Category: Respect

… of Robbie Burns Day

“The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley…”

In observance of Robbie Burns Day and, thereby, of John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice And Men, I highlight this thoughtful character study of Curley’s wife, by Leighton Meester for The Huffington Post, based upon her own stage portrayal of that character.

Perhaps above all I appreciate Meester’s nuanced intuition about the audiences who judge Curley’s wife which, beyond their relationships to the characters in the story, might suggest something about their own – our own – blind spots and hypocrisies. How often we live with daily nonchalance, oblivious to the interiority of those we encounter, and of those beyond. How much we rely on our affirmed belief of our selves.

If confronting ourselves is art’s great authenticity, then Meester’s perception is spot-on: in Curley’s wife, Steinbeck subverts our conceit – whether he intended to or not. Indeed, the best-laid schemes…

Teaching Open-Mindedly in the Post-Truth Era

[Originally published June 16, 2017]

A year on, and this one, sadly, only seems more relevant…

I had brilliant students, can’t say enough about them, won’t stop trying. I happened to be in touch with one alumna – as sharp a thinker as I’ve ever met, and a beautiful writer – in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election campaign and wrote the following piece in response to a question she posed:

How do you teach open-mindedly in the post-truth era?

I was pleased that she asked, doubly so at having a challenging question to consider. And I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to compose a thoughtful reply.

I’ve revised things a little, for a broader audience, but the substance remains unchanged.

How do you teach open-mindedly in the post-truth era?

Good heavens. Hmm… with respect for peoples’ dignity, is my most immediate response. But such a question.

Ultimately, it takes two because any kind of teaching is a relationship – better still, a rapport, listening and speaking in turn, and willingly. Listening, not just hearing. But if listening (and speaking) is interpreting, then bias is inescapable, and there needs to be continual back-and-forth efforts to clarify, motivated by incentives to want to understand: that means mutual trust and respect, and both sides openly committed. So one question I’d pose back to this question pertains to the motives and incentives for teaching (or learning) ‘X’ in the first place. Maybe this question needs a scenario, to really illustrate details, but trust and respect seem generally clear enough.

Without trust and respect, Side ‘A’ is left to say, “Well, maybe some day they’ll come around to our way of thinking” (… that being a kind portrayal) and simply walks away. This, I think, is closed-minded to the degree that ‘A’ hasn’t sought to reach a thorough understanding (although maybe ‘A’ has). Whatever the case, it’s not necessarily mean-spirited that someone might say this. With the best intentions, ‘A’ might conclude that ‘B’ is just not ready for the “truth.” More broadly, I’d consider ‘A’s attitude more akin to quitting than teaching, which is to say a total failure to “teach”, as far as I define it from your question. It would differ somewhat if ‘A’ were the learner saying this vs being the teacher. In that case, we might conclude that the learner lacked motivation or confidence, for some reason, or perhaps felt alone or unsupported, but again… scenarios.

Another thing to say is, “Well, you just can’t argue with stupid,” as in we can’t even agree on facts, but saying this is certainly passing judgment on ol’ stupid over there, and perhaps also less than open-minded. To be clear… personally, I’d never say bias precludes truth, only that we’ll never escape our biases. The real trouble is having bias at all, which I think is what necessitates trust and respect because the less of these is all the more turmoil. I figure any person’s incentive to listen arises from whatever they think will be to their own benefit for having listened. But “benefit” you could define to infinity, and that’s where the post-truth bit is really the troublesome bit because all you have is to trust the other person’s interpretation, and they yours, or else not. The more ‘truth’ gets tailored or personalised, the more quickly we run out of things to talk about.

Yeah, I see “post-truth” as “anti-trust,” and that’s a powderkeg, the most ominous outcome arisen of late. People need incentives to listen, but if treating them with dignity and respect isn’t reaching them, then a positive relationship with me wasn’t likely what they wanted to begin with. That’s telling of the one side, if not both sides, which in your question means ‘the teacher’ and ‘the learner’. At the same time, it’s harder to say in my experience that students have no incentives to listen or that, on account of some broader post-truth culture, they don’t trust teachers – that might be changing, who knows, but I hope not.

But I’m leaving some of your question behind, and I don’t want to lose sight of where it’s directed more towards the person doing the teaching (you asked, how do you teach open-mindedly…).

That part of the question was also in my immediate reaction: respect peoples’ dignity. For me, when I’m teaching, if I’m to have any hope of being open-minded, I intentionally need to respect the other person’s dignity. I need to be more self-aware, on a sliding scale, as to how open- or closed-minded I’m being just now, on this-or-that issue. So even while that’s empathy, it’s also self aware, and it’s intentional. It’s not “me” and “the other.” It’s “us.”

Me being me, though – irony intended – I’d still be the realist and say you just can never really know what that other person’s motive truly is – whether it’s a pre-truth or post-truth world doesn’t matter. But whether or not you trust the other, or they you, the real valuable skill is being able to discern flaws of reason, which is what I always said about you – you’ve always been one to see through the bull shit and get to the core of something. I’m no guru or icon, I’m just me, but as I see it just now, the zeitgeist is an emotional one more than a rational one. And there’s plenty to understand why that might be the case. And given that emotional dominance, I do think post-truth makes the world potentially far more dangerous, as a result.

Whichever incentives people are identifying for themselves, these days, are pretty distinct, and that’s a hard one for unity. That saying about partisan politics – “We want the same things; we just differ how to get there” – that doesn’t apply as widely right now. So, by virtue of the other side being “the other” side, neither side’s even able to be open-minded beyond themselves because trust and respect are encased in the echo chambers. More than I’ve ever known, things have become distinctly divisive – partisan politics, I mean – and I wonder how much more deeply those divisions have room to cut. Selfish incentives cut the deepest. Trust and respect guard us from deep cuts.

So, for instance, lately I find with my Dad that I listen and may not always agree, but where I don’t always agree, he’s still my Dad, and I find myself considering what he says based on his longevity – he’s seen the historic cycle, lived through history repeating itself. And I obviously trust and respect my Dad, figuring, on certain issues, that he must know more than me. On other issues, he claims to know more. On others still, I presume he does. Based on trust and respect, I give him the benefit of the doubt, through and through. One of us has to give, when we disagree, or else we’d just continually argue over every disagreement. If you want peace, someone has to give, right? Better that both share it, but eventually one must acquiesce to their “doubt” and make their own “benefit” finite, stop the cutting, compromise themselves, if they’re to see an end to the debate. Be bigger by making yourself smaller. So should I trust my Dad? I respect him because he’s given me plenty good reason after such a long time. Certainly I’m familiar with his bias, grown accustomed to it – how many times over my life have I simply taken his bias for granted? Too bad the rest of the world don’t get along as well as my Dad and I do.

I see it even more clearly with my daughter, now, who trusts me on account of (i) her vulnerability yet (ii) my love. The more she lives and learns alongside me, as time passes by, the more cyclically her outlook is reiterated, a bit like self-fulfilling prophecy. Other parents have warned me that the day’s coming when she’ll become the cynical teenager, and I’m sure it will – I remember going through it, myself. But I’m older, now, and back to respecting my Dad, so at least for some relationships, the benefit of the doubt returns. My Dad preceded me, kept different circles than me, and lived through two or three very different generations than me. Even as we see the same world, we kind of don’t. So this is what I wonder about that deep cut of division, reaching the level of family – and, further than one given family, right across the entire population. Do I fact-check my Dad, or myself, or maybe both? Should I? Even if I do, neither one of us is infallible, and we’re only as trustworthy as our fact-checking proficiency.

Anyway, the child of the parent, it’s as good an example as I can think of for questioning what it means to learn with an open mind because there’s no such thing as “unbiased.” Yet love, trust, and respect are hardly what we’d call “closed-minded,” except that they are, just in a positive way. Love, trust, and respect leave no room for scepticism, wariness, and such traits as we consider acceptable in healthy proportions (for reasons about motive that I explained above).

But “teaching” with an open-mind takes on so much more baggage, I think, because the teacher occupies the de facto as well as the de jure seat-of-power, at least early on – school is not a democracy (although that now seems to be changing, too). Yet teachers are no more or less trustworthy on the face of it than any other person. That’s probably most of all why I reduce my response to respecting human dignity because where it’s closed-minded, for all its “positive,” it’s also a do-no-harm approach.

That jibes with everything I’ve learned about good teaching, as in good teaching ultimately reduces to strong, healthy relationships. Short-term fear vs long-term respect – it’s obvious which has more lasting positive influence. And since influencing others with our bias is inevitable, we ought to take responsibility for pursuing constructive outcomes, or else it’s all just so much gambling. At the core, something has to matter to everybody, or we’re done.

Development vs Winning: Actually, There Is No Such Thing

Also read the follow-up article to this post: Development and Learning: Part II – Youth Football

Outside of corruption, throwing the game, which has no place in this discussion, I submit that nobody deliberately plays to lose.

Specifically, I’m talking about football, less commonly known as soccer, and perhaps this discussion even applies to many different sports. But, as a player and coach, football is the beautiful game that I know best, so here goes.

Playing football, we would anticipate the team that makes the fewest mistakes ought to win – as in, the fewest mistakes both in and out of possession, from the kick-off until full-time. If so, then consistent quality performances are key because these should result in more opportunities to earn a win and prevent a loss. What’s more, as the reward for winning grows more lucrative, and the stakes are raised, players must all-the-more learn to develop that “consistent quality performance” on demand, under whatever pressure: effective decisions, executed at the proper moments, skillfully, every time, or at least as frequently as possible. Developing this “quality performance” consistency also demands that opponents earn victories rather than handing them the result, unimpeded, because now they’re challenged to execute just as consistently, if not just as flawlessly. As I say, no one competes to lose.

So, what of development and winning in light of all this? Too often, for me, these two ideas are falsely conflated into sides of what is truly a non-existent – or, at least, a very ill-conceived – debate. As ends-in-themselves, development and winning are typically deemed incompatible. Further, winning is then often vilified since winners produce losers while development is commended for being inclusive. At that point, I find the debate often sidetracks into competition versus fun, another false dichotomy, but in any case, the parameters are so muddled as to render all a meaningless waste of breath. For the sake of dispensing with the issue, I simply ask: why would we not reasonably expect to see fun in conjunction with competition? These are not oil and water, nor do they need to be, nor should they be deemed to be.

Football, the Game, can be played for fun, exhilaration, fitness, camaraderie, focus, perseverance, discipline, teamwork, all manner of virtues and benefits – yet all these arise from the very nature of the Game as a contest of opposition. And where one person finds things fun and enjoyable, another does not necessarily agree, yet who’s to say which is correct, if the Game has enabled all? All sorts of people find all sorts of fun in all sorts of things – who’s to say that finding competition to be fun is wrong, if only because it makes you squeamish? Just the same, if someone’s threshold for intense competitive drive is lower than another’s, can’t each still enjoy playing with like-minded peers?

In fact, just for instance, this is exactly why various youth and adult leagues categorize levels of play into (for example) gold, silver, and bronze tiers. Everyone must learn to play, and development (to whatever degree) will occur as they go. That implicates teammates, the quality of coaching, and other factors relating to a team or league’s motives for playing in the first place (i.e. emphasizing the intense competition at gold vs the social bonding at bronze). Motive, however, changes neither the nature of the Game, itself, nor the broader nature of effective learning, development, coaching, and teaching.

As I see it, the issue is not Development for its Own Sake versus Winning for its Own Sake or even Development for its Own Sake versus Development in order to Win. The issue is Development and Learning as a concept, altogether, period, because how else could you learn to play? And the more you play, the more you develop. Whether that development is good or poor is down to context, and a separate issue.

And when the arguments start, what’s really being debated, it seems to me, is how any one person simply wants to be “right” and demands that everyone else agree with what constitutes “successful” participation in the Game. Ironically, it’s a territorial argument over ideology. But to win an egotistical war suggests to me that we might better spend our efforts re-evaluating our culture and how we wish to treat other people – this, too, a separate issue.

Fair enough, people want to be “right.” We all have egos. But let’s at least offer some basis from which to claim what the word “successful” can mean and how it might be measured:

Since losing a match always remains a possibility, no matter how consistent our quality performance might be, we could measure “success” as the degree to which a player or team over time is developing a consistent quality of performance (i.e. process), at their corresponding level and motive for play, regardless of winning (i.e. product).

**I’ll specify, as I did above, that where wins are lucrative – such as in professional play – the stakes grow higher, and different debates will ensue about what “success” means. Yet a commercial issue relates to development and learning on the basis of peoples’ patience and tolerance for financial pleasure or pain: in other words, the two issues are perhaps less inherently related than coincidental: a crowd of supporters or sponsors are willing to pay money in order to back the team for a season.**

For the Game, itself, we must let winning take care of itself, i.e. at every level, this is why we play: players control what they are able to control, under conditions that also include the pitch, the ball, the referee, the weather, health, fitness, and so forth. So what can we measure? Measurements ought to fall under player and team control, e.g. shots at goal, completed passes, tackles won, saves made, etc. Far from counteracting the importance of winning, such consistent measurements of quality performance provide feedback, i.e. if our pass completion is 90% successful around the penalty box, then maybe we don’t score because our shooting is infrequent or inaccurate. One might even argue that the statistical measurements we gather are less important than the ones we’ve overlooked.

In any case, successful players and successful teams identify strong and weak areas by regularly measuring consistent quality across a range of performance details, and they develop each area for consistency – which we anticipate will translate into more wins – because consistent quality performances usually translate into what can be measured as an “ongoing success.” Success now defines a degree of purposeful, committed, consistent hard work, which makes for more focused, more effective training. Developmentally, the more successful you are, the more often you can theoretically win – but if your opponents also train and measure, and respond better than you do, then guess what? That’s called competition.

Development and winning not only can but already do co-exist. And they always have. It’s people who separate them, falsely, perhaps because they want to win more than they want to earn wins – or, worse, perhaps because they merely want to win a territorial argument about development vs winning that never existed before someone’s ego dreamt it up.

Beyond on-field training and competing, development and learning should cover a range of areas that affect – yet lie beyond – the Game, e.g. health, fitness, nutrition, goal setting, mental preparation, personal responsibility. Coaches ought to take players beyond the Game, teaching them how to train, how to contribute to a team, how to compete at higher levels of skill and intensity, how to manage the dynamics and emotions of competition, and how to conduct themselves with personal integrity in all respects. Of course, the Game is included within the scope of these matters because that’s why we’re a team in the first place. And the range of these inclusions will comprise a more holistic football program. We also implement and measure that program as we go, or we ought to.

Effective programs inevitably reveal the crux of commitment, either thanks to peoples’ dedication or on account of their inconsistency. Effective programs encourage trust and a shared pursuit of common goals. Where trust and commitment are maintained consistently and respectfully, a team and its members learn to measure quality and respond consistently, i.e. successfully. Such programs require time, discipline, and patience to learn, but the degree to which participants buy into the philosophy is met with concomitant developmental consistency, and again, one can expect winning to result more often than not, relative to the quality of the opposition. Likewise, individual people can take credit for this-or-that achievement only relative to other participants, e.g. teammates, opponents, officials, etc, who are all also active participants in the program-slash-the Game.

Active participation should find team members applying complementary strengths by filling key roles on the path to team success. Individual contributions accumulate, and if these have been consistently defined by common goals and measured for consistent quality, “success” is more likely because people can envision it more clearly and pursue it more meaningfully.

Opponents, especially of equal or slightly higher abilities, likewise play a key role in a team’s pursuit of success since measuring consistent quality performances against them is, in one sense, what the Game – and what sport – is all about.

Active involvement in a program unites a team, preparing everyone for more advanced challenges. Occasionally, a teammate might advance to more elite programs, and when a team member grows beyond the scope of the program, that is a team success that all of us can share.