(Side note: Remember when we had both Supernanny and Nanny 911? It seems like Supernanny won that war, at least in the glorious world of syndication. Wasn’t that around the same time that Nanny Mcphee came out, too? America must have been working through some weird Mary Poppins nostalgia or something.)
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| Pictured: Gordon Ramsay (née Mcphee) |
Now, I do not respond to criticism very well. I get defensive and argumentative just like that douchey bald guy. But I know this about myself, so I don’t go out there and actively seek out criticism. (Besides, I criticize myself and everything I do more than enough to make up for it.) The people on these shows applied to be on them, though. Or, at least, they have hard evidence in front of them that proves (as I often yell at the TV) “WHAT YOU’RE DOING ISN’T WORKING.” Their bar or restaurant is losing money, or their kids are out of control, or their pet doesn’t obey them or whatever. (Is there a pets version of this show already? If not, it’s mine.) Very often they utter the words, “I need help.” So it’s fascinating that they still can manage to be so resistant to the help that comes.
Moreover, one of the central premises of these shows is that the people who are giving them advice - the Gordon Ramsay, the Supernanny Jo, the Supertrainer Steve (TM) - are qualified to do so. They have done this sort of thing before, many times, and have had success; they aren’t pulling any of it out of their ass, so to speak. But still, many people don’t want to hear it. They’d rather cling stubbornly to their own failing policies than accept the advice of an expert.
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In education, we are inundated with experts. There are the consultants from outside organizations that teach us about the initiatives that our school has been signed up for (often without teachers’ awareness or consent); there are our actual bosses, the principals and superintendents and department heads; there are the legislators who pass laws regarding what we can/cannot/should/must do in the classroom; there are the scholars who study our discipline and/or education at a higher level, and publish their research in journals that nobody but their colleagues can access anyway. And in a broader sense, everybody sort of considers themselves an expert on education, or at least acts like it. When I used to mention to people - my coworkers at Subway or Toys R Us, for instance - that I was planning on becoming a teacher, they always had some opinion that they wanted to share. Either teachers were too boring, or too judgmental, or needed to be more strict, or needed to focus more on teaching critical thinking, or needed to go “back to basics” - each opinion uttered with the same air of authority that you would expect from the Jon Taffer of teaching.
I wonder if people in other professions deal with this phenomenon, too, but I kind of doubt it. At least not to the same degree. But it does make sense. Pretty much everyone you meet does have all kinds of experience with education - at least twelve years of it, which is plenty of time to form some opinions. Plus, there’s always that “taxpayer” card that can get played (which is a whole other discussion, but let me just quickly make the point that I, too, pay taxes, so unless I pay my own salary, you don’t pay my salary either, SHARON.)
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| Demetri Martin is just, like, really really good |
And it would be one thing if all these experts and “experts” agreed with each other, but of course they do not. I figure it’s sort of like this: you’re sent to five different doctors to figure out what is wrong with you and how to make it better. The first doctor diagnoses you with some specific disease and writes you a prescription. The second doctor diagnoses you with something else and writes you a different prescription, which absolutely cannot be taken with the first pill you were prescribed or you will die a gruesome, painful death. The third doctor solemnly tells you that you need to have surgery. The fourth doctor tells you that you simply need to exercise more, drink more water, and eliminate all potential sources of stress in your life (you know, like a job and a family.) The fifth doctor insists upon the “rest cure,” where you are to do nothing but lie in bed and stare at the patterns on some yellow wallpaper all day. And each doctor is positively emphatic that his or her cure - and only his or her cure - will make you better.
And then you go home and say to yourself, “Man, I didn’t even think I was sick. I mean, I didn’t feel amazing or anything, but I didn’t think things were that bad.”
It would be easy, in this situation, to become distrustful of “experts,” to conclude that none of them really knew what they were talking about, since they can’t even agree on the nature of the problem, never mind the solution. And this is exactly what I think a lot of educators (and others, but we’ll get to that later) have done. At every single mandatory training or instance of professional development I have attended over the past few years, there has always been a silent majority of teachers who have listened politely to the speaker, participated in all activities and discussions, but - candidly, after the fact - expressed a general sentiment that it was all a waste of time, that they already knew what worked from their own experience, and that’s what they were going to continue to do. You know, the same thing that some reality show participants say about the advice that they are given.
What I want to consider here is the relationship that ought to exist between “expertise” and “experience.” (To be clear: I am using “experience” here in the sense of one’s personal, direct experience doing something. Someone else’s experience, or an appeal to the amount of experience that another person has doing the thing, would really fall under “expertise” in this framework.) I think that is is unhealthy and unproductive to dismiss expertise and revere experience, and equally harmful to dismiss experience and revere expertise - and yet we have a tendency to fall into these patterns.
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Probably the best example of “expertise” in our culture is science. Most of us don’t really understand science beyond, like, an eighth-grade level, but we do believe in the authority of its experts, even when what those experts teach us directly contradicts our personal experience. I mean, do you believe that the Earth revolves around the sun? Yeah, me too. Do you believe that disease is caused by little living creatures so small you can’t even see them, and that millions of those little creatures live on and inside your body? Same. Do you believe that all life on Earth descended from one organism that lived billions of years ago? So do I, but I certainly don’t have any personal experience that confirms it.
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| Oh, yeah, these are totally real. Not made up at all. |
Of course, there is a certain segment of the population that does not believe in science. Our president happens to be one of the most egregious examples. (He doesn’t believe in exercise because he thinks the body contains a finite amount of energy, “like a battery” - which goes against, like, pretty much everything we know about bodies.) But then there is also the US Senator, James Inhofe, who brought a snowball into Congress as an argument against global warming, or every annoying guy in line behind you on a cold day who has to offer his two cents: “So much for global warming, huh?” Then there is alleged comedian Steve Harvey who doesn’t believe in evolution because (and this is a direct quote): “Why we still got monkeys?” Or all of the people who are “just raising questions” about vaccines, or the small but presumably serious group of people who still claim the Earth is flat. Man, we’ve got a lot more of this shit than I thought.
And if you asked any of those people what they were doing, I bet they’d say something about how they were being skeptical, or questioning authority, or challenging things that simply “don’t make sense.” That is: they are choosing to follow their own experience over other people's expertise. Which is kind of strange for me to think about, because putting it that way, I instinctively want to side with them. I believe in being skeptical, don’t I? I believe in following my own perception rather than what a group of experts has told me I’m supposed to think. But, like, just not in this case?
There is a fantastic scene from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia that illustrates this whole situation perfectly. In it, the character Mac makes what is honestly the best argument I have ever heard for being skeptical of scientific truth: we only believe in it because we have read about it in books, which is exactly what we criticize religious people for doing. And Dennis is all of us, unconvinced but unable to rebut the point. Because, holy shit, Mac is actually right. We have been trusting in the expertise of scientists even when it contradicts our own experience. Because, like, the Earth does look flat and it does look like the sun is the one moving.
So how do we contend with this? I think the answer lies in the necessity of allowing for a conversation between experience and expertise, in scientific as well as all other matters. Choosing one side and defending it no matter what only leads to absurdity. What we need to do is understand that both our experience and the voice of experts are valid in some way, and that there is some sort of relationship between them. They make comments upon one another. In some cases, expertise is able to explain why we perceive things the way we do; in other cases, it cannot account for them and therefore is not sufficient.
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I mentioned before that one of the groups of experts that teachers have to contend with are the scholars who study their discipline, with their ivory-tower pronouncements about the right and wrong ways to teach. I can’t speak for other disciplines, but I know that one of the groups that has the most clout within the writing-pedagogy community is the National Writing Project and its associated academics, people like Donald Murray and Lucy Calkins and Peter Elbow. They espouse a particular approach to teaching writing - the “workshop” style, as it is often called - which I personally find appealing and try to emulate in my own classroom. But there is undeniably a sense of “Thou shalt” in their writings and speeches and so on, and I know that plenty of teachers have reacted to that with resistance.
For instance, way back in 1990, before I was even a person, a high-school English teacher wrote a piece that was published in English Journal entitled, “Why High-School Writing Teachers Should Not Write.” This was a direct contradiction of one of the central tenets of what was then, and arguably remains, the orthodox view of how to teach writing. Jost’s opening line reveals her position pretty clearly: “From the mountain heights of academia a new dictum has been passed . . .all the way down to those of us in the trenches.” She then goes on to explain that the experience of teaching high-school English does not leave her with time or energy to write seriously, and ends by challenging the experts to “come on down here into the trenches and show me how it’s done . . . the day you join a high-school faculty, I’ll pick up my pen and start a novel.”
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| Kind of an extreme metaphor, huh? |
I do not think, though, that what Jost wrote is a problematic example, though, the way that the Senator’s snowball is (senator's snowball new band name called it) - for two reasons. One: it is about a particular thing that she feels she is being told to do, rather than about expertise in general (though some of her snide remarks do veer in that direction). Two: it was written down and submitted for publication, thereby beginning a conversation about the issue, which is exactly what I am suggesting is the right way to deal with a discrepancy. In fact, the way I found Jost’s article was through another article written a year later by a practicing teacher named Tim Gillespie called, “Joining the Debate: Shouldn’t Writing Teachers Write,” which articulates some of the reasons why writing might be useful for writing teachers. And I found that one from a blog post by Peter Anderson, a writing teacher who I follow on Twitter, who was researching the same question. So the conversation has been going on for twenty-seven years now.
But I think the most interesting part of Gillespie’s article is the following section: “I was surprised that Karen Jost railed against experts who urged her to write, since I have always viewed by own writing as my main defense against experts. My own experience as a writer inoculates me from any nonsense I might run across in the pronouncements on the teaching of writing by anyone . . . Karen Jost views writing as acquiescence to authority; I view it as establishing my own authority.”
What one person considers to be dripping with expertise is someone else’s revitalizing experience.
And so that means that it is our own perceptions that really need to be examined in all of these cases. After all, to Charles Darwin, evolution was something that he had observed directly rather than the received wisdom it is today; to the early Protestants, reading the Bible for oneself rather than listening to the interpretations of a priest was the ultimate in experience. These things are relative. And so perhaps the most important conversation that needs to take place is the one that happens inside oneself, where we reflect honestly on what we believe and why we believe it.
I do believe the Earth goes around the Sun because I read it in a book. That is the truth. And that is the only worthwhile starting point.
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