more about advice
Because, let me be honest, I am a far from complete person, and would be nowhere without the help and guidance of nearly everyone around me. I figure nobody's just born knowing what to do, so it's good to have honest people around you to keep your head on straight.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I met someone who works as a career coach. We had been making smalltalk, but there must have been something in my body language that showed I am badly in need of some coaching in the career/long-term goals/life-direction department. My exposure to career counseling thus far in life is limited totools like the "career aptitude test" they gave us in high school, which told me I should either be a security guard or assemble furniture, or the "what would you do all day if you didn't have to worry about money or working?" mental exercise familiar to us all, if not from a counselor then from the movie "Office Space" (my answer: uh... read about sports on the internet?). And the one time I used drop-in hours at my college's Career Development Office, the officer started by asking me which field I was looking for a job in, a step I was nowhere near prepared to take.
Her advice, however, struck a chord with me, and I've been kind of mulling it over ever since. She suggests writing or doing other exercises to think about, not what you *want* to do, that awful nebulous question, but what you've done already that you're proud of. This was, to be sure, difficult. When I think of the word "pride", I think of Greek tragedy, or an Olympic medal ceremony, or even of a group of lions sitting in the grass before I think of anything from my own life. I'm uncomfortable with a lot of the metrics by which society measures value (and frankly I don't stack up well in a lot of them), and usually when I think about being proud of something, it's in terms of being Good at Something Important. So my initial reaction was a kind of incredulous intrigue: what do most people feel proud of? How does this help them think about careers? And the like.
Well, it finally hit me today what it is that I'm often proud of: explaining things. You may say, wonderful, Sam, you're already a teacher! But teaching is not exactly the same as explaining things. Explaining has no relationship to what is important (for the real world or even for the next standardized test). It thrives in the presence of intricacy, obscurity, and rules-based systems.
Most importantly, the distinction between teaching and explaining is centered around audience. Many teachers I have spoken with are motivated by the knowledge that their teaching will benefit students in important ways. They strive to make their material interesting and engaging, and appreciate it when students are committed to learning the subject. Explaining is unconcerned about audience. I would like to apologize right now for all the people I've explained to (there are a lot of them, even just considering the past month) whose glassy-eyed, disinterested stares failed to impart to me that I should seriously shut up and stop explaining. I've tested people's patience recently with explanations about the history of the Magyars and its impact on the Hungarian language, with a description of the relationship between European league soccer and Champions' League, with semi-articulate defenses of the Obama candidacy, with assessments of the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defense, with a not-so-brief summary of my math thesis. I apologize to all of you. Every one of the above explanations went on for far too long and failed to elicit any questions or reaction from you, the listener. Which failed to stop me the next time I got started with an explanation. Please, please, for both of our benefit, the next time you aren't interested or just kind of get lost or whatever, stop me. I won't think it's rude, I really won't. But if you just kind of zone out and let me keep going, I will explain for long stretches of time, irrespective of body language cues or the world around me, until the explanation is somehow "complete". Often, for particularly technical explanations, or those outside your typical fields of interest, I will step back and explain related topics requisite for the understanding of the original object of explanation. So stop me quickly, and our lives will both be fifteen minutes richer.
Why am I a prisoner of this habit? Well, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, explanatory efforts are rewarded. I met with a group of people to help teach mahjong yesterday, and I had a great time. People actually wanted to learn; the game is intricate, rules-based, and non-intuitive; I was not expected to know how to play at all, as a foreigner, let alone be able to teach anyone; and the teaching was relatively successful. The stylistic difference between teaching and explaining, though, was in retrospect quite apparent: at one point, I was at a table with two learners, two observers, and one person who already knew the game. This other person was a teacher: she discussed the game with the person observing her tiles, elicited answers and provided feedback about strategy, and had patience and enthusiasm for the other learners whether they just made a good move or a mistake. I, on the other hand, was explaining. I failed to ask good, information-eliciting questions. I was not as patient with the new players. I at times did things to show off that I had additional "local" knowledge beyond the scope of the lesson. I think learning happened, but I was explaining, not teaching.
I mentioned that I was a math major at the beginning of this post because I associate this general type of behavior with math/technical people. I display one of a whole family of forms of being awkward that includes a lot of talking. Although one refuge from feeling uncomfortable in social situations is social withdrawal or introversion, I have one of those forms that showers those around me with faux pas. Instead of being intervened against and corrected, though, the safer social course appears to be to diagnose my problem as a sign of "knowledge of trivia" or even "intelligence", which is almost certainly solely thanks to Merv Griffin and Alex Trabek (which I do enjoy, though I was always a bit more partial to Win Ben Stein's Money). So that's why it's somewhat OK to be an explainer, and why, I guess I feel proud of explaining things sometimes. Maybe, just maybe, the things explained will awaken someone's latent interest in something new. Although don't expect this to happen if we end up talking about my math thesis.
The next question is, clearly, what kind of career advice do you give to an explainer?
Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I met someone who works as a career coach. We had been making smalltalk, but there must have been something in my body language that showed I am badly in need of some coaching in the career/long-term goals/life-direction department. My exposure to career counseling thus far in life is limited totools like the "career aptitude test" they gave us in high school, which told me I should either be a security guard or assemble furniture, or the "what would you do all day if you didn't have to worry about money or working?" mental exercise familiar to us all, if not from a counselor then from the movie "Office Space" (my answer: uh... read about sports on the internet?). And the one time I used drop-in hours at my college's Career Development Office, the officer started by asking me which field I was looking for a job in, a step I was nowhere near prepared to take.
Her advice, however, struck a chord with me, and I've been kind of mulling it over ever since. She suggests writing or doing other exercises to think about, not what you *want* to do, that awful nebulous question, but what you've done already that you're proud of. This was, to be sure, difficult. When I think of the word "pride", I think of Greek tragedy, or an Olympic medal ceremony, or even of a group of lions sitting in the grass before I think of anything from my own life. I'm uncomfortable with a lot of the metrics by which society measures value (and frankly I don't stack up well in a lot of them), and usually when I think about being proud of something, it's in terms of being Good at Something Important. So my initial reaction was a kind of incredulous intrigue: what do most people feel proud of? How does this help them think about careers? And the like.
Well, it finally hit me today what it is that I'm often proud of: explaining things. You may say, wonderful, Sam, you're already a teacher! But teaching is not exactly the same as explaining things. Explaining has no relationship to what is important (for the real world or even for the next standardized test). It thrives in the presence of intricacy, obscurity, and rules-based systems.
Most importantly, the distinction between teaching and explaining is centered around audience. Many teachers I have spoken with are motivated by the knowledge that their teaching will benefit students in important ways. They strive to make their material interesting and engaging, and appreciate it when students are committed to learning the subject. Explaining is unconcerned about audience. I would like to apologize right now for all the people I've explained to (there are a lot of them, even just considering the past month) whose glassy-eyed, disinterested stares failed to impart to me that I should seriously shut up and stop explaining. I've tested people's patience recently with explanations about the history of the Magyars and its impact on the Hungarian language, with a description of the relationship between European league soccer and Champions' League, with semi-articulate defenses of the Obama candidacy, with assessments of the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defense, with a not-so-brief summary of my math thesis. I apologize to all of you. Every one of the above explanations went on for far too long and failed to elicit any questions or reaction from you, the listener. Which failed to stop me the next time I got started with an explanation. Please, please, for both of our benefit, the next time you aren't interested or just kind of get lost or whatever, stop me. I won't think it's rude, I really won't. But if you just kind of zone out and let me keep going, I will explain for long stretches of time, irrespective of body language cues or the world around me, until the explanation is somehow "complete". Often, for particularly technical explanations, or those outside your typical fields of interest, I will step back and explain related topics requisite for the understanding of the original object of explanation. So stop me quickly, and our lives will both be fifteen minutes richer.
Why am I a prisoner of this habit? Well, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, explanatory efforts are rewarded. I met with a group of people to help teach mahjong yesterday, and I had a great time. People actually wanted to learn; the game is intricate, rules-based, and non-intuitive; I was not expected to know how to play at all, as a foreigner, let alone be able to teach anyone; and the teaching was relatively successful. The stylistic difference between teaching and explaining, though, was in retrospect quite apparent: at one point, I was at a table with two learners, two observers, and one person who already knew the game. This other person was a teacher: she discussed the game with the person observing her tiles, elicited answers and provided feedback about strategy, and had patience and enthusiasm for the other learners whether they just made a good move or a mistake. I, on the other hand, was explaining. I failed to ask good, information-eliciting questions. I was not as patient with the new players. I at times did things to show off that I had additional "local" knowledge beyond the scope of the lesson. I think learning happened, but I was explaining, not teaching.
I mentioned that I was a math major at the beginning of this post because I associate this general type of behavior with math/technical people. I display one of a whole family of forms of being awkward that includes a lot of talking. Although one refuge from feeling uncomfortable in social situations is social withdrawal or introversion, I have one of those forms that showers those around me with faux pas. Instead of being intervened against and corrected, though, the safer social course appears to be to diagnose my problem as a sign of "knowledge of trivia" or even "intelligence", which is almost certainly solely thanks to Merv Griffin and Alex Trabek (which I do enjoy, though I was always a bit more partial to Win Ben Stein's Money). So that's why it's somewhat OK to be an explainer, and why, I guess I feel proud of explaining things sometimes. Maybe, just maybe, the things explained will awaken someone's latent interest in something new. Although don't expect this to happen if we end up talking about my math thesis.
The next question is, clearly, what kind of career advice do you give to an explainer?
posted by sam at
11:55 PM
2 Comments:
do research? write papers? be a professor. cuz professors don't care don't care about students, they just care about research and hearing themselves talk. At least at big universities. Or be a consultant. Or a middle man. the guy who explains stuff to people.
By
Kristy, at 2/6/08, 1:10 PM
Sam - I think you should write a novel.
By
Anonymous, at 2/8/08, 2:53 AM
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