Writing isn’t just a way of communication. It is a way of learning about yourself and learning how to show up, how to speak, how to develop and wrestle with ideas. Learning to write is enabled by good constraints, by a purpose that is not about the artifact but about the process of its creation. Cory Doctorow today talks about learning to write in the university context, where writing is almost always about the artifact and not the process. He shares experiences of great writing workshops because his experience is that learning how to write is relational.
It’s revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It’s alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.
I appreciate too how he talks about the stakes that students face. Reporting on a faculty meeting he attended at Cornell, Doctorow writes:
It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students’ attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they’re afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.
That is unreal pressure. It usually takes several years in a professional context before people are allowed to make six figure decisions that impact people’s lives and yet we expect that students take this into consideration with every test and reading and essay they have to write.
If you find out that your degree isn’t what you want to study, or you had shitty profs who ruined your learning experience, or you drop out to do something else, you still owe the money back.
So try being a student with $50,000 in debt on the line. Why wouldn’t you use ChatGPT to produce something the exactly matches the rubric for success upon which you will be graded? The risk not doing so is too great.
Cory’s meditation on learning to write is a microcosm of what universities are facing. The constraints that now exist on teachers and students of higher learning have transformed institutions ever further away for their stated missions of being places of learning and inquiry. Universities are trying hard to balance their core missions of creating spaces active and powerful learning, research and intellectual formation with the ill informed political mandates that are constraining that very mission. The result will be devastating over the long term, doubling down on a generation of students who are already indentured debtors, who were educated in a way that minimally supported their learning by teachers who were prevented from teaching good process and helping students explore, stumble, fail, and grow.
That has impacts on the workplace because it requires employers to do the education that universities are no longer able to do. If a student doesn’t learn to write in university because the cost of failure is too high they are going to have to learn on the job. Most employers trust the education system to provide them with generally competent well rounded people that are capable of basic permanent skills. That’s the bargain of public education.
When I hear employers complaining about “this current generation” of new graduates it makes me want to ask them what they did to ensure that the public education system was working at its absolute best. The ability for folks to teach and learn at every level of the education system has been eroded by resources cut by austerity measures or ideological decisions. The pressure from people who are employers to cut government funding or to go to war against particular ideological bugaboos, be they social, cultural or scientific, further erodes both the resources and methods that are used to educate students.
Writing, reading, expressing yourself, engaging in dialogue, collaborating, and creating are all permanent skills. The trend in education of all kinds is to make these skills inferior to the measurable and temporary skills because they are not measurable in transactional and financially relevant ways. They are life skills. They require mentorship, safety in failure and exploration from teachers who can help a student see where they are and grow. Education should be the place from which students are launched with the ability to develop and refine their practices of these skills over a lifetime.
This is how a university turns out citizens who contribute to the world from a secure place of knowledge and confidence. Trained as permanent learners.
Short-term thinking driven by fiscal or ideological concerns builds a system that encourages students to cheat, or more precisely, waste their learning time gaming the system so they achieve the carrot of approval. It drives teachers crazy, who grow more and more powerless to stop it. And it turns out into the world young adults who are woefully ill equipped for a world of massive uncertainty which requires diverse brilliance, talent and creativity.
It’s a gift to read thoughtful takes on that language, concept and practices of being in complexity I never cease to be inspired by folks who write on this stuff. As someone who has to teach and explain this to all kinds of different people in all kinds of contexts, that inspiration matters.
Here’s Jen Briselli writing on her experience playing hockey:
Like much of our day to day lives, hockey is both complicated and complex. The complicated parts can be trained. The complex parts must be sensed.
Much of this has been made clearer for me because I came to the game late. Though I watched hockey as a fan, I didn’t grow up playing. I started skating in my late 20s, which means I don’t have the same muscle memory as people who’ve been on skates since toddlerhood. My stickhandling won’t turn heads, and my shots don’t challenge most goalies. But I do possess a fluency for the dynamics of the game and I know how to respond to whatever scenario I find myself in. I can track the shape of a play, notice when the energy shifts, sense when to step up and when to hang back.
Even when I’m one of the slower, smaller skaters surrounded by faster, larger men, my anticipatory positioning keeps the puck out of dangerous places. Despite my unremarkable skating, passing, and shooting skills, when I turn off my goal-oriented pre-meditative brain and rely instead on a visceral connection to what’s happening around me, I can often hold my own with players that are objectively more skilled. (It doesn’t hurt that we’re talking recreational beer league hockey here, but the principles hold true across any type of dynamic human environment.)
That echoes my experience of really learning how to play soccer in my early 40s, never in competitive full-sided games, but rather in small-sided rec leagues or friendly tournaments, where I get to practice all of those embodied skills.
I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.
The view across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island, on a calm and quiet New Year’s Day.
A beautiful, mild and glass-calm day to start the year. There was fog at the mouth of the Sound that lifted during the morning. We walked in a large loop around the Cape Roger Curtis lands, looping through the trails and the Conservancy lands, nature reserve, and the waterfront path. All told its about a 7 kilometre loop and it takes you through forest, down creeks, past waterfalls and along the cliff tops of Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, the edge of the world, the edge of Squamish territory, the southern edge of Atl’ka’7tsem/Howe Sound. It’s my favourite place on Bowen, looking out over the wide open Strait of Georgia and the Salish Sea. From the bluffs one can see, on a clear day, the islands of Puget Sound to the south and the norther Gulf Islands of Texada and Lasquiti to the north. Across the Strait the Mountains of Vancouver Island rise, and nearly all of the northern Coast Salish territories are visible. It’s an amazing place.
Today we saw 23 species of birds, including a pair of marbled murrelets, several hooded mergansers, buffleheads, red necked grebes, and a few of the hundreds of surf scoters that spend the winter around our islands. This is going to be a big year of birdwatching, with planned trips to Costa Rica and France and several trips to eastern Canada on the docket for this year. I’m wondering if I can make it to 365 birds for the year so we’ll see.
Back at home, Spurs drew Brentford 0-0 in an insipid draw, but in the hockey world, my Maple Leafs came back twice from being two goals down to win an 11 goal thriller 6-5. Auston Matthews scored a hat trick. Hopefully this signals a change in form for one of my blue and white teams. The other one may need to do some business in the January transfer window to regain some dignity.
Phil Rosenthal, being interviewed by Tom Power.
Phil Rosenthal, interviewed last year by Tom Power on Q at CBC talking about what it was like when he stepped into running Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s great interview, but I love the section that begins at 21 minutes. It was his first job as a show runner, and he learned from other bosses he had worked for. He was scared, and he was a rookie. But he established a clear vision and then took care of the connective tissue between his staff. He adopted a persona that was “nice” rather than dictatorial. He wanted people to love coming to work. He focused on the food that people ate, and hired a chef to delight the staff and give them something to connect over. Adopting the principles of “the army travels on its stomach” he knew that food would bring the cast and crew together in a way that abstract hand waving at values could not. The result was that the show created a feeling of family.
A family is not always the best generative image for an organization. Families are complicated, and full of tricky dynamics. But when they work well, they anchor loyalty to one another and create sustaining love and friendship. When people talk about their workplace as “my family” it’s usually because they experience the best of what a family can be. A chosen family. Rosenthal gets that and he gets what it takes to put his optimistic worldview into practice. He says “Food is the great connector and laughter is the cement.” To paraphrase Harrison Owen, who was a devoted observer of high performing teams. trust the people and notice when they are laughing because that is a sign that it’s working.
In the past few years I have seen so many workplaces and organizations that could benefit from this simple wisdom, this gentle approach. It is often the small things that make the difference, that build the connective tissue that keeps a team going through the inevitable ups and downs of organizational life. you have to work on the love part, because people don’t always like each other, or don’t always like the behaviours and actions. If that isn’t attended to, groups of people can reach a social impasse and sometimes the only move left is to leave or come apart. That entails tremendous cost to individuals and to the organization. It is sometimes the only fix, but it won’t always leave you stronger. And even if it does, the work is to repair, to take a new approach and build trust and friendship and commitment to one another back into the work. It’s a long and slow process, because once trust is diminished, it is requires deep commitment to change to re-establish it.
We’re in a world where trust seems very low and self-awareness, responsibility, and a willingness to grow together is at a premium. These are what Harold Jarche calls “permanent skills” and they need training and practice on the regular. They don’t go away and there is no place or time when they are not helpful.