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Sept. 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:39
424 Reaching Students

How to 'control' difficult students the market-anarchist way!

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Yes, no traffic noise. Just for a moment, I have a letter from a listener to read, which we'll talk about this morning.
My dearest god of the intellect.
Oh wait, sorry, that's a little bit of editing.
Steph, I'm a relatively new teacher.
This is my, this is the second semester teaching on my own.
And I'm having some problems with my student's behavior, which you know he's a teacher because the student apostrophe, student S apostrophe.
Very nice. However, I think it is more of my own problem than theirs.
Most wise. It seems to be mostly the younger ones, grade 8s.
I have very little problem with the older students, but I really think this is aside from the point.
I tend to get very stressed out when my students are not focused on the task.
I try very hard to make my lessons engaging and free enough to allow creativity.
But I am still having problems getting my students to achieve at a high level on their own.
I don't like pushing people.
I would rather they achieve something on their own.
I feel like I am having problems letting the students get off task, and so they see this, my reaction, and it makes them fool around even more.
Then, when I try to create systems to control the behavior, it gets reacted to and the class becomes even less productive.
I understand that they're just kids and that education is forced on them in a lot of ways, but I think...
This is far more of a personal problem.
I tell myself every day that I will not, quote, come down on them and let stuff get by, but I end up reacting poorly because I can't find a different way, and then I feel bad, and I think the class reacts to this.
I would like to learn how to make a productive class where students want to achieve for their own reasons, but right now, with this class, it's not happening.
I am almost positive that I am 90% of the problem, but I don't know how to solve it.
I have been listening to all the podcasts and paying special attention to the discussions on how people train others to treat them, and I believe this to be a big cause of my problem.
I really want my class to be fun, and I want my students to succeed.
I only wish I could get students on my side.
Any ideas? Well, yes.
I mean, obviously, I'm not a teacher, formally, but I would...
Certainly, there's a couple of things that I would recommend in this area.
There's a guy doing somebody else's...
This guy's doing somebody else's lawn here, and I don't want him to back into my car.
There we go.
Yes, I do believe he is letting me out of my garage, or letting me out of my driving.
So, sorry about that.
It's the perils of doing things live.
Badly. Anyway, so...
I'm not a teacher.
My experience with teaching has been limited.
I was an assistant teacher for a couple of years when I was a teenager at a daycare.
Where we had some bad neighborhood kids from broken homes and some real performance and behavioral problems from these kids.
So I have some experience in this area.
And on sort of the other side of the spectrum, I was an assistant teacher for a program for gifted children.
Where of course performance wasn't much of a problem.
Now, so those sort of small smatters of experience, I'm not going to say are even comparable to what you're facing, but I think there are a few areas in which...
Oh, and I went in for one day and taught a class on Shakespeare to a bunch of grade 8 girls one day for a friend of mine, so I don't know if that counts or not, but...
Anyway, so the criteria that I would start to put forward about how you're training other people to teach you is that the really great and grave difficulty that we have as individuals almost always is that it's almost impossible to approach a situation Without a desire, a strong desire, to control it.
And this is something that you really learn in sales.
Without wanting to trivialize things that are not sales, there's an enormous amount of life that is sales.
And there's an enormous amount that can be learned from thinking about sales.
Because we're trying to sell ourselves.
We're trying to sell insofar as people don't have the leisure and the time.
To go around trying to figure out whether everyone and their dog has good ideas or bad ideas.
So there has to be some criteria by which people can judge others, as we talked about sort of recently, without having to get to know every single human being.
There has to be some way that we can do that.
And of course, what happens up front is a kind of presentation, a kind of self-presentation.
That a lot of libertarians don't understand too well, I would say.
And it's not libertarian in particular, it's people in general.
So, for instance, I'll sort of give you a parallel from the world of sales.
In the world of sales, when you go to call on a customer, you really want that customer to sell Sorry, you really want the customer to buy your product.
I mean, you really want to go and sell them half a million dollars worth of software and services, and you'd love them to give you the bag of cash in the office and say, let's go to town.
We don't even need a contract.
Actually, no, you do want a contract.
But you are going in there, you have an agenda, right?
You have an agenda, which is that you want somebody to buy your product.
Now, the problem with that is that if that is your only real and sole agenda, and I'm not saying it is in your case, because all praise to you for wanting to become a better teacher.
That's fantastic. It's one of the most important jobs on the planet.
But if you go in and try and sell something to someone, really only with the agenda to have them give you money, Then they will never, ever give you money.
I mean, yes, you want these kids to behave, but if you go in with the idea that you want these kids to behave, then they're never going to behave.
This is sort of human beings' natural response to a desire to control them.
And much though you are intending...
To try to teach these children what they're sensing deep down, as I'm sensing deep down, and as which of you are sensing deep down because you're writing for help.
Again, fantastic.
Is you want to control them.
So... The first thing that you do in sales is you recognize that you don't want to take people's money.
You want to give people their money.
You want to give people money.
Sales is not about...
We all know this from the free market in general.
Sales, if you're going to sell a pen for $5, the interaction is not about you getting $5, but about the other person getting the pen, if you're the person with the pen.
You are trying to sell, so to speak, benefit to the other person, and the money is what the cost of that benefit is.
So if I'm going to go in to sell a $100,000 software system, I have to recognize, if I want to make the sale, That I need to convince the other person not to give me $100,000, but that the other person, that I can give them $200,000 in a matter of three to six months.
Because I don't want them to buy my software.
I want to sell them their own money.
This is a very, very important thing to understand, and there's no sales job that's nearly as important, what I do, completely inconsequential, next to the sales job of teaching children.
But that's a very important distinction to understand, whether you're in sales or in anything else.
You don't want to take people's money, you want to give them their money.
And if you want the children to control you, if you want them to behave, and this is, look, I'm not saying this is easy.
This is the great leap of faith, so to speak.
I only call it faith because it's the leap of reason.
Let's be more accurate, of course.
It's the great leap of reason that anarchism requires.
It's the counterintuitive, what the hell are you talking about, you crazy bald guy kind of leap of reason, that anarchism totally requires in order to be accepted.
In the same way that understanding that the world is round is kind of a leap of reason against our instincts and experience.
So, when I was younger, I was a little shallow, let's say, and I would be attracted to women because they were pretty.
Now, it's not that I'm not attracted to women because they're pretty now, I just recognize that they have to have a little bit more to offer me than accidental cheekbones.
Well, not that they have to offer me anything anymore, because I'm married, but that was sort of my belief before I was married, sort of the understanding that I gained.
Actually, a good film for that was Shallow Hell, if you get a chance to see it.
It's a good film. Anyway, and so I would approach these women, and I would want them to go out with me so that they would look good on my arm, and so I would look good...
To other people, I mean, it was all that shallow and silly, right?
And I was not thinking, of course, what I could offer them.
And, of course, what I could offer them was not, you know, a gel-haired young boy toy who looked cool at a dance club.
I certainly couldn't offer them that.
I'd sort of go out with younger women, but fundamentally it wasn't something where I was thinking, what can I give to you that makes sense in your value context?
Now, I know this all sounds amoral and relativistic and manipulative and so on, but I'm just talking about how in this amoral and relativistic world, if you want to get things done, these are the approaches that you need to take.
You don't have to take these approaches, but then you better be good at growing your own vegetables.
So... In this situation that you're in, you're going in to these children and you want them to do something.
And you're emotionally invested in doing it, in having them do that.
And, of course, you have a cover story for yourself and you have a real story and I'm going to sort of go out on a limb here and talk about where this dichotomy might be occurring.
Your cover story is you want to be a good teacher, and you want the children to learn, and you've tried to make it as creative and as fun for them as possible.
And that is, I'm sure, true.
And that is a conscious motive, but the unconscious motive is probably twofold.
One is that you have a family history wherein, in order to get children to do stuff, you bully them, and you're sort of fighting that at a conscious level, but unconsciously it's radiating out like a little dwarf sun there up in front of the room.
And the second unconscious motivation is probably something like this, that you're a new teacher, That you want the children to behave so that you're perceived as a good teacher so that you get to keep your job.
And I don't know the circumstances under which you're teaching, whether it's in Iceland or Reykjavik or Vladivostok or, I don't know, Chicago.
But... The thing that I find is the greatest leap of reason that you need to take is to recognize that a desire not to control is control.
A desire not to control is control.
A desire not to affect stability is stability.
This is one of the lessons that free market economics gives us very strongly, which is worth taking into our personal relationships.
Which is that any time you desire to control something or someone or an outcome or the stability or the process or whatever, then you are going to destabilize things.
And we could sort of go into the psychology of that another time, just sort of very briefly.
When an unconscious agenda occurs from someone, So if someone comes into my office and wants to sell me something because they need to make their quarter, they need to make their commission, because their job's on the line, and they come in wide-eyed, then they're going to try and control the process.
And they're going to try and control the process by not taking feedback from me.
Because they're desperately afraid that my feedback is going to be that I don't want their product.
And the moment that I say I don't want their product, then, you know, the disaster scenarios in their mind will begin to roll out, this salesperson.
And they will then feel, oh my god, I'm a bad salesman.
I've put so much time and effort into becoming a good salesman.
I can't sell anything. I'm not making any money.
I'm going to get fired. It's a disgrace.
I'm bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, in order to avoid that kind of necessary correction in their personality, in the same way that a depression is a necessary correction in a mismanaged economy, a personal crisis is a necessary correction in a mismanaged personality, This person is going to rush blindly on, wide-eyed, barely blinking.
He's going to go what we call it in the sales profession is a spray and pray.
What you do is you spray all your features and everything your product can do from A to Z, top to bottom, back to front at a potential client and you hope that at least one or two or hopefully more of those features and benefits are going to strike the client And then that client is going to create the value connection for themselves, himself or herself, and then they're going to buy the product.
It's called the spray and pray, also known as death by PowerPoint.
But what's going to happen is it's going to be a one-sided conversation.
So the salesperson is going to just say, blah, blah, blah.
It does this, that, and the other. It's great.
These people bought it. Those people bought it.
The price is good. And you'll even see the person start negotiating.
I've seen this before. Salespeople start negotiating with themselves when you haven't expressed any interest or non-interest in the product, right?
So, I mean, this is natural.
Don't feel bad about it. This is perfectly normal.
It's perfectly natural. This is all we're taught to do.
So, early on in my career, when I was involved in sales in a sort of periphery way, I would sit down and I would talk about the product a little bit and then I'd start showing off screens, right?
And I was wondering why people seemed to be sort of bored.
And then, for a variety of reasons, I ended up figuring this out or learning a reading about it or something and trying the approach that went this way.
So, you sit down and you say, yeah, we've got a product, but I have no idea Whether or not it's any good to you.
I think it's going to be useful to you, and here's the reasons that I think so.
And of course, you don't ask the client for any questions that you could have got answers from some other way.
You don't sit down with a big client and say, so what's your revenue again per year?
Because you can get that from the website, so it just means that you're being lazy and wasting their time.
But you'll say, okay, well, here's, you know, very briefly, this is what the product is generally around, so why don't you spend 15 minutes, or however long you want, telling me about your environment.
I'll take notes, and then, if I believe that we can be of help to you, we can have a discussion about that.
If I can't be of help to you, of course, I'm not going to waste either of her time, and I'm going to sort of apologize for the meeting and get out of your hair.
And that is a very, very important part of communicating with people.
And you haven't heard me do that very much, of course, because I generally am doing a monologue.
And also, when people call in, they're generally firing off 50 questions a minute at me, so I don't get a chance to figure this sort of stuff out, to ask people in general.
But If I were to sit down with somebody and have a long, not a debate where the positions are fixed, and you're sort of trying to influence the listener, but if I were to sit down and have a debate with somebody about libertarianism, Then I would first of all sit down and ask them and say, well, why do politics even interest you?
What issues do you see as sort of the major problems?
And I'd sort of make a list of them and I'd say, okay, well, what things in society do you think are working well?
And they'd say, oh, I don't know, the computer industry or car manufacturers more or less.
Oh, they'd say, well, car manufacturers are working really badly because basically there are healthcare providers who occasionally build cars.
And there would be all of these...
Questions that I would ask to get a mind map of the other person.
Now, of course, you can't really do that individually when it comes to students, but there are ways that you can approach it.
So, this is if I were in your shoes, and I'm not saying this is the easiest thing in the world to do, but if I were in your shoes, I would sort of put the brakes on trying to move forward my agenda without knowing anything about the children's Pleasures, agendas, likes, dislikes.
Now, of course, you're hobbled a little bit by the fact that the last thing that any grade 8s want to do is be stuck in a classroom for six hours a day.
I mean, their hormones are racing wild.
They can't think clearly. They're just not interested.
Their bodies are going haywire.
And the hormones, it's not just the sexuality of the hormones that's a problem at that age.
I was... When I was going through puberty, or it gets shortly before puberty, I had...
Actually, for most of my sort of early childhood, I had...
I think it was called lumbago or something, but basically my...
Oh, bad driving.
Basically, my bones were growing a lot faster than my tendons, so I had these aches and so on.
And when you're going through growth spurts, as a guy, you know, not everything all grows at the same time.
And so you've got sort of aches and pains and I went through a situation during puberty where I had terrible skin itching.
I guess some hormones were doing something wild or, and of course what cured it after I figured this out after a couple of months was lotions.
My skin just was fine as a kid but then when I was going through puberty it went just totally haywire and dry and I got incredibly itchy and it took me a little while to figure it So basically I'm trapped in a little school desk.
I've got aches and pains in my tendons because I'm growing so fast.
I have horrible itching, like I'm sort of covered by ants.
And all I can do is think about sex.
It's not a very conducive situation for learning, and of course this is why it makes almost no sense for children of that age to be in school, but of course school is a propaganda-based babysitting service for parents, and so it's not got anything to do with the children.
So what's happening is you're going in there saying, I must control these children.
I must, for my own ego's sake, I must be a good teacher.
I want to be respected as a teacher.
I want these children to learn so that I can be a good teacher and feel good about myself.
Well, that's not going to work.
And kudos for you for recognizing it, but I can totally guarantee you that that's never going to work.
Because when somebody is doing ego-based control, we totally get that unconsciously.
I mean, all of culture and the government and society as a whole is an enormous and faintly ridiculous ruse because we all totally get it anyway, right?
We all totally get when people are trying to control us and just bullshitting us.
And again, I'm not saying that this is your situation entirely.
But the reason that you want to be a good teacher is for your own ego gratification.
And I'm not saying that that's a bad motive.
I mean, of course you care about the kids and so on.
But how it's working for you emotionally is that you want to gratify your own ego by being a good teacher, by being effective, by being successful, by having these Mr.
Chips or Mr.
Tibbs moments with the kids and these...
Dead poet society moments with the kids.
And all those things are perfectly possible.
And all you have to do is surrender your ego.
All you have to do is surrender your ego.
And there's lots of ways that you can do that sort of in a procedural or in a functional or outward manner.
But fundamentally, you have to give up that it's about you.
You have to give up that it's about you.
This is useful and powerful and fundamental in so many areas in life that I can't even tell you.
It's not about you.
It's about them. It's about them.
And if you're trying to control them, then I can guarantee you that it's not about them.
It's about you.
They believe your pronouncements about as much as you believe George Bush's pronouncements.
Especially as a libertarian, right?
Right? You are just another authority figure who is claiming an argument for morality while secretly being, I wouldn't say going on an ego trip or something like that, because again, I don't want to sound disrespectful.
This is such a common problem that it would be crazy to be disrespectful.
And of course, you're identifying an issue, which I totally understand, which you've inherited from your family, which I could be totally wrong on, right?
I'm just sort of going by gut here.
And a paragraph of typing, right?
But this is why I've sort of constantly said in these podcasts and videocasts that it's not about me, that I'm totally unimportant in the equation, that it's about you and your relationships, and it's about you and your family, it's about you and your spouse, it's about you and your work environment, and you and your kids.
This conversation is not about me.
It's about you. Even the videocasts and audiocasts on philosophy were not about me.
They were about philosophy. But I think that...
Maybe I'll sort of say, for fairness, with some exceptions, though none pop to mind, that mostly I've tried to keep this to be an ego-less...
So that involves things like self-deprecation, things like emotional vulnerability, things like the constant reiteration that it's not about me, and things like when I get upset, I'm getting upset at things which control and keep you down.
I'm not getting upset at people for, I don't know, disobeying me.
I mean, what a strange thought that would be to have, that I would get angry at people for disobeying me.
As if I am physics or something, right?
But what's happening is the kids are kind of looking at you, and there's an unconscious transaction that's occurring between you and these children.
And the unconscious transaction, of course, is that you want to control them for your own ego, and they find that unbearably humiliating, and so they're acting out disobedience in order to retain a false self sense of pride.
Boy, you know, I should have just started off with that, and that would have been so much easier.
So, the real question, of course, is not what's happening, but how to fix it, how to solve it.
I'm going to throw some ideas out.
I have no idea the restrictions under which you were teaching, so I do apologize totally and completely.
If these are absolutely impractical for you, but if they're impractical for you, then perhaps it would be worthwhile thinking about how you're going to raise your own kids, or if you're a parent, maybe this would be helpful for you in this area.
But the first thing that I would do in this situation is fess up.
Honesty is a pretty good policy, I would say.
So the first thing that I would do is I would fess up.
And I would say, children, children, children.
All right. I've been kind of wanting you guys to be good kids and I haven't really taken the time to ask you a whole bunch of questions so I apologize for that and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself and where I'm coming from and what I'm hoping to achieve as a teacher and I'm going to tell you that I want you kids to behave well, and I haven't figured out how to do it yet.
It's okay. This is a negotiation.
You've got lots of experience at being kids, me not so much experience being a teacher, so you guys are totally winning hands down, and no problem.
I respect that.
You guys are totally committed to what you're doing, and I think that's great.
I definitely want to find ways that we can have more productive interactions.
So far, I haven't had much luck.
I've written to some people for some advice, and I've got some good advice.
The first thing that's going on, I think, is that I want you guys to behave so that I can be a good teacher.
I know you guys are full of love and admiration for me.
But I'm not sure that you stay up at nights wondering whether I am in fact a good teacher and whether I feel good about myself as a teacher and this and that and the other.
And so I totally get that you're not totally invested in whether I'm a good teacher.
And so because I'm trying to make you guys behave so that I can think of myself as a good teacher, you guys aren't so much with the behaving, right?
I mean, and I totally understand that too.
If the principal comes in and wants to be a big man and orders me around because he wants to feel like he's an effective and dangerous tough guy principal, then I'm going to kind of resist him as well.
Now, he pays me, I don't pay you, so there's not that relationship.
It's a little trickier for me.
But, that's sort of where I'm at, and I know that this is all fairly embarrassing, that this kind of frankness isn't that pleasant for you, but, you know, hey, me being honest is my punishment for you not behaving.
No, I'm kidding. So, I'm just going to do a hands-up survey to begin with.
I just want to get a sense of where you guys are going and where you are and what you're thinking about and so on.
Let me get a show of hands here.
How many of you love math?
I just want to get a mental map of this class.
How many of you love math? How many of you would love nothing more than to do math problems and get paid for them for the rest of your natural-born lives?
And then you send those people off to the school psychiatrist.
No, I'm kidding. And, you know, how many of you love reading?
How many of you love English? How many of you hate school?
Right? I mean, let's be perfectly honest here.
How many of you would sort of say, okay, in a choice between school and prison, I'd flip a coin, I'd see, would it be on my permanent record?
Right? For how many of you is this kind of tortuous?
How many of you want to become doctors?
How many of you want to become lawyers?
How many of you want to become free-market libertarian podcasts that are vaguely starving in their own car?
How many of you want to become...
What do you guys think of the world that you live in?
How many people think that the government is good?
How many people think the government is bad?
How many people think the war is good in Iraq?
I'm assuming you're in the US here.
You sort of get a survey, and what's happening is you're eliciting responses from them.
Now, you don't want to go up and down the road and say, tell me about yourself, because that's really embarrassing for the shy kids, and the extrovert kids will simply use that as a way of cutting up the class and sort of mocking you and so on.
But the show of hands thing is not bad.
What's happening is somebody's actually asking their opinion.
Now, I guarantee you that that's going to engage them a whole lot more than you trying to control their behavior, right?
So, as I said in the beginning, when you...
Sit down with somebody you're trying to sell something to, and of course a class is a particularly challenging area of this.
You know, you go around, you ask people a little bit about themselves, introduce themselves, and why are we even here, so that everyone has an understanding of what we're going to try and achieve.
And if they basically come back and say, yeah, basically we hate school, it's all stupid, we hate math, I don't know, and you're like a math teacher or whatever, then You know, you could say something like this.
And again, I'm not trying to get you canned like tuna.
I'm just sort of saying that this is a way that in an ideal world, you could work at approaching the problem.
I'm not saying this would be the way you do it, but this would be a way of approaching the problem.
And you could say something like this.
Okay. Well, we kind of have a challenge here, right?
And the challenge is that I've got a big book of stuff I've got to teach you.
I mean, this is your life, right?
You can put this on the blackboard, right?
This is your life, right? So you got born, and you kind of kicked around and pooped and peed yourself for a while, and yeah, that was a pretty great time of life.
And then you sort of grew up, and you learned how to walk, and you sort of fell down a lot, and then you were allowed outside on your own, and then you sent to school, right?
And basically what school, you know, let's just say for the sake of argument, that school is just trying to...
you know, is trying to get you to learn certain things.
And let's just say that the people who came up with these curriculum are sort of, you know, they're sort of saying that you are supposed to learn this stuff for your own good, they're sort of saying that you are supposed to learn this stuff for your own good, that it's essential, it's important, it's something that is going to be of And And, you know, obviously reading and writing and some basic math is pretty important.
You've got to read job descriptions and so on.
I think that verbal communication is pretty important in life too.
Obviously I do. I mean, I'm a teacher and all.
But that's not something that you guys get to do a lot of, which I think is a real shame, right?
Because verbal communication is very important in life, and you mostly get to sit there like a bunch of mushrooms behind a desk thinking about other things, passing notes and spitballs and stabbing people with pens and, you know, that kind of stuff.
So the verbal communication is important, but you don't get to do a whole lot of that, which is a real shame.
And... So, if you hate everything that's being taught, then we have a problem.
Now, I assume that you don't want to become, like, homeless bum guy.
And trust me, they'll enjoy the use of the word bum.
But you don't want to become that guy, right?
Who's, like, panhandling on a street corner.
You don't want to become...
Somebody who's like, you know, you don't want to be living in your parents' basement until you're 50, until, you know, you inherit, right?
That's no good, because, you know, clubbing is kind of fun, and you need some money for that, so get some money, you got to work, and so on.
So, you don't want to be those people, right?
That's definitely not the way you want to be.
Now, given that you kind of got to jump through these hoops, and I've got to jump through these hoops, I kind of knew this coming into the job.
I knew this coming into the job that there was going to be a bunch of nonsense that I was going to have to teach you.
And this is sort of what I'm proposing, right?
So we have a problem that we have to solve if we want to go clubbing and have fun and go on trips and buy cool cars and iPods and stuff, right?
So I've got to teach you stuff, and you've got to learn some stuff.
And yeah, okay, maybe the content of some of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and so on, but I sort of believe that you can learn something from just about anything.
That you can learn something useful from just about any situation or any event.
So we kind of have this problem that I think we can solve together.
And I had some ideas about how we might be able to solve it together and so on.
But the basic thought that I have is that I've got to teach you this stuff.
You should learn it.
And I want you guys to sort of succeed in a basically financial way.
So... That much I am fairly convinced of, and I know that you guys want to sort of succeed in a fairly financial way.
Let's sort of see what we can do.
This is sort of my commitment to you.
This is sort of what I want for you.
Because I don't want you guys to be stuck in this class for me to be the teacher who's just another blurry, nagging face of idiocy.
I'm not saying any of your other teachers are, because I have to talk to them later in the staff room maybe.
But I don't want to be one of those teachers who come and go in your consciousness without any particular...
This is my own ego, maybe, and maybe that's bad, but I kind of want to be somebody who makes a difference for you, and I'm not going to do that by telling you what to do.
I'm also not going to do that by pretending that something's great when it's not.
And yeah, I think this curriculum could be improved.
Okay? But, you know, my choice was to either say, I'll do what I can with this curriculum, or I'm not going to be a teacher at all, and you're then going to have somebody, maybe, who's never going to have a conversation like this with you guys.
I mean, that's sort of, you know, one way of looking at it.
And I kind of wanted to be here, because, you know, I do want to teach and give you guys a love of learning.
Because, I mean, I went through the same stupid school system that you did, but I did end up with a love of learning, and I'd kind of like to share that, and I think I've got some useful ways to do it, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway. So, we're kind of in this situation.
Now, we can either sort of go through the motions, and I'll try and teach you stuff, and you'll pretend to behave, and whatever, right?
And sort of a year of our life will go by, and nothing will really be achieved, other than you will learn to write some scribbles in some tests, which will get you to the next step.
And, you know, unfortunately, this could be not just your year, but your life, rather than going through the motions to get to the next step.
Not that satisfying, got to tell you.
Not really that great.
Or, we can sort of put our heads together, and I have some ideas, but I'm certainly open to ideas from other people.
I have some ideas about how we could make this kind of meaningful and fun and really, you know, enjoy using our minds.
Like, you know, the way you guys love running around and exercising your bodies?
Well, it's the same thing. It can be as pleasurable, and you can want to do that with your minds if we take the right approach, right?
I mean, if you try running on your hands, it's not going to work out for you too well, unless you're some sort of circus performer, and even then you won't get very far, because you've got to use the right muscles for the right things, and so that's sort of what I want to be able to teach you, to run with your legs and so on.
Okay, this is getting silly, but you know what I mean.
Give me a few minutes.
I'm going to put on the board some ideas about how we might be able to make this stuff more meaningful and more fun, and how the stuff that I'm going to teach you can be really happy.
Like, for instance, did you know that learning mathematics is really, really great for making sure that you have great relationships?
Did you know learning mathematics is really, really important to helping you to understand what great relationships are and how to have them?
And of course, they'll sit there and they'll be all Google-eyed, right?
And I'll say, if I could convince you that the way that you learn mathematics and the respect that you give to the principles of mathematics Will be absolutely fantastic and make sure that you have the best chance to have, like, best boyfriend-girlfriend status, best marriage status, and so on.
If I could convince you of that, would that make mathematics a little bit more interesting?
And of course, you know, some of them would say, sure.
You know, and said, if I could tell you or teach you that learning about science will tell you everything that you need to know about government and about your role as citizens and everything, right?
And that you're going to, in your relationship to authority, if I could teach you that science, learning everything about science or how to learn about science or how to learn within the realm of science, if...
If I could get you to really understand that that will teach you everything you need to know about dealing with authority, would that be of interest to you?
Because, you know, I know that you're students and I'm a teacher, but, you know, I have to deal with authority.
Everyone has to deal with authority.
Maybe after you retire, you don't so much, but that's a long way off for all of us, so let's not worry too much about that.
So, I'm going to try and make...
Like, I'll make this promise to you.
I'm going to try and make this stuff that I'm teaching you important and relevant to you.
And I'm going to constantly try and take it out of the clouds and put it into your life.
The stuff that we're working on together.
Because I really want that for you.
I really, really want that for you.
And... So, if we can do that together, like if we can find ways to make all of this stuff relevant, to make it something that you will be able to remember and use for the rest of your life, and if I really ask you guys about the kind of stuff that's most important to you,
and I really try to tailor everything that we kind of have to have to do together, if I really try and tailor that for you, Then does that sound like a good plan, or is there another plan that I've never even thought of that would be an even better plan?
Now, you may not want to make the speech as long as that...
Because you're not me and don't need to.
But that would be a sort of approach that I would take.
Kids, they're eight years old.
They understand honesty.
They understand authenticity. They want their lives to be meaningful in the same way that you do.
They want to be good students.
And by good students, that doesn't mean obedient students, and it doesn't mean students who do well on tests that other people define.
Good students in that they want to want to learn.
All children want to want to learn as much as they want...
Like if you do this Chinese foot binding on kids, they're not going to enjoy running around playing tag because it's going to be sort of painful and they're going to feel awkward.
And because children in the modern world...
Most times in history and across the world are almost never taught how to think and how to enjoy thinking and how to reach conclusions and build up on their prior conclusions and integrate everything, which is what our mind is designed to do.
Because our children mentally have their feet bound, of course they don't enjoy exercising those muscles.
Because our children are never taught how to think, of course they don't.
Appreciate or enjoy learning.
They feel awkward. They feel stupid.
They feel bullied. They feel controlled.
And who can blame them?
That's what is in fact happening.
So it's kind of tough to say you're wrong.
So, I hope that that helps you at some level to sort of understand a possible way.
Again, I'm not sort of trying to tell you what to do or trying to control you.
This is just a vague possibility that might be of use.
And of course, let me know.
The fact that you feel, will feel, and I certainly would, and I'm sure you will as well, the fact that you're going to feel very nervous, The fact that you're going to feel very nervous about doing this is kind of important, I think.
It's kind of instructive.
Because it means that you're breaking new ground.
Trust me. These podcasts sometimes scare the crap out of me.
I'm really pushing new ground, at least for myself.
Maybe it's all old hat for you, but it's new ground for me.
So... And that newness, that breaking of new ground, is something that really gets the attention of other people.
When you are talking about something that's also new for you, or talking about something at least that makes you feel kind of awkward and uneasy because it's new ground, that means that you're not just saying the same old crap that you always say.
And again, I'm not saying this is true of you, I'm just sort of saying this in general.
But when you're saying new stuff, you're kind of like an icebreaker, right?
Watching a dinghy row along a placid lake is not that exciting.
Watching an icebreaker power through the ice with great resistance and on an urgent mission is a little bit more gripping and exciting.
And I guess I'm the icebreaker there.
Okay. A metaphor that it didn't quite turn on me, but it might need a few volts.
But that fear that you have, will have in communicating that, because the fear, when we're being honest and authentic, is that of ridicule, is that of indifference, is that of the kind of blank stares and contempt where people are like, why are you telling me this?
You know, that kind of stuff, which all comes from families and all comes from the depression that comes from being constantly around people who don't really talk to you.
Anyway, all of that stuff is usually very useful, and there's nothing wrong with saying, I've got to tell you, I thought long and hard about this.
This is kind of a nerve-wracking speech for me to give, and you guys can do whatever you want, but I'm telling you that it's making me nervous.
That kind of honesty is important, too.
Kids will totally pay attention to you for that.
Kids will totally pay attention to you for that.
And they will have no clue how much they respect you for that in the moment.
They'll be baffled, bewildered, troubled, upset, confused.
But they will remember that speech for the rest of their life.
And it will be, like, when somebody asks them about their own education, they will remember that speech more than they will remember anything else.
I mean, what do I remember?
I remember having an argument with an English teacher when I was in grade 13, and I guess about 17 or so.
Having an argument with an English teacher Where, about the existence of God, where his proof required that memory did not exist within the brain, right?
And of course, the only thing I remember was thinking what a complete ass-clown this guy was, and how pathetic it was, and how little you can respect somebody who will hang on to any amount of nonsense just to keep believing in a certain theory they think has validity.
That is just a wretched, wretched situation.
So... I hope that this is something that will be of interest to you.
Tell me what you think, of course.
I'd certainly practice this speech a little bit, because when you're nervous, things tend to go awry.
So I'd do at least half a dozen dry runs to sort of get it synthesized.
You also might want to do something like, again, for the shy kids, and because there's lots of brutal extroverts in school, you might want to do something like give out an email address to That they can email suggestions to you, right?
I thought originally of a suggestion box, but some kid might see them putting it into a suggestion box and make fun of them or whatever.
But you might want to allow offline conversations with the children so that you can get to know them and what their interests are and what their preferences are.
And then you're kind of like a team, right?
You're kind of like a team solving a problem.
The problem is how best to learn.
And it's a great and exciting problem to deal with.
But what will happen is you will have the chance to really have an impact on these kids.
And it won't any longer be...
A situation wherein the problem is, how do I control these kids?
And the other is, you're a team.
And you're all sort of pointing in the same direction.
And because of your honesty, you will have some sort of grudging respect from the children.
There is the possibility that children go home and the parents say, have a school today.
And the parents say, you know, kind of weird.
My teacher said that all school is stupid.
Right? So that's why you want to practice this and, of course, review what you're subject to in terms of regulations.
All right. Is that really?
48 minutes. Thank you so much for listening.
I really hugely appreciate it.
I will talk to you soon.
And have yourselves a fantastic day.
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