5. Physical Education Part I: Your Brain Is Writing This Down

Writing and Looking at the Bird and What It's Doing

[Previously]

“Deliver me from the days of old.”

When you're a little kid . . . you're a little bit of everything. Artist, scientist, athlete, scholar. Sometimes it seems like growing up is the process of giving those things up, one by one. ––The Wonder Years, Episode 13

A student wrote about how he hated his high school phys. ed. class. He called it the worst part of the school week. Then there was the day the teacher had all the students get in line to do chin-ups one by one with everyone watching. The author foresaw his undoing, so he hung back, hoping the class bell would rescue him.

The bar was too high. He wasn’t tall enough to reach it and was too heavy to jump up to it. On top of this, the clock did not cooperate, and the writer was forced to meet his doom. Standing beneath the bar, he made a few futile leaps to reach it. His classmates snickered. The impatient gym teacher intervened, grabbed him in a bear hug around the waist, then boosted him up. Dangling from the bar, the writer tried his best, straining, squirming, and kicking, while his teacher commanded him to pull harder.

He did what his teacher said. He pulled and pulled. He felt veins bulging in his neck and forehead. It got him nowhere. He wrote that he just hung there until, finally, his hands gave out, and he dropped to the mat with a thud. Everyone laughed. His humiliation was complete, and the writer sat off to the side for the rest of the period, muttering under his breath, wishing to disappear.

The writer’s story was his response to an assignment that asked people to write about a successful or a failed learning experience. The purpose was to see if it might be possible for the class to develop some ideas about what makes a learning experience a success or a failure. My aim, which I hadn’t yet revealed, was to have students come up with a few principles that could later be applied to writing instruction and practices. (The learning theme was just a head fake.)

When we discussed the physical education essay as a full class, most students thought there was no teaching going on and no learning, either. All the teacher did was shout orders and leave the writer hanging. That ain’t teaching, they said.

Everyone in class could relate, though. They'd all been left hanging by teachers at some point, they complained.

After some discussion, the English students came up with a list of things their classmate learned:

• Gym class sucks.

• I’m no good at this.

• School is hell.

• Teachers are jerks.

• Sports are no fun.

In Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson updated their earlier work on metaphor based on new developments in neurology. What we learn changes us physically, they say. This fits with Lang’s new pathways idea. The student’s story connects with Lakoff and Johnson’s work by showing the negative side of this. Even learning the wrong things is learning.

As we learn our concepts, they become parts of our bodies. Learned concepts are embodied via permanent or very long-term changes in our synapses. Much of our conceptual system, so deeply embodied, cannot become unlearned or overridden, at least not by some act of will and almost never quickly and easily.

This is how the habitual patterning we saw in the dance newsletter forms. You could say what the gym student learned that day made quite an impression. It is still a part of him. Literally. Like a wart.

A student from another class once wrote, “If you are married to the rooster, you will follow the rooster; if you are married to the dog, you will follow the dog.” It’s a traditional saying about using caution in choosing a spouse. It’s a warning teachers should heed as well. Whether they know it or not, they are married to one method or another, and they do whatever it tells them to do. (“Yes, Dear,” they say.) This teacher was married to the drill sergeant model. He saw his role in the learning process as running a kind of boot camp designed to toughen students up.

But teachers are not the only ones who leave students hanging. They have accomplices—the textbooks they assign. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, travel writer Bill Bryson tackles science, a subject he had avoided most of his life. When he describes what inspired a nonscientist to write a book about science, he tells the story of a young Bill Bryson who saw a diagram of the earth’s layers in his elementary school textbook. He found the diagram so exciting, he couldn’t wait to read about it. When he turned from the illustration to the text, however, he was in for a shock: it was boring. Really boring. Also, he couldn’t understand it. How could something that looked so interesting be so dull? He writes, “There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call away from the frankly interesting.” After that, he steered clear of science over the years, he says, and “grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn’t be . . .”

As science journalist Natalie Angier points out, what Bryson describes is a common problem in education. She quotes physics professor Peter Galison about this incredible ability of school to suck the fun out of some of the most fun things ever:

We had to work really hard to accomplish this spectacular feat, because I’ve never met a little kid who didn’t think science was really fun and really interesting. But after years of writing tedious textbooks . . . and presenting science as a code you can’t crack, of divorcing science from ordinary human processes that use it daily, guess what: We did it. We persuaded a large number of people that what they once thought was fascinating, fun, the most natural thing in the world, is alien to their existence.

In days of old, we often did the same with writing. (Not anymore, right?) Traditionally, we’ve been damned good at taking the fun out of it. So what can be done? Physicist Richard Feynman provides an alternative approach to education. In an interview, Feynman talked about his “little kid” years and how much fun it was to learn things from his non-scientist father who, he explained, “knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Even when Mr. Feynman read to his son from the encyclopedia––not often high on the list of thrilling reads––it was “exciting.” When he read about Tyrannosaurus rex, he didn’t just recite the facts or present the information "as a code you can't crack" or as something that was "divorced from ordinary human processes"—he made the words come to life:

the encyclopedia would say something like this thing is twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across, you see. So he'd stop all this and say, “Let's see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the [second floor] window . . .” Everything we'd read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so that I learned to do that––everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying by translating.

Mr. Feynman didn’t leave his son hanging. He took a child’s foggy notion of 25 feet and made it real by showing him what it would mean to have a reptile that large outside in his yard. The concept of Tyrannosaurus rex was no longer alien to his existence. This is exactly what young Bryson needed—to have someone translate that cool diagram into some reality for him.

Another time, Mr. Feynman and his son came upon a brown spot on a leaf as they walked in the woods. Looking at the leaf his son found, Mr. Feynman spun a tale about a fly which laid an egg there and when the egg hatched there was a tiny maggot that ate from the leaf, leaving behind a widening brown trail as it grew until it matured and turn into a fly. This fanciful story was not just some easily forgotten, ho-hum lesson about reproduction. It had another purpose. In a TED Talk, computer scientist Randy Pausch uses the term “head fake” to describe a particular teaching method. He explains,

We send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it's the first example of what I'm going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don't want our kids to learn football . . . [Instead] we send our kids out to learn much more important things: teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance.

With his fly story, Mr. Feynman was doing a head fake. His real aim, says his son, was to teach him “to notice things,” and that a brown spot on a leaf is not just a brown spot on a leaf. Reading from the encyclopedia was not just a lesson from paleontology––it was about “translation,” about how to read and understand. As Feynman grew up, because he had been taught to notice things, he learned to read the world, not just the encyclopedia.

In addition, his father taught him that memorizing things such as the names of the birds is a superficial kind of knowing. You might know the name, but you still wouldn’t know much about the bird. It would be better, he said, to “look at the bird and what it’s doing.” These lessons transferred for Feynman so he could apply them in novel situations. One day, for instance, he noticed the way a ball in a wagon rolled to the back when he pulled the wagon and then rolled to the front when he stopped. He asked his father why the ball did that, and his father told him that the word for what was happening is “inertia,” but he didn't stop there—he didn't leave his son hanging. Instead, he told him to go back and look again to see if the ball rolls to the back of the wagon or if he is pulling the wagon out from under the ball. Feynman then returned to his wagon and looked at the ball and what it was doing by observing it in relation to the sidewalk instead of in relation to the wagon. This was when he saw with his own eyes how the ball was behaving. Because of this, inertia became more to him than just another bird with a name. Mr. Feynman’s earlier head fakes had taught his son that there’s more going on and that he shouldn’t be satisfied with ready answers or with what he thinks he sees.

Feynman’s father was not married to the drill sergeant/gym teacher model. For him, learning was not about finding out who “has it” and who doesn’t. He wasn’t trying to toughen anyone up. Lessons were not lectures and the topic was rarely the point. Instead, it was walks in the woods and “lovely, interesting discussions” with “no pressure.”

Instead of creating a pressure-packed culture of haves and have-nots, of forcing people to attempt chin-ups in front a of tough crowd, imagine if the writer’s physical education teacher focused on providing a place for students of all sizes to feel safe and on helping them to feel what it’s like to use their bodies more, a place where a short, heavy boy might learn pressure-free ways to feel more at home in his own skin.

For decades, (and based on my experiences as a writing student) a lot of writing instruction was the names of the birds with some drill sergeant thrown in. Given how I’ve seen my students react to writing assignments, I suspect many are still experiencing it in this way. Some are like the gym class writer, staring at the pull-up bar unable to imagine how they could reach it. Somewhere, they learned that they were not up to the task and just didn’t have the right stuff. Those fears and insecurities then became a part of them, and all their self-fulfilling prophesies came true. Because of this, many have been unable to see writing the way Feynman saw the world, a world where a brown spot on a leaf has a story to tell, where encyclopedic facts can spring to life, where birds are so much more than their names.

Writing education is physical education. Like in the writer’s story, the wrong messages can be sent directly or indirectly, and they become written into our gray matter. The hard part about writing may not be what’s on the paper so much as what writing instruction has done to the inside of our skulls. The toughest part of my job was helping students unlearn some of the drill sergeant things about writing that had become embodied for them.

Though Lakoff and Johnson say rewriting the brain can’t be done quickly or easily, there are ways. Mr. Feynman’s methods can apply to the writing classroom with head fakes, translating writing concepts into some reality, and looking at what the heck this writing bird is doing. This makes things seem less daunting and will create a more enriched environment, where new pathways will open up creating space for us to revise some old stories that our brains have been writing down about us and our abilities as writers or athletes or dancers or whatever else we are so convinced we cannot do.

In Physical Education Part II, we will talk about rocks and look at the world through a skateboarder’s eyes.

Notes

Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

Randy Pausch [not the original video that I used with my students (which I can’t find) but he explains here using the same comparisons.]