h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My old dissertation director and paradigm shifter Haj Ross sent a message out to some of his students/colearners today that is ruining my cerebral digestion this afternoon. Someone asked him to write up a sort of teaching agenda, a mixture of personal and pedagogical philosophy that would explain what and why he does and will do in his classes, followed by a quote from a novel someone sent him that seems to illustrate the kind of "eureka!" moment he is after. Here it is:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 01:28:26 -0500 (CDT)
From: Ross John Robert
To: Haj Ross
Subject: Haj's agenda

Haj Ross
Linguistics / Poetics
University of North Texas
Texas Woman's University
[email protected]


The unleashed power of the atom has changed
everything save our modes of thinking. And
thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

"It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that modern
methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy
curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from
stimulation, stands warmly in need of freedom; without this, it
goes to wrack and ruin without fail."

"The really valuable thing is the Intuition. The
intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes
a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, and
the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why."

Albert Einstein


Abstract: I seek a profound change in the way we think, a change
which must be accompanied by a change in the way we learn. My focus for learning is on Gregory Bateson's notion of deutero-learning, or learning
how to learn. The changes in thinking / learning are fusional, along
many dimensions. I follow Morris Berman in his insistence that we need
to fuse fact and value; I see such a blending as a part of an even
greater flowing together. I suggest that we fuse science, art, religion
and philosophy - that we treat them all as being ways of seeing or perhaps
as being facets of one great nameless jewel. And that we replace the
notion of teaching with the symmetrical concept of colearning - that we
see everyone in the classroom as one kind of learner or another, with the
differences between us being only those of levels of learning, along a
hierarchy which starts like this: learning, teaching, teaching teachers,
teaching teachers of teachers, . . . .
In such a vision, there is no place for grading, which I feel to be
an obstruction to the deepest forms of learning, in which we find a
blending of work and play. Finally, all of these views are rooted in a
view of human existence that takes us to be a composite of mind, body,
heart, and spirit, a composite done honor to by the Chinese word "xin," or
by the Japanese equivalent "kokoro," but belied by the quadripartite
lexical fissioning we encounter in English and other Western languages.
My goal is a university for the xin / kokoro, not one like most present
ones, which are concerned almost exclusively with mind. I seek a
UNIVERSity, characterized by the proFUNdity of the colearning which
happens there, learning which is entered into by integrated beings, which
can be seen best by fusing the views offered by the four facets of spirit,
mind, heart, and body.

The three Einstein quotes above are as good a place as anywhere else that I can think of to begin to try to ground my agenda - the "things to
be done."

I am not alone in my belief that we are presently in a dark wood.
I, with many others, feel that we are imprisoned in the kind of thinking
that holds science to be the only way to truth, a stance that has been
termed "scientism." Science is one way, but when we leave out of our
science a feeling for beauty, a sense of wonder which is hardly separable
from our own realization of the degree to which we are limited, and the
deepest understanding that if our actions are not grounded in a
transcendental order of being they cannot bring us to the peace which we
need - when there are holes of this size in any science, all it can
furnish us with is fact.

I find many of our institutions of higher learning to be thin, wan.
From their names, we might expect that they would connect the learners
within them to all of universe - but to our sorrow, we find that they
concentrate so much on mind that they leave out the other three cardinal
points of our being: heart, body, and spirit. The Chinese word "xin,"
and its Japanese translation "kokoro," denote that totality of our nature.
I want most deeply to help coinvent a university for the xin / kokoro.

To do this, we will need to find a fusion of fact and value, as
Morris Berman phrases it in his brilliant "The Reenchantment of the
World." And I hope that all of us will start looking for such a fusion
fast. Our UNIVERSity must abandon the fostering of what Gregory Bateson calls, "proto-learning" (like learning chess, or Italian, or cooking) and move to ever-higher levels in Bateson's hierarchy of orders of learning:
"deutero-learning," which is learning how to learn, "learning III," which
is learning how to deutero-learn, etc.

But how are we going to rev up our learning motors? My suggestion
here, also unoriginal, is that we should model our learning environments
after those of the most fearless and creative learners that we know of
-our children. And from their mode of learning ("natural learning," as I
will refer to it), I have lifted two aspects. The first is the fusion
into one verb of what we can only express as two:


.....P
.....L
LE A R N
.....Y


The second aspect of natural learning which we must learn better
than we have thus far is its collaborative nature. Just as shared play
is funner, so is shared discovery more exciting, and I believe even
deeper. If one can bring to one's thinking these two traits - serious
play, and total openness to collaborative thinking - then a kind of
"colearning" becomes possible that I have shared the experience of with
groups of people in various countries, and on various occasions.

Briefly, what happens is that the people who are gathered together
for the purpose of learning more in some area fuse into a collective
being, one which has its own goals, and its own way of communicating.
Very often, it is not the teacher whose words are heard as being the most
helpful and important. I will not soon forget being in such a class in a
summer school at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Mr. Long, a
visitor from the People's Republic, stood up and said what I had been
trying to get across for quite some time and said it indelibly, much
better than I had been able to. We all applauded after he sat down. I
believe that probably for most of us in that room, that phrasing of Mr.
Long's was a high point of our time together.

Teachers often talk of a class jelling. I think that what is meant
by this expression is the emergence of what would scientistically be
called the class identity, but what I would prefer to call the soul of the
class. From the limited amount that I have seen, what helps to catalyze
such events, such births, is a lot of listening on my part, and amounts of
humility that are normally way beyond me. When I have been graced to
participate as one voice in the chorus of voices which is how such
collective beings talk to themselves, it has been an experience which I
can only describe as soaring.

I use such words as soul and grace (ill-)advisedly. I do not mean
to put off people who have trouble with such words, but I find the usual
workaday words with which one might describe these encounters (inspiring, moving, deep, etc.) not even close to being up to what those who have been participants feel.

I am sure that many will find that what I have written here is flaky,
impractical, overly idealistic, a spaceshot, etc. Indeed, there are loud
inner voices in me which yell such criticisms at me. I admit that I am
flying blind. My only defense, if that is what I need, is that whatever
intuitive sense (I usually call it my nose) has carried me to syntactic or
poetic analyses that others have found useful feels like it has been
involved in carrying me also to these admittedly revolutionary
conclusions.

And I have been heartened and encouraged beyond measure by the
kind words of others who have participated in these collective adventures
aloft - my fellow colearners. Without their help and support, I might
not dare to be saying this now.

The agenda which I argue for here is our birthright. We have,
through carelessness, perhaps, let our educational system slide down to a
point at which what I am advocating, and must advocate, seems unreachable. But I know it to be reachable, and can settle for nothing less. I feel we clip the wings of our children and their children if we do not
restructure the ways we come together to learn so that what some of the
classes who I have learned with is not exceptional, but simply to be
expected.


*

He was taking a shower in his apartment. Suddenly his body turned
light as a feather. His head lifted up off his shoulders, and he felt
like the time he had planed in a sailboat. The boat had been traveling
at normal speed, but the wind had been extremely high. Without warning
the hull lifted out of the water and the drag instantly dropped to near
zero and the boat began flying, as if some giant hand had grabbed the mast
and flung the boat over the surface like a skimming stone.

He was planing. He sank down on the tiles, with the water
pouring over his head, and saw his error as well as the entire solution to
his problem. A mixture of particles was more fragile than a pure
population; a mixture made the gravothermal catastrophe more likely to
happen. The answer appeared in his mind as a beautiful curve and he
tingled and shivered. It had to be right. He leaped out of the shower.
Without bothering to get dressed, or even to dry off, he went to the
kitchen table and got out his pages of calculations and a new pad of white
paper and began writing. He lost track of time, he lost track of his
body. He was completely outside of himself, outside of the world.
Within two hours he had reworked his problem in complete quantitative
detail. Shaking, he graphed the solution and it matched the arc in his
mind. The equations, which over the last months had grown tired and
suspicious, came to life, and they were right and they were graceful and
they glistened like a moon over trees.

He never understood how he had found his mistake, but it
wasn't by going from one equation to the next. Somehow, his subconscious mind had been studying the problem in its own slender way, spotted an error, and then danced to the answer. A year later, he decided that the problem was indeed trivial, as the fellow student had said. The
sacrament of certainty was perhaps an illusion. But the sensation of
planing, that swift soaring breath of discovery, was not an illusion. And
for a while he, the discoverer, was the only person on earth who knew this
new thing. He would soon get dressed and go to his office, he would take
his results to Professor Jacoby and tell his colleagues, he would publish
his results in the "Physical Review." But for those few moments at his
kitchen table, he was alone with his discovery, he knew something true
that no one else knew, and he had vast power in the world.

From Alan Lightman, "Good Benito," Warner Books, New York
(1994) ISBN 0-446-67160-6

A present from Dorian Darrow
June 15, 1997.


Some other resonances

Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind," Ballantine, New York
(1972)
Morris Berman, "The Reenchantment of the World," Bantam, New York (1981)
Carl Rogers, "Freedom to Learn," Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company,
Columbus, Ohio (1969)
Haj Ross, "Network learning," Diversity, Volume 3, Summer 1995, pp. 27-38
(1995)

So here I sit, with four classes of expository writing for speakers of English as a second language looking to me to teach them the intricacies of college writing and the fastest surest way to continuous A's, and Haj drops this whole "fun" thing on me. How do I meet the expectations of students, administrators, and mysekf while encouraging the kind of risk-taking, playful inquiry Haj advocates? My students want to write error-free prose. How do I get them to think about _what_ they are writing more and where the commas go _less_, knowing that they will leave my colearning comunity ands move on to Prof. Grundy's Boring Pedantry 505 class and get their hearts broken?
I am not saying that what Haj wants is impractical or impracticable; what I am trying to figure out is how to make it happen in my little patch of the UNIVERSity.
I imagine the exchange:
"We need to have more fun in this class, students."
"More fun sit? Yes, sir, right away sir. Will there be a test?"


 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Whew. That was *some* post....

What can I tell you? It was on my mind. Still is, as I crawl through my late-afternoon mental haze to my evening class, how to make sure I leave room in the schedule every day for some fun with the language. The fact that I'm still thinking in terms of schedules is probably a sign of how far I have to go.