We also worked with planners at the BRA and at other city agencies.
Over time we compiled a detailed portrait of the city, with a modest set of proposals for improving neighborhood business districts, connecting green spaces, and promoting affordable housing. Our centerpiece proposal — to promote “transit-oriented development” — moved forward. So did a few other ideas.
But the mayor never showed much interest in Boston 400. He focused instead on separate projects for the South Boston Waterfront, Roxbury and East Boston, Harborwalk, and Downtown Crossing. One of his top aides pulled me aside one day to explain why.
The mayor will embrace the effort, he said, when community activists pepper him with praise for Boston 400. “Until then,” he said, “you’re on your own.”
That was, of course, a Catch-22. Neighborhood residents were skeptical until they knew Menino was committed. Well over a thousand residents showed up at meetings to share their ideas to improve their neighborhoods. But they doubted that the BRA would ever do anything with the plan. They were right.
When Menino ran unopposed in 1997, the whole vision thing became unnecessary. Menino’s strategy as a politician was simple. First, he stayed visible in the neighborhoods, where people loved his “urban mechanic” persona. Second, he brokered big deals in development all over the city. For Menino, every parcel and project presented an opportunity for a transaction. To his credit, he appointed strong managers to run the schools, police, and parks departments. Along the way he raised campaign donations that scared away any plausible candidates for his job.
A successful citywide plan has three basic prerequisites:
Strong support from the mayor. The boss needs to make the plan central to all its planning processes. Everyone in City Hall needs to cooperate or else risk the mayor’s ire.
Clear definition of the plan. What is the desired result? Is it a set of principles? Passage of clear, binding rules for planning and development? The launch of major projects on the scale of the Big Dig or the “high spine” of skyscrapers from the waterfront to the Back Bay?
A rigorous process. Above all else, planning requires broad engagement and clear deadlines. What isn’t urgent doesn’t get done. Planning also requires extensive input from activists, ordinary residents, and professionals. Today that means not only meetings and committees, but also social media to keep conversations alive.
Lacking these essentials, Boston 400 became a BRA orphan. Toward the end, we drafted a report that offered a detailed portrait of the city’s planning issues with principles to guide planning. The BRA director and his chief of staff, Tom O’Brien and Matt O’Neil, gave us the go-ahead to publish our report. Then the mayor fired them.
We tried. I hope Walsh and his team fare better.
Charles Euchner is a case writer and editor at the Yale School of Management.
El•e•ment \’e-lə-mənt\ n [ME, fr. AF & L; AF, fr. L elementum] (13c)
1. one of the parts of something that makes it work, or a quality that makes someone or something effective: the heating element of a toaster.
Ex.: Having a second income is an important element for most homebuyers.They had all the elements of a great team.
2. in chemistry and physics, a substance that cannot be reduced to smaller chemical parts and that has an atom different from that of any other substance.
The beauty of any great thing—in nature, in people, in the arts and crafts, in science—lies in how simple elements can be combined in different ways to create something original.
In nature, scientists have identified 118 chemical elements that serve as the basic units of our world. An element is a pure substance consisting of one type of atom. It cannot be broken down into a smaller part or transformed into another element. It’s basic, fundamental, core. ,Elements—which fall into the three categories of metals, metalloids, and nonmetals—are combined with each other to create compounds. Water is a compound, made up of two molecules hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen. Chemical elements and compounds combine in countless ways to create everything we experience in the world, from the vitamin C in our oranges to the metal in our cars.
We can find basic elements—core building blocks—in all our endeavors. An artist’s composition includes a number of elements, from the form of a composition of an image to the colors used to represent that image. A photograph’s elements include light, shutter speed, and distance. An engine’s elements include cylinders, pistons, valves, rods, crankshafts, and rings. An economy’s elements include producers, commodities, sellers, buyers, money, and prices.
You get the idea. We can reduce everything in life to its basic elements. When we understand the elements, we can deploy them to create something bigger and more complex.
Welcome to The Elements of Writing.
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I remember a moment in college when our professor explained how bureaucrats gain control over dissidents in the organization.
“It’s what Harold Lasswell referred to as ‘selective partial incorporation,'” he said.
That moment came back to me while reading Rachel Toor’s terrific philippic against bad academic writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In class, I could hear the scribble-scribble-scribble around the table. I was always one of the biggest scribblers. You could use my notes to reconstruct any class. But I stopped short here.
Selective partial incorporation? What the . . .
1. Selective: You pick one or more people in the organization to buy off. You;re going to bribe them — or, to use the language of the collective action literature, offer them “selective inducements.”
2. Partial: You don’t engage your targets in all of the important affairs of the organization, just enough to get their cooperation.
3. Incorporation: You bring them inside your tent.
“Oh,” I said in my loud way, “you mean buying ’em off!”
After a brief moment of silence, with 12 sets of eyes darting back and forth from me to the professor, the professor agreed.
“Why, yes, Charles, if that’s the way you want to put it. It’s a little crude, but I guess that’s the point.”
The way I see it, bad academic writing and speech stem from two major sources: the Breakdown Problem and the Fake Razzle-Dazzle Problem. The expression “selective partial incorporation” is a good example of both.
The Breakdown Problem occurs when you’re analyzing all the factors that contribute to something. Take a simple example: To explain the concept of force, you need to understand the concepts of mass and acceleration (f=ma). To understand mass, you need to understand density and volume (m=dv). To understand acceleration, you need to understand velocity and time (a=dv/dt). To understand velocity, which means the rate of change of position, you need to understand the displacement and time (v=Δ x/Δt). On and on we go, defining one simple term with two or more other terms.
When my professor talked about “selective partial incorporation,” he was trying to break down the concept of the bribe and put it in the context of government bureaucracy. Each word contributed something to the idea.
But along the way, the real meaning of the term got obscured. You hear “selective partial incorpioration” and you can’t really picture the process of buying someone off. It’s too abstract for such a flesh-and-blood aspect of politics.
When academic writing gets filled up with this kind of vocabulary, the real meaning of everything can get confused. Even when all the experts understand the arcane language — when all political scientists, for example, understand that ‘selective partial incorporation’ means bribing — you shut out a broader audience.
The tragedy of Joe Paterno is as old as the human experience. The great literary works — from Sophocles and Milton, Shakespeare to Tolstoy, Fitzgerald to Hemingway, O’Neill to Miller — warn us about the dangers of greatness.
We need heroism, for heroism is the opposite of cowardice. But heroism contains the seeds of its own corruption. And so when we see great men fall — and, in the world of sports, Joe Paterno was a great man — we need to reflect on the vices inherent in all of us that lead to that fall.
The Greek concept of hubris applies here. Hubris refers to excessive pride, the belief that some people are better than others, and the arrogance that comes, almost inevitably, with power and prestige.
The Greeks understood that people possess a powerful capacity to do great deeds. Those people could be rulers, generals, teachers, sailors, mothers and sisters, athletes, and even children. This capacity for greatness gives life energy. It makes advances in civilization possible. So when we see these people rising above the ordinary, we want to applaud. Somehow, it’s not enough for us to show appreciation for good deeds. Somehow, we must exalt and deify heroes.
That’s when the trouble begins.
Heroes are, after all, fallible. Given a taste of adulation, heroes get addicted to their own beliefs about their superiority. They might guffaw and aw-shucks the praise that comes their way. But they love it and want more. And so they begin to construct a mythology and build a team to spread the word of their heroism. When they make mistakes, they deny them or ignore them. They make excuses. They rough up the truth-teller. They turn their attention away from the work that brought them accolades and toward the business of amplifying those accolades.
You can often tell when this transformation occurs — the switch from heroism to its perversion — when the hero and his coterie make bold claims about their superiority. When the Paterno Empire boasted about “Success With Honor,” they slowly separated themselves from the unglamorous need to do the right thing. Life at Penn State became about the image. Followers wore their adulation like a coat of superiority. And so we all lost sight of how fallible even the great Paterno could be.
Even with real evidence of flaws, people look the other way. It’s too hard to explore investigate unpleasant reports or to speak unpleasant truths.
People in Happy Valley, the isolated kingdom of Joe Paterno, had heard rumblings of scandal and depravation in the Penn State football program for years. But who dares to speak up? When the university’s president and athletic director visited JoePa and dared to suggest that he retire after a dismal season in 2003, Paterno showed them the door. He had that kind of power. (For a superb treatment of the scandal, see this piece by L. Jon Wertheim and David Epstein in Sports Illustrated.)
And that is what is so ugly about Paterno’s role in the coverup of child molestation. When Paterno learned that sick things were happening, as WFAN’s Mike Francessa notes, he alone had the power to pick up the phone and demand justice. But he did no such thing. Instead, he focused on protecting the image of his Penn State football program.
So what does this have to do with writing or journalism? Everything.
All too often, writers get carried away by glory. Who doesn’t want to chronicle the exploits of a great person? Who doesn’t want to bask in the glow? Who doesn’t want to take in the electricity of great moments — a parade for Wilson, a fireside chat of Roosevelt, Kennedy’s Berlin speech, Reagan’s toughness after getting shot, Obama’s celebration at Grant Park? Or, in sports, Ali’s Thrilla in Manila, Brady’s “tuck” victory, the Yankees’ heroism after 9/11, the Red Sox’ triumph over the Curse? It’s a thrill. And so when the hero makes claims to be morally better and the throngs stand and cheer, it’s hard for reporters to stick to the facts. It’s hard not to get sucked into the glory and the glee.
And it’s easy to ignore the whispered rumors of wrongdoing that fill every community.
To understand the failures of the Penn State tragedy, consider the story of Martin Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe. Baron was brought in from the Miami Herald in 2001. When he arrived in town, he heard a rumbling of rumors about the Catholic Church and a generations-old practice of priests molesting children. Baron wondered why The Globe had not investigated. The response was like this: Well, er, um, everyone knows it already.
Because he was an outsider — and a good editor and journalist — Baron did not accept that answer. It’s a story, dammit. Cover it. And so The Globe unmasked the unholy deeds of a long series of priests. This reporting began a global uncovering of this awful scandal.
A couple of years before the Catholic priest scandal broke, I went to a press event at the gilded mansion of Cardinal Bernard Law, the man most responsible for allowing priests to prey on young boys. As a researcher at Northeastern University, I was the coauthor of a report on affordable housing sponsored by the Catholic archdiocese. I was amazed at the royal way Law was treated by academics and politicians and corporate and civic bigwigs and other dignitaries. It was strangely sickening and thrilling at the same time, the sights of this inside world of privilege and power.
After the Catholic pedophilia scandal broke, I thought back to that day at the Cardinal’s Xanadu. Suppose a victim of that abuse had gotten in and confronted the Cardinal? What would have happened? I think I know. I think he would have been quietly but forcably removed from the premises: This is not the time. We are holding an event. Please state your concerns in a letter.
So who’s going to demand that Law investigate and punish and report the predators in his church? No one, of course, except an out-of-town newspaper editor.
Joe Paterno, sadly, gained that same holy status in Happy Valley as the Cardinal did in Boston. And so when people knew about strange and dangerous goings-on, few had the nerve to demand that the football program and its great leader be held accountable. The few lame attempts — like the request from superiors that he resign in 2003 — fed the aura of the great leader’s invincibility.
Happy Valley had no Martin Baron.
Now that the scandal has broken, reports are surfacing of the suspicions and concerns about the “darker side” of Joe Paterno. And of suspicions about the departure of Paterno’s assistant coach who had abused and terrorized innocent boys. But suspicion gets stifled, not explored, in the kingdom of all-powerful leaders.
When JoePa finally got fired for his role in the greatest scandal in college sports history, hundreds of students gathered outside his home. They chanted: “We are … Penn State! We are … Penn State!”
They were right.
In this scandal, as in all others, we are all Penn State. Everyone who bought into the mythology, everyone who contributed to a climate where reporting a child rapist is hard because it might upset “the program,” everyone who reported this big-time football program as if it were an episode of “Father Knows Best” and not a big, sprawling business involving hundreds of millions of dollars, is part of this scandal.
We are … Penn State. We are … Penn State.
The real pros do their jobs and then walk away. They don’t talk about how hard it is to do it. They don’t take shortcuts when it gets tough. They set standards and follow them.
Can you imagine Willie Mays talking about how hard it is to hit a 97-mile-an-hour pitch? Or Winston Churchill moaning about how hard it is to lead a nation when the Nazis are bombing it to hell? Or Einstein grumbling about how hard that whole relativity thing is because, after all, it’s not in any of the textbooks?
No. The pros do their job, period.
So it is with Ken Auletta, the veteran media reporter for The New Yorker. In his latest effort, Aulatta profiles Jill Abramson, the first woman to be named editor of The New York Times. He shows Abramson for what she is: A talented reporter and editor, a sponge for facts, relentlessly curious, demanding to the point of insulting, and determined to strengthen the core competencies of The Times while leading it into the scary new Age of the Internet.
Auletta reports, you decide. He interviews people from every stage of Abramson’s life and presents all sides of her character. He’s fair, sympathetic but open to others’ critiques of her depth, breadth, and temperament.
Toward the end of the piece, Auletta bring up the ages-old debate about the liberal bias of The Times. In particular he discusses the way that opinion pieces now mingle with straight news throughout the paper. Most of the opinion pieces get labeled “analysis,” which offers the reporter a free pass to say whatever he or she wants to say. But a number of opinion pieces slip into the news pages without such a label, such as Ginia Bellafante’s article about the Occupy Wall Street movement:
The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face — finding work, repaying student loans, figuring out ways to finish college when money has run out. But what were the chances that its members were going to receive the attention they so richly deserve carrying signs like “Even if the World Were to End Tomorrow I’d Still Plant a Tree Today”?
Now, maybe Bellafante understands the strengths and weaknesses of the movement. But she not only cops a lot of attitude, but also presumes to play the role of strategist for the protesters. And she endorses the OWS gang when she talks about “the attention they so richly deserve.”
Abramson acknowledges that she needs to guard against her own urban bias. She’s a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in its privileged, liberal precincts. She understands that The Times can look down its noses at Flyover Country and the many groups who struggle to make sense of a world that seems to be flying apart.
But when the out-and-out bias of passages like the OWS piece come under debate, Abramson and the other Timespeople talk about how hard it is to keep news straight when so many other publications cop an edgy attitude. As Bill Keller, Abramson’s predecessor as editor, puts it:
Part of the great competition for audience in the twenty-first century is the competition to get beyond commodity news. To add meaning to it. To help readers organize the information into understanding. … The tenor of a front-page news story has changed in the last five or ten years from who, where, when, what, why to more emphasis on how and why.
Yes, readers can be demanding. All day long, we readers hear the headlines on NPR and cable TV and click for updates online. We know the basics — who, what, when, where, and why — by the time we get The Times plopped onto our porches or zapped into our iPad. Readers surely want more than a rehash of what they already know.
But ultimately, it’s a false argument to say that reporters should strut their opinionated stuff because we have so many sources of news.
Take that Occupy Wall Street story. Yes, we hear about it all day. Yes, we want something new when we get our Times. But that doesn’t mean we care what Ginia Bellafante thinks about the struggle. It means we want a deeper, more compelling arrangements of hard-news reporting. Just because Bellafante shouldn’t just repeat what we already know doesn’t mean she should opinionate rather than report.
I would like to see Bellafante and other reporters do twice as many interviews, track down twice as many documents, get twice as much background on the maneuvering of City Hall and unions and liberal funders and police and neighbors and Wall Street workers. No, don’t give us what we already know. Give us deeper, fresher reporting.
Opionators pose the false choice — repeat what you heard yesterday or add the sizzle of opinion — because they still follow the rules of pack journalism. If someone calls a press conference — especially a pol or a celebrity — the Knights of the Keyboard flock to see it. If candidates stage events in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, they flock to these extravaganzas. If a royal son gets married, they flock to it. If a pol gets caught tweeting naughty stuff, they stake out his house. And so on.
Not that these stories don’t deserve attention. But they don’t deserve hundreds of reporters saying the same thing, as happens all too often.
When you write the same basic stuff that as the rest of the pack, yes, opinionating might seem the best or even only way to stand out. But there is another way. Call it the Wee Willie Keeler Way.
Keeler, of course, was the old-time baseball star who coined the phrase “Hit ’em where they ain’t.” He was talking about hitting a ball beyond the reach of the fielders.
The journalistic equivalent would be to report where they — the rest of the pack — ain’t. Then you get fresh news and don’t have any excuse to fall back on “analysis” and speculation and opinion.
A good model for this principle? None other than Ken Auletta. All he did was report the hell out of his story, make sense of The Times‘s recent years of woe, with a well-organized feast of facts and balanced perspectives.
Without opining or showing off.
Change is scary.
You grow up wanting to “be” something—a ballplayer, business person, artist, public servant, union worker, builder, programmer, teacher, or writer. You get a fixed idea of what that means. You imagine the daily routines, the friendships, the rewards, the prestige. And if you get a taste of success, you decide, consciously and subconsciously, that the system rewarding you is the way things ought to be,
Then things change. New technologies change the way people do business. New markets emerge, undermining old markets and relationships. Jobs that used to reward people disappear. In their place, new jobs defy the old hopes and dreams. You lose your sense of self, your confidence, your faith in the system. You start to believe that the world does not honor you anymore. And maybe you’re right.
Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” As the market churns away, new technologies and processes render old ones obsolete. You get all kinds of exciting new industries and careers, products and services. But the old ones disappear, pitilessly. It’s hard. Just ask an old autoworker in Detroit, a steelworker in Pittsburgh, or a textile worker in North Carolina.
Or just ask a newspaper reporter or author.
We are in the midst of the greatest literary revolution since Gutenberg. A. J. Liebling once remarked that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” Until the PC and Internet, the ability to speak to an audience was limited to the people in control of the presses and studios. If you wanted to write an article about, say, the city council’s zoning policy or the president’s wars, you needed to buy or rent the means of production (presses) or get the approval of one of their gatekeepers (publishers and editors). If you wanted to write a book, you needed to get the nod from the mandarins on Publisher’s Row.
To become a writer, you needed to be part of the guild. And that was not always easy.
It’s all different now. Anyone can put up a blog, for free. Anyone can post comments on an Internet site, for free. Anyone can post a book on Amazon, for free. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, for free. Anyone can start a movement and build a community, for free.
If you want to say something, you can do so. There’s no guarantee that anyone will read it, but you can put out your ideas and arguments, stories and plans, for all the world to see.
These days, everyone’s a writer. We are on the crest of a literary revolution. Roll over, Gutenberg.
The flip side of this openness is that the group troops of the old order – reporters, editors, researchers, authors – have lost their special place. Newspapers and magazines are dying or cutting back, laying off staff. Advertisers have found other media to sell their wares. Journalism and publishing have not figured out how to survive in this brave new world. It’s scary.
You talk with journalists and authors and editors these days, and there’s a brittleness. It’s doom-and-gloom time. They don’t know what the future holds, so they cling to their old ideas. They recognize that change is coming—hell, it’s arrived—but they want to play familiar roles in the new world.
Revolutionary change requires visionaries. The best leaders not only embrace new technologies, but also hold on to the best values of the ancien regime. They understand that human needs and values are eternal, that new technologies offer new opportunities to pursue those values. They have empathy for the people who lose everything in the revolution. But they focus on opportunities rather than lamenting loss.
One of the leading figures in the Literary Revolution—Arianna Huffington, the founder of the online magazine The Huffington Post—is The Elements of Writing’s 2010 Person of the Year.
If Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington did not exist, someone would have to invent her. She is the perfect symbol of the media in the age of the internet, globalism, and amateur-specialists.
Born in Greece in 1950, Arianna Stassinopoulos convinced her mother Elli to leave her father because of his philandering. Elli had no money, education, or connections, but she left anyway anyway to claim her own identity and independence. And that’s what she encouraged Arianna to do as well, when she urged her to apply to Cambridge University. Arianna got in and excelled at debating and writing.
Arianna Huffington’s first book, The Female Woman, was a post-feminist manifesto. Since then she has written books about artists (Picasso and Maria Callas), mythology (The Gods of Greece), the modern spiritual malaise (After Reason and The Fourth Instinct), a satire on the Clinton-Gingrich years (Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom), and the culture of corruption in Washington (Pigs at the Trough). Her latest, Fanatics and Fools, offers a new left vision for America.
At one point, everyone thought Arianna was angling to become America’s first lady. She married a Houston oil heir named Michael Huffington, who served in the State Department in the Reagan years, in 1986. Michael spent an unprecedented sum of $5.4 million to win election to Congress as a Republican from California in 1992. Two years later he spent $28 million in an unsuccessful bid for the Senate. In 1998 he announced that he was bisexual. The couple divorced.
At this point Arianna was the glamour lady of conservatism. She was caught up in the Gingrich Revolution. Always a social butterfly, she alighted on Comedy Central with Al Franken and continued to articulate a new blend of independence and mutuality, feminism and traditionalism, glamour and combativeness. She extended her reach and vision beyond the right and the GOP. She gathered movie stars, academics, politicians, artists, authors, athletes in salons.
Rather than fearing change, she seemed to delight in it. Maybe it was her own personal odyssey of change that made its inevitability so obvious to her. But more than any other figure in the politico-media-art axis, she seemed to relish the coming of the new—while, in her own way, holding on to Old World values.
In 2005—five short years ago, around the same time YouTube launched—she founded The Huffington Post. It was a natural extension of her personality, an online version of her ongoing salons. HuffPo provided … what?
On one level, HuffPo is just another aggregator—that is, a site that grabs other people’s work from the web and puts it all in a dynamic package. The site consists of hundreds of new links every day, arranged into traditional “sections” but also according to hot topics. HuffPo is, in fact, exactly what Old Media titans harrumph about. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, the TV networks and cable outlets, and countless other media invest millions in research and reporting. And HuffPo and other aggregators and bloggers grab it, format it for their own purposes.
Traditional media lack a viable business plan for the age of the Internet and mobile media — their fault — but the complaint has merit. The traditional media do all the heavy lifting and Arianna’s elves and their ilk go out and take it and give it their own sizzle.
But, as Richard Nixon used to say, let me say this about that:
First, the old media need to figure out their own plan. If they want to sell ideas, they need to figure out how to make it work. It looks like they are finally doing that, more than a decade after web surfing became a national obsession. Most of the major newspapers and many smaller papers are starting to charge for online content. The Wall Street Journal has for years. The New York Times and Washington Post have announced plans to charge. The emergence of ereaders like the iPad—combined with the new national habit of clicking, which Steve Jobs popularized on iTunes—make it possible for old media to start selling subscriptions and stories.
But the fact that it took so long is not the fault of bloggers and aggregators.
Second, even though you could say they have been somewhat parasitic, The Huffington Post and bloggers have also created new conduits to newspapers and other old media. You post something interesting on the web and Arianna’s elves post it. Those posts direct traffic to the original site.
But there’s more. HuffPo is generating mountains of its own content. Whenever a big story breaks, a new flock of experts and commentators emerges to talk about it. Hundreds of bloggers post on HuffPo. The list includes old-style pol pundits (Howard Fineman), academic wonks (Graham Allison), New Age gurus (Naomi Wolf, Judith Orlaff), health gurus and foodies (David Katz, Jeanne Ponessa Fratello), TV and movie executives (Aaron Sorkin), lapsed pols (Al Gore, Art Agnos), musicians (Neil Young, Madonna), humorists (Andy Borowitz), management gurus (Steve Covey), and more.
HuffPo has also been hiring a flock of new old media hands and developing video blog pages.
Everything seems to come HuffPo’s way, like marbles rolling down a slanted table. In fact, you could say that The Huffington Post is one of the prime centers of media reinvention.
Despite Arianna’s conservative past, HuffPo has a lib-prog-lefty slant. It does not represent right-wing thinking much. Oh, you’ll find Log Cabin Republicans and relatives of conservative politicians like Candace Gingrich. But you won’t find an all-out case for limited government or contracting out. Maybe that’s a flaw. Or maybe it’s a gap waiting to be filled. No reason why HuffPo couldn’t offer a home to Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, City Journal folks, flat taxers, foreign policy experts concerned about human rights and proliferation. In fact, I would expect HuffPo to become a much richer ideological stew over the years.
If Arianna Huffington did not come along, someone else might have invented a similar aggregator site, right? Well, maybe. But would it be the same? Would it combine the smarts, the breadth of vision, the diversity of viewpoints, the verve?
You could say that someone might have invented a people-friendly computer, a people-friendly MP3 player, a people-friendly smartphone, and a people-friendly e-tablet had Steve Jobs and Apple not come along. But we don’t know. Sometimes, history bends to the vision of once-in-a-blue-moon entrepreneurs. I think you can say that about both Arianna Huffington and Steve Jobs.
The ultimate fuel for the Huffington Post comes from Arianna Huffington’s personality. She’s a case study of the Lois Weisman principle. Weissman, remember, is the woman who connects people in Chicago’s intersecting worlds of politics, policy, parks, media, the arts, and neighborhoods. Malcolm Gladwell made her famous with his 1999 New Yorker profile. Arianna plays the same role with writers, thinkers, performers, activists, builders, producers, futurists, and curiosity-seekers. She connects them — both in person and on her site.
The Internet is the ultimate free-for-all. Anyone who can say the words “dot” and “com” has a website. The quality is wildly uneven. There are no real standards.
But it’s one thing to post blogs, and quite another to give the blogosphere some coherence. Somehow, the centrifugal forces of the Internet needs something to relate them to each other.
HuffPo is, above all, a place of journalistic and civic experimentation. Arianna and her team play around with any story—or information, videos, pictures, whatever can be shared—to figure out what works. It’s still an open format, and it’s bound to face resistance from old-media producers. They make plenty of mistakes. But that’s the point.
Someone has to try new approaches to gathering and distributing the news. To be sure, HuffPo is far from the only kid on the block. But it’s the kid that seems to draw a crowd and delight in doing whatever possible to get them talking about the issues that people care about.
No one knows how the old media will emerge from this revolution. Will The Times get its sea legs again? Will old newspapers, magazines, and pubishers adapt to the electronic readers with an iTunes-style instant-click format? Will WikiLeaks transform investigative reporting into a game of document dumps, with blogs and reports by amateurs and pros? Will writers and artists create new combinations of words and images? Will any new media formula be able to recreate the voice of authority once held by The New York Times and Walter Cronkite?
No one knows. But it’s a fair bet that at the center of media reinvention will a woman who has spent a lifetime finding new roles and exploring new ideas.
Years ago, I made a stray comment to my students at Yale: “You know, the best model for explaining and process is the recipe.”
It makes sense. A recipe has to break the process down into simple steps. A recipe also has to get the sequence right. You can’t mix the eggs for an omelet until you break the crack the shell.
As the semester drew to a close, one student challenged me. “If recipes are such great models for writing,” she said, “let’s cook something together.”
So we reserved a kitchen in a dorm and someone found a recipe for an apple pie. I brought a recorder and made a foolish promise.
“If we talk about what we’re doing, and why, at every step of the process, we’ll end up with a first good draft,” I said. “You can actually talk out the first draft of almost anything you write, as long as you break it into steps.”
When we gathered, the instigator talked about her grandmother’s love of cooking and how she passed it on to her family. Other students piped in with stories about family cooking memories. Not a bad start.
Then we started mixing ingredients, preheating the oven, preparing the pie tin. We made a crust, then put the apples, raising, cinnamon, sugar, and other ingredients together.
Someone talked about the oven’s heat.
Someone took my recorder and interviewed other students about their attitudes about food and cooking. People talked about diets. Some people waxed poetic about the emotional response to entering a house while food bakes.
And the room filled with the aroma of homemade pie. These sophisticated college students, from all over the world, who had talked about all kinds of tough issues in their papers all semester softened.
If Michael Pollan had entered the room, he would have been proud. The students turned an ordinary event—cooking a pie—into an intelligent essay on the culture of food.
Then we talked about the end-of-semester blues, and how different moods affect attitude toward food. A few people confessed that they lost their discipline at the end of the semester and ate rank junk food that they would never consider at the beginning of the semester.
Finally, the pie came out of the oven. It was getting late. People had other places to be—classes, meetings, clubs, sports. We each took a slice. As we cleaned up, we continued talking into the recorder. Something about how the job is never done till the place is put back into order.
When I got home, I listened to the recording. Turned out I was right. A transcript of that event could have been a strong first draft. The piece would need some work. We’d have to figure out what point we were trying to make. We’d have to develop some ideas more fully and drop some meaningless asides.
But the recipe recipe works. Here’s why.
Too often, writers work to cram too many ideas, too soon, into their writing. They feel like they don’t have time to say everything they want to say.
The origin of this problem, I think, is school assignments. The introductory paragraph has to state the thesis, the supporting arguments for the thesis, and maybe even the significance of the topic.
Even when they know about a topic, readers have a limited capacity to take in new thoughts. In a series of psychology experiments in the 1950s, George Miller found that humans can only remember seven items at a time. The “scratchpad” that is our shortterm memory simply can’t hold any more. That’s why, legend has it, telephone numbers were seven digits long.
But experts on the brain say that our shortterm memory is actually a lot less. Some say we can only hold three ideas in our head at the same time. Others say that, actually, it’s . . . one. We can jump back and forth along , say, three ideas. But we can only focus on one at a time. And the parade of ideas makes sense only when they come in some logical sequence.
The genius of the recipe approach to writing is twofold. As a chef, you can only do one thing at a time: measure ingredients, sift flour, butter pan, chop apples, and so on. And you have to do them in the right order. You can’t scramble an egg until you break it, right?
Next time you have something complex to explain—how nuclear licensing works, how to code a website, how to close a sale, how to get to Aunt Tillie’s house in North Carolina—make it a recipe.
The hearts of veterans of the civil rights community broke this week when the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that Ernest Withers, the photographer who created some of the lasting images of the movement, was a paid informant for the FBI.
Withers took some of the pictures that we remember most about that long-ago but still-present era when blacks struggled to break the back of a terrorist state and win their full rights as citizens. They marched and got beaten by mobs and cops. They signed up to vote and they lost their jobs and homes. They sang and they got thrown into jail. They spoke up and their churches and homes got shot at and burned.
Withers documented the trial in the Emmett Till case in 1955 and the planning for the Poor People’s March in 1968. He took pictures of Martin Luther King marching, riding a bus in Montgomery after the boycott, relaxing behind closed doors before his death. He took the iconic picture of sanitation workers marching in Memphis, bearing the signs “I Am A Man,” in the days before King’s assassination. He recorded demonstrations all over. He took pictures of those quintessential American institutions, jazz and baseball, which gave expression to black aspirations even while holding blacks down.
And now, after combing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and matching reports of an informant named in FBI files as ME 338-R with a memo matching Withers to that tag, the Commercial Appeal reveals that Withers gave the FBI hounds information that J. Edgar Hoover and his henchmen could use to disrupt the civil rights and peace movements. The period of Withers’s activity is not clear; so far it looks like Withers worked for the FBI from 1968 to 1970.
The icons of the civil rights movement deserve to feel betrayed. They were battling a deadly enemy with little more than their bodies, minds, and souls. The FBI and its allies drew from the deep pockets of the federal government and private hatepreneurs. Withers’s information could have resulted in dire consequences for the friends he named. Some might have lost jobs and homes, got hit with audits and smear campaigns, the whole COINTELPRO bag of tricks.
So what Ernest Withers did was wrong, a terrible betrayal of the people who loved him and brought them into the most intimate places and moments.
But in researching my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, I heard stories that might lend a broader perspective on this betrayal.
I got lots of files from the FBI, many recycled from previous FOIA requests. It was obvious that the FBI was getting its agents into all kinds of church meetings and activist groups. And of course the FBI was tapping the phones of major figures not just in civl rights but all over politics and the arts. Someone had to be sitting in those meetings and taking notes. Some of them had to blend in with the crowd.
And the people in the movement knew it. The civil rights activists of the day sometimes laughed about who was in the meeting to snitch. Sometimes they knew, sometimes they didn’t. But as many told me, they didn’t care. What they were doing was righteous and open for all to see. The element of surprise sometimes played a role, but careful planning and discipline were more important. When surprises happened, the leaders were often the most surprised of all. The “dash for freedom” in the Birmingham campaign is just one example.
A man named Julius Hobson, who was active in Washington politics, sat in all the meetings to arrange for security at the March on Washington. The minutes of these meetings show that Hobson was excited about the toys of the security detail. He talked constantly about walkie-talkies and command hierarchies. He wanted to be in the middle of it all, even though Bayard Rustin, the brilliant march organizer, had recruited and trained black cops from New York to keep the peace using nonviolent means. And the Washington police and federal security officers were involved too. Years later, after Hobson died, FBI documents showed that he too was an informant.
Friends defended Hobson, saying he was undoubtedly feeding false information to Hoover & Co. Maybe yes, maybe no. We’ll never know.
We won’t ever know the full story of Ernest Withers either. Did he just need the money? Did he get framed? Did he want to rat on the Invaders, a Black Panther-style group on the rise in Memphis? Was he trying to deke the feds? Was he confused? Was he targeting enemies and promoting friends? Some of the above? All of the above?
The civil rights movement was the transcendent moment of our time. A vast community of people from all over — ministers and housewives and students, factory workers and sharecroppers and garbage men, teachers and artists and the unemployed — embraced a strategy of nonviolence and love to confront a vicious and corrupt system of racism. They won, not just for themselves but for all of us and all the world.
Part of what’s so amazing — and so profoundly moving — is that they were just ordinary people. They were not superhuman. They were courageous but also scared. They made mistakes, lots of them. They got sloppy and sometimes selfish and even ornery. But they rose above their flaws and transformed a nation, and that’s one of most beautiful things you can say. And no FBI file will ever change that.
The following is an excerpt from Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington by Charles Euchner.
Western Union had delivered hundreds of telegrams of congratulations to the March on Washington tent. One came from W. E. B. Du Bois.
“One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life!” Du Bois said in a final message composed two months before, during his final illness. “Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.”
Then came the news that Du Bois had died the day before in Accra, Ghana, at the age of ninety-five. Maya Angelou led a group of Americans and Ghanaians to the U.S. embassy in Accra, carrying torches and placards reading “Down with American Apartheid“ and “America, a White Man’s Heaven and a Black Man’s Hell.”
In Washington, the news fluttered through the audience and onto the platform.
Over a seventy-year career, Du Bois took every conceivable approach to the race problem. He was a provocative propagandist and measured scholar. He was for integration and then for separation. He believed in the American dream and disdained it. He believed in the power of politics and the ambiguity of culture. He brawled and he stood aloof. He embraced indigenous liberation and global communism.
Du Bois wrote thirty-eight books on the experience of race—on slavery and reconstruction, rebellion and war, psychology and economics, America and Africa, war and democracy, ideology and crime. He wrote thousands of articles and reports. He debated Booker T. Washington and coined the expression “the talented tenth,” to describe the vanguard that could lead the black race out of bondage. As an American facing the cruelty and degradation of Jim Crow, Du Bois embraced the pan-African ideal of a global race.
Lifetimes ago, in 1909, Du Bois helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He left the NAACP in 1948 when he was rebuked for holding a civil rights march in Washington. In 1961 he became a Communist Party member, renounced his American citizenship, and became a citizen of Ghana.
When Bayard Rustin got news of Du Bois’s death, he worked his way across the crowded stage to deliver the news to Roy Wilkins. As the head of the NAACP, surely Wilkins would want to say a few words about this historic figure.
“I’m not going to get involved with that Communist at this meeting,” Wilkins told Rustin. “I’m not going to announce that Communist’s death.”
So Rustin crossed back to confer with Phil Randolph. How to announce Du Bois’s death?
“Tell Roy that if he doesn’t announce it, I will.”
Rustin crossed the stage again. He told Wilkins that Randolph was ready to speak.
“I don’t want Phil Randolph doing it,” Wilkins said.
But someone had to announce the death of the century’s most enduring civil rights leader at the nation’s greatest demonstration.
“Well, you tell Phil I’ll do it,” Wilkins said.
That was the ornery Roy Wilkins—the same Wilkins who had attempted to block Rustin’s appointment as the organizer of the March on Washington…who insulted Martin Luther King at Medgar Evers’s funeral…who complained bitterly about the attention given the younger activists in the Deep South…who poked John Lewis…who dismissed the possibility of change resulting from demonstrations.
But a sweeter Roy Wilkins also showed up that day. For a man who did not believe in the power of mass demonstrations—who believed that real progress happened when elites lobbied presidents and congressmen and filed lawsuits against carefully selected targets—Roy Wilkins was positively buoyant on the day of the march.
His whole life, Roy Wilkins had been determined to live within the system. The grandson of former slaves, Wilkins was raised by an aunt in Duluth after his mother died of tuberculosis and his father abandoned him. After studying sociology at the University of Minnesota, he took a job in Kansas City with the black newspaper the Call. “Kansas City ate my heart out,” he said. “It was a Jim Crow town through and through. There were two school systems, bad housing, police brutality, bombings in Negro neighborhoods. Police were arresting white and Negro high school kids just for being together.”
Early political victories forge political character. Wilkins’s first victory came in 1930, when he joined the successful effort to defeat President Herbert Hoover’s nomination of John J. Parker to the Supreme Court. A coalition of labor and civil rights organizations targeted Parker for his yellow-dog contracts and his opposition to black suffrage. Later that year, blacks cast the decisive votes to defeat Senator Henry Allen of Kansas, who supported Parker. “I was ecstatic,” Wilkins said.
“Here at last was a fighting organization, not a tame band of status-quo Negroes.” Fighting, though, was confined to the formal arenas of politics. Like intellectuals of the period, including William Kornhauser and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Wilkins believed that Hitler had forever discredited mass politics.
Besides, he said, protest didn’t work. Even the protests in Birmingham and other cities, he said, “didn’t influence a single vote by a congressman or senator…not a single one.”
Wilkins moved to New York to write for the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis before getting promoted to assistant to Walter White, the NAACP’s executive secretary. Wilkins’s efforts followed the contours of the movement—first he took on lynching, then school segregation, then public accommodations and voting rights. Brown v. Board of Education illustrated the NAACP’s model of racial progress. The NAACP chipped away at the edifice of segregation—first gaining blacks admission to professional and graduate schools, where the idea of “separate but equal” was impossible to implement because of the complete absence of programs for blacks, and then moving on to universities. Only when the courts had embraced the idea of blacks and whites going to universities together did the Brown case move forward.
Tenacious, pragmatic, distrustful of radical approaches, Wilkins became the head of the NAACP in 1955. Wilkins helped create a black-owned bank to assist blacks in starting their own businesses and avoid reprisals for civil rights activism. He embraced the NAACP’s emphasis on judicial and legislative strategies. But by the summer of 1963, he embraced direct action. On June 1st, he was arrested for picketing a variety store in Jackson.
However mainstream in his approach, Wilkins maintained a hard line against segregation. “It’s just poison and no matter whether you have a teaspoonful or you have a barrelful of it, it ain’t no good,” he said. “Self-segregation is worse than another kind because your own eyes ought to be wide open. Segregation ought to be seen for what it is. It is not, necessarily, the division of people according to color. It can…and it does take that [form] in America; it is a device for control, for isolation and control…A segregated group can always be cut off, be deprived, be denied equality.”
Now, standing before this integrated throng—tan and relaxed, wearing a royal blue overseas hat with the letters NAACP stitched in gold—he began to talk with “my people.” He paused, smiled, looked out on the throng that extended down the Mall, out back under the trees by the snow fence, even up in the tree branches. He was in the mood to play.
“I want to thank you for coming here today,” he said, like a friendly uncle, “because you have saved me from being a liar. I told them that you would be here. They didn’t believe me…because you always make up your mind at the last minute. And you had me scared! But isn’t it a great day?”
Laughter rippled across the Mall. Then Wilkins called for silence down the middle of the Mall. “I want everybody out here in the open to keep quiet, and then I want to hear a yell and a thunder from all those people who are out there under the trees.”
Suddenly, like magic, the crowd quieted.
And then he commanded the people on the edges of the Mall, sitting under the trees, to shout out. The Mall filled with cheers. And Wilkins laughed.
“There’s one of them in the tree!” [Note: You can watch this part of the speech here, preceded by the Eva Jessye Choir]
Wilkins suddenly reveled in mass politics. And humor leavened even his dead-serious points.
“We want freedom now!”
“We come here to petition our lawmakers to be as brave as our sit-ins, and our marchers, as daring as James Meredith, to be as unafraid as the nine children of Little Rock, and to be as forthright as the governor of North Carolina, and to be as dedicated as the archbishop of St. Louis.
“All over the land, especially in parts of the Deep South, we are beaten, jailed, pushed, and killed by law enforcement officers. The United States government can regulate the contents of a pill, but apparently has no power to prevent these abuses of citizens within its own borders.”
He endorsed President Kennedy’s civil rights legislation but insisted on strengthening it. “The president’s proposals,” he said, “represent so moderate an approach that if any part is weakened or eliminated, the remainder will be little more than sugar water. Indeed, the package needs strengthening. The president should join us in fighting for something more than pap.”
After a day of somber and contentious rhetoric, Wilkins chose to be light. He turned toward Congress: “We commend Republicans, north and south, who have been working for this bill. We even salute those Democrats from the South who want to vote for it and don’t dare. We say to these people, ’Give us a little time, and we’ll emancipate you—get to the place where they can come to a civil rights rally too!”
Then he spoke about W. E. B. Du Bois: “Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903.”
Half a world away, Shirley Graham Du Bois, his widow, wept in appreciation.
“Now, my friends, you got religion today. Don’t backslide tomorrow. Remember Luke’s account of the warning that was given to us all. ’No man,’ he wrote, ’having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’”
One of the most important techniques of storytelling is the beat. A beat is a unit of action that advances the story, in some way. A beat could be anything from a nod (like Rick’s OK for the band to play La Marseillaise in Casablanca) to a major collision (like the ship hitting an iceberg in Titanic). Whatever its scale, the beat advances the story. If the beat doesn’t happen, the rest of the story does not unfold in quite the same way.
Beats create tension and intrigue by alternating from positive to negative values. Something good happens, then something bad happens. The hero is lost and then found. The team scores a touchdown and then its star quarterback gets injured. The young man saves a buddy in a battle and then gets shot just as he returns to the bunker. Good, bad; bad, good. The more you can drive beats forward, the more you will advance the story and engage your reader.
I was thinking of beats when I reviewed Bill Ury’s book The Power of a Positive No. Ury is half of the famous duo, with Roger Fisher, that changed the way we think of negotiation with their classic book Getting to Yes. That book describes a straight path from conflict to agreement. But as Ury says, sometimes the best path to Yes moves through doubt and conflict.
In a review for The Boston Globe, I described this process. As a writer, I want you to consider how you can give your writing this yes-no-yes-no rhythm. By shifting back and forth from positive to negative and back again, you will improve your ability to explain complex issues and processes. You will also engage your reader like a master storyteller.
By Charles Euchner
Boston has the reputation of a civic naysayer, with a culture so cranky that good ideas get rejected as a perverse ritual. The political graveyard is filled with ideas that seemed so good when announced, but then suffered nasty deaths. Remember the grand plans for reviving City Hall Plaza? The new Back Bay-style neighborhood on the South Boston waterfront? The Cape Cod wind farm? One 2004 report by the CitiStates Group called the region “fractious, exclusionary, and lacking the collaborative gene.”
But in a new book, Harvard Law professor William Ury shows that Boston needs to learn, of all things, to say “no.” In The Power of a Positive No, which Ury calls a “prequel” to his classic Getting to Yes, he says that rejecting ideas is not such a bad thing. The problem is that Bostonians, and many people, do not always say “no” in a constructive way.
He calls for a new kind of “no” that is not a shrill message of rejection. Instead, “no” should be built on the foundation of strong and positive values, and be the beginning of a conversation, not its end. This “positive no” holds the possibility of changing politics, opening new possibilities. But, he argues, it could also transform the lives of individuals, businesses, teams, and communities.
“No may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is the most difficult to say well,” Ury writes. “At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship.”
Ury argues that people avoid uttering the two-letter word because they confuse it with total rejection. We have to deal with people even when we disagree, and we don’t want to say something that might hurt future interactions. We also live in a manic age, full of distractions and demands that make it easier to just say “yes.” As a result, we have become a nation of accommodators and avoiders.
Ury outlines a three-stage process of constructive dialogue. In the first stage, we reach inside to find our deepest values — what Ury calls the “Yes!” statement. Being clear on those values makes it easier to move to the next step: saying “no” to things that betray those values. Finally, both sides can suggest common ground, a stage Ury calls “Yes?”
The Yes!/No/Yes? process mirrors the structure of storytelling, from Athens to Hollywood. In Act 1, the hero develops and affirms his deepest values. In Act 2, he confronts a great foe that requires him to fight back. In Act 3, the great struggle opens new possibilities for all concerned.
Massachusetts has become the capital of negotiation studies. Ury’s Global Negotiation Project is based at Harvard. Two Red Line stops away, at MIT, Lawrence Susskind’s Consensus Building Institute has trained hundreds of people. And don’t forget the Albert Einstein Institution, the leading source of information about nonviolence as a form of political action, which Gene Sharp now runs in his East Boston rowhouse.
But smart negotiation has not played enough of a role in Massachusetts politics. According to Ury, the problem might not be that we have a hard time getting to “yes,” but that we don’t know how to get to “no” first. So we go along with undesirable ideas, like the Big Dig (along with its multibillion-dollar “mitigation” projects) and the convention center in South Boston. Or we avoid taking up good ideas, like the expansion of charter schools or the creation of business improvement districts, because of the shrillness of opponents. The result is an undercurrent of frustration, which occasionally explodes in anger.
Neighborhoods regularly say “no” to even benign projects — housing, parks, schools, new commercial development — that would alter their neighborhood in any way. The “no” of NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) can poison community life for years.
I know a nonprofit developer who struggled for years to build affordable housing on an open lot in the Roslindale section of Boston. Neighbors repeatedly rejected the idea in community meetings and zoning board hearings. The developer’s response was to call the neighbors racist and to vow to fight for the housing until he won.
Ury would instead get the developers and neighbors in a room for a long conversation about what the community needed and what it feared. Ury would try to learn everyone’s deepest desires and fears (their “Yes!”) and then tell them how they can say “no” in such a way as to open the discussion to new possibilities.
“A positive ‘no’ respects rather than rejects, even when you’re saying ‘no’ to someone you don’t like,” Ury told me. “The first time I taught this course at Harvard Law School, we were in the midst of the war, and the students said, ‘What about Saddam Hussein? Does he deserve respect?’ and I said ‘yes.”‘
The most important part of a good “no” might be having a Plan B: An alternate plan to use when the other side won’t accept your answer. More than any other part of a negotiation, having a Plan B can force a stubborn opponent to respond.
Suppose then-Governor Mitt Romney had listened to his budget advisers on the plan to rebuild the Greenbush commuter line to the South Shore. The administration had lots of good reasons to kill the $500 million project, adopted as part of the “mitigation” agreement to get the backing of the Conservation Law Foundation for the Big Dig in the waning days of the Dukakis administration.
But he didn’t have a Plan B. Different transit investments, perhaps? Greater attention to strengthening old urban centers? Modern highway management systems? Hard to say. The state, in fact, has not had a comprehensive transportation strategy for more than a generation.
Contrast that situation with the politics of “no” on highway construction back in the early 1970s.
At the time, residents of Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge were agreed on a powerful “Yes!” — the devotion to maintaining the character of their neighborhoods. So they shouted “no” to Governor Frank Sargent’s plans to build an extension of Interstate 95 and an inner-belt highway, which cut through densely populated areas. Sargent then hired an MIT political scientist named Alan Altshuler to develop a comprehensive transportation plan for the Boston area. The resulting blueprint became the “Yes?” that shaped transportation and planning for a generation, leading to improvements in transit (like the new Orange Line) and urban design (the Southwest Corridor park).
One could argue that Altshuler’s 18-month planning process did more to revive Boston than any other single event. But it all started with a resounding “no.”
This piece appeared in the April 22, 2007 “Ideas” section of The Boston Globe.
This article originally appeared in Education Week on January 25, 1984.
By Charles Euchner
A young graduate of the public-school system here, now a sophomore at the City College of San Francisco, has few memories of his first years of formal education. About all the student, who immigrated to this city from Hong Kong, recalls is that he felt isolated from other students because he could not speak English.
As the years passed, the student gradually learned English. He took Chinese lessons after school for several years, but quit in order to make his English classes a top priority. When he was not in school trying to understand what his English-speaking peers were saying, he watched television for hours on end, imitating the speech of the actors to eliminate his Chinese accent. “The shows on TV are more or less how the society speaks,” he now says.
School officials offered to enroll him in classes for non-English-speaking students, the student recalls, but he told his mother that he would rather learn English without any bilingual instruction. “I said no, because [classmates] said, ‘You’re an ESL [student]’ and laughed at you.”
The student, who plans to major in computer electronics at City College, now speaks in a clear voice with hardly a trace of an accent. His name is Kinney Kinmon Lau. He was the plaintiff named in Lau v. Nichols, the case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court 10 years ago this month that led to an explosive growth in bilingual-education programs here and across the country.
The class action against the San Francisco Unified School District originated in the U.S. District Court here in 1970. The suit charged that the district was denying non-English-speaking pupils their civil rights as Americans because it did not offer them a program for learning English.
Chinese and Hispanic community groups had unsucessfully pressed the district for years to develop a comprehensive bilingual-education program when in 1970 a public-interest lawyer recruited some non-English-speaking families to challenge the district. The first of 13 plaintiffs listed in the suit was Kinney Lau.
The district court ruled in 1971 against the Laus, stating that the city must provide students with equal access to educational programs but not the opportunity to derive equal benefits from the programs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the decision in 1973.
The Supreme Court in January 1974 unanimously reversed the rulings of the lower courts, holding that the district violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by not offering the students any special programs to overcome their academic handicaps. It rejected the students’ constitutional claim that they were denied their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the law, however. The Court ordered the district to develop a program to address the problems of the 1,800 Chinese-speaking students represented in the suit.
Those who spent years lobbying for bilingual education both before and after the decision say the programs the city developed are often inadequate and even narrow-minded. But they also say the Court’s decision has done more to change the district than any other development in recent years.
The school that Kinney Lau attended at the time of the Supreme Court decision, Jean Parker Elementary School, has undergone demographic and program changes that officials say is fairly typical of the district’s experience with special-language initiatives.
The demographic makeup of the school, which sits a block from Chinatown’s business district, has changed dramatically. As much as 98 percent of the school’s students at the time of the suit were of Chinese descent. The school is now about 45 percent Chinese and 15 percent Hispanic; the rest of the students are white, black, Filipino, Cambodian, Indian, Burmese, and Arabic.
The school now offers a variety of language programs that officials say mirror the district’s mix of bilingual-bicultural and “English-as-a-second-language” programs. The programs involve six or seven times as many pupils as they did at the time of the decision.
Students in the bilingual classes learn demanding subjects such as mathematics and social studies in their native language while also attending English classes. ESL students receive instruction in English and are pulled out of the classroom for separate English instruction. School officials stress that there is a considerable mix of bilingual and esl approaches in all classes.
In addition to those two basic approaches, the school also teaches Chinese and Spanish to students whose first language is English, and writing to students who can speak but not write their native languages. All students in the language programs learn about the countries associated with the foreign languages, teachers say.
Virginia Wales, the principal of the school, says she favors giving all students access to bilingual programs. But ESL predominates, she says, because the district has had problems finding and paying qualified bilingual teachers. Right now, the school has 21 special language teachers and aides for the school’s approximately 300 “other-language” students.
In the district of 62,000 students, about 550 teachers offer special language instruction to some 17,000 non- or limited-English-speaking students, officials say. The students are divided into two roughly equal groups–those in bilingual programs and those in “personalized” programs. About 600 students choose not to take part in any special program.
District officials say they have no cost figures for the program because it has been incorporated into the regular school budget. But the cost for bilingual teacher salaries is about $15 million annually, and the district spends another $1 million for special programs, the officials estimated.
The approaches that schools use in bilingual programs vary, the officials say; some resemble ESL programs in many ways and others offer students instruction in two languages throughout. The individual programs are tailor-made for each student, with almost all resembling ESL.
“All bilingual programs contain an ESL component, so it’s not an either-or kind of thing,” said Roger Tom, the program manager for bilingual education in the district. “What’s in the programs–bilingual or ESL–is a matter of degree.”
Edward H. Steinman was working in the Chinatown office of the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation in the late 1960’s when he started to investigate the problems of limited- and non-English-speaking students in the area.
Now a professor of law at the University of Santa Clara, Mr. Steinman says he needed an interpreter to understand most of his Chinese clients. He started to attend meetings of community groups, where he said he learned about the problems of Chinese-speaking students in English-language classes.
After formally asking the board of education to develop a bilingual program–“their response was, yes, there’s a problem but there’s not anything we can do about it,” he said–Mr. Steinman started to look for people willing to get involved in a court battle.
“President Reagan’s right when he says that [public-interest lawyers] manufacture cases,” Mr. Steinman said. “But they don’t manufacture problems. Something needed to be done.”
Mr. Steinman was representing Kam Wai Lau in a landlord-tenant dispute when he asked her to get involved with her son in the class-action suit. Ms. Lau agreed, she said recently with her son acting as interpreter, because teachers at the school “told her she had to do something for herself” when she complained that she “saw other children crying and unhappy.”
Because Ms. Lau and her son spoke no English and had access to no special-language programs, Mr. Steinman decided to place Kinney Lau’s name first in a list of 13 plaintiffs involved in the suit.
The Laus and the other Chinese families sued the San Francisco Unified School District in 1970, charging that the district’s language policy violated both the students’ constitutional rights to equal protection and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Under growing pressure from Chinese and Hispanic groups in the late 1960’s–a time of youth-gang warfare in Chinatown and unrest in the city’s other minority neighborhoods–the system started to develop special language programs.
By the time the Court handed down its unanimous decision in 1974, the $1.5-million program involved less than half of the 10,000 “other language” students in the district. Most of the students were enrolled in ESL classes, which generally provided students less than one hour of instruction daily. Many educators criticized ESL for ignoring the students’ need to advance in all subjects while learning English. Most of the programs were experimental projects started with federal money under the 1967 Bilingual Education Act aimed at disadvantaged children.
Even district officials said the city’s bilingual program was inadequate, the courses were poorly designed, the teachers were not well trained and had few classroom resources, and the screening and evaluation of students was poor.
“We were doing some things, but there were a lot of things that just weren’t in place,” said Raymond del Portillo, then the director of bilingual education. “There was a great lack of teachers that were bilingual and biliterate. They’d say, ‘Hey, del Portillo, don’t you speak Spanish?’ And then I was a bilingual educator.”
Despite the claims of Thomas O’Connor, the district’s lawyer, that San Francisco “pioneered bilingual instruction” before Lau, the critics said the district’s program was purely political. Mr. Steinman said the district tried to “moot the case” by starting new programs for Kinney Lau and other people named in the case.
The controversy over how to deal with non- and limited-English-speaking pupils was just one of many problems facing the district in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
In early 1975, when a task force created to develop a bilingual-education program was preparing its final report, the district had seen three superintendents quit in six years. Enrollment was declining in the city, which was already noted for its low proportion of students to overall population. The district’s budget was out of balance by 10 percent. The district consistently had some of the lowest achievement-test scores in the state despite showing the highest per-pupil expenditures of any large city. Officials faced an unprecedented array of lawsuits from disaffected parents, students, teachers, and administrators.
On top of all these problems was desegregation. The federal district court in July 1971 ruled in Johnson v. San Francisco Unified School District that the district must develop a comprehensive desegregation plan–the first such court order in a northern city. The order followed more 10 years of political controversy that bitterly divided the city’s whites, blacks, Chinese, and Hispanics.
Wilson Riles, then state superintendent of public instruction, told a Congressional committee investigating the impact of Lau that San Francisco was an “embarassment” to the state.
The debate over how the district should comply with the Court’s decision started the day the decision was handed down.
Wellington Clew, the superintendent of the city’s bilingual program, said the district should offer a variety of programs rather than endorsing one approach. “We should provide an option for the parents and children,” he said. “Some prefer ESL only, and others think bilingual is the [correct] program.”
Victor Low, the director of a pilot project in Chinese bilingual education at Commodore Stockton Elementary School, endorsed the bilingual approach as a way of allowing students to maintain cultural pride while learning English. He suggested that tensions in Chinatown were caused by the emergence of two major groups–the ABC’s, or American-born Chinese, and the FOB’s, or those who were “fresh off the boat”–half of whom spoke Chinese and half of whom spoke English.
Mr. Low and others also said the student with “other-language” students could be psychologically damaged without attention to their culture, and that use of their native language would be a valuable tool for learning English.
Some of the people most involved with the suit favored a “maintenance” program, in which students would receive instruction in their native language and English throughout their public education–regardless of how quickly they learned English.
L. Ling-Chi Wang, a leading community organizer, and Mr. Steinman argued that programs to teach children English should be taught alongside programs to teach children their native languages and the histories of their native countries.
“This country does not know any other languages and cultures. It was unprepared to establish relations with China,” said Mr. Wang, who attended a recent dinner here for China’s Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. “Each year, we spend millions of dollars to teach foreign languages to diplomats, and then we spend so much of our time trying to wipe out other languages.”
Ligaya Avenida, the district’s current bilingual coordinator, added: “Our district should capitalize on the multiplicity … of ethnic groups. The delivery of subject areas can be done in a second language. We have to expand our concept of bilingual education into second languages. English will always be there–it’s the status language of this country.”
The Supreme Court remanded the case to the federal court in which it was originally filed. Mr. Steinman said he and other bilingual advocates were determined to limit the role of U.S. District Judge Lloyd Burke in developing a remedy. “He was anti-bilingual,” said Mr. Steinman. “He said the Supreme Court was wrong and bilingual education is a sham–a year after the Supreme Court acted.”
The leaders of the bilingual movement lobbied the board of education to create an independent committee to devise the plan. When the board created the Citizens’ Bilingual Task Force, those leaders lobbied the board to appoint members who were committed to devising a comprehensive bilingual plan. And when the task force completed a comprehensive report, the leaders lobbied the board to approve the plan.
Mr. Wang, now chairman of the department of ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley, said bilingual proponents originally had only one ally on the seven-member board. Mr. Wang said he helped neighborhoods organize to press the board for a comprehensive bilingual effort.
“The task force took one year to form,” said Mr. Wang. “The district wanted to do it on their own, but we used to have 600 or 700 or 800 people [at meetings] demanding to create the task force. The board finally realized that it had to create the task force. We in fact took away the formulation of the plan from the school district.”
To increase the credibility of the task force–which needed interpreters to function–its members also persuaded the board to hire a private consulting firm. The task force and the Center for Applied Linguistics, a Washington-based firm, worked on the plan for nine months before submitting it to the board in February 1975. The board approved the plan on March 25, 1975.
The task force’s “master plan” was more than 600 pages long. The four-volume study included 124 specific proposals that, if enacted, would have reshaped the district’s approach to teaching almost all subjects. The district signed the Lau consent decree, a plan based on the report, in October 1976.
The master plan includes specific provisions for improving the early evaluation and placement of students, a counseling program, the training of teachers and other staff members, the development of curriculum and class materials, student evaluation, and community participation.
Officials say the district’s greatest innovations are “intake” centers, which were started in 1972. Children of all major language backgrounds are evaluated at the centers, and some 600 students spend a full year in intensive English instruction. Elementary-school children with no English background attend Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino centers.
Almost all high-school students with no English background attend the Newcomer High School, started in 1981. The school’s 500 students are given instruction in their own language in mathematics and social studies and three intensive English classes.
According to A. Richard Cerbatos, the chairman of the task force and now a member of the board of education, the master plan’s ultimate goal was a comprehensive language-maintenance program, in which all students would be taught subjects in two languages throughout their elementary- and secondary-school education.
That vision has not yet materialized. According to Ms. Avenida of the district, Clarendon Elementary School’s Japanese program involving 150 students is the only maintenance program in the city.
The frustrations that such bilingual advocates express is matched by the frustration of people who say students are kept in bilingual programs too long. According to Beatrice Cardenas-Duncan, the bilingual-education expert for the city’s Human Rights Commission, and Mr. del Portillo, anecdotal evidence suggests that school administrators and teachers keep pupils in special-language programs long after they have mastered English.
Ms. Avenida says students stay in bilingual programs for an average of about five years, and that 200 students are “reclassified” as English speakers annually. Students are reclassified on the basis of their grades, teacher recommendations, oral-proficiency tests, and the California Test of Basic Skills. A student’s scores on the latter test must rank in the 36th percentile of all students statewide.
“Sometimes [school officials] perpetuate the idea that certain students cannot move on in order to get more funding,” said Ms. Cardenas-Duncan. “This is information we get from parents.”
Ms. Cardenas-Duncan called for an independent commission to study the effectiveness of the city’s bilingual program “so that when issues like Proposition O come up we will have documentation.” She was referring to the nonbinding citizens’ referendum that discourages multilingual ballots, which passed overwhelmingly last fall.
At about the same time that Mr. Wang and his allies convinced the citizens’ task force and then the board of education to embrace bilingual education, Mr. Wang served on the groups advising the state and federal government about the impact of Lau.
Mr. Wang was a member of a task force created to help the Office for Civil Rights of the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare devise guidelines for enforcing the Supreme Court’s decison. The resulting guidelines–the so-called “Lau remedies”–have been a central part of the planning of districts across the U.S.
Mr. Wang and his allies also lobbied state legislators, and, partly as a result, they say, the state bilingual laws are similar to those of the district. Under state laws passed in 1976 and 1980, all students who are in a grade with 10 or more children who speak the same foreign language must be enrolled in a bilingual program. The school must develop “individualized learning plans” for the other pupils who require bilingual instruction.
“The master plan became viable with the state laws,” said Mr. del Portillo, the district’s former bilingual coordinator. “Through a process of osmosis, the district’s plan became the state law, also.”
Bilingual advocates in San Francisco say the city’s language program does not meet all of the task force’s ambitious goals, but they say the program has become institutionalized and will be able to survive political threats.
Some expressed concern about the overwhelming success last fall of Proposition O. “We can’t just sit back,” said Ms. Cardenas-Duncan. “Bilingual education and bilingual ballots are related.”
But most bilingual advocates say that and other developments–such as the Reagan Administration’s funding cuts and withdrawal of regulations mandating bilingual education–have not significantly affected the city’s program. The district’s growing minority population is likely to give bilingualism a broader base, they add.
“We haven’t been at all affected by what has happened in Washington, D.C. The city is almost immune to what happens there,” said Mr. Steinman. “San Francisco has gone beyond the stage where they’d go back. The number of Lau children has been growing–it’s almost tripled. Institutionally, it’s always going to be there.”
Adds Mr. Cerbatos: “As more and more people in this community experience the program–and the district is 83 percent minority–they’re going to think more and more in terms of what’s good for the minorities, including bilingual and bicultural programs.”
One person who says he is uneasy about “maintenance” bilingual-education and bicultural policies is Kinney Lau. “If they teach you [basic subjects] in Chinese, you’ll never learn any English,” he says. “You can’t have a [native language-speaking] teacher all the way.”
“If there’s enough money to supply the schools, I guess it can be good. If the teacher would teach the class in English and be able to answer questions in [students’ native languages], I would say that’s good.”
Pittsburgh–In collaboration with one of the computer industry’s most influential corporations, Carnegie-Mellon University is attempting to create in two years the “wired city” that so far has been only the dream of futurists.
Students who enroll at the university in the fall of 1985 will not only own their own personal computers, but they will also be part of a computer network and will have access to a large stock of programs and an “electronic mail” system.
That network will also spread throughout the city and perhaps move across the country, with instructional programs offered to graduates of the university and probably others, officials said.
Carnegie-Mellon’s president, Richard Cyert, last fall announced a joint initiative with the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to create on campus what officials said will be the most extensive everyday computer network in the world. Most undergraduates will be required to buy their own computers for about $3,000.
IBM will spend up to $50 million over the next three to five years to develop a new line of microcomputers and a system that can link thousands of them together in one network. The new machine will be 20 to 100 times as powerful as most personal computers now on the market, spokesmen said.
Under the terms of the Carnegie-Mellon agreement with IBM, both sides will assign employees to work full-time to develop the technology. Both sides also pledged not to divulge any trade secrets they discover in the course of the project.
IBM would develop the new line of computers even without such a cooperative venture, university officials said. But they said it is worthwhile for the university to help with that development in order to be at the forefront of the technology.
The IBM initiative will expand Carnegie-Mellon’s already extensive on-campus use of computers in subjects ranging from English literature to physics to political science–by so improving access to computer hardware and software that they become everyday tools.
But the networking idea is the most revolutionary aspect of the pro-ject, university officials said.
The officials have already moved beyond creating a network of students and alumni. They have held discussions with Warner Communications and the Bell Telephone Company to expand the network throughout the city of Pittsburgh–either with Warner’s already extensive cable-television system or with a Bell light-wave system now under construction.
Douglas E. Van Houweling, the vice provost for computing and planning, said he expects campus routines to survive. But by expanding the computer network to graduates and local businesses, he added, education probably will become more decentralized and accessible.
Said Karolyn Eisenstein, the assistant dean of the science college: ”The effect of computers on organizations is the real frontier.”
John Crecine, the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the network might shift the focus of education from the classroom to course goals and instruction displayed on a computer.
“Whether we like to admit it, most learning does not take place in the classroom,” Mr. Crecine said. “We all know that the assignments … and peer interaction are the key things that determine what students do.” Both of those, he suggested, will be directed increasingly by computer programs.
Since the announcement of the initiative, Mr. Van Houweling said, many companies that turned down previous Carnegie-Mellon overtures have expressed an interest in hook-ing up to the network.
“The technology will be in a huge number of homes and schools at the end of this decade,” he said. “Organizations like Westinghouse or [Pittsburgh’s] Mellon Bank might adopt this. It will be an interesting question about at what point you’ll start to get a wired city.”
Such businesses might be interested in hooking up with the network to buy educational programs, access to data bases, and management programs, officials said.
‘Lifetime’ Education Foreseen
At the very least, Mr. Van Houweling said, the network will create “lifetime learning opportunities” for graduates and will allow students and faculty members to use time more efficiently. Graduates will be offered a chance to continue their studies for the rest of their lives with instructional computer programs that will be transmitted in an as-yet-undetermined way.
“It is assumed that the computers will be their [the students’] machines and that they will have a lifetime access to learning,” said John Stucky, director of computing for the humanities and social sciences.
“You need to teach more these days,” he said. “A lot of us behave as if education is an inoculation process that lasts four years. We don’t have good delivery [of formal education] after they leave the campus.”
That, Mr. Van Houweling said, will change when Carnegie-Mellon implements its computer initiative. As more sophisticated programs for computer-based instruction are de-veloped, the university will transmit them to graduates and possibly others.
The continuing-education program is in its earliest planning stages, Mr. Van Houweling said, so there is no way to estimate what fees Carnegie-Mellon will charge for access to the programs.
Officials said they had heard criticism of instructional programs, or “software,” now available, but noted that computer technology is changing so rapidly that the quality of software is bound to improve markedly in the next few years.
Microcomputers will not only have greater power in themselves, Mr. Crecine said, but the developing methods for transmitting computer programs will allow more information to be transmitted than is possible through current techniques of transmitting them by telephone.
“The network of personal computers will open new vistas for computer-assisted instruction,” said Mr. Van Houweling. “The key is being able to devote substantial computing power to each student … so the system can capture the expertise of the teacher and not just be an automated page-turner.”
Added Mr. Stucky: “The notion of having a tutor any time a student wants to throw a switch is very exciting.”
Computer Use Is Extensive
The university is already well known for its use of computers. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the French futurist and politician, came to the campus this semester with Steven Jobs, the chairman of the board of Apple Computers, to learn about the institution’s computer strategies.
Mr. Servan-Schreiber later arranged a lunch date for Mr. Cyert with French President Francois Mitterand, who is also greatly interested in the uses of high technology.
What has attracted such attention is Carnegie-Mellon’s enthusiastic development of one of the most technologically advanced computer networks in the country. Already, officials said, 75 percent of the Carnegie-Mellon’s 5,500 students use the university’s 1,000 computer terminals regularly. About 60 percent of the faculty members have terminals in their offices and homes.
A task force on the future of computing at Carnegie-Mellon, established by Mr. Cyert, last year reported that the university spends more than $6 million annually to support its computer activities.
Members of the university regularly use an extensive “electronic mail” system to send notes, assignments, tests, and bulletins of campus events. It is a system that allows faster responses and encourages greater cooperation on research and other projects, said Mr. Stucky.
Students are required to take at least one semester of computer science using the computer language fortran, and computers are widely used in liberal-arts courses. Starting this fall, computer use will be required for graphic-arts majors.
Until an entire generation grows up with computers, Mr. Stucky said, teachers should be introduced to them gradually so that the knowledge of the technology and the subject area are well balanced.
Even Carnegie-Mellon faculty members and students express misgivings about the rapidity of change on their campus and say they are worried about how the new initiative with ibm will affect the academic atmosphere.
Faculty members say they are concerned that students’ fascination with their own machines might distract them from the necessary dedication to study.
“Some of that seduction is going on right now,” said Ms. Eisenstein. “We shouldn’t be pushing students to deliver the same output in slicker form.”
For example, Ms. Eisenstein said, computers would be useful for calculating the movement of molecules in biology studies.
But students need “semester on semester of study” to understand the field well enough for the computer to be useful, she said.
Teachers and students also say they worry that computers will discourage social intercourse. But university officials downplay that possibility.
Working Together Encouraged
If anything, said Joseph Ballay, the associate dean of the College of Fine Arts, computers encourage people to work more closely together. “This is more interdepartmental than anything else I’ve been involved with,” he said.
In addition, some students have expressed concern about assuming a heavier financial burden at a college that will charge $7,500 for tuition next year. Administrators say they might improve the university’s financial-aid package to take into account the additional expense of students’ computer purchase.
Last year’s task-force report acknowledged that many students might not need computers and that “greater availability of computers should not create expectations that everyone will use them.”
The student newspaper, The Tartan, has also criticized what it says is inadequate student involvement in the project.
In an annual April Fools’ Day issue, the newspaper identified the university as “a subsidiary of IBM” and reported that Mr. Cyert had signed an agreement with the Defense Department that would put a nuclear-attack warning system “in every dorm room.”
Richer Problem Environment
Whatever the shortcomings of the project, Mr. Crecine said: “The computer makes it possible … to operate in a far richer problem environment–and more efficiently. You can operate on a higher philosophical plane.”
Mr. Van Houweling said the university will not change admissions standards because of the computer. He said he would tell high-school teachers “just do what they’re doing. We’re not looking for any previous computer knowledge.”
In fact, he added, background in computers might even be a liability. Mr. Van Houweling said that if the applicant pool appeared to attract students with unusual backgrounds in computing, “probably we would look for those who have less experience.”
The idea, Mr. Crecine said, is not to produce “computer nerds with narrow interests and no social or interaction skills,” but to pull together the parts of the university with the computer network.
By Charlie Euchner
Education Week
July 27, 1983
Concern about mathematics and science education stems at least partly from the perception that today’s students need to be more “technologically literate” than the students of any previous generation. And the challenge posed by computers can, in turn, be met by using computers in the school.
On that much, most educators agree. But just how educational technology can be used–and, in fact, whether it ever will–is a constant source of dispute.
Technology is likely to be used increasingly in all subjects, but experts believe that it holds special promise for math and science. The computer’s potential for “mass delivery” of instruction might help address the shortage of teachers, some educators say. Furthermore, computer use could make math problems less abstract, reduce tedious operations, and teach logic. And computer simulations could demonstrate complex physical phenomena that are impossible to show in standard science laboratories.
Some experts say “mass delivery” of instruction is where the computer’s greatest potential lies. Computers can illustrate the abstract concepts of mathematics and science better than traditional methods, they say, and will be able to help alleviate the shortage of teachers in those areas.
Others hold that to use the computer as a “solid-state Socrates,” or a means of delivering instruction, would be a waste. They say the computer is best used as a tool for doing tedious computation, working with complex mathematics problems, and aiding with some laboratory work.
Educators appear to agree that the computer is useful to introduce students to the basics of information technology, such as programming–which, according to a recent survey, is now one of the most common uses of the machines.
That study, conducted by the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University, found that the computer so far has simply been “grafted” onto the traditional mathematics curriculum. The nationwide survey of 2,209 schools found that most teachers put greater emphasis on programming and less on computer-assisted instruction as they gain experience with the technology.
Such a practice has both positive and negative effects, says Arthur G. Powell, executive director of an independent national study of high schools. On one hand, such courses can attract students who normally would not take part in any program with a mathematical component. Computer science could teach many of the reasoning skills that are considered central to other math subjects, he says.
But such courses also serve as a way for schools to “get around” state mandates for stiffer graduation requirements. “It’s one way the school can respond without making the teaching of math more strenuous … and you don’t have to deal with problems of sequence,” Mr. Powell says.
THE COMPUTER AS TUTOR
Educators say the professional arguments about computers will intensify in the next several years as the number of computers in the schools and the range of educational software increase.
Few experts expect computer-assisted instruction to make the teacher obsolete, but many believe that the computer can at least free the teacher from many tedious tasks and do a better job teaching students basic skills–especially in areas such as mathematics and science.
According to a report by Technical Education Research Centers (terc), commissioned by the National Science Foundation, there are now 1,000 science and 650 mathematics software packages on the market, and 100 new mathematics and science packages appear every month. Those programs represent almost half of all of the educational software available. More than 90 percent of all the math software programs are for drill and practice.
There is almost no software for elementary-school science classes and for many high-school topics, terc found. Many software topics overlap, the survey found, and teachers reported that they are not aware of what software is available.
Robert Kansky, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wyoming, says many schools in his state “can’t afford to hire math and science teachers.” The only way students will be able to take advanced courses in these ares, he says, is through computer hookups.
Mr. Kansky, who in 1981 and 1982 served as a consultant for a computer-assisted-instruction experiment in South Africa, says a three-tiered computer systems–with mainframe computers on the top, minicomputers in the middle, and microcomputers on the bottom–eventually will make delivery of sophisticated programs cost-effective. In such an arrangement, desktop computers would be able to use more sophisticated programs now available only on the larger machines.
In addition to increasing access to math and science education, Mr. Kansky and others say, computer-based education can also actually improve student performance.
A recent analysis of data from 52 independent studies found that students who receive computer-based instruction in all subjects perform better academically than those who do not. The study, conducted by three researchers at the University of Michigan, found that students using computers earn better scores on tests in less time than other students.
Despite such findings, many experts contend that using the computer as a means of instruction will not be worthwhile for many years. Other methods of expanding schools’ teaching capacity, such as cross-peer tutoring, are more effective, these people say. For now, they conclude, the computer should be used only as a tool–to perform time-consuming computations, gather laboratory data, and analyze data–and for the practical skill-training that programming offers.
For tutorial software to keep the interest of the student, says Robert B. Davis, associate director of the research laboratory on computer-based education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it needs to be much more sophisticated–and for the software to be more sophisticated, the hardware needs to be more sophisticated. Mr. Davis said that almost all of the hardware available to schools is not powerful enough to handle worthwhile software. Because “the great pressure in education is to get something cheaply,” many schools buy the least sophisticated machines.
“Sitting in front of a computer for seven hours” will not keep students engaged, adds one science educator. “They need to talk to people, work on real-world activities.”
THE COMPUTER AS SIMULATOR
The value of simulation programs for the sciences is almost as much a matter of controversy as the tutorial programs. Simulations show simplified models of physical phenomena, such as biological functions.
At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Baltimore, a panel of computer scientists and educators extolled the virtues of simulation programs that allow students to learn about science “intuitively.” But the participants also agreed with Tom Snyder, the president of a software firm, who said, “Right now, there is just a handful of good programs. It will take time and money to develop good programs.”
The participants never questioned whether simulation programs were worth developing. They agreed that some programs already available showed that simulations give students a better “intuitive” and “hands-on” understanding of mathematics and science than they had been able to offer.
Alfred Bork, professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, says that his colleagues sometimes do not have a complete understanding of some physical concepts because they have not worked with variables in a dynamic setting such as a computer simulation.
“As soon as they saw a plot that didn’t appear in the books they had problems,” Mr. Bork says, referring to problems dealing with electrical phenomena.
Robert F. Tinker, director of the technology center at terc, says he has seen students develop a “working vocabulary” in complicated subjects such as nuclear power and the ecology with computer simulations. “There’s a lot of good science in it,” he says, referring to a simulation entitled “Three Mile Island,” in which students are required to operate a nuclear-power plant both safely and profitably.
But some science educators say they doubt that either computer-based tutorials or computer simulations will improve enough to make them worthwhile. One educator explains that simulations he has seen are not only inadequate, but harmful in some cases. The computer models, he says, oversimplify scientific phenomena to the point of teaching invalid concepts.
He cites two simulations–one which demonstrates the ideal gas law, and a second which demonstrates the law of universal gravitation–that “teach something that’s wrong.” Gases hold dozens of properties that cannot be expressed accurately in a simple model, the educator says.
The “intelligent videodisk” machine, a device that connects a videocassette player with a microcomputer, holds more promise, some educators believe. Using a computer program, the teacher can move to any single frame of a video tape in seconds.
The most useful tapes, these educators say, would demonstrate laboratory experiments with many variations. The teacher would be able to show students in seconds how hundreds of changes would affect an experiment’s outcome.
Educators also agree that the computer could be an important laboratory instrument–as long as it is used merely to manipulate data and not to replace most experiments.
An official with a leading manufacturer of laboratory equipment says that computer-based laboratory programs are so expensive that only about 300 have been sold nationwide. But, he adds, less expensive equipment that measures and analyzes data digitally is selling well.
The company has sold “thousands”of MPUTE “photogate” instruments, which measure the acceleration of objects at several points on an “air track,” and similar instruments that measure the movement of objects too small for the human eye, the official says.
Because mathematics and science require that students build on their knowledge, educators say, the computer can be valuable as a “manager” of educational programs. By entering data on student performance, teachers can track students’ progress in specific curricular goals–and give special attention to their weaker skills.
The computer can receive such information in several ways. Some testing programs evaluate the data and indicate which areas should receive special attention. Other programs require special “inputting” of information.
“These [computer programs] can analyze patterns of errors. Worksheets can’t do that,” says Mr. Powell.
THE COMPUTER AS SUBSTITUTE
The computer eventually could lead to fundamental changes in the mathematics and science curricula, the experts note. The computer not only requires greater familiarity with some complex mathematical concepts, they say, but it can also reduce the need for much of the arithmetic that is usually taught throughout elementary school.
Mr. Powell says students will need to have more advanced mathematics and science backgrounds than their parents. “In Japan, virtually every kid has some kind of calculus,” he says.
Jonathan Choate, chairman of the mathematics department at the Groton School, has developed a two-year mathematics curriculum for the computer that teaches high-school students systems dynamics–a subject that he says normally is not taught until college.
Mr. Tinker of TERC and others say educators should at least partly “prune” several areas from the math and science curricula because of the computer.
Among the topics that Mr. Tinker says he would give less emphasis are: rote algorithms; fractions; axiomatic geometry; several operations typical in algebra classes, such as root extraction, simultaneous equations, and trigonometric functions; many calculus proofs; and much of the specialized science vocabulary, which he says means little to most students.
“Much of what we now teach in elementary school can now be done with a $5 calculator,” says Mr. Kansky. “You could release students for at least half of their time … and move on to more problem solving.”
By Charlie Euchner
Education Week
July 27, 1983
Late last month, the Nissan Motor Corporation’s new plant in Smyrna, Tenn., produced its first 160 light trucks. The $300-million plant, which employs 2,200 American workers, is one of two in the United States owned by Japanese firms.
Officials at Nissan and other Japanese companies for years resisted pressure from the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry to build a plant in the U.S., according to industry analysts. The ministry wanted the U.S. plants to counter a growing protectionist movement here.
That Japan felt a need to placate the American public is indicative that the U.S. might be losing the economic and strategic edge that it has held since World War II, experts say. And one major reason for the danger, they say, is that American mathematics and science education poorly prepares students for a technological society.
Isaak Wirszup, professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, goes so far as to claim that “the education crisis is a threat to our national security.” The National Commission on Excellence in Education apparently concurred in that view, declaring in its report: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.”
Since 1966, when the Soviet Union enacted reforms to provide a strong, comprehensive program of math and science education, it has moved “far ahead” of any other nation in such training, Mr. Wirszup contends. “The Russians wouldn’t waste all that money unless it was for military power and political power,” he says.
According to a National Science Foundation report, the Soviet Union, Japan, and West Germany have been able to parlay improvements in mathematics and science instruction into significant military and economic gains.
Those countries’ education systems have developed a workforce, the report states, “which, at all levels, has a relatively high degree of science and mathematics skill, and this has been a factor in the very rapid expansion of technical industries.”
Herbert J. Walberg, research professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agrees. “The Japanese are very fastidious about the product,” says Mr. Walberg. “Henry Ford says genius is attention to details. That’s the result of hard work in schools, six days a week.”
Between 1963 and 1977 Japanese industrial productivity grew 197 percent; the U.S. growth rate for the same period was 39 percent. Education was by no means the only or most significant factor involved in that difference, economists point out, but it was an important one.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Theodore W. Schultz notes that studies of education and entrepreneurial activity clearly show “the pervasiveness of the favorable effects of schooling on the ability to deal with … economic modernization.”
Typical of society’s increasing need for knowledge of math and science is the military. About three-fourths of all Army and Navy jobs now require some technical expertise, according to Leopold E. Klopfer and Audrey B. Champagne of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center.
The limited data available comparing mathematics and science achievement among students of different countries show U.S. students faring poorly, except among the top 5 to 10 percent of the students. At this level, U.S. students perform as well as or better than those of any country.
The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), an organization funded by the governments of several countries, is the only group that has tested students in several nations on the same subject matter.
A 1970-71 IEA survey of science achievement in 19 countries found that students in the U.S. and other countries learned similar things with similar success in the early grades, but that disparities in achievement grew in the later grades. The tests included 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds. The American 18-year-olds finished last in the rankings.
Educators point out that the U.S. scores are affected by a policy of compulsory school attendance for all. The sample group of American students who took the test, for example, represented the 75 percent of American youths who attend high school at age 18; the sample represented only the 9 percent of West German youths of the same age who attend the Gymnasium, the upper-level high school.
But even by comparision with students in countries that also have mass-attendance policies, U.S. students performed poorly. Japanese 18-year-olds were not included in the test, but at the 14-year-old level, which had an enrollment rate of 99 percent, Japanese students scored better than those of any other country. Five other countries with similarly high rates of enrollment performed better than U.S. students at that level. (The survey did not include the Soviet Union or East Germany.)
An earlier IEA survey of mathematical achievement found the same pattern.
“Elite” American students perform as well as those of other countries, but Mr. Wirszup and other experts argue that those U.S. advantages are overshadowed by the fact that the great majority of the population is “illiterate” in basic mathematical and scientific concepts.
“It’s absolutely a mistake,” Mr. Wirszup says, to believe that only a strong “elite” is required for a strong economy. “The industrial countries until recently looked to the elite. But the educational mobilization in the Soviet Union for high-technology … means that that isn’t enough anymore.”
Twenty-four countries are now taking part in a new IEA survey for mathematics, and 30 countries are participating in an IEA science survey. Analyses of the testing probably will not be completed for three or four years, according to the organization.
Experts do not expect the U.S. to look much better on the new surveys. They point to an April report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and to recent trends in educational policy in the U.S. and other countries.
The naep report found slight gains in “routine” mathematics skills such as computation, but a decline in problem-solving skills. For example, 48 percent of a representative sample of 17-year-old students incorrectly answered this problem: “A hockey team won five of the 20 games it played. What percent of the games did it win?” A higher percentage of students failed to solve complex word problems.
But even the most ardent critics of U.S. education acknowledge that the foreign systems have their own disadvantages.
Japanese schools may have more rigorous precollegiate programs, but American higher education is considered vastly superior. While the Soviet Union requires its students to take more advanced classes than the U.S., intense specialization reduces opportunity for career mobility. And West German families must decide their children’s course of formal education when the students are in the fourth grade.
None of the foreign education systems, the experts add, offer students as much choice as the American system. That freedom often is criticized for allowing students to avoid courses in the sciences. But Willard Jacobson, professor of mathematics and science education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, asserts that it is also the most decisive factor in the nation’s economic creativity.
“We should not try to imitate other countries,” says Mr. Jacobson, who is also a member of the IEA committee studying science education. “We ought to build on our own strength–the freedom to try different things. We can release a great deal more energy” in academic pursuits than other countries.
But some experts have identified areas in which other nations excel that they believe deserve serious consideration here. Chief among these are teacher training, time on task, national academic standards, and the use of a “spiral” curriculum.
• Teacher training. In nations with higher levels of student achievement in mathematics and science, special care is taken to nurture able students for teaching roles, researchers point out.
Margrete Siebert Klein, a program officer at the National Science Foundation, notes that prospective teachers in both East and West Germany are among the most academically inclined students in those countries. Only university students, who have been extensively screened before being admitted, are eligible to become teachers.
“In West Germany, only the students who go to the Gymnasium [the upper-level high school] and pass [a special examination] go on to college, and you have to go to college to be a teacher,” Ms. Klein says. She added that only university-educated students in East Germany, or the top 12 percent of students, are eligible to be teachers in East Germany.
Japanese and Soviet teachers also must survive a rigorous screening process to attend college, and therefore are considered to be among the best students in the country. The Soviet Union produces in one year the total number of physics teachers that are now teaching in the U.S., Mr. Wirszup says, and their training is superior. Soviet secondary teachers must receive training in their fields that is comparable to the level of a U.S. master’s program, he says.
• Time on Task. Most other nations require their students to take courses in mathematics and science throughout their years in high school. U.S. standards vary from state to state, but probably less than 10 percent of the course time in American high schools is devoted to math and science, according to Ms. Klein.
A national guideline in Japan requires 25 percent of classroom time in grades 7 through 9 to be devoted to math and science. In the 9th through the 12th grades, nearly all Japanese students take four math and three science courses; only 34 percent of all American high-school students complete three math courses, according to Paul deHart Hurd, a highly regarded expert in science education who is now retired from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.
Japanese students attend school five days a week from 8:30 A.M. to 3:15 P.M. and on Saturdays until noon. Schools are in session for 240 to 250 days a year compared with an average of 180 days in the U.S.
The Soviet schedule is similar to the Japanese, and the emphasis on math and science is greater. Students study mathematics during all 10 years of their formal schooling, including calculus courses in both the 9th and 10th grades. In recent years, about 5 million Russian high-school graduates have studied calculus, compared with about 100,000 Americans, Mr. Wirszup says. All Soviet students also study mechanical drawing and astronomy, subjects that receive little attention in most American schools.
Rustin Roy, a science fellow at the Brookings Institution and a key figure in the development of “science appreciation” courses, asserts that the U.S. is so far behind the Soviet Union and Japan in math and science education that it has no hope of catching up any time soon. “Appreciation” courses offer the only cost-effective means of introducing students to the importance of science and technology in society, he says.
• “Spiral” curriculum. Most countries with advanced systems use a “spiral” curriculum, in which algebra, geometry, trigonometry, biology, chemistry, and physics are taught in a sequence over several years. In the U.S., such subjects are usually taught as one-year courses.
The strongest asset of the spiral approach, Ms. Klein and others say, is that it blends the course material of subjects so that students can understand how they are related. For example, principles in mathematics and physics that reinforce each other are taught at the same time.
The spiral curriculum also allows schools to introduce the subject in “concrete” ways before engaging students in abstract principles.
The experts disagree on whether U.S. schools do an adequate job of familiarizing students with the concrete before teaching them abstract principles.
Mr. Jacobson of Columbia University and the IEA science committee says that early analyses of the international study indicate that U.S. schools do a “very, very good” job familiarizing elementary-school students with plants and animals, magnetism and electronics, and other basic topics.
“We have kids working with materials, doing ‘hands-on’ work,” Mr. Jacobson says. “I think the U.S. does a very good job.”
Still, American elementary schools often lack the basic equipment necessary to run a sophisticated program, he notes. And American elementary-school teachers do not specialize in subject areas as they do in other countries.
Others say that the American school system should give students basic work in subjects such as chemistry and physics before high school.
Those subjects now are taught in one-year courses.
In Japanese schools, field trips and experiments closely tied to textbook material are stressed for the primary-school students. In their first six years, students spend one-third of their time working on “hands-on” activities. Middle-school students spend one-seventh of their time on such work, and high-school students spend one-ninth of their time on such work.
Japanese schools also use “semiconcrete” representation of numbers to teach children mathematics, as opposed to the counting-up or counting-down strategy. Students work with numbers in fives, with each number having a pattern that a student can visualize. Japanese officials say the American stress on counting leads children to see numbers as abstractions.
J.A. Easley Jr., professor of teacher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says Japanese students are able to write simple equations in the 1st grade and to understand word problems and everyday uses of math at an early age. According to a National Science Foundation report, 75 percent of American students are taught arithmetic for nine years or more. The result, the experts agree, is that students do not learn the “higher order” skills until they reach junior high school.
Some educators believe the spiral approach would not work in the U.S. because of the many levels of responsibility for education. A spiral curriculum would need to be coordinated at a national level so that a student would not repeat some course material and miss other material when he or she moves to a new school.
• National standards. According to Benjamin Bloom, professor of education at the University of Chicago, the biggest difference between the American education system and others is its decentralization. All other developed countries have a national curriculum.
Leadership in the United States is “absent,” F. James Rutherford, the education director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, charges in a book to be published this fall. The curriculum, he writes, is a “model of inefficiency,” with “no planned sequence.”
Efforts to upgrade the curriculum, says Mr. Bloom, have consistently fallen short because of the lack of central control. With no national curriculum, Mr. Bloom and others say, mobile American families often see their children take some courses twice and others not at all, and the level of course content varies.
Many educators point out that the absence of a formal national curriculum has resulted in less rigorous textbooks. “Things tend to be reduced to the lowest common denominator” because publishers are competing for several different school markets, says Mr. Walberg.
Concern about mathematics and science education stems at least partly from the perception that today’s students need to be more “technologically literate” than the students of any previous generation. And the challenge posed by computers can, in turn, be met by using computers in the school.
On that much, most educators agree. But just how educational technology can be used–and, in fact, whether it ever will–is a constant source of dispute.
Technology is likely to be used increasingly in all subjects, but experts believe that it holds special promise for math and science. The computer’s potential for “mass delivery” of instruction might help address the shortage of teachers, some educators say. Furthermore, computer use could make math problems less abstract, reduce tedious operations, and teach logic. And computer simulations could demonstrate complex physical phenomena that are impossible to show in standard science laboratories.
Some experts say “mass delivery” of instruction is where the computer’s greatest potential lies. Computers can illustrate the abstract concepts of mathematics and science better than traditional methods, they say, and will be able to help alleviate the shortage of teachers in those areas.
Others hold that to use the computer as a “solid-state Socrates,” or a means of delivering instruction, would be a waste. They say the computer is best used as a tool for doing tedious computation, working with complex mathematics problems, and aiding with some laboratory work.
Educators appear to agree that the computer is useful to introduce students to the basics of information technology, such as programming–which, according to a recent survey, is now one of the most common uses of the machines.
That study, conducted by the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University, found that the computer so far has simply been “grafted” onto the traditional mathematics curriculum. The nationwide survey of 2,209 schools found that most teachers put greater emphasis on programming and less on computer-assisted instruction as they gain experience with the technology.
Such a practice has both positive and negative effects, says Arthur G. Powell, executive director of an independent national study of high schools. On one hand, such courses can attract students who normally would not take part in any program with a mathematical component. Computer science could teach many of the reasoning skills that are considered central to other math subjects, he says.
But such courses also serve as a way for schools to “get around” state mandates for stiffer graduation requirements. “It’s one way the school can respond without making the teaching of math more strenuous … and you don’t have to deal with problems of sequence,” Mr. Powell says.
THE COMPUTER AS TUTOR
Educators say the professional arguments about computers will intensify in the next several years as the number of computers in the schools and the range of educational software increase.
Few experts expect computer-assisted instruction to make the teacher obsolete, but many believe that the computer can at least free the teacher from many tedious tasks and do a better job teaching students basic skills–especially in areas such as mathematics and science.
According to a report by Technical Education Research Centers (terc), commissioned by the National Science Foundation, there are now 1,000 science and 650 mathematics software packages on the market, and 100 new mathematics and science packages appear every month. Those programs represent almost half of all of the educational software available. More than 90 percent of all the math software programs are for drill and practice.
There is almost no software for elementary-school science classes and for many high-school topics, terc found. Many software topics overlap, the survey found, and teachers reported that they are not aware of what software is available.
Robert Kansky, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wyoming, says many schools in his state “can’t afford to hire math and science teachers.” The only way students will be able to take advanced courses in these ares, he says, is through computer hookups.
Mr. Kansky, who in 1981 and 1982 served as a consultant for a computer-assisted-instruction experiment in South Africa, says a three-tiered computer systems–with mainframe computers on the top, minicomputers in the middle, and microcomputers on the bottom–eventually will make delivery of sophisticated programs cost-effective. In such an arrangement, desktop computers would be able to use more sophisticated programs now available only on the larger machines.
In addition to increasing access to math and science education, Mr. Kansky and others say, computer-based education can also actually improve student performance.
A recent analysis of data from 52 independent studies found that students who receive computer-based instruction in all subjects perform better academically than those who do not. The study, conducted by three researchers at the University of Michigan, found that students using computers earn better scores on tests in less time than other students.
Despite such findings, many experts contend that using the computer as a means of instruction will not be worthwhile for many years. Other methods of expanding schools’ teaching capacity, such as cross-peer tutoring, are more effective, these people say. For now, they conclude, the computer should be used only as a tool–to perform time-consuming computations, gather laboratory data, and analyze data–and for the practical skill-training that programming offers.
For tutorial software to keep the interest of the student, says Robert B. Davis, associate director of the research laboratory on computer-based education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it needs to be much more sophisticated–and for the software to be more sophisticated, the hardware needs to be more sophisticated. Mr. Davis said that almost all of the hardware available to schools is not powerful enough to handle worthwhile software. Because “the great pressure in education is to get something cheaply,” many schools buy the least sophisticated machines.
“Sitting in front of a computer for seven hours” will not keep students engaged, adds one science educator. “They need to talk to people, work on real-world activities.”
THE COMPUTER AS SIMULATOR
The value of simulation programs for the sciences is almost as much a matter of controversy as the tutorial programs. Simulations show simplified models of physical phenomena, such as biological functions.
At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Baltimore, a panel of computer scientists and educators extolled the virtues of simulation programs that allow students to learn about science “intuitively.” But the participants also agreed with Tom Snyder, the president of a software firm, who said, “Right now, there is just a handful of good programs. It will take time and money to develop good programs.”
The participants never questioned whether simulation programs were worth developing. They agreed that some programs already available showed that simulations give students a better “intuitive” and “hands-on” understanding of mathematics and science than they had been able to offer.
Alfred Bork, professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, says that his colleagues sometimes do not have a complete understanding of some physical concepts because they have not worked with variables in a dynamic setting such as a computer simulation.
“As soon as they saw a plot that didn’t appear in the books they had problems,” Mr. Bork says, referring to problems dealing with electrical phenomena.
Robert F. Tinker, director of the technology center at terc, says he has seen students develop a “working vocabulary” in complicated subjects such as nuclear power and the ecology with computer simulations. “There’s a lot of good science in it,” he says, referring to a simulation entitled “Three Mile Island,” in which students are required to operate a nuclear-power plant both safely and profitably.
But some science educators say they doubt that either computer-based tutorials or computer simulations will improve enough to make them worthwhile. One educator explains that simulations he has seen are not only inadequate, but harmful in some cases. The computer models, he says, oversimplify scientific phenomena to the point of teaching invalid concepts.
He cites two simulations–one which demonstrates the ideal gas law, and a second which demonstrates the law of universal gravitation–that “teach something that’s wrong.” Gases hold dozens of properties that cannot be expressed accurately in a simple model, the educator says.
The “intelligent videodisk” machine, a device that connects a videocassette player with a microcomputer, holds more promise, some educators believe. Using a computer program, the teacher can move to any single frame of a video tape in seconds.
The most useful tapes, these educators say, would demonstrate laboratory experiments with many variations. The teacher would be able to show students in seconds how hundreds of changes would affect an experiment’s outcome.
Educators also agree that the computer could be an important laboratory instrument–as long as it is used merely to manipulate data and not to replace most experiments.
An official with a leading manufacturer of laboratory equipment says that computer-based laboratory programs are so expensive that only about 300 have been sold nationwide. But, he adds, less expensive equipment that measures and analyzes data digitally is selling well.
The company has sold “thousands”of MPUTE “photogate” instruments, which measure the acceleration of objects at several points on an “air track,” and similar instruments that measure the movement of objects too small for the human eye, the official says.
Because mathematics and science require that students build on their knowledge, educators say, the computer can be valuable as a “manager” of educational programs. By entering data on student performance, teachers can track students’ progress in specific curricular goals–and give special attention to their weaker skills.
The computer can receive such information in several ways. Some testing programs evaluate the data and indicate which areas should receive special attention. Other programs require special “inputting” of information.
“These [computer programs] can analyze patterns of errors. Worksheets can’t do that,” says Mr. Powell.
THE COMPUTER AS SUBSTITUTE
The computer eventually could lead to fundamental changes in the mathematics and science curricula, the experts note. The computer not only requires greater familiarity with some complex mathematical concepts, they say, but it can also reduce the need for much of the arithmetic that is usually taught throughout elementary school.
Mr. Powell says students will need to have more advanced mathematics and science backgrounds than their parents. “In Japan, virtually every kid has some kind of calculus,” he says.
Jonathan Choate, chairman of the mathematics department at the Groton School, has developed a two-year mathematics curriculum for the computer that teaches high-school students systems dynamics–a subject that he says normally is not taught until college.
Mr. Tinker of terc and others say educators should at least partly “prune” several areas from the math and science curricula because of the computer.
Among the topics that Mr. Tinker says he would give less emphasis are: rote algorithms; fractions; axiomatic geometry; several operations typical in algebra classes, such as root extraction, simultaneous equations, and trigonometric functions; many calculus proofs; and much of the specialized science vocabulary, which he says means little to most students.
“Much of what we now teach in elementary school can now be done with a $5 calculator,” says Mr. Kansky. “You could release students for at least half of their time … and move on to more problem solving.”
New York–At a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences here this spring, Seymour Papert managed to take issue with just about every teaching method that schools use in education–particularly the way most of them are now using computers.
Mr. Papert, professor of education and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is considered one of the most revolutionary thinkers in educational technology.
He first became widely known when he and colleagues at MIT developed LOGO–a computer language specifically designed for elementary schools. Mr. Papert and his followers say that LOGO eventually could be the centerpiece of a movement to restructure education.
More recently, Mr. Papert has attracted attention because of his association with the Paris-based World Center for Microprocessors and Human Resources, an organization with the goal of using the computer to enable developing countries to “leapfrog” whole stages of development.
In his remarks at the New York meeting, Mr. Papert offered his scientific colleagues the kind of visionary perspective on computers and education for which he is noted. He began with a general critique of schools, saying the traditional K-12 system is arbitrary and should give way to a program of studies directed almost entirely by students–with few of the formal lecture situations that now typify schools.
Mr. Papert disputed the contention of many educators that extensive use of computers in schools is expensive and threatens to widen the gap between students in wealthy and poor districts.
By making a modest financial commitment over several years, he said, districts could provide every student with a terminal. But Mr. Papert does not want his remarks about computers and student-directed education to be considered an endorsement of computer-assisted instruction. Structured computer lessons, he said, are “a bad thing.”
Educational Development
In his address and in an interview, Mr. Papert outlined a philosophy not only of how education in industrialized countries should work, but also of the role it can play in the development of third-world nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and with people who have not succeeded in traditional schools.
At the World Center, founded by the French journalist and futurist Jeans Servan-Schreiber to test Mr. Papert’s ideas, researchers hope that the microcomputer will give developing countries the means to move into the modern era without the traditional stages of development.
The idea, described by one critic as putting “a computer in every hut,” is that the microcomputer will soon be as inexpensive as a portable television set and will respond to spoken commands–and therefore will offer third-world countries access to the information they need to increase literacy and become economically self-sufficient.
But with the center embroiled in political controversy, Mr. Papert quit as chief scientist last November and returned to his projects in the United States. If he can’t pursue his ideas for an “educational utopia” in Paris, he said, he will pursue them in the U.S.
LOGO Is Key
At the center of Mr. Papert’s educational utopia is LOGO, the language that grew out of his five years of study with the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget.
Using LOGO, which was developed during the 1970’s, students use a keyboard to manipulate a triangular cursor (the electronic directional signal found on most computer-terminal screens) called a “turtle.”
Through trial and error with the turtle–“discovery,” Mr. Papert calls it–children can understand concepts such as large numbers, angles, and curves that traditionally are taught to older students.
A child as young as three or four can design objects on the computer, line by line. For example, to program a box, the student might instruct the computer’s cursor to go forward a set number of spaces four times and make a 90-degree right turn three times.
The student, by pulling together many such simple sets of instructions, or “subprocedures,” eventually can write programs that become as complicated as variations of “Pac-Man” and other video games, according to the MIT scientist.
In the process of programming, Mr. Papert said, students create their own “microworlds.” The microworld involves a physical object–in this case, the turtle–that a student can use to play with and to become familiar with larger numbers and the ideas that go with them.
Microworlds, Mr. Papert said, enable children to learn much faster. ”Why is it that children have to do 98,000 repetitions of this?” Mr. Papert said, pointing to an addition problem. “One reason is that they don’t know what they’re looking at. They need an object to think about other things with.”
Mr. Papert contends that the ease with which students grasp LOGO and their own microworlds eventually could lead to a kind of educational utopia.
In that perfect world, all children would have access to a computer and LOGO programs throughout their years in school. They would use the computer to learn “powerful ideas,” not only in mathematics but also in physics, English, art, and music. The computer would make them significantly more curious and capable of understanding other fields, such as history and science.
Also in this perfect world, the traditional teacher-student relationship would change. Instead of attending several classes daily, children would be given sets of academic goals that they would be required to achieve. There might be one lecture per week in each area of study, and during the rest of the week the students would direct their own studies.
Such a vision is controversial–“subversive” is the word Mr. Papert uses–and he said he has no illusions about achieving it in the near future. But he added that he is confident that some programs under way in the U.S.–in New York City’s “Computers in the Schools” program and at the Lamplighter School in Dallas–will start to convince educators that such changes are desirable.
“This computers-in-the-schools project in New York [does not have] the shock of sudden change,” he said. “We started off by training some teachers … and then increasing [computer use] to two or three in the classroom, and now there are a few classrooms where there are 15 or 16 computers.
“It takes a little bit of time, but you begin to see in these contexts quite dramatic results,” he added. “It’s seeing those results, documenting them, making them as visible as possible” that eases the worst fears of teachers.
For the time being, Mr. Papert said, educators should “start clearing their heads about notions that computers are expensive. Every child should have a computer like an Apple II.”
Mr. Papert noted that New York City schools spend more than $30,000 on a student over the course of his 13 years of public schooling. If the computer were priced at its manufacturing cost, he said, it would cost no more than $1,000 to equip a student throughout his formal schooling.
“For a negligible cost, you can have this change that can transform education,” he said. “Get rid of any ideas that this is mythology.”
Plan for Development
It is the relatively low cost of computers and the lack of established educational systems in developing countries that attracted Mr. Papert to Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s ideas for the third world.
The idea for the Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressources Humaines grew out of Mr. Servan-Schreiber’s involvement with the Paris Group, a collection of international economists, politicians, and scientists formed in 1979 to study problems of world development. The Paris Group concluded that the microcomputer could be decisive to third-world development.
Mr. Servan-Schreiber convinced French President Francois Mitterand in the fall of 1981 to support the idea of an international center to use computers in third-world development, and the center opened its doors last March. But it has been embroiled in controversy ever since.
Mr. Papert and others blame Mr. Servan-Schreiber and their own political inexperience for the problems. The problems began, the participants said, when Mr. Servan-Schreiber took strong control of the organization and irritated officials from Kuwait, India, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines who had expressed an interest in the project.
The problems continued when researchers, who Mr. Papert said were promised that they would be able to use whatever equipment they felt was necessary, were criticized for using non-French products.
“This was an example of how fundamental research gets diverted into something more trivial,” Mr. Papert said.
“There had been a very formal though verbal agreement that the center would never be restricted to use technology because it’s French, or for that matter to choose people who were French. But very quickly we were very severely criticized for accepting a gift from Digital Equipment Corporation.”
The pressure to buy French never abated, Mr. Papert and others said. Finally, the center passed from the control of the Ministry of Research to the Ministry of Communications–without the consultation of Nicholas Negroponte, the executive director, or Mr. Papert. It was considered a coup for the French electronics industry, and the ultimate defeat for the center’s foreign researchers.
World Center Projects
But before that development–which led both Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Papert to announce their resignations–the center had started work on research and pilot-development projects in Marseille, France, and Dakar, Senegal.
In both places, officials from the center sought out members of the community who expressed an interest in using computers and gave them training in everything from programming to repairing a broken computer. The job of those “vectors” was to introduce computers to every segment of society possible.
If residents of the community expressed a desire to use computers to plan agriculture or medical programs, Mr. Papert said, the researchers in Paris set out to either find the appropriate software or to create new software.
The project now “is going at a snail’s pace,” Mr. Papert said. If it were on schedule, he said, the World Center’s projects would be moving from the cities to smaller towns–“ultimately aiming at the most un-urban, traditional village, with a low level of literacy.”
A training program for unemployed youths in Paris using LOGO, Mr. Papert said, showed the promise of computers for the most desperately troubled people.
“My experience working with this group is really quite moving,” Mr. Papert said. “Generally, their attitude to computers is very negative–they blame the computer for bureaucracy, for putting people out of work. They are very militant about it. They are very angry.
“The other element, the paradoxical element, is that they absolutely can’t keep their hands off. In the end, bit by bit, some of the people were expert enough to be able to go out and work with [unemployed people] on their own. [Such programs] can magnify literacy.”
The ability to achieve some success with these youths is not that surprising, Mr. Papert suggested, when one considers the way children of all ages and backgrounds enjoy playing “Pac-Man.”
“There’s no question that there’s a certain real holding power,” he said. “This tells us that we can harness these powers. We have to think in terms of what will make children fall in love with learning.”
The past two decades have seen a fitness revolution of sorts in the United States. But, with scattered exceptions, that revolution has not found its way into the schools, physical-education experts say.
While adult Americans have flocked to Nautilus machines and aerobics dance classes–the National Athletic and Health Institute estimates that $7 billion is spent each year on health clubs, bicycles, and running shoes–physical-education classes in schools across the country have changed little.
As a consequence, the experts said, most children are out of shape and tend to become even less active as they get older. Physical-education programs that stress running and proper movement instead of games that exclude many students, said one specialist, “are more the exception than the rule.”
“Far too many classes are just roll calls and kids standing around scratching their heads,” said David B. Marsh, the director of health and physical education in the Ridgewood, N.J., public schools.
C. Carson Conrad, the executive director of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness for the last 12 years, added: “I’ve never seen physical education in as low morale as it is today.”
Mr. Conrad said he has written letters to 12 members of the House of Representatives, including Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., asking for a comprehensive study of physical education and its later effect on the health and fitness of adults and on national defense.
The Committee of Physical Fitness of the Defense Department last month issued a statement expressing concern over the physical condition of high-school graduates who volunteer for military service.
Surveys Show Lag
Surveys taken in the 1979-80 and 1980-81 school years by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and Nabisco Brands Inc. found that only 43 percent of participating students could perform exercises such as running, jumping, situps, and pullups up to the minimum standards for their age and size.
In fact, the survey results suggest, students become less fit as they progress through school. The average 17-year-old male, for example, takes 12.8 seconds to run 100 yards, while the average 14-year-old takes 12.6 seconds. And the average 17-year-old girl can do 38 modified pushups; the average 12-year-old girl can do 43.
More fundamentally important, according to Thomas B. Gilliam, a health-care consultant in Cleveland, is the small amount of time in which children engage in physical activity.
Ideally, Mr. Gilliam said, children will exercise enough each day to raise their heart rates to more than 160 beats per minute for 30 minutes, and to 141-to-160 beats per minute for 43 minutes–a total of one hour and 13 minutes of active play daily.
But according to a survey of Michigan children that Mr. Gilliam conducted during 1974, the average child spent only 18 minutes per summer day in intensive physical activities, even though most children had the whole day free.
Girls–“due to cultural differences,” Mr. Gilliam said–are much less active than boys. According to the study, they spent seven minutes engaged in the physically intense activities.
And the situation has not changed since the survey was taken, Mr. Gilliam said.
“We spend so much time worrying about how fast they can run and how many pushups they can do,” Mr. Gilliam said. “But the real test is what they do in their spare time. That shows what kind of physical education they have.”
Wynn Updike, professor of physical education at Indiana University, said that adults usually continue the habits they developed while in the physical-education classes.
“You have to know what it feels like to be in good physical shape,” he said. “People who have that experience know that they don’t have to be tired all the time. But you need to get that awareness at an early age.”
The ‘Typical’ Program
There is no nationwide study of state physical-education requirements and the way that those classes are run, but officials at the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) and the President’s Council are preparing such a survey.
Educators said, however, that there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest what a “typical” physical-education class offers.
In a majority of cases, they said, the class stresses playing games rather than working on calisthenics, running, and weight-training to get into shape. During those games, the less talented students often spend most of the period sitting on the bench or playing positions that require little physical activity.
And some games–such as softball, archery, golf, and dodge-ball–require little physical exertion for any student.
“It becomes very discouraging,” said Mr. Gilliam. “Teachers fail to use the intensive component in the classes. In a typical class, the kids are put into lines with five or six children in a line. And there are eight or nine minutes of physical activity in a 25-minute period.”
The typical pe program, he and others said, starts with “cat and rat” games in the early grades and moves into competitive sports as early as the 3rd grade. From the 5th or 6th grade on, there are few activities besides the major team sports–football, soccer, basketball, and softball for boys; field hockey, basketball, and volleyball for girls.
“It should be a developmental curriculum,” said Mr. Gilliam. “We don’t teach kids what they’re not ready for in other subjects–we don’t teach geometry in the 3rd grade. All we need to do for pe is what we do for other subjects.”
Teachers’ Colleges Blamed
The educators interviewed blamed the teachers’ colleges for the way classes are structured. Most prospective physical-education instructors are gifted athletes and see fitness as an outgrowth of participation in team sports, they said, and the college curricula reinforce that approach.
“What the colleges prepare are teachers good in one sport, but incapable of teaching a class,” said Roswell Merrick, the executive director of the National Association for Sports and Physical Education, a division of AAHPERD. “Coaches are great at after-school sports but lousy at teaching gym class.”
Adds John Berryman, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Washington: “Look at the Universities of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Marshall University–you look at the curriculum and they have to take baseball, swimming, tennis, volleyball. The first move has to be better-trained teachers … putting emphasis on fitness and exercise.”
An example of an “ideal” preparatory program, in Mr. Merrick’s opinion, can be found in the University of Michigan’s School of Education.
All students are required to take several classes in kinesiological and physiological bases of human movement, psychological and sociological bases of human movement, the history and principles of physical education, kinesiology, testing physical education, and motor movement.
In addition, students are required to take courses in human growth, several noneducation courses, and courses focused on developing skills in many sports.
AAHPERD’s consultant for elementary education, Margie R. Hanson, complained that few education schools pay much attention to elementary-school physical education. Before the early 1970’s most elementary schools did not have full-time physical education teachers, she said.
Most physical-education programs at teachers’ colleges still only offer “one or two courses for elementary preparation,” Ms. Hanson said. Classroom teachers with no physical-education training are assigned gym duty.
Budget Cuts
Physical-education and sports programs are often the first to be cut when budget problems arise, educators said.
Fifty-one percent of the nation’s schools do not have adequate funding for their sports and physical education programs, according to a survey conducted last spring by the American Sports Education Institute and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
The states that are in the poorest shape, according to the responses of more than 4,000 school officials nationwide, are West Virginia (89 percent reported funding problems), Alabama and North Carolina (88 percent), Delaware (83 percent), and South Carolina (81 percent).
Despite a consensus that elementary programs are the most important part of physical education, they are in the worst financial shape, Mr. Gilliam and others said.
“If a millage [increase] is defeated they cut the elementary program” instead of a high-school program, he noted. It would be better to cut from the top down, he said, because students taught good fitness habits early tend to keep up their physical activity regardless of the formal program.
Many elementary schools do not have facilities for a full-fledged physical-education program in the first place. “They use what they call a ‘cafetorium,’ a combination gym and cafeteria,” Mr. Gilliam said.
The pressures of budget cuts for both public and private schools, said R. Inslee Clark, the headmaster of the Horace Mann School in New York City, leave them little latitude to improve the content of their physical-education classes.
“Where you get a real divergence from quality is where they’re cutting back or where they’re under pressure to produce a winning team,” he said. “They’re doing what they can just to stay alive.”
Reform Proposals
Opinions on approaches to a restructuring of physical education–and on the question of whether the subject should be changed in the first place–vary widely.
The Paideia Proposal, a wide-ranging manifesto for changing the overall structure of elementary and secondary education, suggests mandatory physical education and participation in intramural sports. It does not specify how those activities should be carried out, however.
AAHPERD promotes “movement” instruction, in which students are taught specific skills that they can later use in sports–especially the so-called lifetime sports, such as tennis and other racket sports, swimming, and soccer.
In a movement program (see accompanying story), students are taught ”space awareness” by using their bodies for a variety of activities. Children use balls, rings, beanbags, tires, and balance beams–in fact, about any safe object available–for the purpose of developing specific skills.
A key part of the program, said Mr. Merrick, is allowing children to invent their own games and avoid the competitiveness that sometimes develops into the habit of uncooperativeness.
Gradually, the students learn to apply the specific movement skills to game applications. By junior high school or high school, the students are playing in games.
But Mr. Gilliam and Mr. Berryman, among others, said the movement program is sometimes “too soft.” While movement exercises give a student many of the skills that will be needed to function on a basketball court or soccer field, they said, they do not do enough to give the student endurance, strength, or agility.
Mr. Berryman said the movement advocates put too much emphasis on making class pleasurable. “I didn’t like Latin, but I was forced to do Latin grammar,” said Mr. Berryman. “Teachers who know better must take control. We’re not in a popularity contest. Why should physical education be fun?”
If carried out correctly, a tough exercise program will be embraced by students, Mr. Berryman said. “Kids could like it,” he said. “There’s nothing more important to some of these kids than looking good and feeling good.”
Mr. Marsh said running is the most popular physical-education elective course among high-school students. In his classes, students start out running one-half mile and gradually increases the distance to four miles in the three-week course.
“Kids I never thought I would ever see running are saying, ‘Hey, this is terrific,”‘ Mr. Marsh said.
Moreover, Mr. Marsh and others said, once students become part of such active programs, they spend more of their own time in similar activities.
In a 1979 experimental “intervention” program, Mr. Gilliam said, Michigan students were taught about the physical habits that lead to a risk of heart trouble and were put in the “intensity-oriented” program that Mr. Gilliam recommends.
‘Intensive Activities’
The result: “The children were more active the following summer. … The number of minutes spent in intensive activities almost doubled to 33 minutes. And they were eating more nutritionally.”
But besides offering strenuous fitness programs, the Ridgewood schools offer several less demanding activities such as golf and softball, Mr. Marsh said. The idea, he said, is to keep the interest of the students with fewer athletic inclinations.
“Education has to be more than just fitness,” Mr. Marsh said. “You have to give the students positive attitudes, show them it’s not a matter of punishment to run. If you turn off the ‘Fat Freddies,’ they’ll just go home and eat cake. Golf is a legitimate activity if paired with an active activity. We have kids that we have to force to run.”
State Government Role
For any reform to take root, Mr. Berryman said, the state must be more specific in its requirements for teacher certification and the content of physical-education classes. State regulations in both areas are too vague for improvement on the sports-oriented programs, educators said.
But, if anything, state governments appear to be backing off physical-education requirements. “It’s a sad story,” said Mr. Conrad, that California and Illinois are both considering loosening high-school graduation requirements. Pennsylvania’s nominee for secretary of education, Robert Wilburne, asked that state’s Board of Education to postpone consideration of ending high-school physical-education requirements.
“Changes are very isolated–there are always one or two people that take it upon themselves to do it,” said Mr. Berryman. “There’s never any leadership from the top down.”
Physical-Education Evolution
Physical education has not always been so heavily dominated by sport. Guy M. Lewis, a sports historian, said that until about 1906 physical education consisted of formal training directed by physicians.
That changed, said Mr. Lewis, an associate professor of physical education at the University of Massachusetts, with the growth of intercollegiate sports and the belief that team sport builds character and helps to solve social problems. Among the most vocal advocates of this view were President Theodore Roosevelt and the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis.
By 1929, the public schools in 46 states were required to provide physical education. Those programs were usually run by athletic directors with impressive backgrounds in team sports but no background in physical education. Eventually, physical education and sport became synonymous in the schools.
Until recently, girls’ programs avoided the physical education\sport nexus. But educators said that the movement for equal rights for the sexes has gradually changed the girls’ programs.
Most physical-education programs, said Mr. Merrick, are now at least partly coeducational. Gone, he said, is the “myth” that boys and girls cannot work together without “hanky-panky.”
Hurt Some Programs
But Lucille M. Burkett, the director of health and physical education for Cleveland public schools, said Title IX, which bars federally financed schools and colleges from discriminating on the basis of sex has sometimes hurt girls’ programs.
“There used to be an idea in women’s sport that all girls had a right to play,” said Ms. Burkett. “Everybody in this field had a service ideal. And we had, at that time, a fine secondary physical-education program for girls, much more inclusive than the programs for boys.”
“With Title IX, we have to have teams like the boys do. And we now don’t have the many intramural programs for girls that we had up to 1972-73. The girls’ teams are far better than they used to be, but very few girls get to play. And the stars get all the attention.”
By Charlie Euchner
New York–P. Kenneth Komoski was giving a visitor a tour of his offices at the Teachers College of Columbia University when he paused before a row of cubicles that contained desktop computer terminals.
Here, he said, is where researchers evaluate the computer hardware and software that is marketed for educational uses. “Do you know what used to be here?” he asked, smiling. “Language labs.”
Mr. Komoski, the executive director of a nonprofit organization called the Educational Products Information Exchange (EPIE), took great delight in the irony. His self-appointed job is seeing that educational applications of computers do not meet the same fate that earlier attempts to bring innovations into the classroom have.
To accomplish that, one of Mr. Komoski’s highest priorities these days is convincing educators that EPIE is the place to turn to for sophisticated evaluations of all educational computer products–from hardware to software to printers to user manuals. EPIE’s evaluations are now printed on large, shiny file cards, but, appropriately, they will soon be accessible electronically
Early Signs
Mr. Komoski says he hopes eventually to be able to convince one-fourth of the nation’s nearly 16,000 school districts to subscribe to the service.
And he has dreams of creating a databank that would integrate evaluations of all kinds of educational products–a project that would cost about $2 million per year, or about $25 for each public school, he estimates.
EPIE has taken a major step toward its goal by joining forces with Consumers Union, the national organization that evaluates consumer goods, to study computer products.
The EPIE-Consumers Union project has received a two-year, $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, $200,000 of which will be spent this year.
EPIE’s $700,000 budget for this year also includes a $100,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation and about $400,000 in revenues from product evaluations and newsletter subscriptions.
Mr. Komoski says he has initiated negotiations with several state governments to sell the product evaluations in mass quantities–a process that has been helped by the availability of block-grant money.
With a full- and part-time staff of about 25 and more than 300 free-lance product evaluators nationwide, Mr. Komoski says he has the base necessary not only to keep a steady stream of evaluations, but also to increase his contacts with schools.
Elementary schools and smaller districts have been among the most receptive to EPIE’s computer-evaluation services thus far, Mr. Komoski says.
Rather than eschewing evaluation altogether because their staffs are too small to warrant the investment, he said, they have come to view EPIE as their research department.
If EPIE gets the district subscribers it wants and creates the databank it dreams of, its influence over the sales of all educational products–which are already esti-mated at more than $1 billion annually–could be considerable.
Teachers Uneasy
Some educators are uneasy about using computers in schools, Mr. Komoski acknowledges. Teachers fear that computers are just another of what they have come to see as a long line of “fads.” The earlier “fads” included just about everything besides textbooks and chalkboards–overhead projectors, teaching machines, filmstrips, movies, television, and, of course, language laboratories.
Mr. Komoski and others founded EPIE in 1967 after spending years developing such now-spurned teaching aids. The idea, he says, was to ensure that educational products are evaluated, and when they are found wanting, to give the schools the information they need to demand better ones.
Mr. Komoski still has faith in the early innovations. To explain a point about the way teachers structure class time, he pulls out a plastic sheet with a grease-pencil chart, the kind used on overhead projectors. “These things are great,” he says, waving the transparent sheet, “if you know how to use them.”
The innovations of the 1960’s, Mr. Komoski says, failed because schools acquired materials without knowing what to do with them and, consequently, there was no imperative for the manufacturers of educational products to make them fit the needs of teachers in the classroom.
There was a great influx of federal money for education in that era, Mr. Komoski explains, but much of it was spent without a clear sense of purpose. The clearest guidance came from the manufacturers, he notes, suggesting that that only added to the problem.
“That money was play money,” Mr Komoski says. “The sales representatives in many cases became the partners in writing purchase orders and helping [the schools] through the federal labyrinth. It was very difficult to get across the idea that the money should be spent wisely.”
The ideas behind the innovations, Mr. Komoski still says, were good. But, he adds, the products were hustled onto the market so quickly that most schools were not adequately prepared to judge which products actually were worthwhile.
Many of the teaching tools that had been lauded in theory by Mr. Komoski and others–as a way to help teachers better develop a curriculum, a way to give students more exact and personalized instruction–were soon collecting dust on school shelves and ridicule from critics.
Educators’ Computer Needs
Although there are signs that computers might receive more of the scrutiny needed to assure effective classroom use, computer products to date have been ill-suited, for the most part, to the needs of educators, Mr. Komoski contends.
Evaluations by EPIE staff members of most educational computer products produced in the last few years have concluded that:
No large-scale software package is available for high schools, and most programs available are for drill and practice.
The major emphasis of most computer programs is on recall of previously learned facts. There is little emphasis on “higher-order skills,” such as analysis and synthesis of material.
The programs that are available perpetuate a myth that computers largely are designed for mathematics applications. Ninety-five percent of the large, computer-managed packages are for arithmetic.
Graphics are rarely an integral part of the instruction. Mr. Komoski says that the visual representation of ideas is often easier for students to understand. But graphics usually are no more than supplements to the written text, and the graphics that are used are often are distracting.
Users usually cannot control more than the speed of the program and getting out of the program. There is little choice in the sequence of activities the student goes through.
The “diagnostic help” provided by most computer software is minimal. When a student makes an error, he generally is not told what went wrong. Programs often involve simply a series of cues and guesses through which a student can eventually get the right answer but learn little from the experience.
Past Problems–and Hope
Publishers, Mr. Komoski asserts, have never been held accountable for the materials they produce. The most telling example, Mr. Komoski says, is the story of how “Dick and Jane” readers were brought into schools–a clear case, he adds, of “industry-created demand.”
Such texts using a limited number of repeated words, called “controlled vocabularies” by reading experts, were first used to teach English to adults in India, according to Mr. Komoski. Without conducting any research on their effectiveness, Scott, Foresman & Co. published a controlled-vocabulary reader for elementary schools that sold briskly. Other publishers followed suit.
Control over teaching devices must shift back into the hands of educators, argues EPIE’s founder; he points to three developments that may encourage such a change.
First, the advent of the microcomputer marks a shift in the way the whole society conducts its business. Businesses and parents are demanding that schools get involved with computers and that school programs respond to the changing educational needs of students.
“Did you ever remember community leaders saying, ‘We must have filmstrips, we must have overhead projectors’?” Mr. Komoski says.
Second, in era of budget-cutting, schools are more likely to subject purchases–including computers–to careful scrutiny.
Third, most teachers are willing to admit–and redress–their ignorance of computers. More than half of the respondents in a recent survey by the National Education Association expressed an interest in learning about instructional applications of computers, operating computers, and programming, and more than 80 percent said they would like to take a computer-related course. (See Education Week, Jan. 12, 1983.)
This last development is perhaps most important, Mr. Komoski says. Earlier EPIE studies and anecdotal evidence had suggested that many teachers would not or could not deviate from their lesson plans. One survey, for example, found that 90 percent of classroom time is devoted to a textbook-based curriculum.
“The teachers were saying [of the earlier innovations], ‘Oh, I don’t know. … Is that any better than what we’re doing now?”‘ Mr. Komoski says. “They became so dependent on the textbook” to plan classroom activities that they failed to understand the new products.
If computers are to be used wisely in the schools, Mr. Komoski says, teachers must not only learn enough programming to alter software, but also stop treating all pupils in the same way.
A drill-and-practice program, which is appropriate for students who have trouble organizing thoughts in a structured way, would be worthless to a student who is capable of learning “higher-order skills,” Mr. Komoski asserts.
“Teachers have to learn to fit the students with [the proper program],” he says.
“I think teachers would rather do that than stand all day in front of a chalkboard.”
Are teachers today able to develop more flexible attitudes about the structure of their lesson plans?
“I wouldn’t have said so ten years ago, and I probably wouldn’t have said so five years ago,” Mr. Komoski answers. “But now you have this situation where things are changing so rapidly that teachers are saying, ‘That’s the way things are. I have to deal with it.”‘
Early Involvement
Mr. Komoski–educated at Arcadia University in Nova Scotia and the Union Theological Seminary–got involved in educational technology in the late 1950’s through B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist who developed the teaching machines that were at the heart of educational innovation in the 1960’s.
Then a teacher at the Collegiate School in New York City, Mr. Komoski and other faculty members learned to program the machines, which presented the student with questions and offered immediate responses to their answers.
“I became fascinated by the idea that the machines taught a lot about instruction,” he says. “You have to know each step of the way what’s going on, how to lead the learning. Every teacher should have to go through the steps to see what it is that works.”
Eventually, Mr. Komoski says, he became disenchanted with the “incredible commercialization and oversell” of the products–and with Mr. Skinner’s theory that learning occurs through a series of physiological responses to stimuli.
The problem with Mr. Skinner’s approach, Mr. Komoski says, is the idea that learning progresses in small increments.
“Learning often takes place in larger chunks,” Mr. Komoski says. “The way some of these people turned out these programs, kids could get through them and not learn anything. The machine didn’t take into account the contingencies of the environment.
“What I’m saying is that you have to open the thing up and allow the programmer of the tutorial or the simulation to be somehow shaped by the learners’ responses.”
Out of the such failures of such educational machinery, Mr. Komoski adds, grew “my intense conviction that until we got consumers out there demanding that [producers] make better things, we weren’t going to get any good out of technological change.”
Enter EPIE.
What if writing was the most natural skill that we possess? Would that change how we teach children to read and write … or develop as writers throughout their lives?
Researchers on evolutionary biology tell us that storytelling is the essence of the human experience. Other species eat, drink, play, sleep, and mate. Some species use language and tools. But as far as we know, humans are the only storytelling species.
Young children delight in hearing and telling stories. Given the chance, they will talk endlessly about their experiences, both real and make-believe. So what if we tapped that energy and that intellectual firepower? What if we taught kids how to put those stories down on paper, even before they learned how to read?
These are some of the issues I explored as a staff writer for Education Week. This piece comes from the December 22, 1982 issue.
By Charles Euchner
Once each hour at Congress Heights Elementary School in Washington, D.C., kindergartners and 1st graders gather and neatly put away their supplies in the “Writing to Read Center.” Without instructions, with few words among themselves, the students line up at the door to return to their regular classrooms.
They file out in two lines–one for boys, the other for girls–and soon the room is filled again with a new group of equally well-mannered students who go to their five workstations and get to work without any directions from the teacher or aides.
It is a scene that would not have surprised Frank N. Freeman or Benjamin DeKalbe Wood, who 50 years ago wrote the book that would inspire a retired teacher named John Henry Martin to start the writing experiment that involved these Washington public-school students.
Freeman and Wood, who studied the effects of typewriters on the classroom performance of about 15,000 elementary-school students from 1929 to 1931, found that the children were fascinated with the machines and had much better work habits when they used them.
The Depression-era researchers quoted a 1st-grade teacher: “I notice an awakening sense of responsibility; the children remember to put away typewriters and leave offices in order; they are pleasant and polite in choosing helpers …”
Not incidentally, the researchers also found improvements in academic performance. They were less certain of the typewriter’s value in lower grade levels, mostly because of the inadequate testing methods for younger students.
On a recent tour of schools experimenting with his “Writing to Read” program, John Henry Martin did not express any doubt that his contemporary version of the program works.
Tests have shown, he said, that a combination of computer, typewriter, workbooks, and pictures makes it possible for children to write almost as soon as they enter school.
“I proclaim it,” he told a group of Washington principals. “It works.”
The “it,” the Florida-based consultant says, is a classroom situation that combines “truly interactive” machines with a child’s natural desire to know and express himself in words. After seven years of developing and testing his idea, Martin concluded it worked because children of varying backgrounds scored well above national norms in reading and writing tests.
“It’s amazing,” Martin said, “that with the research of the last 50 years, and especially the last decade or so, we have failed to use the typewriter and other things … that are truly interactive.”
Martin’s project, financed by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), now involves 10,000 students from a variety of economic and educational backgrounds. Besides the 15 schools in Washington, the experiment includes districts in Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas, and universities in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
The Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, N.J., has contracted with IBM to evaluate the program.
The program is based on the premise that students already have many ideas to express by the time they enter school. A kindergartner has a working vocabulary of 4,000 to 5,000 words, said Martin, and just needs to engage more in “multi-sensory-receptive” activities to express ideas.
Children are wrongly taught to read before they learn to write, Martin says, but it has not always been that way. Prior to the early 20th century, students expressed their ideas in writing from “day one,” Martin said.
“In the past, children used a slate and chalk to, using the old expression, ‘make their letters,”‘ Martin said. “Sometime between 1910 and 1920, writing and reading were made into separate processes.”
With the stress on reading before writing, Martin said, students do not receive the “positive reinforcement” that the behaviorist B.F. Skinner identified as an essential part of learning.
Children in the “writing to read” program work each day for one hour. They work with partners of their own choosing at workstations for computer work, typing, workbook exercises, creative writing, and listening to tape-recordings. They also work on miscellaneous projects, such as labeling and matching pictures with appropriate written material.
The students use all letters of the alphabet except Q and X, and a set of letter “blends” such as oi, ei, th, sh, sc, and gh.
Teachers and computer programs, which give and receive sound, teach the students how to pronounce the letters and blends and how to use them in words.
At the computer station, the student strikes the terminal’s keyboard when instructed by the program, then watches as the letters and blends fall into place to spell a word. At each step, the student hears then repeats the sound.
After completing 10 “cycles” of instruction, the student will have learned the 42 phonemes he needs to write about almost any subject. As soon as the student has mastered these basics, he can begin to write strings of related sentences and complete essays, paying attention to the grammar and spelling that before would only have hindered the writing flow.
The typing skills, which Martin said most students should be able to develop in the 1st or 2nd grade, will not only give the students a head start on working with computers but will also enable them to write much faster and more creatively throughout their lives, Martin said. Martin said his approach differs from the Depression-era experiment and from other current uses of computers in the classroom because his approach is “truly interactive.”
“The typewriter, by itself, is not interactive, and the cathode ray tube is not interactive,” he said. “What makes this interactive is that it gets students to make physical, bodily responses.”
Martin said that he adopted the program’s components only after eliciting such responses with a broad cross-section of students–from the gifted to the average to the slow learners, from those in small groups to those in large groups.
The approach to writing was tested for two years with a group of 60 students at the University School of Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The striking results there, Martin said, convinced IBM officials that a test with a larger sample was needed.
Joseph Randazzo, the University School’s headmaster, said 1st graders who learned under Martin’s program scored 2.7 on a reading grade-equivalency test, while others scored 1.8. Half of the entire group scored in the 94th percentile nationally on the test, Randazzo said.
Martin started his career 45 years ago in a one-room schoolhouse in Alabama. After serving with the Navy in Europe in World War II, he worked as a teacher, principal, curriculum consultant, and superintendent in seven districts on Long Island and in New Jersey.
On the side, he has done extensive consulting, serving on panels for two presidents.
Martin said he first became interested in the use of typewriters and other “multi-sensory” instruments when a friend recommended that he read the Freeman-Wood book, which carries the bulky title, An Experimental Study of the Educational Influences of the Typewriter in the Elementary School Classroom.
Martin has toyed with the idea for years since. Seven years ago–bored with a retirement forced on him by a heart attack–he decided to study it in a clinical setting. He took his proposals to Abraham S. Fischler, the president of Nova University, and soon started soliciting money for his work from the private sector.
The 1932 book, Martin says, now occupies the prized position on the coffee table in his Fort Myers, Fla., home.
The obvious challenge of seeing is to apprehend what is present—what is there, within the compass of one’s sight.
Ideally, we see something clearly, and in enough detail to make sense of it, and to give it meaning and to put it in the context. Seeing clearly requires looking with intent and purpose—with an open mind, a will to search, and even with a beginners mind.
To look clearly, and in detail, we need to pay attention to not just what is in front of us, but what we bring to the process, including our biases and limitations, as well as our physical limitations. Rather than just accepting whatever our eyes and our distorted processing deliver to us; we also need to pause and think and reflect.
Usually, we see objects with little clarity and detail. Lacking the appropriate level of detail, we give it less meaning.
We allow our emotions and biases and other limitation’s color and distort what we are seeing. It’s like listening to a phone conversation with a bad connection. We hear or see bits and pieces and can strain to make some sense of it. But that doesn’t mean we here at Hall or that we understand it. We are improvising. We are operating on incomplete information. we might be able to convince ourselves that we are looking at the “real thing.” But deep down, we know that we are looking at the equivalent of a broken plate and thinking that it is a whole and complete plate.
We are more likely to believe what we see when we want to see it – when we have an emotional or other stake in actually seeing some thing. This is true with all of our senses, as well as all of our intellectual, emotional, and social engagements with the world.
Even when we consciously try to say something, clearly, we struggle to do so accurately. We could be surprised by the onset of an event or a scene and therefore I have a hard time focusing in on what’s happening. We spend so much time trying to frame the scene that we do not, take in the details that might be telling. If the scene is fast, moving, what we notice might be gone before we have a chance to check it. We also operate in a world of noise. It is often times hard to separate the signal from the noise —any subject that we want to focus on and the surrounding clutter. Also, when we are assessing a scene or a situation, we are often at war with ourselves or others. We are fighting over, not only what we see, but what we should see, and what we should do about it. And so even the most obvious elements of a scene can be missed.
In civilizations going back to antiquity—in Aristotle’s ideal state in The Politics, for example—people who perform physical labor are excluded from full citizenship. Farmers, mechanics, and shopkeepers are considered lesser beings. Incapable of the broad thinking necessary for making decisions for others.
In a way, this makes sense. The carpenter’s ability to connect two joints or sand the edges of an object has little to do with making decisions for fellow citizens. The farmer’s understanding of planting cycles, seeds and ground conditions, and harvesting techniques offers few skills for inspiring other people.
These crafts require immersion with objects that are tangible and specific. The same goes for arts like dance, sculpture, and music. The artist needs to focus entirely on something specific and unique. There can be only one Gene Kelly version of “Singing in the Rain,” only one Michaelangelo masterpiece David, and only one Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2. The arts (and some crafts) are sui generis—constituting a unique class in itself.
As such, the artist and craftsman must work to concentrate totally on the objects and movements of her craft. Gloria Liu says:
As a dancer in training, you learn to dissociate your self from your body, to relinquish your agency to the structure and aesthetic of the form – whether that’s classical ballet, modern dance or something else.
At times, we need to separate our actions from the surrounding environment. We need to focus totally on our craft, ignoring the larger swirl of activities around us. We need to go “all in” on our project. Especially in activities involving movement, our actions involve all aspects of the neural system.
People in business, the law, medicine, tech, and other professions understand this basic truth. By concentrating intensely on an isolated task, they bring their whole selves to bear on the challenge.
But wait. As we focus on the object of our work, we also connect to other ideas. We cannot help but relate one process to another process. The work of a artist, sculptor, or composer offers insights that can inform other activities.
As we narrow our attention, we broaden it as well. Arts and crafts—especially the physical ones—help us to move beyond our limited patterns of thinking. We may train ourselves—with conscious, repetitive movement—to make our actions automatic. But that process, in turn, opens our mind to think and at more consciously.
Athletes understand that developing a broad range of skills and actions enables them to use their whole selves. A trainer named Edythe Heus uses bouncy balls and wobble boards and to put her clients off balance when they exercise. When they are unbalanced, they cannot focus on just one muscle group, like pectorals. They need to activate hundreds of tiny muscles in their back and other parts of the body.
When people move their bodies—running, jumping, twisting, reaching, accelerating, slowing, braking—they gain an intuitive sense of how objects relate to place. When a baseball outfielder sprints after a fly ball and leaps to catch it, he is making countless calculations. He is coordinating dozens of separate actions, in an exquisite sequence of moves. The same goes for a ballet dancer, an assembly-line worker, and a cook.
The magic—for people to know themselves and to improve themselves—happens when they toggle back and forth between action and reflection. A danger might perform a routine enough times to make her steps automatic. Then she can step back and analyze what she did, moment by moment, and then consider how to improve or add to her routine.
Leaders do this too. One of the most powerful self-help programs in America, Dale Carnegie Training, teaches people how to overcome whatever is “holding them back” by teaching how to deliver a one-minute speech. Carnegie students, who are not allowed to use notes, must speak directly to the whole class about a different topic every week. The speech has three parts:
For a century, this exercise has helped even the shyest, angriest, uncertain, and agitated people how to focus their minds, collect their thoughts, and connect with other people.
The exercise works because it is a whole-body exercise. Like a trapeze artist without a net, the speaker must master her command of mind and body in real time. Most students start to get good at the one-minute exercise within three or four weeks of the program. They can use this skill in just about every aspect of their lives. Thinking and connecting with other people become part of their body memory.
All kinds of strategies help budding leaders master their use of bodies and minds. Simple meditation and breathing exercises help to regulate blood flow and attention. Consider this simple 10-minute breathing exercise from “The Iceman,” a Dutch extreme athlete named Wim Hof:
As his nickname suggests, Hof also exposes himself to freezing temperatures for sustained periods. This exposure teaches him to concentrate his mind and to manage his breathing and attention. Again, a physical challenge—especially one that takes us out of our comfort zones—can transform the way we think and behave.
The obvious challenge of seeing is to apprehend what is present—what is there, within the compass of one’s sight.
Ideally, we see something clearly, and in enough detail to make sense of it, and to give it meaning and to put it in the context. Seeing clearly requires looking with intent and purpose—with an open mind, a will to search, and even with a beginners mind.
To look clearly, and in detail, we need to pay attention to not just what is in front of us, but what we bring to the process, including our biases and limitations, as well as our physical limitations. Rather than just accepting whatever our eyes and our distorted processing deliver to us; we also need to pause and think and reflect.
Usually, we see objects with little clarity and detail. Lacking the appropriate level of detail, we give it less meaning.
We allow our emotions and biases and other limitation’s color and distort what we are seeing. It’s like listening to a phone conversation with a bad connection. We hear or see bits and pieces and can strain to make some sense of it. But that doesn’t mean we here at Hall or that we understand it. We are improvising. We are operating on incomplete information. we might be able to convince ourselves that we are looking at the “real thing.” But deep down, we know that we are looking at the equivalent of a broken plate and thinking that it is a whole and complete plate.
We are more likely to believe what we see when we want to see it – when we have an emotional or other stake in actually seeing some thing. This is true with all of our senses, as well as all of our intellectual, emotional, and social engagements with the world.
Even when we consciously try to say something, clearly, we struggle to do so accurately. We could be surprised by the onset of an event or a scene and therefore I have a hard time focusing in on what’s happening. We spend so much time trying to frame the scene that we do not, take in the details that might be telling. If the scene is fast, moving, what we notice might be gone before we have a chance to check it. We also operate in a world of noise. It is often times hard to separate the signal from the noise —any subject that we want to focus on and the surrounding clutter. Also, when we are assessing a scene or a situation, we are often at war with ourselves or others. We are fighting over, not only what we see, but what we should see, and what we should do about it. And so even the most obvious elements of a scene can be missed.
In 1817 John Keats wrote this letter to his brothers. I am publishing it here as a “guest post” because we need to return to this wisdom regularly.
Sunday [21 Dec. 1817] Hampstead
My dear brothers,
I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this.
I saw Kean return to the public in ‘Richard III’, and finely he did it, and, at the request of Reynolds, I went to criticize his Luke in Riches. The critique is in to-day’s ‘Champion’, which I send you, with the Examiner, in which you will find very proper lamentation on the obsoletion of Christmas Gambols and pastimes: but it was mixed up with so much egotism of that drivelling nature that pleasure is entirely lost. Hone, the publisher’s trial, you must find very amusing; and, as Englishmen, very encouraging — his Not Guilty is a thing, which not to have been, would have dulled still more Liberty’s Emblazoning — Lord Ellenborough has been paid in his own coin — Wooler and Hone have done us an essential service — I have had two very pleasant evenings with Dilke, yesterday and to-day, and am at this moment just come from him, and feel in the humour to go on I spent Friday evening with Wells, and went next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality — The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’, and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness — The picture is larger than ‘Christ rejected’.
I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and Kingston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment — These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter — They talked of Kean and his low company — Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Shelley’s poem is out, and there are words about its being obiected to as much as “Queen Mab” was. Poor Shelley, I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la!!
Write soon to your most sincere friend and affectionate Brother
John