The One Who Rakes Alone

Susan Cain is my new TED-crush. Her talk on "The Power of Introverts" hit me very powerfully, and spoke to some worries I've had recently about the mania we've made of collaboration in school and in the workplace. Collaboration is touted as a "21st century skill." Kids who do not learn how to collaborate in school are told that they will fail in the modern workplace. And they probably will. In my current job, I've had many--far too many--moments where individual, solitary thought and creativity has been denigrated and dismissed--held suspect, somehow, as though anything not put through the meat-grinder of group brainstorming cannot possibly be good.

I have no problem working in teams, but I need to know that it is "I" who is part of the team--that I am contributing something of myself, from myself, and that this individual contribution is important. When leaders act as though the group has one mind, and that individuals should subsume themselves to that mind--that the group is always smarter than the individual--well...I find that kind of scary. That's not 21st century thinking; in fact, it's very dangerously 20th century thinking, as seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

As Susan Cain points out, the great works of art and insights of science have come from solitary thinkers. The great revelations of religion and philosophy have come from solitary thinkers. The world needs time enough and space enough and quiet enough for us to go off in the woods, sometimes, and dive deep down into our own minds, to wrestle with our ideas in solitude and follow a line of thought wherever it might lead.

Bruce Chatwin wrote memorably about the power of walking, in aiding thought and creativity, in The Songlines. You could certainly walk and work with a partner, but most often, it's a solitary thing--you, setting off into the world, getting lost in the woods while lost in thought.

I am, at heart, an introvert, so I suppose it's just a bias of mine, but I truly believe that a group of people sitting around a table, yapping at each other incessantly and jockeying to be heard, can only (or if not only, then often) result in thinking that is superficial, that is brightly colored and clearly delineated--easy to see and appreciate--but that is not terribly profound or original. That's my bias, and I'm sticking with it.

Which is not to say that collaboration is bad. Bringing together a group of people who have had time to think and ponder alone, and letting them bounce ideas off each other, is definitely of use. Sending them away from the table again and letting them continue their work alone--that also has value. When I worked in a theatre company, I did my play writing alone, but then I brought my work to the group, and the collaboration within the group definitely improved my original contribution. I loved that collaboration. But I would have hated having to create the play in the harsh light of the group. In today's way of thinking, that seems to seen increasingly as hanging on to outmoded models of authorship and ownership: selfish; greedy. But I don't see it that way.

Life should be an ebb and flow--never one thing, incessantly. But we love to pounce on the Next Big Thing and work it to death, to the exclusion of all else. And nothing really works that way. There is a place for collaboration, and there is a place for quiet, individual thought.

Again--I'm basically an introvert, so of course I'm going to feel this way. When Susan Cain recites the "camp spirit" cheer she was forced to participate in as a child ("R-O-W-D-I-E!), I cringe. I remember moments like that, and I hated all of them. I never had camp spirit, or school spirit, and I hated chanting with a crowd. Like Cain, I've had too many moments where I've put my suitcase of books under a chair and gone out to big, loud parties. More often than not, I've stood with my back against some wall, feeling more isolated and alone than I would have felt in the solitude of my room. A loud, raucous table at a bar, somewhere, with a small group of friends? Love it. A loud, raucous dance club filled with strangers? My season in hell.

These things are with us from birth. Either we acknowledge them and honor them, or we spend our lives fighting them, feeling like the world is right and we are wrong. When I was 10 or 11, I had to help rake our yard. We lived in suburban New York, and the fall was filled with dead leaves--more and more every week. We had shrubs planted along every wall of the house, so raking involved not only the front and back lawns, but also required scrabbling through the underbrush to get at the leaves trapped there. Every weekend. And I noticed something pretty quickly. When my dad and my brother were outside with me, raking was a chore. But somehow, on the weekends that I had to do it all by myself, it wasn't. Somehow, being alone with the job--knowing it was mine to do and mine to own--that mattered to me, and made it something worth doing. Someone else could easily have felt the opposite--lonely and bored when working alone; happier when the family was pitching in. We're all wired differently.

Internet and Web 2.0 technology and tools have made collaboration across time and distance easy, affordable, and fun. I have no problem with it, and, in fact, I make use of it constantly. But we are not the Borg, and we are not ants in a colony. We are not undifferentiated neurons in a vast brain that is Humanity. We are human beings. Maybe it is an old fashioned view of things, and maybe I am old and outdated. But I do believe in the mystery and the sanctity of the individual human mind. I believe that each mind is a world unto itself, and holds within it a unique gift (or curse) for the world.

The world already has more R-O-W-D-I-E than it needs.  God bless the girl with the suitcase of books.

Arizona: Bringing the Crazy Since 1925

My former state of residence has added its own piece of chipotle-flavored gristle to the national stew of gynophobia with this proposed legislation, forcing women of "religious" employers to submit evidence from a doctor that any prescription contraceptive for which they want insurance coverage is being used for reasons other than birth control. Because God hates birth control, but he's willing to give women a pass if they need the pill to ease cramps, or whatever.

The blog post linked to, above, is not partisan hysteria. Here's a summary of the legislation, straight from the Arizona House of Representatives. It is what it is.

Look, I'm all for religious freedom. I'm all for freedom of conscience. People who truly believe that abortion is repellent shouldn't have to pay for other people to have it. People who believe in sin, and believe that contraception qualifies as a sin, shoulnd't have to provide it as an employment benefit.

But why is that the extent of the discussion, these days?  Why is it all about the choice between A) Force employers to pay for procedures and drugs they find morally offensive vs. B) Force women to pay for expensive drugs and procedures without the help of insurance? The real question is: why are we putting women and their employers in this position in the first place?

Why should it be any business of an employer how or to what extent a woman engages in family planning? Why should women have to go to their bosses, hat in hand, to beg for some kind of coverage. The whole thing is evil, and it doesn't seve either side of the equation well. I'm amazed that religious employers aren't pointing out that they shouldn't be put in this position at all.

The real problem here is our country's Fear of National Health Care. Employers should not be in the business of making medical decisions on behalf of their employees, but they shoudln't have to be in the business of covering their health care at all. It's none of their business, and it's an enormous expense and pain in the ass for them. Take it off their plates. Especially in this day and age when people change jobs and careers multiple times, why should a person's access to health care have change over and over again, purely dependent on what job she has. It's absurd on its face.

Why won't any of our Brave Leader and Statesmen talk about that?

New Formats!

Cool for Cats is now availabe in all e-Book formats, right here. So if you have a Nook, or a Kobo, or some other non-paper device for reading books...now's your chance to get to know Jordan, Susannah, Oticha, Porkchop, and all the rest of the gang.

National Read an E-Book Week

Yeah, yeah...it's always National Something Week. But this week (March 4-10) just happens to be National Read an E-Book Week...or so say these folks.

So listen. If you haven't yet read my jazzy, breezy, more-than-occasionally funny mystery novel, Cool for Cats, (see blush-inducing reader reviews here), isn't this a perfect opportunity to do so? Not only will you get to read an entertaining new novel--you'll also get to support adeeply important pseudo-cause and participate in a national--perhaps even international non-event.

How can you say no to that?

You can't. So use the links on the left-hand side of this page, or just go here and snap up a copy. You won't regret it.

School as LEGO-land

Seth Godin rants eloquently and importantly on the question of “What is school for?” The Big Essay (or mini-book) is free and available for printing, reading on screen, or for download to your e-reader. It’s worth a read, and he wants feedback and commentary. Here is mine.

Godin takes a fairly extremist view that schooling, as we currently do it, can do nothing but kill dreams, squelch creativity, and teach kids to be obedient sheep. It’s an argument I first encountered in Jonathan Kozol’s early book, The Night is Dark and I am Far From Home. That book was written in the wake of the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, and Kozol’s thesis was that a few weeks of basic training could not have turned the perpetrators of that horror into mindless followers of orders; it could only have been done by years of public schooling. Like Godin’s manifesto, the book was impassioned and well-meaning, but a bit extreme. In fact, when the book was reissued in the ‘90s, Kozol annotated it to provide context and to tamp down some of (but not all of) the rhetoric.

As it happens, I am more in agreement with these two authors than not. I spent years in New York City telling my friends that the only kind of school reform I could see being effective was dynamite and a bulldozer. But that kind of extremist position makes it easy for doubters and critics to dismiss what may be valid and important in the argument. Godin seems to suggest that the creative and innovative people who have made this country dynamic and strong have prospered either outside of or in spite of school. All of them. And while we know this has been true of many influential, creative people, we know it’s not true of all of them. Many people come through our school systems with their creativity and drive intact, and they do so because they are lucky enough to have the right parents, the right teachers and the right schools. It can happen…it just doesn’t happen nearly enough.

When Godin attacks the way we do schooling, he seems to include all of our educators in his attack, as though there is a mass conspiracy afoot in our school system to destroy the humanity of our children in order to produce compliant workers and citizens. This is just not so. There are thousands upon thousands of well-meaning, well-intentioned educators out there in our schools, trying to do their best to teach creative and critical thinking skills. They do not believe their mission is to force compliance or to create a generation of sheep or automatons. They really don’t. The problem is that the mechanics of the system in which they work do want that, which means they are working against the very structure of their schools. When the work you do creates friction with the system, it’s more likely that you get worn down than that the system does. The machine endures, and the people who want to do something the machine wasn’t built to do, well, they burn out and walk away.

Godin is dead-right when he says that the problem lies in what Ken Robinson calls “batch processing” of children, the old factory model. That model was created to churn out compliant factory workers. The problem we face today is that our educational mission and vision has changed, but the machine we use to get there has not.  Go to any professional development workshop or sit in on any Masters class on instruction or curriculum design, and you'll hear all the right things. The problem is that we’re trying to broadcast TV shows over a radio. We’re trying to get from New York to Atlanta in a day, riding a horse. The medium we’re using cannot handle the message we intend. In fact, in many ways, it works against the message we intend.

Oh, you can teach against the model all you like, and try to differentiate, individualize, and personalize your instruction. Teachers do it every day. But the system isn’t set up to encourage or even accommodate that approach, especially in middle and high school. The system was built for mass-instruction: get them in, give them a lecture, give them a worksheet, move them along to the next station. That’s what it does best. If you work that way, the machine hums along very nicely.

The question for us is not whether we want to create compliant sheep. Most of us—the vast, overwhelming majority of us, do not. The question is whether we are brave enough to do something radically, structually different.

In business, there is always a tension between the innovators who want to try something different and the stalwarts who want to rely on what has worked in the past. There is no universally correct side to the argument; it all depends on what works. If the innovation saves money or makes money, the innovator wins, and a whole industry may begin to shift. If the innovation wastes money or destroys a company’s reputation, the status quo ante is reinforced as having been correct, and the company becomes more conservative. And who are we to tell them they were wrong?

The problem is that in education, there is no incentive to innovate, no reward beyond doing what you feel is right. A public school that does things differently and produces inventors, scholars, artists, or brilliant professionals gets no more money than a public school that churns out dropouts and fast-food workers. No one at the “winning” school gets a bonus or a raise, and no one gets to expand or franchise the school to serve more students. And the crappy school is rarely ever shut down. The incentives to innovate are all—100%--intrinsic: you do it because you know, deep down, it’s the right thing to do. And as I said, plenty of teachers act on those impulses every day.

But it’s so, so, so much easier not to. It’s so much easier to do things the way they’ve always been done, to go with the flow, to swim with the current. Not because these educators are bad people, but because they are people, and while there is a deep impulse to create, there is also a deep impulse to be safe. I agree with Godin that our schools can and should do a better job of liberating and nurturing the creative impulse in people, in teaching young people how to think, question, analyze, and create in unique and dynamic ways. But I don’t think for a minute, that our nation—or any nation—will ever get to a point where dynamic, creative, innovative free-thinkers are the majority or the totality of the population. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I think human nature has a deeply conservative, cautious strain that cannot be educated out. I would love to envision a world in which each person marches to the beat of a different drum. But I can’t. There is something in us that likes the regular beat and the steady march; there is something in us that likes knowing in what time we should all be stepping. Most of us are not simply conformists or non-conformists. We are not one thing or another. We live forever in the dynamic tension between the desire to be unique and creative, and the desire to be safe and protected—the desire to stand apart and the desire to hide within the herd.

This is where Godin’s LEGO analogy misses a crucial step. Yes, when LEGO started out, it sold bricks without any instructions. That’s what I played with as a child, and it’s what I loved. And yes, they moved away from that product and started selling nothing but pre-determined kits, which I hated, but which made the company far more profitable. And yes, that does speak to our innate fear of freedom and plan-less-ness. But that is not the end of the story. Today, you can buy both sets and mixed blocks, and when you go to one of their stores, you can root through enormous bins to create your own custom collections. Both kinds of customers are served. And the two types are not so clearly separated; there are many kids who take the kits and change them, adding new pieces from other kits. There are kids who use computer programs to design their own kits. There are kids who buy individual pieces in bulk from online wholesalers, to get just the pieces they need. There are public forums where kids bring enormous, insane, and wildly unique creations to display and share.

If given the freedom to play, we are improvisers at heart—people who like to tinker, adapt, and jerry-rig. We are jazz musicians. It’s in our national DNA—maybe even our human DNA. The people who create something new from scratch, ob ovo, may be rare in this world. But the people who play, who tinker, and who adapt—that’s all of us. A school system that remembered this and made room for it--for the kids and for the adults who work there--would go a long way toward liberating our creative impulses and honoring our dreams. 

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PS: one minor correction for Mr. Godin. According to Snopes, Harvard never offered a professorship to Galileo. During Galileo’s lifetime, Harvard was nine students and a single teacher. And Galileo was under house arrest in Florence.