Einstein thinks you should play more

On facilitating versus teaching, the urgent need for the humanities, and not taking it personally

Driveway sled. Photo by Jorge.

For some reason this semester I agreed to teach a course in the Slavic Department on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Keep in mind I have never been to Russia, Eastern Europe, or any of the former Soviet Republics, speak none of these languages, and have absolutely ZERO experience with Slavic culture besides binge-watching The Americans with Jorge a few years ago. I also happen to have zero knowledge of the nuclear power industry! So why not!

I took this on in part because, (cue documentary narrator voice here) many many years ago, back when I was an innocent young college student, I thought I would ultimately pursue a doctorate in History.

I was pretty certain about this until I’d traveled for a few years and, mercifully, yanked myself off the tidy young professional timeline. I did apply to UC-Berkeley from Beijing and I remember writing in my personal statement, “I am not interested in writing for academia but rather in translating academic concepts for a wider popular audience,” which turns out does not get one into an elite doctoral program!!

So that was that, and I ultimately ended up in an MFA two years later, which brought me to Pittsburgh, and blah blah blah here we all are. But to be honest, I have long wanted to teach content. To teach writing is to teach skills. It’s debatable whether the skills of writing, at the top levels, can actually be taught, and the more research I’ve done into education, the more I’ve come to question whether it makes any sense to teach skills apart from content at all. No one learns to critically analyze in a vacuum. No one learns to write in a vacuum. You critically analyze or write because you care about what’s being argued.

So I’ve been shaping my Seminar in Composition courses around themes – climate change last semester, and education this semester. I took on the Chernobyl course because I wanted to practice what it was like to teach a whole class of heavy, deep, connected content, to give students a wealth of information on a specific historical topic and also to ask them to analyze and discuss cultural objects.

It’s been very fascinating and challenging, but also, this being Slavic culture and the world’s most devastating nuclear incident, pretty dark. The actual course is called “Chernobyl Memory Museum,” and the idea is to analyze the cultural history that has grown up around Chernobyl: everything from paintings to novels to TV series to video games. How has this incident been constructed in cultural memory around the world?

Some of you (hello beloved paid subscribers!) may recall that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to plan. That’s it: plan. Like, literally any planning at all would be a step up from how I usually function. As it so happens one excellent way to achieve this resolution is to adapt the syllabus of an extremely over-prepared highly organized exceptionally brilliant Russian scholar who has every single assignment of the semester uploaded to Canvas on Day 1 with programmed due dates and everything! Slightly different from Yours Truly Harried Writer Person who relies on Mac sticky notes that read “CREATE ESSAY ASSIGNMENT ASAP!”

Already I have learned, with no minor amount of cursing, how to make a Google slideshow AND how to create fancy color-coded tables on Canvas that elegantly delineate each week’s assignments. Exciting stuff.

I did NOT learn, however, that Google slideshows can actually have presenter notes until 2:27 pm, three minutes before my first class started. I then understood that the photos of various nuclear stations weren’t meant to be analyzed only on vibes but that I, The Professor, was supposed to give a detailed and informative history of each using the presenter notes. I googled “how to see presenter notes and present slideshow at the same time” at 2:29 but it was too late. So we went on vibes.

This first class was a bit of a journey, but it illuminated several things I’m working on this year. The first is, obviously, planning.

Next: really pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, and giving myself fully to the task at hand. Learning something new is such a gift. It can illuminate everything around it, giving dimension to what has flattened.

It’s like the first day of mindfulness classes when they make you eat a raisin: you have to sit there churning the little wrinkled gob around on your tongue, thinking about the soil it was raised in, the sun that nurtured it, how and where it dried, its subtle textures, its sweetness, its grapey-ness, the hand that picked it. All the things you never noticed when you just inhaled it running to catch the 61D down to Oakland.

So it goes with SLAV 0860: I have to really pay attention to the Google slides, the table formatting, how Discussion Board 1 gives way to Discussion Board 2, the layering of themes and questions. And this transfers over to composition, exploring how teaching content can enliven the writing, and vice versa. I have to taste the raisin.

I’ve read so much educational theory now, most notably Paolo Freire, that positions the educator as facilitator or guide rather than what we immediately think of as “teacher.”

This sounds lovely and dreamy, me and all my undergrads in a meadow together thinking about how we can unite to solve climate change, but in reality it is incredibly difficult. Most of these people cannot even use a semicolon properly and we’re all supposed to be learning from one another??! Brayden who says Foucault “thinks police are bad” and I are going to jive philosophically?

But the more I’ve tried to approach teaching from this angle the more interesting my classes have gotten, for everyone. Last semester when I taught Robin Wall Kimmerer I asked my students how they thought they could bring more of an indigenous approach to knowledge and ways of knowing in their courses, and they came up with such interesting answers. My one skeptical student argued this wouldn’t be possible with math or chemistry and the whole class had a pretty fascinating debate about whether math is actually creative and amenable to multiple ways of learning or not. I learned. I was surprised.

In Chernobyl Memory Museum, the students and I will be very much on the same page. I am not the excessively organized overachieving Russian scholar with the answer to every question about what happened at Reactor 4 and the history of Estonian cinema, so we will all have to sit there together and ponder, “Huh, why do you think they titled it Stalker?”

This isn’t to say we’re all “equal,” per se. What I bring to the table is years of experience being underpaid to facilitate esoteric conversations about cultural artifacts! And a rich vocabulary and some classroom management skills.

Finally, one of the biggest things I am hoping to reinforce in SLAV 0860 is the art of not taking it personally. By this I mean not caring whether or not I fumble or fail or Brandon in the back row is clearly betting on football while I am offering a brilliant soliloquy on the terrible beauty of the sublime. I mean not getting all caught up on wanting everyone to like me and think I’m a genius. I mean, I hope they do and I hope they think I am, but I’m just going to show up with a decently good attitude and faith in them and go from there. I’ve realized there’s no way I can expect them to be totally on board every day all the time and also that often, whatever is going on with them has nothing to do with me.

This isn’t to say that my teaching presence and ability don’t matter, but rather that I don’t want to be derailed or demoralized by worrying about why someone hasn’t done their discussion board or is zoning out on their laptop or digging crap out of their nails instead of participating in the small group discussion. See it, acknowledge it, deal with it, without taking it personally.

This allows me to give so much more to the students who are engaged, and to myself as a teacher. It’s also just good stuff to take with me for life. There will be people who just aren’t on board. Who are buying jeans from Old Navy right at your most triumphant moment of eloquence. So what! Carry on! Because someone will come up after class, maybe, at some point, and say, that was so interesting. And that’s enough.

I wore a black blazer and a black turtleneck to my first class to appear hard core and compensate for the fact that I have zero knowledge of Slavic culture or history. It felt like role-playing. It is role-playing. But in playing the role, with dignity and dedication, we learn.

And – it’s fun. It’s this, too, I want to give to my students: this is actually fun. It’s okay for it to be fun. That’s how you learn. Why you learn. That doesn’t mean it’s not challenging and the expectations aren’t high and that it doesn’t matter – to the contrary. When it’s fun, you’ll give yourself over to it more completely.

In my Seminar class this semester, I’m introducing a new dimension to the debate about the humanities that was so catastrophic last semester. I’m bringing in the big guns: Albert Einstein.

In a 1936 address at SUNY-Albany, Einstein came out swinging in favor of the humanities. He argued that schools were becoming too focused on the success of the individual, and the successful individual focused solely on how much they could get from others, ignoring the collective, the joy of learning, and the desire for truth. Prescient stuff just a decade before we dropped the first nuclear bomb!

Einstein believed that the impact of education lies as much in the approach as in the material itself. He wrote:

“The same work may owe its origin to fear and compulsion, ambitious desire for authority and distinction, or loving interest in the object and a desire for truth and understanding, and thus to that divine curiosity which every healthy child possesses, but which so often is weakened early.”

A student who is heavily coerced using punishments, or who is promised power and prestige, has a different motivation from a student who is eager and curious; the same goes for the teacher, who can rely on her position of authority to enforce exactly what she thinks students must learn, scolding them if they stray, or who can bring her content and her experience and her skills and say, what will we make with this?

“The point,” Einstein wrote, (emphasis mine here) “is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition…it is that education which in the main is founded upon the desire for successful activity and acknowledgment.”

This is achieved through the humanities, not through teaching specific skills. He explains,

“The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialized training in school appear possible. Apart from that, it seems to me, moreover, objectionable to treat the individual like a dead tool. The school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist.”

This “harmonious personality” comes not from drilling the student endlessly in technique and demanding mastery of a specific knowledge set, but from the broad education in how to think, and even more so, in how to find joy in thinking. Self and social awakening happen via a process of critical engagement, not simple training.

So I role-play and the students role-play, all of us trying on this new subject, trying on these ideas, playing together, with the stakes of the game nothing more or less than how we comprehend nuclear disaster, how we create and imagine and build our way out of what is happening in California right now, how we make a memory museum that guides us into our blazing, uncertain future.

“Knowledge is dead,” Einstein told that class nearly a century ago. “The school, however, serves the living.”

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