The New Hunting Season

The cycle has come around again and tour groups are massing on the horizon. It's sort of like an academic hunting season. I love to talk to tour groups of prospective students and their parents. They're all people with high hopes and the best of dreams for the future and their family. Promise and excitement flow all around them. They're a fun group, interested and eager to listen and learn, though often a little fearful or reluctant to speak out.

My only problem with the number of them is in repeating myself over and over. I feel like an idiot. Two groups in a row isn't so bad, but after three I start forgetting what I've said, lose my train of thought and head off in tangents. OK, I usually head off in tangents anyway; it's really my style. It takes much longer to approach a topic obliquely, but once you finally arrive you've got more background and depth of understanding - it builds contextualization. Well, at least I try to convince myself that's true.

This last Monday I finally gave up talking about the film/photo program to the fourth group and said, hey, let's talk about education. "Where do you think learning comes from", I asked a mother. She stammered, "you're asking me?" "Yes, what's your idea of that." She thought a moment and said, "asking questions." Bingo! Wow, that's just the answer I wanted. Yes, it's all about asking questions - back and forth much like a ping pong game.

The ball is the question or answer, the table is the range of topics appropriate to the discussion and the net is to judge the clarity of the question or response. It's the exchange that's the most beneficial - a flow of talking back and forth. Sure you could hit the ball off the table with a wild question, but then the exchange stops and after a few of those in a row no one wants to play with you. You're off topic, too erratic or seem incoherent.

So to play the game to learn you need to know the topic area - what's the appropriate range of discussion. That comes from doing the reading that's assigned and maybe a bit more than that too. It's also useful to know the history of the topic or even the history of the discussion of the topic. That, again, comes from doing the reading, but for sure this time reading more broadly than just what was assigned.

Finally and more personally you need to be self examining about your own clarity of understanding. Do you get it? Or maybe not so much. I often find that what I thought I knew well, when I go to explain it to someone else it's much foggier in my mind than I realized. I don't really understand it after all, though I thought I did. That social or public opportunity to talk allowed me to find out just how well I grasped the topic or surprisingly didn't.

We're all so clever in our own minds, but much less so once those thoughts get "published" and can be examined by others or even, by developing professional distance, hear ourselves talk.

I always tell students it's important to show work in class. Not because the other students are going to give you good advise. They may, but usually they're no better a filmmaker than you are. The real reason to show work is to discover how you feel about it when you show it publicly. Often we find that what we thought was so hot yesterday in the edit room makes no sense on the big screen after all and we cringe and slide down in our seat mumbling, what was I thinking of, gotta change that fast. That's what's helpful.

So thanks mom for the great answer. You do know a lot about education and you were brave enough to speak up. That's one of the debilitating problems at the start of any inquiry - fear. Managing fear, professionally, is a fundamental part of the learning process. At the beginning we all feel lost and unsure of what questions we even have, let alone how to ask them. With a little time and knowledge under our belt that passes. We discover the lay of the land, grasp what we've come to know and become equally aware of what we still don't know. This all falls, I think, under the heading of learning to learn, maybe the most valuable skill of all.

gunther