Building bridges

Sometimes first impressions can be mistaken. Yesterday I taught my second English lesson to a group of teenagers at Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Vietnam. Two of the keener students arrived early and chatted happily in Vietnamese before a boy I didn't know came into the room. They argued. The new boy looking intimidating with a tattoo and angry face. When he left, I asked if my two students were OK and they smiled and shrugged it off. 

The rest of the students arrived and the lesson started. We sat in a circle on a carpet and I used a pile of lego to introduce the English colours. Working in pairs, the learning task was to make a bridge out of lego saying the number and colour of blocks as they took them from the pile: "two red, four green" etc. The finished bridges needed to be big and strong enough to cross a piece of A4 paper.

At this stage the angry boy with the tattoo came back into the room. He came around the circle and sat close beside me. I handed him some lego and watched as he tentatively tried to put them together. I showed him how to pull blocks apart and he experimented and grew in confidence as he discovered how the lego worked. I tried a few English words for numbers and colours but he didn't engage. So I started building a bridge. One block at a time I made a base and a series of steps and my newest student copied the process to build his side of the structure. When each of our sides was big enough, we joined them with a final block and added our bridge to the others spanning a piece of paper. He turned to me and smiled.

Only today did the rather blatant symbolism of the task occur to me. The bridge I hope I built was one that takes a young boy from insecurity to a little more confidence. A bridge that makes him feel more accepted and confident. A bridge that builds his humanity. That's the bridge he built for me.

Digging

(in homage to Seamus Heaney) 

How has it taken

Fifty four years 

To learn the difference 

Between a spade 

And a shovel?

Spades I’ve had many,

But the shovel is recent.

Inherited from my 

Father-in-law who

Knew his tools.

He owned two scythes,

The blades brought back

As hand luggage from 

Austria in the days 

When that was possible.

Despite owning a slasher,

He still cut grass

With the Scythe. 

Said the cows liked it better

Untainted by fumes.

Sweeping in great arcs

He showed me

How the blade was angled, 

Just so, to catch 

The grass along its edge:

“To Slice, not Chop.”

Precise words to 

Describe an action

Honed as keen

As the blade.

Pausing often

To run the whet stone 

Over the edge,

He told me the secret

To a good blade:

“Have just the right compromise 

Between Hardness and Flexibility.”

Too hard and the blade will snap;

Too soft and you won’t 

Get a fine cutting edge.

In Austria, he said,

A good scythe was 

A treasured thing.

Before it wore down

It was taken to the Blacksmith

Who would twang it with 

A finger, listening 

To the vibrations

And transfer the same note 

To a new blade: 

Just hard enough to cut well;

Not so hard as to be brittle.

Each new blade a song 

Going back generations -

Singing the instrument 

To its perfect shape.

…

In my garden 

The shovel is a revelation

The back-breaking 

Spade work transformed 

Into something elegant and precise;

A measured economy of 

Movement that has

A rhythm like poetry. 

The length 

Of the handle

Teaching me to bend

And use my legs, 

Hands positioned to

Make the most of 

The angle of the blade.

Bend, slice, lever

Lift, thrust, flick

And the motion

Repeats drawing me

Into a reverie 

And memories of 

My uncle in Shetland

Showing me the peat bog

Where he cut slabs 

Of peat for the winter.

The tools looking 

Like crazed creations

From a lunatic blacksmith

But having, in fact,

A form perfect for their function.

Nick, slice, lever, 

Lift, thrust and pile

The sods on the bank

Where they dry to provide heat 

Through the winter.

On the hill nearby 

Are the marks of peat lines

That contour down, 

Fading as the new 

Heather heals the scars.

Each line another chapter 

In the story of generations

That dig this hill,

Bottom to top in a 

Rhythm that marks millennia.

…

My driveway is quickly finished.

A couple of days enough 

For it to look like new

And for me to discover

This tool that teaches me

Who I am.

Playing With Fire

Words lick at the air 

Igniting a reaction - 

Fuel to heat, 

Comfort or pain, 

Tongues that dance 

Probing the ear, 

Fingers that itch 

To touch forbidden fruit. 

Risking the moment 

We steal from the gods 

This ember of meaning.

Breathe gently upon it 

And watch it glow.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What made my reading of this book so interesting was that I was given my copy by my friend Pete who is an engineer. Every Friday night Pete and I ride our pushbikes 25 kms around the east side of Singapore, drink a beer or two and ride back again. We talk: Pete about engineering, me about teaching and the books I read. One Friday Pete passed me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and said he'd always wanted to read it; he'd bought two copies and we could read and chat about it each week. Thus began a remarkable bookclub.

What Pete loved and helped me to see better was the idea of an engineering problem as holistic. When things go wrong you can treat the symptom or you can think more holistically to understand the nature of the system. But, as Zen and the Art explains, the engineering systems we engage with also include the user as an integral element and so the problem is always more than just physics. The relationships between humans and the world we shape are reciprocal and complex and engineering is art as well as science.

That's the easy bit. Prisig then goes into an exploration of how the reification of the mechanical world seeps into the management of education and the human sciences. Somewhere around the last third of the book my understanding began to waver and Pete's company recalled him to the US. I'm not sure what we would or could have made of this last section. I'm not even sure whether Pirsig knows. At some point, it seems to me, all great writing reaches the limits of what can be said. Pirsig pushes those limits leaving me grateful for what I have understood, and a little in awe of what I have not.

I highly recommend the book, bike-riding book clubs, and clever people who see the world differently to you.

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The company I keep

The company I keep 

Includes poets. 

Odd individuals 

Who see the world sideways, 

Lurking in conversations, 

Waiting for the weird words, 

The unusual observations,

And surreptitiously wrapping them 

In paper napkins 

To sneak them home. 

Best to keep your insights hidden 

Lest they pilfer those too 

And sell them to the world in a poem.

A friend has been writing a poem a day and publishing on Facebook. At dinner last night he was asked if he'd written the day's poem. "I'll do it later" he said, "hopefully someone will say something that will give me inspiration". 

 

The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750 by David Wootton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book matters. It matters generally because of its meticulous scholarship and its well-reasoned articulation of the processes that underpin scientific knowledge. It matters specifically now as an antidote to the forces of counter-scientific thinking that, through ignorance or self-serving lies, are picking away at the fabric of society and academia.

In the context of COVID, a robust and reliable scientific process is life-saving. What I came to better appreciate through reading Wootton is both how recent and also how fragile the processes we call "science" really are. My crude understanding prior to reading the book was that the key transition into modern thought occured with Aristotle. Plato represented antiquity with the proper locus of inquiry being the mind; the objects of the world are no more than interesting approximations of intellectual "forms" and of limited use to the thinking philosopher. However misguided much of Aristotle's thinking may have been, I understood science to have begun with Aristotle's determination to investigate the details of the world through observation and classification.

Wootton argues convincingly that just observing the world and documenting what is seen is not enough to form the foundations of science. What is missing until the 16th and 17th centuries is a true scientific process and a culture of inquiry. And for such a process and culture to exist, Wooton demonstrates, a series of social and technological advances needed to be made. The printing press is necessary because knowledge has to be widely available and documented clearly so that others can test and verify. Advances in technology are important because they provide the precision instruments that allow for the careful and replicable measurement of the natural world. A culture of inquiry built on the social investment in the 16th century voyages of discovery supports the elevation of individual thinkers who can explore the natural world in new ways. Wootton's chapter on the historical evolution of the concept of a "fact" is both exhaustive in its scholarship and compelling in its argument that an enlightenment understanding of a "fact" is qualitatively different to any understanding that preceded it. Before the enlightenment, "fact" had more of the quality of the modern concept of "gossip" relying on hearsay and authority; after the enlightenment, a "fact" requires validation in objective evidence. This is the true origins of modern science.

Most interesting for me is Wootton's explanation of the relativism of the mid 20th century. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, the post-structural thinking of Jacques Derrida was influential. I found the arguments (to the extent that I understood them) compelling and persuasive but also deeply unsettling as they seemed to uncouple the mind from the world. In the final chapters of his book, Wootton offers a rapprochement by reminding the reader of the "whiggish" history to which Derrida and others in the relativist tradition were reacting.

What stopped Aristotelian philosophy maturing to become modern science were the mechanisms of self-serving social power which permeate language and culture. The post-modern philosophers provide a clear articulation of these processes. What Wootton argues - very convincingly to my mind - is that it's possible to understand the thinking of Derrida and Wittgenstein and others as a useful addition to the history of science rather than as a refutation of scientific process. Scientific thought needs to be understood as both a social and a "factual" process.


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Banksia

When I trace my hand it’s 

Naturally the right that 

Picks up the pencil and marks

The page with tracing lines.

Dominance ironically results 

In the right being erased

And the image on the 

Page emerges as a

Mirror to that

Determination to define.

The wordless left:

An empty space

Inside the boundaries 

That seek to contain 

And frame and

Control.

The spirit of the Law,

A Terra Nullius,

Which we try to contain 

Within the legal letters that write

Who belongs where.

The vast openness 

That Banks and Cook 

Traced as they sailed

North labelling the

Flora and Fauna.

…

An educational mentor

Reminded me regularly that

“Values are Caught

Not Taught.”

“Create the right space” 

He said, 

“Model respect,”

Which he did,

Walking gently through 

The world. 

…

We wear paths 

In the landscape.

Tracings 

That define

Us

And circle 

The soils

Too beautiful, 

Too soft,

For words.

“Whereof one cannot speak

Thereof one must be silent.”*

Tracing our words

We map the edges 

Of the known world.

*Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. 

Banksia

This poem is my attempt to grapple with ideas in two remarkable books: Sand Talk: how indigenous thinking can change the world by Tyson Yunkaporta and The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

The book that began it all was McGilchrist’s and I came across his writing after hearing an interesting story. A couple of years ago, the judges of the High Court of Australia (that’s the court that interprets the constitution) were grappling with the problem of how they interpret the “spirit” of the law in contrast to the “letter” of the law. On the one hand, they have the documents that lay down understandings with a semblance of clarity through the reified language of the law; on the other hand, they have their understandings of the context in which laws are created by humans who make sense of the world in more than just words. The role of judges is to interpret the law but the words on the page don’t necessarily represent the entirety of the intent of the law makers who wrote them - particularly if you consider that much of our thinking and understanding is non-verbal. 

So the High Court judges looked around for someone to help them think through this problem and found McGilchrist. They invited him to Australia to join them for a study retreat. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist: at various times he has been Clinical Director at Bethlehem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London, a researcher in neuroimaging at John Hopkins University, and a lecturer in English at Oxford University. The core argument in his book is that individuals have two basic modes for engaging with the world which correspond in loose neurological terms with functions in the two hemispheres of the brain. The one is when we put the world into words; the other is when we look for patterns and relationships. Describing the latter function he writes:

Another way of thinking of this would be more generally in terms of the ultimate importance of context. Context is that ‘something’ (in reality nothing less than a world) in which whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it. The problem with the ‘attentional spotlight’, as conventional psychological literature calls it, is that this isolates the object of attention from its context - not just its surroundings, but the depth in which it lives. It opacifies it. Our vision stops at ‘the thing itself’. The price is that this sheering away of the context produces something lifeless and mechanical. In a famous passage in the Meditations, Descartes speaks of looking form a window and seeing men pass on the street. ‘Yet’, he reflects, ‘do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.’ It is not surprising that, shorn by the philosophical stare of all context that might give them meaning, the coats and hats that Descartes sees from his window walking about in the street could be animated by a machine. They have become fully opaque; the observer no longer passes through them to see the living person beneath. He no longer sees what is implied. However, the attention of the right hemisphere, concerned as it is with the being in context, permits us to see through them to the reality that lies around and beyond them. It could not make the mistake of seeing the clothes and hats in isolation. (p.181)

Words show us what is, context show us what it means. Through an exhaustive review of neuropsychological research and a detailed journey through the history of philosophy and art and literature, McGilchrist shows how an increasing separation between words and context is a hallmark of Western civilisation. He argues that this has made societies increasingly bureaucratic and structured and decreasingly adaptive and engaged. The letter of the law is engulfing the spirit of democracy.

Which is pretty much what Tyson Yunkaporta argues too, but in a very different way. 

Yunkaporta is an Alpalech man from Western Cape York in the north of Australia and a lecturer in Indigenous Knowledge at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. In Sand Talk, he explores the contrast between western thought and indigenous thought; how each frames the world and responds to its problems. He writes about “haptic” or embodied knowledge and argues that:

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships - deep connections between generations of people in custodial relationship to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn’t need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently. (p.167)

I don’t know if McGilchrist and Yunkaporta have ever met, but if they did, I would sure like to sit by and listen to that yarn. 

Yunkaporta writes often about hands - as mnemonic devices, as the physical conduits of thought - and I think it is from him that I picked up the metaphor of hands in my poem. He doesn’t write in his book about James Cook or Joseph Banks, the Captain and gentleman botanist of The Endeavour which sailed up the east coast of Australia in 1770. Both characters fascinate me. I’ve read Cook’s log in the remarkable book H.M. Bark the Endeavour by Ray Parkin and Patrick O’Brien’s insightful Joseph Banks, a Life and neither Cook nor Banks strike me as the kinds of people who would have wished for the environmental and cultural destruction their mapping unleashed. 

I see myself as part of that unleashing. Particularly my work as a teacher. In a literal sense because so little of the education systems I have been a part of even begins to show respect for indigenous knowledge, but in a more subtle sense because the needs of our world to engage respectfully with one another and the environment are not well-served by education. 

The right hand of knowledge is constantly telling us how to live, without a counterbalancing respect for an alternative sense of embedded being. 

In education this tension is particularly represented by the predominance of exams. One potential countervailing mechanism is what is known as “Capabilities” in some curricula and “Approaches to Learning” in others. Capabilities or ATLs are attempts to value student's attitudes and approaches to knowledge but the challenge is that we don’t seem to know what to do with them. When we try assessing them, it feels wrong; intuitively, I think, we realise we’re making them subservient to the exam culture again. They end up remaining token elements at the fringe of education. 

I think McGilchrist and Yunkaporta nudge me towards a different way of thinking about education in general and Capabilities/ATLs in particular. I need to find ways to better honour process, engagement, connection and enjoyment without resort to numbers and definitions. In education, we need to build a culture where the sharing of a child’s story has a greater value than the grade it is given. 

Brian Henderson, the Headmaster I worked for at Woodleigh, showed us that “values are taught, not caught”. When the beautiful natural environment of the school had too much rubbish, he would wander around at recess chatting to the kids and picking up papers. I found it impossible to watch him do this without picking up a few myself. Students would see, and a culture develop. In education I think we need to spend a little less time working out what to teach and a little more time working out who to be.

When Brian retired, the school gave him a gift: the naming of a new cultivar of the indigenous Banksia. I didn’t remember this fact when I wrote the first draft of this poem and it was only after looking back through the poem and remembering that Joseph Banks gave the bush its European name that I remembered Brian and found a name for the poem. The thing about a poem is that it can embody a kind of haptic knowledge greater than prose. It’s a space for meaning inviting the reader to open potentials and trace their own paths as they look sideways for meaning. As a teacher, I've never been able to work out how to give a grade to poetry.