Searching for Conversation/Part 1

People find different ways of acquiring what they want or need to learn. But, it strikes me the notion of learning by doing is universal. Doing up the information ladder of abstraction takes on forms from mostly physical to totally conceptual. Learning concrete action such as chopping fire wood, for instance, required me to first create mind-images of the procedure I observed over years of adults accomplishing the task and then to replicate the mind-images as accurately as possible as I took my turn to chop fire wood. Or, learning to manipulate a car's manual transmission, again, required me to first observe for some time, to form mind-images and then to closely replicate the mind-images in action. On the other hand, the concept of ironic conflict in a black hearted, maimed Capt. Ahab against a white whale in Melville's Moby Dick required first solitary reading, interpretation and reflection AND THEN extensive conversation. The same process unfolded when encountering much later the massive conflict between technological determinism and free will. In this realm of high abstraction I found externalizing my inner conversation to colleagues captured by the same question not only clarifying concepts, but intensifying the understanding of them, in other words, deepening learning. Over the decades engaged in professional education pursuits, I have concluded that my manner of doing up the information latter of abstraction is mostly like everyone else. And I also discovered the universal need for conversation in completing the learning process, especially, in areas of high abstraction. However, as a both a student and a professional practitioner in the structures of formal learning, I have found the procedural instruction of say learning to chop fire wood applied to nearly every aspect up the ladder of abstraction, leaving totally aside the need for extended conversations. Indeed, one should find in such as English Language Arts the perfect conditions for conversation, but the procedural process of deconstructing text ecumenically employed throughout contemporary schooling precludes the conversational arts exploring concepts inherent in literature under review.

I come to conversation through my mother's attention. On more than a few occasions as a boy, my father struggling from his bedroom to the kitchen in search of some wake-up juice and silence would discover my mother and me in rapt conversation. Ugh, he would say, how can you two be so awake and talking and talking about so heavy a subjects as you constantly do? We would apologize, shrug shoulders, allow him to pour his coffee in silence, and then as he sat down at the table we continued with whatever “heavy” conversation we were having.

The subjects were not all that “heavy”, but to my father, that early in the morning was not the time to consider questions of such as “Why can’t an egg stand on its ends?”, or “How come I can get Chicago radio stations at night (we lived in Brooklyn, NY) when I can’t get them during the day?”, and stories the like of how my grandfather and my mother fixed pancakes on a favorite griddle when my grandmother was away from the house, or the several about her and her friends having a real special treat of a tiny serving of ice cream from the candy store when they were children during the Depression. This was not the typical kid question and parent answer as my mother would ask of me my experiences of, for instance, trying to stand an egg on its end, or about what it was like listening to Chicago radio. I mean, we listened intently to each other and responded to what we heard: it truly was that perfect exchange of ideas between two people wanting to know.

But then I went to school and had to be quiet. In both elementary schools through which I traveled (St. Angela Hall Academy through fifth grade and Our Lady of Angles parish school through eighth) teachers occasionally asked questions of me which I answered, but they were not the kind provoking conversation, nor did the teachers desire conversation with us kids. Largely they demanded we copy notes from the black board into our composition books from which we drilled answers to teacher questions, read prescribed books from which work book answers were derived, mimicked solutions to math problems, and so on.

Definitely looking for conversation, I started up with classmates before and after classes and during recess but they just looked at me as if I had two heads. That was the way it was until I met Brother Joseph, my high school English teacher at LaSalle Academy, Manhattan. He was thrilled to have a student as interested in conversation about the topics of his instruction as he. Indeed, while I did not read all he assigned, I had developed a question/dialogue style which enabled on topic conversation at a drop of a hat and the hat dropped frequently. I discovered over time that teachers, most especially Brother Joseph, considered me “well read”. Being actually well read or not, my other high school classes were just the repeat of elementary school. And my high school classmates were as unresponsive to conversation as were my elementary schoolmates, that is beyond the mutual boasting of their great feats of sportsmanship or dating, or dishing the gossip about other classmates and our teachers. And the group of neighborhood friends, well, they had not a single interest in any conversation outside of dickering over which sand lot sport to play, later which bar to go into, and always who was doing what with whom.

And then came college, well, I should say colleges as I attended three different undergraduate schools (State University of New York, Maritime College; Long Island University, Brooklyn; and New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, from which I received my Bachelor’s degree). The professors I had in all three schools remained as uninterested in conversation with us as all earlier, but I was able to find small pockets of schoolmates who were as thirsty for conversation as I. And on topics of great and little significance, on the meaning of life, on the planes of existence, on war and peace, on sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. We talked Smith, Locke, Rousseau; we talked Freud and Jung; we talked Kierkegaad, Kant, Schopenhauer; we talked Civil Rights, the Draft and The War; we talked Dylan, Joplin and Cream. Deeper conversations over beer were had as faculty joined in at The New School where I took my Masters in Media Studies as we discussed the concepts of such as Diane Arbus, Marshall McLuhan and Lewis Mumford and the films of such as Truffaut, Cassavetes and Barbara Kopple. They widened further through New York University’s now defunct Doctorate in Media Ecology as we considered in class and out such as technological determinism vs free will, the impacts of the transition to a new orality, and the fact that our society is Amusing Itself to Death. The near daily conversations during these times and at the conferences I attended then were as mother’s milk to me. And then I went to teach!