Ed Psych

There are two ways to learn something new:

1. Books/classes
2. Immersion/obsession

I choose obsession.

Obsession is not for everyone. Luckily, I have a natural gift for focus, drive, and physical insensitivity to awkward sitting positions.

I have no corresponding gift for balance—of anything. I am clumsy (and in fact, despite years of hurling myself to the floor in gym class, have never successfully completed a cartwheel). I tend to choose a topic or author or director and then talk about/read/watch only that thing.

This is occasionally obscured by my rapidly rotating through topics/authors/directors, which makes me appear to be more balanced than I probably am. It is also punctuated by periods of what I described in “Apoplectic, anorectic” (but don’t bother reading it—it’s not that good), in which I completely lose interest or investment in something that should be necessary or good: like eating, or reading anything at all, or watching movies or TV, or work of any kind. I’m pretty sure I’d be on jihad right now if it weren’t for that natural circuit-breaker.

But there’s this point in obsession, when you’ve absorbed all you can of whatever the topic or activity, when you can break through into understanding; the whole world snaps into place, somehow. It happened to me in China, after two months of not understanding a word of what the Chinese were saying to me…suddenly, I understood everything. It wasn’t because I had been studying. It was because I had been saturated with the everyday movements, gestures, laughter and doubt and way-of-being of the people, and my point of view had shifted. I could understand them even without vocabulary or grammar; I felt I could understand their way of thinking.

It was as dramatic as when the optometrist clicks the next lens into place and asks “Okay, one…or two? One…or two?” and your prescription is finally, literally, clarified.

I heard myself respond to questions I couldn't understand with words I didn't know I knew. I had to translate into English based on how I had responded to the question in Chinese, to get back to what the original question had been. Often, I would have entire conversations with shopkeepers or waitresses or hairdressers and later realize that I could not explain to other Americans what we had talked about because I didn't know the individual meanings of words -- only the meaning intended to be conveyed. I could not remember whether films I watched had been subtitled or dubbed, my memory of the content was so vivid. It was as though I were learning a new mother-tongue.

This perspective-shift can happen with book-learning, and I’ve experienced it with a particularly good book’s explanation of principles or characters or an especially revelatory scene in a movie — but it feels less then like I’m changing, and more like my understanding has changed.

Still, this is how I teach, or how I try to teach and learn: to the break-through point, not to a test. Tests are worthless -- I think most teachers would agree -- and in a perfect world, they would do nothing but distract us all from the business of learning. As it is, I can count on my hands the number of historical facts I learned in twelve years of public school: The Magna Carta was signed in 1215; Chief Pontiac of the Ottawas was indirectly responsible for the Proclamation of 1763; Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1733; the Bismarckian system of alliances is unfathomably complex; forty percent of British went to the movies twice a week in the 1940's.

I learned differently in China. I learned a lot more.

My second year in China, while in the lao cheng (Old City) in Yinchuan with my best Chinese friends — three girls, my students — I walked ahead, breaking through the crowd as we aimed for another large market, and I noticed that people were staring as they passed us. I turned around, trying to discover what was fascinating them, and looked for a second before understanding dawned: They were looking at me, a foreigner (with huang se tou fa, “yellow hair,” freckles and blue eyes). I laughed and said to my girls “Sometimes I forget that I’m a lao wai ('foreigner').”

They looked at me, startled for a second, and I saw understanding hit them the way it had me — they laughed, too.

“Sometimes, we, too” they said. “You are like a Chinese to us. You are just Alicia.”