PeterKline Edwin Burr Pettet, the teacher that influenced me the most, was a brilliant theater director who brought his acting, directing and playwriting skills into the classroom.

I found that I could remember everything he said well enough to write it down on an exam months later and use it in writing books years later, because he said whatever he said in such a compelling manner that it was unforgettable.

That's probably why the rest of the faculty at Amherst College couldn't stand him, and why the college did not renew his contract.

He made most of the other teaching I was exposed to there seem rather pointless, needlessly confusing, unfocused, and largely beside the point of almost anything that I thought it might be intended to apply to.

So the first thing I learned from him was that teaching combines the art of the dramaturge with the skill of the salesperson.

Whatever you are teaching is something you must sell to your student. If the student isn't interested, that is a sign that you haven't sold it.

That does away once and for all with the myth that says, "I taught it to them but they didn't learn it." That's like saying, "I sold it to them, but they didn't buy it."

I understood that learning is a form of play and never anything else. (Every infant is born knowing that, and it takes a great deal of brutality to make the young person think that learning is a matter of concentration and hard work. As a student, I always found that concentration and hard work got me nowhere because I was concentrating so much on concentrating that I couldn't pay any attention to what I was supposed to be learning.)

I knew that as a teacher I had to engage my students, just as I had to engage my readers as a writer. You're always learning the most when you're unaware that you're learning anything at all. (That's like "music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all.")

Every subject can be turned into a theatrical experience. There is nothing so dull that it hasn't lit a fire in some brain, and the way that brain thinks about it is the stuff from which the great drama of teaching is made.

Another thing that Pettet did was awaken me to the art of reading for the very first time. He presented to me the ideas of George Bernard Shaw in such a way that in reading Shaw I felt I was discovering myself. For a while, Shaw's ideas became my ideas.

Then Pettet pointed out that T. S. Eliot, a writer that is as far from Shaw as any writer could be, was in reality just like him, because both of them had a deeply religious view of the world and expressed it as the primary message of their writing. For Shaw the Life Force was the central focus of the religious experience.

For Eliot, it was the still point at the center of the turning world.

Again, they seemed poles apart, and yet they were the same. From that I learned that synergy comes from the marriage of opposites, from their finding the commonality between them.

I now believe that you can't understand anything unless you can effectively argue the most extreme view of each of the polarized opposite positions from which the subject may be viewed.

Matter and energy are opposites, and yet they are the same thing in different guises. I have learned that if I am going to take a strong position on anything, I have to take an equally strong position on the opposite side of it, because if I do not, I will not understand it, and will only be escalating needless conflict and confusion.

The fact that most people don't know this, is the cause of destructive conflict in nearly all of its guises.

 

Each copy is

a work of art in itself.

Click here to read more about

 

 Michael Chacko Daniels' books.

 

 

Click here to view a digital version of

Anything Out of Place Is Dirt

 

on Google Book Search 

 

Click here to view a digital version of

Split in Two

 

on Google Book Search

 

______   *   ______ 

 

Have you visited the rest of

Michael Chacko Daniels' website,

US-India Writing Station?

If not, please do and be sure to

bookmark it. If you wish to

refer others to it, here's the URL:

http://indiawritingstation.squarespace.com/

Feel free to visit, and explore: Fiction, Poetry, Community Service, Homeless, Commentary, & Discussion On The Road To Remaking The World We Live In . . . San Francisco, Grand Rapids, Evanston, Bombay, Kerala, Oakland, Berkeley, Monterey, Bangalore, Calcutta . . .

Feel free to share the above link with others.

____________________________

Have you read Michael Chacko Daniels' flash fiction story,
Sing an Indian Name, on Denver Syntax's free online magazine?
If not, here's the URL:

http://www.denversyntax.com/issue5/fiction/daniels/indian.html

Feel free to share the above link with others.