How Do We Know? 8.28.22
Teaching Moments, Learning Curves and Wisdom Around the Eyes
Greetings and a back-to-school newShrink salute to knowing, in all its forms and levels.
Schools and education in general are top-of-mind this time of year, especially across the current political and economic news-scape. So today’s focus is:
🔷 What’s getting intentionally taught, delivered individually or put-out-there via the news — which we might consider our teaching moments. (A handful of headlines depicted in the left column above are examples.)
🔷 Then there are learning curves over time: Historic revisitings of context and relationship that dramatically influence or are even essential to what gets absorbed at all, acted upon, how, and when. (Some examples are pictured in the center column above.)
🔷 Finally, from the soul- and psychological perspective: A broader question of awareness, of how we come to “know-what-we-know” (and also what-we-don’t). I tend to think of this in terms like the title-phrase wisdom around the eyes. (Ideas from various traditions are depicted in the quote boxes and in the right column above.)
Thinkers through millennia dating back to ancient Greece have another word for this knowing awareness: epistemology. A small few of them are pictured above at top left (viewing left-to-right in two rows):
#1. Aristotle, Plato, and in more recent centuries, Immanuel Kant and René Descartes.
These are three organizing themes to watch for in discussion below. (Items that refer to specific clustered images are numbered and note location on the illustration. Images are stock photography unless credits are otherwise cited.)
On today’s three themes my sense is that we’re always in dynamic process, moving forward and back between skill training, being increasingly educated, and becoming something more overarching or big-picture like “witnessing”… wiser.
🔷 Speaking of themes to watch for, it’s apt that the Friday Worldle-solve was irony, for there’s a lot of that to note among today’s items. One example is pictured in the top two images in the center column above. Shown together here quite by accident are two very different men and their stories nearly a century apart, one not even a real person or an educator but a fictional lawyer. Both happen to ply their respective trades using their cars in a signature way — to both service and detriment of learning, knowledge, healing or progress. I noticed the quirky car-similarity only after selection and placement of photos and stories.
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Teaching Moments: A handful of headlines
Aside from the annual start-of-school rituals, in our current politics and economy multiple overlapping issues, actions and concerns about education, schools and the people in them make headlines and ignite public forums. A handful of examples are cited here: School safety in the wake of gun violence, widespread teacher burnout resulting in massive shortages and strikes, political pressure entering the classroom itself via an array of daunting state “anti-woke” curricula mandates, and a Presidential plan to relieve or at least ease some of the estimated $1.5 trillion in student loan debt held by some 43 million Americans.
#2. Back to School Days
(Left column above.)
(CNN Story with stock photo. Print or video option with link.)
Classrooms in Columbus, Ohio, are empty on 1st day back as teachers strike
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks Wednesday with Regina Fuentes, Columbus Education Association spokesperson, about the teacher's strike over failed contract negotiations between the teacher's union and the school board. (Audio or transcript option with link.)
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The Heartbreak of Going Back to School in Uvalde
(From The New Yorker. Photo by Jordan Vanderhaer, Getty.)
On NPR’s All Things Considered, Mary Louise Kelly introduces a comprehensive report from the team who had been on-site in Uvalde all week:
Uvalde families are grappling with 1st school year since deadly shooting
(NPR, audio or transcript option with link.)
In Uvalde, Texas, the community is still grieving three months after a deadly shooting at Robb Elementary, and are now responding to school district police chief Pete Arredondo's firing.
In these coming days, many kids and educators will return to public school classrooms for the first time since the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School, the shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. And in Uvalde, the school year will begin without one leader who's been widely criticized for the police response to the shooting.
And from The Washington Post:
Uvalde school board fires embattled Police Chief Pete Arredondo (WAPO)
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Florida students return to schools reshaped by Gov. DeSantis' anti-'woke' education agenda (CNN, video or transcript option here.)
This terrifying CNN story summarizes the many issues.
And here’s MSNBC’s Alex Wagner report last weekend on the issue:
DeSantis imposes extreme culture war framing on nuanced U.S. civics
This past Wednesday, the second night of Wagner’s new Tuesday-through-Friday role in the 9 p.m. Rachel Maddow timeslot was devoted to an excellent story featuring Wagner on-site in Florida. She interviewed even very young teachers with a lot at stake who are raising concerns about the curriculum. I wasn’t able to find the clip, at least not yet. If you have better luck, I recommend it as well-done and thorough.
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Biden to cancel up to $10,000 in student loans, $20K for Pell recipients
(The Washington Post. Photo from video by The Post’s Michael Cadenhead.)
Biden to Cancel $10,000 in Student Debt; Low-Income Students Are Eligible for More (The New York Times)
The debt forgiveness comes after months of deliberations in the White House over fairness and fears that the plan could make inflation worse ahead of the midterm elections.
Fact check: Student loan forgiveness won’t make inflation ‘even worse,’ experts say
(The Charlotte Observer)
What You Need to Know About Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan (NYT)
President Biden’s move means the student loan balances of millions of people could fall by as much as $20,000. This F.A.Q. explains how it will work.
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A general concern for effective teaching is some part of every story and issue covered here. Then there is a special, transformative kind of teaching moments and the people who excel at them — often not by either intent or profession. Taking others with them they move into the gap, the learning curve, between what is taught and what is taken in, absorbed and applied.
During this week’s process a good example popped up from a random recent Netflix streaming-search that had became a quick favorite, The Lincoln Lawyer.
Learning Curves
The Mickey Haller, high-pressure/high-end lawyer title character runs a lot of his practice on the move from the back of one of his Lincolns driven by fellow recovering addict, Izzy. Along the way he shares great running commentary about ins and outs of courts, law and life — plus some remarkably healthy, mutually supportive, both savvy and humble ways of relating with Izzy in the car and with others across his sphere. (What’s for a newShrink not to like?!)
# 3. The Lincoln Lawyer
If you’re not familiar, Mickey Haller is a former superstar L.A. defense attorney now healed from a surfing accident that leveled him a few years back and in recovery from the painkiller-addiction that ensued. Now he’s back in spotlight and career-rehab, with a story-line that’s over-the-top and not too plausible in your average courthouse — but fun to watch.
Here I mean the current Netflix series, which adds lawyer-writer David E. Kelley’s deft touch and character nuance to the Michael Connelly novels of the same title also adapted for the 2011 feature film. Without Kelley the 2011 movie with Matthew McConaughey was Bosch-level — also from Connelly novels — good. But from a psychological perspective Mickey and his relationships with himself, Izzy, his still-beloved prosecutor ex-wife Maggie, and others are are more developed and complex in the current version.
Mickey is a bit of a poster-child for lot of key depth-psychology processes, among them how he does that “relaxing of defensive identity with the ego” discussed last week. He owns and brings in his own unknown shadow aspects (both positive and negative) and vulnerabilities as he also navigates a host of archetypally powerful roles from uber-lawyer to failed druggie to bad husband to perfect son to hapless loving dad etc.
For all of us many of these universal or archetypally energetic roles that can consume us come in pairs or tandems. That most simply means, the more you are operating as “100-percent prosecutor” or “parent” or “healer” with me, the less I’m able to respond as anything but (respectively) “defense lawyer” or “child” or “ill/wounded patient.” Relations between the series’ defense lawyer Mickey and prosecutor Maggie-the-ex are a great illustration of how this can play out. (This unconscious soul stuff is tricky and well, it’s… un-conscious!)
Actually the entire series could be a case-study for training psychotherapists in many areas of the work, including couples. In my own clinical training I was fortunate to have a lot of such film, TV and literature case material, deeply immersive one-on-one dyad work and my own required personal therapy concurrent with the entire program. Well-chosen film, TV and particularly fiction books are powerful tools. (Age-appropriate literary fiction has been shown by research to be more effective than things like rules and discipline for instilling empathy in people, especially children.)
In the series Mickey demonstrates so much, so well, in how he relates to clients as well as the described “teaching/philosophizing moments” with Izzy that it seems a therapist as well as a lawyer must have joined the writing team somewhere.
The “teaching moments” aspect is not part of Mickey’s thing with his driver in the 2011 movie, though they have a kind of shared-renegade vibe. I have wondered if perhaps dramatic changes in our politics, news-scape and culture since 2011 may have generated more of an appetite for something that feels and sounds like a bit of greater wisdom.
I love driving, and when I do I would dearly love having a smart, interesting passenger talking-teaching-philosophizing like that! Maybe it’s a new trend for therapists. Or should be.
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Now for the other guy from a completely different era, who oddly shared Mickey’s habit of plying his profession spending lots of time and miles in his own car, a Ford Tudor sedan…
#4. The Archivist for the Lost Cause
(The Assembly)
This is a gem I have shared elsewhere this week, with many thanks to gifted journalist, reader and fellow UNC alum Pam Kelley. (Pam is also my very dear friend over decades since we were newspaper-reporter colleagues.)
This excellent, durably significant piece from The Assembly is a must-read if your passion is UNC, North Carolina or more generally the critical importance of education and history that keeps learning-to-get-it-right. Published last year, it captured fresh attention this week as someone in England at the University of Oxford spotted and re-Tweeted it.
If you haven’t already discovered The Assembly, Pam’s story is also a great chance to check out the much-needed breadth- and depth- regional journalism it is providing at a very low-price yet high professional level.
Here are a few excerpts and highlights. But this is one that calls for the full-immersion reading-journey, which I highly recommend. It’s a landscape Pam has re-traveled and chronicled with fresh eyes and keen sense of how long that historic learning-curve bend can be.
J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton built UNC-Chapel Hill’s renowned Southern Historical Collection. He was also an apologist for the Ku Klux Klan and taught that Black people were inferior to whites. As the university debates removing the professor’s name from Hamilton Hall, his complicated legacy lives on in the archive.
Images at top center and right are Roulhac Hamilton (center) and at right University Librarian Louis Round Wilson in front of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. The latter photo is from a 1930s-era Ford Motor Co. magazine that touts Hamilton “scouring the South for source materials for a national Southern history collection” in his Ford Tudor Sedan. “More than a million pieces of manuscript have been brought to the University of North Carolina in the car,” it says, “and 66,486 miles have been traversed.” // photo courtesy of University Libraries, UNC-CH
Other above photos from Pam’s story feature findings in the archival collection. The captions to these can be viewed by zooming the screen.
A longtime Observer veteran now a Charlotte-area freelance journalist, Pam is the author of Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South. It’s an excellent investigation of my native Charlotte’s own historic learning curves.
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#5. More of history’s learning curves: The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
(By historian C. Vann Woodward, 1955) Photo in bottom-center cluster.
Resources like Pam’s story amid current news and recent-years’ violence, controversy and backlash over race — and an accurate accounting of our nation’s racial history in particular — have piqued memory and revisiting of this powerful book. I remember as a 13-year-old its eye-opening contents of unspoken things said out loud. Even more keen in recall is the remarkable time and situation in which I read it. It was in teacher Ruth Ellerbe’s 8th grade Charlotte-Mecklenburg (public school) class. She assigned the book, required us to write papers on it and discuss thoroughly.
This wasn’t unusual. On another hotly contested issue of the day, the Vietnam War, she had us each write papers either defending or opposing America’s involvement and the draft, then take the opposite stance, and finally discuss with each other in class taking one or the other position.
In Charlotte, by junior high our school was only slightly integrated, the high school much more so due largely to geographic proximity of some long-established Black neighborhoods and communities. And admittedly within those schools there was enormous internal segregation via academic tiering that disproportionately separated-out and limited Black students, deterring interaction or development of relationships.
Today I can at least remember having the level of rich discussions we did in Ruth Ellerbe’s class — and can even imagine being able to do it at some point with a lot of vibrant voices from Black classmates in the room.
In today’s Florida, Texas, Virginia, and a host of other states it is increasingly impossible even to imagine that conversation.
Now I should probably disclose that I still have a burr in my saddle from a snarky aside comment about public schools during this week’s thinking- and writing-time. It was from an unfavorite neighbor (who is far from the sharpest tool in the shed himself!) I had only engaged at all to support his care for some very young area deer that are increasingly vulnerable and stranded by encroaching suburbia. Wish some of that thoughtful regard could extend to humans, especially the young..
Stories like the ones below particularly strike chords of that irony theme. Signs and commemorations of progress and hope are alongside serious and systemic resegregation along socioeconomic, neighborhood-geography and therefore also racial lines. These impacts and trends are not unrelated to what has been a steady drain of funding, teacher and aministrative talent, more affluent (and more white) students and often more available parent-support via charter- and private-school vouchers.
A majority of CMS schools are now low-income. What are Charlotte’s leaders doing to help?
Similar ironies surface with the following paired stories. I write a lot about these issues year-around, so here will just note these two very different stories.
First (pictured at bottom center), Friday was women’s equality day.
Women’s Equality Day 2022: What Women’s Fight For Voting Rights Can Teach Us Today (Forbes)
Women’s Equality Day happens on August 26th on the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 that gave some women, but not all women, the right to vote. Here are some lessons the first women’s rights movement can teach us about continuing to push for equality today.
And right beside it across the nation…
Abortion to be put further out of reach for millions of women as slate of 'trigger bans' take effect (CNN)
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Sigh. A welcome time for a shift toward the soul-ward direction!
Wisdom Around the Eyes: Coming to know-what-we-know
Today’s soul- and psychology dimension largely echoes last week’s emphasis on continuing individuation — becoming more ourselves, and more whole — across our entire adult life-spans via relativization or relaxing the defensive grip of that ego-ideal of all we are supposed-to (or allowed-to) be. The “stay curious” mantra of the Ted Lasso TV character captures a bit of this.
Several of the block quotes in the illustration present aspects of this, too, particularly the value and strength in the humility involved. The word humility shares so many roots with our very human-ness, as well as words like humor, humid, and humus (the earthy kind, but not hummus!)
Some related ideas are the paradoxical strength and resilience inherent in this kind of relaxed owning and allowing-in of vulnerabilities, shadow sides and contradictions, right alongside all of that “playing to our strengths.” To my mind this is the fundamental flaw in the whole bombastic “lie, attack, shout, deflect but never admit error or vulnerability” schtick so pervasive in American public life today.
It’s just loud, brittle, and requires more desperately loud and brittle to sustain. That’s not what strength and reslience look, sound or feel like. (It’s scary that this is what a lot of America looks and sounds like.)
This brings to mind both the Eastern idea of coming at things with beginner’s mind, as expressed in the Suzuki quote, as well as the theme of world- and self-salvation via a baby, a child that is of course a core belief in Christianity. It’s also archetypal across many cultural, story and myth traditions.
Here, plus time for a run, is the point where from the psyche the earworm song title, “I Thought I Was a Child” arrived. It’s from the 1973 album pictured at top right.
# 6. For Everyman, by Jackson Browne
Browne wrote the song for the album. Bonnie Raitt recorded it later, but by then for me it belonged to Browne’s gritty meandering rendition.
To form some conclusions… maybe this awareness or wisdom that is also childlike with humble curiosity, can be viewed as knowing… with the soul engaged. (That wonky Edward Edinger “ego-self-axis” from last week’s post!)
In this state our awareness, our consciousness, is raised to another level. From there we can be both witness and conscious participant in our own story. This favorite from James Hillman describes how that comes to life in good conversation:
It is now occurring to me that wise and wisdom could also be more accurate terms for the currently tricky, often problematic, terms “woke” and “wokeness.” described in the April 24 newShrink,“Imprints and Blindspots.”
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To close today on an, um, note of childlike beginner’s mind, sometimes everything we need to know, we learned from…
#7. Bugs Bunny
I have this on best authority from two more reader-friends who also happen to be former colleagues from our Charlotte newspaper years: David Vest, now a Floridian, and Barbara Barnett in Virginia. First, eagle-eyed David posted the above cartoon graph (bottom right column) spoofing how many people experience the most classical music — via Loony Tunes cartoons.
To which Barbara chimed in by adding this utterly priceless link. Here via Classic fM the cartoonist illustrates how “a whole generation learned classical music.”
You can click each quick, hilarious, video Twitter link here to sample the music in each cartoon. Seriously, folks, it’s quick and great fun.
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
Thanks for reading newShrink, by dr. tish signet! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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