My
recent piece "
Hobo Queen of the Sciences" actually drew
what, for me, is a deluge of email—fourteen of them. Five were
various flavors of
attaboy
which I have put in the ego reserve for bad days; four were "Kids
these days, they just can't think, and they're on my lawn," with
the interesting note that two seemed to be from conservatives and two
from liberals; three were from teachers who spotted a little bit
about rhetorical/enthymemic listening, which does produce large
improvements in listening comprehension and retention in formal,
academic sorts of settings (in classroom lectures, of course, but
also in situations like listening to campaign speeches, business
presentations, law courts, classroom discussions, and so on).* They
wanted me to say more about how that works and what I would do to
teach it.
Well,
I can't teach you how to teach rhetorical listening in one blog post,
or in ten. I might someday do an ebook about it, or something of that
sort, but at the moment I'm not sure how I'd approach teaching it at
various grade levels, let alone lay out a curriculum in it; I'm not
even sure how much applicable educational research has been done on
it (if it's like most subjects, there are ages below which most kids
can't get vital aspects of it. On the other hand, often kids can get
much more than we give them credit for.**)
Also, my gut feeling is
that it should probably be part of a larger curriculum in "informal
logic and what to do with it" that would also embrace skills
like close reading, outlining for writing, and much of what should be
in critical thinking curricula.*** But with those provisos, here's
what it's about and how I think I might tackle the task if I wake up
and find myself Chief Pooh Bah**** of Education.
First
of all, how and why it works:
The
common reasons (that are within their personal control) why people
don't understand or remember much of what they hear in a public,
one-to-many situation are:
1.
They only sort of want to (in exactly the same way they only sort of
want to know the stuff in the textbook); they're not trying very
hard.
2.
If they do want to try harder, they don't know how
to try harder. Watch academically challenged kids "study"
and you'll see what I mean. They furrow their brows. They tense their
muscles. They look real serious. They read sentences aloud very, very
loudly. But they don't actually do anything that moves things off the
page and into memory, or reshape their understanding of anything with
any idea they encounter. Many people trying to listen better do the
equivalent: they sit forward, squint, berate themselves to pay
attention, lock their gaze on the speaker ... and don't listen
because they're not sure how to do it.
3.
They're too smart (we all are). Everyone thinks 3-6 times faster than
a public speaker talks. So 60%-90% of the time, we're killing time
waiting for that person at the podium to continue, and while waiting,
we think of something else to entertain ourselves. Naturally what
people think of is inevitably more entertaining than the subject of
the speech, so that by the time they need to listen again, they're
already thinking about/invested in something more interesting, such
as when lunch is, whether their parents had any idea how rude that
was, or who has the nicest hair in the front row.
4.
They don't connect it to anything. An often neglected consistent
result in reading research is that a poor decoder, reading about
something in which s/he is passionately interested, learns and
retains more than a fluent decoder reading about something of no
personal interest. The same applies even more so to listening. The
best preachers have always tied the lesson to the parishioners' lives
every few seconds;special ed teachers are forever being astonished by
how much a student comprehends about football or music (if that is
where the passion is); connection is everything.
5.
Their model of knowledge is a "fact pile" model; they think
smart people are people who know large numbers of facts, rather than
the connections between them.***** So they listen to heap up facts,
and the heap overflows storage pretty quickly, especially with no
connections between things, and furthermore since much of what there
is to know is the connections, they miss much of what there is to
know.
The
commercial and noncommercial, widely-distributed learning systems
almost always work for a while, because they really do match up to
the listening problems:
1.
If the student goes to the bother of taking the class, then either
the student or the student's parent wants them to listen better;
motivation is guaranteed because it is self-selected.
2.
Just having something to try, effective or not, means the student
feels less discouraged and less like it's impossible.
3.
Having a system to work means that the student is working the system
instead of wondering when lunch is; it keeps them closer to what's
being said.
4.
Nearly all systems, beginning with the ancient Greek "Palace of
Memory", systematically create associations. Any association is
better than none, and it immediately improves memory.
5.
And while the associations may be goofy (and therefore, sometimes
memorable) and are generally not the ones the speaker was aiming for,
they do enable the student to keep more facts and more statements of
the basic idea on the fact pile at the same time, so the student can
feel him/herself retaining more facts, and feels better.
However,
most of the standardized commercial (and student-learning-center
promoted) systems wear off fairly fast, for predictable reasons that
are also tied to those five problems:
1.
If a student learning by listening does not become a positive
experience in its own right, the student will stop as soon as parent,
teacher, or self-pressure is withdrawn. It's like reading or
exercising because it's good for you; the kids who experience
intensive listening as all broccoli and no pizza will slack off as
soon as authority, even their own personal and internal authority,
turns its back.
2&3.
As soon as the system becomes fully automatic, it's like freeway
driving or working a counter: people can do it with a third or a
tenth of their attention, and they do, thus losing much of the
benefit.
4&5.
If the associations are at variance with the meaning, the student
learns things wrong, or has to memorize a separate set of
corrections. Furthermore, as the set of associations becomes more
familiar, it loses its power of surprise/goofiness, and becomes less
distinctive; the first time you remember the presidents by picturing
them in your favorite bawdy house ("Washington upstairs doing
the books with the madam ... Teddy Roosevelt playing the piano ...
Woodrow Wilson coming downstairs in his red heart boxers ...")
it may stick with you forever, but by the twentieth time you use
that, to learn, say, the elements in atomic number order, it may not
have the sticking power ("Molybdenum tied to the bed and waiting
for Rhoda ... no, wait, maybe that's rhodium is tying Molly to the
bed ...")
Rhetorical
or enthymemic listening is more effective than most or maybe all of
the commercial systems, but it's harder, because the thing you're
learning to associate to actually is part of the speaker's meaning
and the information being communicated to you, so you need less
unlearning, have more accurate learning in the first place, and just
generally get more of the message. It doesn't get old (a person who
has really learned to read fiction, poetry, or reportage well has
more pleasurable entertainment available than s/he can consume in a
lifetime; a music fan with deep and precise musical knowledge never
runs out of good speeches; it is the same with listening to the
spoken word).
This
is all great and a major advantage, but the heart of what makes
rhetorical listening better is something very hard: you have to
become not just acquainted with, but so deeply familiar with informal
logic, that it's in your bones, so that you invoke it and use it as
automatically as you compute Bug for 7x5=Bug or mentally correct
typhogrephical errrers. It's that stuff athletes drill about, so that
if you're a shortstop you're moving the right way, based on the
batter's stance and swing, before you know you're moving, and the
reason why a guitarist's fingers know which fret is E on every string
in a given tuning, and can find it before s/he can think "E,"
and a fact that some crossword-loving friends tease me about, that
because I have been a touch typist since age 12, when they ask me to
spell something, I rest my hands on the table and say aloud what my
fingers are keying.
Having
enthymemics down cold and automatic is not as bad as it sounds.
There are only at most about 25 enthymemes (depending on how you
count and divide them) and each of enthymeme is made up of no more
than about five elements; there are fewer total elements than there
are characters in either the katakana or hiragana syllablaries, or in
multiplication tables up through twelves, and way fewer than most
languages have irregular verbs and nouns. But at least some drill and
practice is necessary; it needs to be automatic rather than baffling
that
an analogy consists of a known and
a partially known,
the part of the known corresponding
to the known part of the partially known is meaningfully like it, and
it is therefore argued that the
unknown part of the partially known can be predicted from the
remainder of the known.
And
at first, like that business about square roots and alright triangles
and hippopotamuses, or the difference between a cross-threaded gerund
and a leaping participle, it's all confusing terminology that doesn't
seem to relate to anything. (Better terminology will help but won't
eliminate the problem).
My
guess is that pushing enthymemics all the way into the mind so that
the subject is automatic is every bit as much fun as teaching long
division, subjects and predicates, and so forth, and teachers and
kids will love it just as much. But the potential rewards are very
large, and since I'm not aware of any large-scale attempts to make
learning the subject fun, I may be quite wrong. Maybe some inspired
teacher out there will invent the book that does for enthymemics what
The Cat in the Hat,
Go Dog Go!,
and Captain
Underpants
do for reading.
Once
the student has the enthymemes down cold, the student simply
incorporates them in some version of the famous Cornell-System
listening (Review-Relate-Anticipate) by taking each point as s/he
hears it and breaking it into:
•What's
the point being argued?
•What
facts (if any) support it, and are they true?
•What
enthymeme connects the facts to the point?
•Are
all the parts of the enthymeme present, or reasonably implied, and
are they valid?"
It's
not really any harder than evaluating a pop song, quarterback, used
car, or entree that you haven't encountered before; and if you're
proficient, you do it as automatically as a gardener looks and sees
peonies or gladioli rather than "flowers," a birdwatcher
knows a barn owl from a great horned, or a serious fashionista knows
whether that will work with her skin and existing wardrobe. And you
may note that after a walk through a garden, a birding trip, or a
shopping expedition, any of those people can remember dozens or
hundreds of things they saw.
Because
the enthymemics of the spoken word is different every time (it's the
difference between a choreographed stage fight and a real one, a
choreographed First Dance at a wedding and being actually able to
dance, or having memorized Goodnight,
Moon
and being able to read)
it doesn't go stale; because it's demanding intrinsically (like rally
driving as opposed to keeping the car in an interstate lane), it
doesn't become too easily automatic; and because it is built on the
structures of meaning, it draws attention to and focuses the effort
of memory on the speaker's points and ideas rather than on stray
facts. The one thing it can't fix, directly, is whether the listener
wants to listen (though even there, people generally like to do
things they have become proficient at, and if there are real rewards
for comprehension, there will probably be enough motivation for the
job).
Now,
how would I get that into students? Some things I think are obvious,
and then some things I'd do because of them:
1)
Kids younger than about age nine or ten don't seem to have most of
the modules for logic (with exceptions, but we're designing a
one-size-fits-most curriculum here); at about that age they become
interested in things like meta-jokes and frame-breaking, and able to
handle math ideas like sets and functions. So we start in 4th grade.
(Other systems may translate as needed...)
2)
About 8th or 9th grade students in academic programs begin to have
lecture-heavy classes, and without getting into it here, a good
lecturer addressing good listeners is still more effective than most
"innovative" teaching methods. (It's just that good
lecturers are if anything scarcer than good listeners, and we don't
do much to develop either).
3)
So we want to start them in 4th and have the complete set of academic
listening skills in place by the end of 7th grade, with 8th grade
probably a review-and-refresh year to make sure it sticks.
4)
With about a 20 enthymeme-system, I'd sort the enthymemes into
logical groups with some considerations about complexity, and teach
my way up the ladder, a few per year, aiming to have the easy ones
taught twice and the hard ones taught at least three times. So to
have all of them in place by the end of seventh grade, I'd have to
introduce the easy ones in fourth grade, review easies and add hards
in fifth, expand and elaborate hards in sixth, and review hards in
seventh. That would mean covering about an enthymeme every three
weeks in fourth and fifth grade, and probably every two in sixth and
seventh.
5)
At the same time I taught each enthymeme, I'd teach how to spot it in
listening, reading, and visual communication, and have students use
it in their own writing, classroom presentations, and art.
6)
Right from the beginning I'd start teaching that enthymemes chain
together to make arguments, arguments chain to make cases, and cases
chain to make up things like philosophies, disciplines, areas, etc.
This would probably get me into brawls with parent groups because,
for example, it would clearly explain why evolution is central to
biology, why military and economic history are ultimately more
determinant than cultural and literary history (or what Marx called
the superstructure, in the good old days), and why quantum mechanics
doesn't mean that wishing will make it so and you can attract checks
and fly if you really want to.******
7)In
4th and 5th grade this would focus on arguments and cases in student
compositions and in understanding them down at the micro level; by
6th grade they should begin to apply enthymemics to learning one or
more specific academic subjects, and by 7th grade should begin
revisiting some of the subjects they had previously learned as small
children to incorporate and expand the enthymemics.
8)
In 8th grade, I'd offer two one-semester classes: one that was a
general review of enthymemics with many, many small applied problems
(the get-it-ineradicably-into-their-bones course) and another that
demonstrates the foundations of informal logic in formal logic
(syllogisms and all that) as a way of expanding and deepening
understanding.
9)
Now, who would teach all that? What I found at the college level was
that most bright adults could get enthymemics on some level in one
semester course, and become proficient in about another one or two.
Learning to apply enthymemics was highly variable, with most students
seeing and using applications immediately but some students really
fighting to see what all this was about (rather like story problems
or like one college roommate of mine who couldn't see why in physics
class we were analyzing circuits that "didn't do anything.")
Once the teacher candidates have got it themselves and are
proficiently using it to learn their academic material (incidentally
that will make their lives easier, and may help to sell them on the
whole thing), then probably a one-semester course in "teaching
enthymemics" with an emphasis on "don't teach rules, teach
what it is."
Could
it be done? Yes, surely. Will it? Not soon. Should it? Well, yeah, I
think so. Don't forget to write me in for Chief Pooh-Bah at the next
election.
ｧ
*One
letter was from a teacher who apparently read the whole piece as
being about "empathetic" rather than "enthymemic"
reasoning, and just wanted to let me know that empathic listening is
so
important because it helps us understand each other. I shall keep
that in my good day bring-down file, for whenever I find myself too
cheerful, and try to remember to give the Lions Club a few extra
bucks this year.
**
A classic example of this which I shall write about sometime,
somewhere, is the New Math of the mid-1960s. People who write about
education like to shriek, in tones of mild hysteria, that they were
teaching set and number theory (previously grad school topics) to
third graders, instead of making them memorize how many inches are in
a furlong like Grandpa did. Inevitably the people who hold up New
Math as the model of educator cluelessness miss two key points: a)
kids that age take naturally to set and number theory, and many
students in remediation who struggle with basic arithmetic improve
drastically once they have the theory behind it, which is not
intuitive for everyone; conversely many bad teachers of grade-school
math are bad exactly because they don't really know how or why it
works, they've just memorized recipes (like the sort of cook who
isn't sure whether you can substitute Jif for Skippy in a peanut
butter cookie recipe). The New Math was barking up the right tree,
but to make it work, they needed to retrain the teachers, thoroughly
(and perhaps get rid of the few who genuinely couldn't get it, as
opposed to just being thrown in over their heads). Which brings me to
the second ignored point: b) In several nations where there was a
national standard curriculum, teachers were simply paid extra to
retrain during vacation time, so that the teacher knew what s/he was
trying to teach, and in those nations, New Math was adopted with very
little stress, and its descendants are still in use, and several
of those are the nations whose students consistently beat the pants
off American kids in international math comparisons.
***
I've seen some excellent critical thinking textbooks and programs,
and also some that seem to confuse critical thinking with "copping
an attitude about things your teacher doesn't like." It's not a
problem that students can't tell the difference, at least at the
beginning of the term; they're there to learn it. Not a problem,
either, if parents can't; they'll just have to have kids who know
more than they do, and isn't that what progress is? But if the
teacher or the textbook author or publisher can't, that's ominous.
The most effective place to entrench against the forces of ignorance
is at the generational line.
****
If they appointed me Secretary, Minister, Czar, or High Commissioner
of Education, I would immediately, as my first act in office, change
my title to Chief Pooh-Bah. I know my moral character and I need to
stay away from temptations to take myself too seriously. Also, all my
press conferences would end with an intern striking a gong and
shouting, "The Pooh Bah Has Spoken! Tremble, grovel, and
comply!"
*****
This is perfectly normal in younger children; when Stepson #2 was
ten, he thought he was the smartest person in the family because he
knew the most names of dinosaurs. Jeff Foxworthy's "Are you as
Smart as a Fifth Grader?" hilariously relies on this; you could
reverse the results (but it wouldn't be as funny) just by testing
life skills instead of general knowledge. I returned to this topic about a year after, in my
"Smart People Who Make Themselves Dumb" essay.
******
Good thing I'm Chief Pooh Bah; a few parental heads up on pikes
beside the hug-and-go lane should suffice to quell the disturbances,
and from then on, if public meetings become disorderly, I shall
simply have the lackeys release the hounds.
