If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

by Alan Alda

  Once the leading character is onstage, he’d better start doing something, or we’ll wonder why he’s there, and Gopen feels the verb—the action—should come soon after the hero’s entrance.

  The Stress Position

  According to Gopen, readers assume that what comes at the end of the sentence has special importance. He calls it the stress position, a place of emphasis.

  For me, the end of a sentence has the same place of honor as the punch line at the end of a joke.

  It’s kind of obvious, but suppose you were to tell a friend this joke (it’s kind of a meta-joke):

  A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “What is this, a joke?”

  If you find that funny enough to tell your friend, it’s a sure thing you wouldn’t tell it this way:

  A bartender says, “What is this, a joke?” because a priest, a rabbi, and a minister have just walked into his bar.

  The setup comes first and the funny part—the twist—always comes at the end.

  If the reader actually has these and a host of other expectations, then being aware of them might give us a clue about what the reader will be going through. Including distracting thoughts, like, What’s this guy driving at? Why am I suddenly not interested in this? Did I leave the stove on?

  But are we actually able to get into the reader’s mind?

  Not everyone thinks so.

  THE READER’S PERSPECTIVE

  In his elegant book The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker says that to write as if the reader were looking over your shoulder is probably not possible. It’s just too difficult to take on the perspective of another person.

  I wonder.

  I think novelists do this when they draw convincing characters. I think an actor does it every time he or she walks onto a stage as a character who is clearly not him or her. There wouldn’t be any theater if actors couldn’t in some way take on the perspective of another person.

  If the director calls “Action!” and I walk into a room to hang somebody up by a chain and torture him, I don’t just walk in knowing I’m going to do this awful thing; I have to see it through the eyes of the character. I have to know why I’m doing it. More than that, I have to know that I deserve to do it. The character’s reasoning becomes my reasoning. I’m not telling you about the character; for a few minutes, it’s as though I am him.

  It takes training and practice, of course, or everybody would be an actor. But the point is that it’s possible, to some extent, to take on another person’s perspective.

  EVEN REACHING US WITH MATH

  My friend Steve Strogatz works this way writing about mathematics.

  Steve wants to convey not just math but the beauty of math. And he does it not so much by thinking about math, but by thinking about thinking—what the other person is thinking and feeling. In his essay “Writing about Math for the Perplexed and the Traumatized,” he says:

  Explaining math well requires empathy. The explainer needs to recognize that there’s another person on the receiving end of the explanation. But in our culture of mathematics, an all-too-common approach is to state the assumptions, state the theorems, prove the theorems, and stop. Any questions?

  What makes this approach so ineffective is that it answers questions the student hasn’t thought to ask.

  Instead, Steve engages the reader as a friend. He wrote a whole book about math as if he were actually writing to one particular good friend of his. I know this is true, because I’m the friend. He knows what I’m probably thinking when he writes a sentence, because he’s spent hours with me trying to get me accustomed to basic ideas in math, like irrational numbers, or the fact that there’s more than one kind of infinity. (How many kinds of infinity do we need, for God’s sake? Isn’t one that goes on forever long enough? Apparently not.)

  But whether he’s writing with me in mind or a stranger, Steve thinks about what the reader is probably thinking.

  You may wonder why I’m going on about this. If you don’t do a lot of writing for a living, you may be asking yourself how all this applies to you.

  I think it applies to everyone, because we all write now. We’re emailing, blogging, texting. And many of us still use whole sentences. We’re applying for jobs in business letters, or applying for love on dating sites.

  My guess is that even in writing, respecting the other person’s experience gives us our best shot at being clear and vivid, and our best shot, if not at being loved, at least at being understood.

  CHAPTER 16

  Teaching and the Flame Challenge

  MAKING IT CLEAR TO ELEVEN-YEAR-OLDS

  In teaching, everyone seems to have heard the phrase “start with what they know.” But it’s another thing to know how to do it. I had a teacher once who seemed entirely innocent of the concept.

  When I was eleven years old, I was beginning to try to figure out how things got the way they were. I was particularly amazed by the flame at the end of the candle. Why did it give off light like that? Why was it hot? And how come it wasn’t solid? If you moved fast enough, you could put your finger right through it.

  That year, I had a teacher I liked very much. She was cheerful, young, and had an opulent chest. These were qualities that at the time recommended her highly to my curiosity. So one day I asked her, “What’s a flame? What’s going on in there?”

  She paused for a long moment, searching her mind for an accurate answer. Finally, she said one word: “Oxidation.”

  That was it. Oxidation. I hadn’t known what a flame was, and now I didn’t know what oxidation was either. I still had a crush on her, but I was back where I started. Except now I had another name for it.

  Simply giving a name to something doesn’t explain it, as much as we might like it to. Richard Feynman told the story of a boy who taunted him when he was young, challenging him to name a bird they’d just seen. When he couldn’t, the boy said, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But his father already had taught him something that was more important than the name of a thing. He’d said to him, “See that bird? It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” Feynman could tell his father had made up the name. Then he started to give Richard fictitious names of the same bird in several languages. “You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world,” he said, “but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird….so let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.”

  Many decades after my teacher had renamed a flame for me, I was writing an article about communication for the journal Science, hoping to stir scientists to reach out to the public with the story of their work. I was about halfway through when I realized I was writing a litany of familiar arguments. It wasn’t personal. It didn’t have a story; it was just the facts, which by themselves can be soporific. I wasn’t following my own advice. There must be some personal angle I can come in on, I thought. And then, suddenly, I remembered: oxidation.

  I went back to the beginning of the piece and told the flame story. My curiosity, my teacher’s frustrated attempt to explain fire. By the time I got to the end of the article, I realized I had a way to engage the scientists I was writing for. I could invite them to join a contest. I asked, “Would you be willing to have a go at writing your own explanation of what a flame is—one that an eleven-year-old would find intelligible, maybe even fun?” And then came the best part: The contest would be judged by real eleven-year-olds.

  I don’t know who came up with the idea of eleven-year-olds as judges. Did I think of it, or was it Howie Schneider, or Liz Bass, the director of the Center for Communicating Science at the time? It seemed like a fun idea, a cherry on the sundae, but it turned out to give insights into teaching. The kids were very much in charge of their own learning as they judged the entries, and that seemed to make a difference.

  They loved the idea that they could say to an adult, even an expert adult, “That’s a good expl
anation, but it could be a little better.” And in order to know whether an entry could be better, they had to become familiar with what was actually going on in a flame. Their teachers could work with them on that, and they were motivated to learn because that gave them the background for judging. Then, what they learned from their teacher was reinforced by reading several entries and comparing them. They were becoming specialists in what goes on in a flame, and it was fun, even though it was a complicated question—much more complicated than I knew at the time.

  I hadn’t realized when we started the contest that about 150 years earlier the great scientist Michael Faraday had delivered nine lectures to young people on the subject of what’s going on in a flame. The lectures fill a book. And the question is even more complicated than that. Science had not yet thought up the puzzling intricacies of quantum physics. If they had, Faraday’s book would be even fatter. And here I was, asking scientists to explain a flame to schoolkids in a few hundred words or a short video. But both the scientists and the kids were having serious fun. Some of the kids’ deliberations were shot on video, and I could see in them a sense of purpose that matched any of the boards of directors I’ve sat on. One boy, criticizing a video he thought was a little hokey, said, “It’s okay to be funny, but you don’t have to be silly. We’re eleven—we’re not seven.” Another example of the importance of truly knowing your audience.

  The contest not only gave the kids authority over the scientists, it also meant they had to listen to one another’s reasoning as they discussed how they should vote. The learning process was a group activity and they thrived on it. In one class, students told their teacher, “I wish we could learn everything this way.”

  We had kids from across the United States and a dozen other countries judging entries from around the world.

  One of those entries in the first year of the contest came from a young American studying for his doctoral degree in Austria. He’d heard about the contest in a podcast of the radio show Science Friday. He immediately knew he wanted to enter the contest and decided the most engaging way to explain a flame would be to build a humorous video. But he had caught up with the podcast so late that he had only two weeks before the deadline to come up with his video. And he was thinking of an elaborate production that involved writing a new song and creating animations.

  His work in the lab involved repairing a broken piece of equipment, which didn’t seem nearly as interesting as putting together an entry for the Flame Challenge, so he told his boss he was taking two weeks off to work on his entry for the contest. He went home and explained to his wife and young daughter that they wouldn’t be seeing much of him for the next couple of weeks, and then he locked himself in the basement.

  During the next two feverish weeks, he wrote a song, arranged it and performed it himself, wrote a script and performed it, and drew elaborate animations that compared the atoms in a flame to the unusual image of Legos punching it out in a boxing ring.

  At the last moment, only minutes before the deadline, he posted the final version of his video. But the next day, he realized that the entry hadn’t gone out and he had missed the deadline. He sent a heartfelt appeal to the Center, explaining that a technical glitch had caused the delay and begging for the chance to have his entry considered.

  It was considered, the kids judged, and Ben Ames became the first winner of the Flame Challenge. His song became a hit in dozens of classrooms. Surprisingly, the lyric included some fancy technical words, like pyrolysis, incandescence, chemiluminescence, and my old favorite, oxidation. But amazingly, the kids weren’t put off by these words; instead, they loved them. One of the students said later that even when she wasn’t thinking about a flame, the song would be running through her head and she’d be learning from it.

  We brought Ben to New York to announce his win at the World Science Festival—and, as a surprise, a classroom of kids who were his fans (and judges) came on stage and serenaded him with what was now their favorite song about pyrolysis.

  Online, Ben’s video brought more attention to the Flame Challenge, and to Ben himself. He was asked to help create a pilot for a television series of animated science shows for kids. The contest was spreading the notion of science communication in more ways than we had imagined it would.

  As the contest grew, the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science became sponsors. It had begun as an improvised attempt to humanize an article and was taking us to unexpected places. Like a true improvisation.

  AUTONOMY

  In the second year of the Flame Challenge, we took a step further toward putting the kids in charge. We began asking them to come up with questions for scientists. In the first six years of the Flame Challenge, the questions they pointed us to were, “What is a flame?” “What is time?” “What is color?” “What is sleep?” “What is sound?” and “What is energy?” What began as an exercise for scientists to explain something complex with clarity had surprised us by becoming a learning experience both for the kids and for those of us who had started the contest.

  If the first principle of teaching is to start with what they know, I think the Flame Challenge suggests that next in importance is that a little autonomy can give students the joy of discovery. And both of these ideas involve empathy and Theory of Mind—a recognition of the interior life of the student: being aware of what they know—and what they want to know.

  My friend Steve Strogatz had been discovering much the same thing while teaching math. Steve is an award-winning teacher, and yet he had become increasingly dissatisfied with his usual way of teaching, which was lecturing. I wasn’t sure why he was dissatisfied. I’ve watched Steve lecture and it was delightful to see how clear and engaging he was. Still, he felt his students were enjoying the lecture as a performance, then doing their homework, but not really becoming engaged deeply with the math. He wanted to find a way to get them more involved and began experimenting with a kind of “active teaching” based on the students’ own sense of inquiry.

  He tried it out in a course he refers to as “Math for People Who Hate Math.” “These were seniors,” Steve said, “who had put off fulfilling their ‘math and quantitative reasoning’ requirement for as long as they possibly could. The only thing standing between them and graduation was this course and the swim test.”

  Instead of lecturing them, and instead of showing them how to solve problems and come up with The Answer, he gave them intriguing puzzles and let them come up with their own solutions.

  For instance, you’re in his class, your first math class in college, and he gives you a piece of paper and a pair of scissors and says, “Fold the paper so that you can make just one cut across the paper with the scissors and you wind up with a piece of paper shaped like a triangle.”

  Not so easy. Is it even possible?

  It is, but you and your classmates have to figure it out on your own. One person will get an inspiration for an approach to the problem, and even if it doesn’t work, another will take the idea and build on it.

  Yes And, with scissors.

  There’s a sense of collaboration and fun. The class may not realize it at first, but they’re doing math and quantitative reasoning. They do it happily because, like the kids in the Flame Challenge, to a great extent they’re in charge of the process.

  There’s pleasure for the teacher, too. “Teaching this class,” Steve says, “was a joyful experience surpassing any other in my career….I certainly love teaching students who already like math. But there’s something remarkable about working with a group of students who think they hate math or find it boring, and then turning them around, even just a little bit.”

  This sounded to me like the reward that comes from paying attention and noticing what the other person is going through: that little spurt of happiness hormone.

  For Steve, it’s a necessary part of teaching. He said, “I need to know what works for you. And I won’t know unless I’m empathic. There’s
no other way. What else can it be, if it’s a mind communicating with another mind?”

  GETTING PERSONAL IS A TWO-WAY STREET

  Sometimes, being willing to see the other person means you have to be willing to let them see you. I saw an interesting example of this when we began training teaching assistants. TAs, as they’re called, are graduate students who are assigned the task of teaching a course to undergraduates. Typically, they know their material extremely well, but they have little or no experience in communicating what they know. This can defeat one of the reasons for having them teach undergraduates in the first place: the hope that they’ll give their students such a fascinating view of biology or physics that undergraduates will be inspired to study those subjects themselves. Too often, though, the undergraduates are scared away by boredom and the frustrating sense that they just don’t get it and never will.

  We started a pilot program, training a group of TAs teaching biology. Rounding them up was tough going. Graduate students have a heavy academic load, and when they have to take the time to teach classes, they’re not in the mood to take more classes on how to do it. We limited the training to one hour a week, hoping that would give us enough time to be of help.

  One of the main things we wanted to do was to get the TAs comfortable with actually making contact with their students. They had to figure out if the students comprehended what they were being taught, if they understood the experiments they were doing, and if they were tuning in to the meaning of the facts and techniques they were exposed to. The way to do that, we felt, was to establish a personal connection with the people in the class. So the TAs were asked to make at least one personal contact with their students before the next session. It could be utterly simple and pro forma, like “Hi, how are you doing?”