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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  November 7, 2010 8:00pm-9:00pm EST

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>> up next, bill smoot talks about conversations are great teachers, a collection of interviews he conducted with exceptional teachers to find out what makes them so affect days. mr. smoot spoke up books inc. in berkeley, california.
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>> thank you for coming. and i would like to thank books inc. for having me, independent bookstores are a very important part of every community, so come back often. i want to start back just saying a word about how i wrote this book. its origins go far back into the 70's when i was a graduate student in chicago and i discovered the works of studs terkel. how many do have a permit and any of studds turcotte spoke? as you know, he was this wonderful old radio journalists who started doing books of interviews with people. and the one that i read first i think was the vision street and soon after that his book working interviews of people about their jobs. in some point over the decades i remember thinking, i wish he would do a book of interviews with teachers.
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i was a teacher. i'm out there was a teacher. i thought it would make a great book. in some time a few years back i read in the papers that he was in failing health and would do no more books and has since passed away. and so, at some point, i can't remember the moment, i thought what if i were to try to do one myself? as a student i.d. at the nature a journalist, and so i thought she'd come and maybe i'll give it a try come into a few sample interviews and see how they work and see if i find it interesting. and so i did. and i didn't just find it interesting. i found it fascinating. i was so compelled to by talking with people about what it was late for them to be teachers, that i was hooked. there were two decisions to make fairly earthy on. what i just do a sampling of
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teachers, you know, good teachers, younger teachers, lousy teachers and have it be democratic in terms of availability of or focus on great teachers. i quickly decided to do the latter. i somehow felt that they are great teachers this country and in this world and i wanted to honor them and give them voice and also the book be away of exploring what is it that makes a good teacher. the other decision that i made soon after it started the book, which was somewhat accidental is it occurred to me that certainly there were great teachers and kindergarten through 12th grade and the university. no doubt there were also good teachers beyond. because in some ways, every aspect of society needs to be taught. it needs to be transferred to other people from generation to generation and not a lot of
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teaching takes place beyond the classroom, beyond the secondary school in the university. so i branched out. and in its final form, the book has more than half of the interviews with people who teach in unconventional ways. as someone who teaches in ballet school. one of my favorite examples is a man who teaches alligator wrestling. there's a major league manager who teaches the arts play in enfield. but factually wrong washington whose team is in the playoffs in the moment as we speak. and so that was the other decision that i made. it became a book about great teachers in all specs of life. so what i want to do tonight is tell a few stories about the people that i met along the way i read a few excerpts from interviews. when i think about the book, one of the stories that often comes
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to mind is interviewing a retired sing sing teacher who was in his 90's and he retired from teaching when he was 91. and he started to tell me what it was like to teach fencing. and we were in his bedroom in the house where he lived. he picked up the fencing toyo and he demonstrated in his a man whose 91 and he stands with his theory erect posture. in fact, i kept started checking my own, you know, the man across from him. and he picked up the foil and suddenly became a 25-year-old and showed me the moves going back and forth across the room. and then he said one of the first things i always teach is how to hold the foil. he said just pick it up and i did and he adjusted my grip. and he took his hand away after
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he had my grip the way he wanted it. i have this odd sensation that i could still feel his hand on mine after he took it away. and so, in some ways that became a sort of metaphor in the peer i often with ink about these interviews in terms of that lingering touch and how in some ways that was symbolic of everybody that i talk to, whether they taught in medical school or first grade were taught since then. and so, and i also felt in some way that every story about teaching this in some way but kind of replay of that metaphor of the miracle of teaching. someone doesn't know or doesn't understand or doesn't have the skill. and after the interaction with the teacher, after the attached, then they do. it's a kind of miraculous
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transformation. one of the teachers that i met with a man named stephen lacy, teaches in massachusetts and as a teacher of fourth grade. and he was an explorer in something now called project based learning. and what he did as a fashion the fourth grade curriculum around projects. and so, he talked to me about the projects that the tape. i remember one of them he said he had his fourth graders take bread. and i immediately had this image in my mind, you know, these little munchkins getting flour on their faces. and i said that sounds really precious. i said, you may need it from scratch? you know, the east and the whole business? he said no, we started by growing the wheat. and it's a whole school year, but by the end of the year we had grown the wheat, harvey said the wheat, ground into flour,
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you know, used it to make bread. and he explained first of all you could build a lot of curriculum into that, science, math in terms of measurement since no one. but also for him, he said that because he was teaching in an affluent suburb, one of the primary things he wanted to teach these little children is that everything in life is not given to us, that brad doesn't grow on trees. my mother used to say that about money all the time. it doesn't come from a store. everything in life has to be made by someone. and so, he wanted to get them out of that sense of entitlement that he thought they might have and teach them that things had to be made deliberately and through human effort. and so, what i found out about a lot of the teachers, if they often talk on two levels. they taught their specific
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content, but they also taught adolescents, sort of larger lessons that surround the particular skill or body of knowledge that they were teaching. and so, one of his other projects was that before school started in september he had the classroom cleared out so the students came to school on the first day in september and there was nothing there. it was a bare room. he said okay, this is their project for the year. we have to design and build our classroom. so, the first thing they thought about was desks. they talked about what a good student desk would be. he went out in the community and found a carpenter who helped them with it. and part of the curriculum for fourth graders in massachusetts is to study the programs. so we say gee, we're going to need money for this, so let setting of the the pilgrims got
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money for their voyage. they did that come in the pilgrims sold stock in their company, so they sold stock in their little classroom and went around the community do do not and they got a volunteer the bank to teach them accounting and how to keep track of the money so the math lesson was built into that. and you know, he based the fourth grade curriculum on the idea of projects. and at one point i said to him, something i've asked a number of the teachers, and that is what is it that makes secret is a teacher? and it was an interesting question because even though most of the people i talk to were very loquacious and spoke easily about teaching, that was the one question that gave a lot of papas, maybe out of modesty or maybe because they hadn't reflected so much on it before. he thought for a few minutes and this is how we answered the question. he said, i think it's something
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about seeing and every student their particular genius, something about their particular spirit, something that was fully formed for them though it was trapped in a 9-year-old body. it's about seeing the potential. well, potential is kind of the charlie word, but jesting qualities that are sometimes not at all represented by their behavior. so in miserable kids that are hardy or by qualities of leadership or people who are whiny or always complaining, you see a depth of ability to turn suffering into something golden. i used to pray a lot about that, to always see, what is the genius in each child that makes him or her absolutely unique? i can think of a number of kids who descended into a kind of bestowed when they entered
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seventh and eighth grade. and then at some point begin to emerge and they decided to become human beings. at that point, variable to reflect on themselves. and once the light begins to shine inward, they see two things. one, god, i was really a. and two, wow, he somehow liked being with me day after day. i've had several kids come back later and express them in one way or another to me. so there are those troubled kids who didn't think you were having an impact on, but then they come back later and you realize that you did have an impact. when you teach these kids, you have no idea what they're going to become. you don't know who's going to become a fireman who was going to be a neurosurgeon or he's going to work in a factory. but what you hope for them is that whatever they become, they will somehow be able to see all of life and learned the lessons
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of life and relate that to bigger principles of who we are and how we are related to each other. that would be my hope for kids out there. speaking of mental lessons, a number one of the teachers i spoke with, an english teacher at the high school level thought for a minute about what he really taught. he said you know, i think what i really try to teach his pleasure. and he spoke about teaching the deep pleasure of reading literature and responding with heart and soul as well as with mind into the content of literature. often people ask me about my own reflections on the book. and you know it's a fair question because i think in some ways it's a different book to every person who reads it because the interviews in some ways really comprise raw
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material and the reflections are going to differ with every reader and the lessons that you draw from the teachers are going to be different with every%. nevertheless, i've tried to think about what some of my own heart. and it occurred to me long after the book was finished that one of the lessons i drew from it is that in some ways teaching seems not so much like the separate art, but an extension of expertise. that is, a person becomes an expert in something. might be neurosurgery, might be mathematics. at a certain level of becoming truly knowledgeable in that area, truly wise about that area, having made that area of knowledge and skill truly wants out, there comes with that the ability to transmit it to others. and i think in some ways that
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might pose an interesting question for well, ed schools that have you major in something and then teach teaching as a separate kind of art. now, this is not to say things can't be learned and at schools. i know a lot of people have. but doing these interviews made me wonder if teaching was that more a kind of an extension of being an expert. so for example, i interviewed amy and named doug butler who spent decades becoming one of the best barriers and the world, that's the art of making and deploying horseshoes and finally opened his own school and is now known throughout the world and students come from all of the world. ireland, the states, saudi arabia, to study the art of it under him. and for him, learning how to
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teach the art of making and applying horseshoes was the ultimate extension of its own acquisition of that skill and understanding. another was alan treatment, a neurosurgeon at duke university have into it than a neurosurgeon who operated on kennedy when he and his brain tumor. here's someone who obviously doesn't have to teach, but he does. and not only does he teach his own neurosurgery residents, he teaches undergraduate that to because he's so committed to it and because for him, one of the ultimate expressions of knowing brain surgery is the ability to pass it on to others. the same was true of suki schorr, a famous ballerina who herself studied under balanchine because they knows and the ballet world and now teaches at the abt school in new york.
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and again, for her, being as good and as accomplished as she was in ballet, the ultimate expression of that was to know how to teach it to others. unlike a lot of these people, she may well put the teaching gene. because when she was very young, when she was 22, balanchine saw in her the teaching ability and pander to start doing some teaching even while she was at the peak of her career. another was from washington, you know, no one in the world for his ability to teach other players to play the infield. and again, for him, the ultimate level of his skill was to begin to understand how he did it, what were the principles that made him so accomplished as an infielder.
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and then knowing those principles how he could pass it on to others. and in a similar vein, and many fascinating man named tom nordland who when he was in high school had been mr. basketball in the state of minnesota. which meant he was the number one rated basketball player in the state. and his primary skill as a player was that he was a phenomenal shot. he set a record for consecutive free throws that still stands today 35 years later. so he went to stanford on a basketball scholarship. and the first and part is your lot of his shots blocked. it completely broke his confidence. he lost to shot. the coaches apparently didn't see what was going on or figured they didn't have the time to spend with him. and so he spent four years at third riding the bench. never played in a game.
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les stanford went to work for apple computer, got into golf and tennis. didn't pick up a basketball for years. in one day on his lunch break at apple, he went out to a basketball court and started to shoot. within five minutes he was wishing every shot. so he started to think, how is it that i can do this? and he began to think about it week after week, month after month and finally came up with what he believed were the four basic constables of shooting, which he found to be unique in the way other people, including the great john wooden, coach at ucla taught the art of shooting a basketball. and so he began to teach it and today he's no as a teacher of the art of shooting and the students range from nine year old to nba basketball players who hire him as a private coach.
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and so again, for him, a certain level of expertise, then made the transition to understanding how he was such an expert and then finally the ability to pass it on to others. i think that's particularly important to me because one of those saints that's always irritated me beyond belief is the same, those who can do. those who can't teach. i'll save the exxon say because this is being taped, but i've always found that to be in some ways a helpful thing because it's one of those same that is idiotic in a way that makes you think about what's wrong with it. and to me what is wrong with it if it misses the entire point of the greatest teachers, the inside their people whose teaching depends upon not only the ability to do, but then further the ability to reflect
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on what they do, know the essential aspects of it and finally pass it on to others. one other story of experts, you know, one of the real treats of doing this book was being able to spend an afternoon with the great actor, martin landau. and he was explaining to me what his point of view is sorted based antipasti and type of what it meant to add an eye you might be in an air-conditioned sound studio. you know, you might have to pretend it's 105 in new orleans and you better start to sweat, so much do you believe in it. and so he said excuse me and he took his bare hands and pretended to be answering a call on his cell phone. and it was really convincing. i thought this was clever, but he continued to talk to this
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imaginary person and covered up the phone and went back to talking. and the seconds went by. and i thought -- i began to doubt my own experience. i thought wait a second, i thought it was his bare hand. but cell phones are small. his hands are big. i think is really talking on the phone. and so it went on for another 30 seconds. and then he said goodbye to the person. and this is true. i really did this. i reached across the table and i opened up his hand and he was sent to you. and i thought, he has good. a half-hour later, his real cell phone rang and he had to take a call. and i realized that the imaginary call was more real and convincing than the real call. and i thought my god, this man
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is talented. and not only is he talented, but he has known how to pass it on to others and generously does so. you know, jack nicholson was interviewed by new york magazine, he said i can ask for one reason, because martin landau put me through exercises over and over and over again until i could finally get them right. okay, finally one were doing story. vince done for many years as a firefighter in new york and he eventually became a teacher of fire fighting. and mrs. levy said in said in our interview. he said for the first 20 years in the fire service i didn't think about anything. i would go into these burning buildings and ran and ran out. and when it was all over it come back to the firehouse and say what you and have a few laughs.
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and then go home and have dinner with the wife. then all of a sudden when i became a deputy chief and got assigned to the bronx and have a lot of people under my command, i said wait a minute, i'm responsible for them. and when i started to think about what they did. once you start thinking about what you do, you start writing and then you start teaching. you think, so exactly what happened here today? and why did it happen? we had this fire and we put the fire out. and during the fire, a part of the floor collapsed in the chimney fell and almost hit a guy. that's pretty interesting. i need to figure out why that happened and how to understand it. one day to remember wrestling a battalion chief. i took off the ladder and get them from the root of a burning building. he was trapped up there. it was easter sunday early
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morning. i took him down and gave him a hug and this was a big rough guide and ensure he went home and had dinner with his family and never said a word about it. but i went down and started writing an article about how he got trapped up there. over the years i've written maybe 50 articles that got published in a couple of textbooks. and it all came from just thinking about what i did. most people in the police, fire and military don't really think about what they do. so the most important lesson i would tell anyone i know it sounds corny, is to go back and write about what you do. because once you start to think about it, then you realize everything. okay, and other general being that i found in a lot of the teachers was there since that teaching was not so much transferring something from themselves to this event as it was trying out of the student
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some kind of the seed that our dmm. for me it's reminiscent of one of the well-known dialogues of of plato called camino, in which socrates begins a conversation with a slave boy who has no education, whatever, begins to ask any series of questions based on the way the slave boy answers the question he asks more. and by the end of the dialogue, he has led the slave boy into what is basically a proof of the pythagorean ferrand, merely by asking questions. so the implication is you have this knowledge or at lease the building blocks of this knowledge and understanding in himself all the time. and the genius of socrates as a teacher was to extract it and develop it. so one of the young teachers that i interviewed -- a lot of
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the teachers were into and like myself. a couple in their twenties. one was a young man named polito heaney who wasn't aztec dance teacher. and he set about his teaching, we, meaning teachers of aztec dance also feel that human beings have in their bodies natural inclinations towards patterns, mathematics, read them, and music and dancing. human beings are natural dancers. i don't want to call it magical, but there's something very natural about patterns. human beings are very receptive to the patterns among them very quickly. another teacher i interviewed named jan basu is a teacher up in oregon and a former pediatrician incidentally said almost everybody who has
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spiritual life has a koan that they are carrying around inside of them. for example, i have a catholic woman who teamed to a retreat. then i asked her, what is the question that you carry around with you all the time? she said, my question is, is there anything outside of god? for example, how could there be children caught in bombings in iraq? how does god allow this? so we melted it down to this, is there anything outside of god? so she spent the week pondering that question and looking around her. is your computer outside of god? is your hand outside of god. he's a homeless person at the side of the road with a sign asking for a handout outside of god? so the koan is a way to dig down through the layers of confusion to have insight into a deep truth. if you've read about koan, they
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found nonsensical. people often read about the koan, what is the sound of one hand clapping. that's actually a very deep inquiry into sound, first of all and then into deep listening. with all koan to have to parse them of the extra words so it becomes, what is the sound of one hand or what is the sound of one or what is the sound? of the teacher will help the student refined essence of what the question is and then guide them into learning so you begin to listen to all of the sounds of the world without listening to them. listen to them as if you've never heard them before. it leads people to some very interesting insights. so again, excepting that teaching is drying out from people who are blatantly has dirty been there.
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one of the things that was really special to me doing this book, this is a bit of a personal convention essay became of age in the 60's. and part of that of course was having great hope. but another part of that was having deep anger and even bitterness and a lot of the institutions and people in american society who are in those things to shins. and one of the things that was sort of liberating for me about doing this book was to meet so many people who are so good and so dedicated and so much giving their life to bringing about new knowledge in bringing about the wisdom. a personal test for me was going to interview former secretary of state, george shultz.
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his politics than mine do not coincide. and i thought, i wonder if i'll be able to maintain my demeanor is a polite southern gentleman when i talk to this man who i once actually heard speak just before the war with iraq and say, you know, the weapons of mass destruction are certainly better there's a rattlesnake in your yard. you have to kill it. that was his metaphor. and actually went to see him because he is frequently mentioned as a mentor for condi rice and i wanted him to talk about that and maybe other mentor relationships that he's been a part of. it wasn't clear early on that he didn't want to talk about that in particular. so i thought okay, this is an interview of going to scrap. but then he said, you know, he said the reason i decided to do this interview with you, i had written to him about the book
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that i believe teaching is very important. he said i'm thinking about it i realized in every job i've ever had in my life i've basically been a teacher. and not for him the first teaching experience was coming back to princeton as a senior, thinking it was going to be his year on the football team. but he got his knee blown out in part as. as the one of the coaches saw in him a potential as a teacher and so put them in charge of the freshmen backfield. he said that was my first experience of teaching and i felt like every job i had my in my life, whether it was in fact be an economics professor at the university of chicago were being secretary of state or any other cabinet position he held. he said basically i felt like what i was trained to do was set up an environment in which everybody on my staff was
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learning. and he said i feel like if people feel that they're learning, it'll bring out the best in them and they'll do the best job that they are capable of. and so i realized at that point, okay, i was going to forget the rattlesnakes in the backyard analogy. and i realized, you know, we were just two teachers sitting down to talk about the nature of teaching. and in that context, he was not nearly so dour as the scum off on television. and you know, do we have our disagreements, with a nice man and one who had indeed always been sensitive to what it means to teach someone who had always taken not hold very seriously. sometimes people ask, what was
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your favorite interview? and that's hard because i really loved doing them all. but this is the one that probably rises to the top of my mind most often. if a woman named rebecca jones teaches and present. she actually lives in the bay area. some of you may know of her. and she is actually one of three people interviewed to teach in jails or prisons. in a previous appearance, someone asked me, why three people out of 51 teach in jails and prisons? and i didn't know the statistics come about in the data. at any given moment, 2.3 americans -- 2.3 million americans are incarcerated. that's a large population. so on reflection, you know, three people who teach them is
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just about right. or does the jones grossly women. and this was the story that she told. she said i was hired by the california arts council 15 years ago to go into the city jail in teach aerobics to incarcerated women. for me as an artist, getting this call i was totally mystified, but i answered the call. so i just improvised every day for the first month. i strutted and they're looking very fashionable, looking like danielle from solid gold, the television show from around that time. i just turned 40 and the women were just fascinated. i was black and so most of the women were black or latino. as of the black and brown woman really sat up and took notice. at 40 is in great shape. and we walk overs, handstands,
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back in, ridges, splits. i'm talking about my own life. and really telling the story of my life. and taking them on the journey that has brought me to this place, to this jail in the city underwent a morning at 11:00. in the course i talked about having it abf 16. i talked about my own dance with drugs and dangerous men. i talked about my own experience of looking for love in all the wrong places. and they were mesmerized. it matched their memory, you know, the cheerleaders, the dancers. there was an even a contender for ms. black california who had gotten stranded and was in for murder. my purpose was to take people out of the space where they say i'm a, i'm a dope fiend, i'm a.
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these are titles that people lay on themselves. and i'm saying, you are so much more before this. before this, who were you? who were you and where were you? and what was going on before life started to hurt. and all of a sudden it was like we were all home girls just kicking it. i remember another incident where a young woman was talking about something horrific that it happened to her. she had been a dud to a man who would've been stalking her at school. and so, she's telling the story, crying, hyperventilating, shaking. and another one gets impatient with listening to her and says that's not nothing. let me tell you what happened to me. and then, as a teacher, i step in and say wait, what do you mean? how can you sit there? and revolving crying and say
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that this woman's story is nothing. everyone's story is valid. everyone's pain is priceless. and i just need to say in the former to everybody that i am sorry these terrible things happened, but don't ever say that ain't nothing because she's giving it up in this moment. i could see the woman who'd been telling the story, who was about to react with anger withdrawal was all of a sudden listening to the fact that i was saying her story was valid. just being able to reiterate this horrible thing that happened to her was valid and good for us all -- i don't think anybody who would ever said to that woman i am sorry. i don't know if she had even told the story to anyone before. as a teacher, you're always watching for that place, where as they say and hip-hop, you drop some knowledge.
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and also, we've opened up an avenue for a new thought. two or three days later, the young woman who is said that if nothing came back into her circle and said, i have something i want to say to alice. i'm sorry that i said that ain't nothing. and i've never said i'm sorry to any pitch before about anything, but ms. jones you are right. analysts i'm sorry and i'm sorry that it happened to you. then she broke down and started to cry. mic while. now, as any teacher will tell you, you're going to learn as much from your students as you're attempting to impart in them. and i tell you, it changed my life to be working with incarcerated populations, mainly women. it may be much more great old.
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it makes the practice gratitude. i really do. and that leads me to my last reflection on the stories. now, i thought about her last remark, but it makes her practice gratitude. and the first i thought well, i guess she meant, you know, these women are incarcerated and i'm free. and so, i'm grateful that i'm privileged in the way a human life. but he later realized that probably wasn't her primary meaning. probably what she meant is -- and they think this is something that was nearly universal among the people that i talk. and that is there was something about them that was so generous in their heart, that their souls were so giving, that giving and receiving.
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an for them to kids was to feel grateful for their ability to give. for then, giving was receiving. thank you. [applause] okay, so we now have time for questions. and if you'd like to ask a question, if necessary take you step to the microphone here and speak the question into the mic. up for the recording purposes. so don't be shy. if i can do it, you can. >> mr. smoot, i guess i want to give a pitch for good teachers, not great teachers. and i think a public school situation where somebody might have a class with 150 students a
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day and they are struggling and trying to be the best teacher there can. and maybe they have moments where their great teacher but on the whole they can be a good teacher and maybe we can create an environment where instead of classes with 80 students than they could make it as a good teacher, not to kill themselves, the time grading papers, not to spend their life always evaluated on test scores. and if we could create this environment were a good teacher could be successful, i think this is what like a public school system would need. what is your response to that? >> well, i think that's very well fed. and it ain't your point is deeply true about teaching and about many things in life. i mean, it's true. we can't all be martin landau or
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ron washington. and i do think that in some ways the function of being able to admire and recognize great teachers and read about them is first of all, it's inspirational for all of us, but also it's a way of reminding us that the great people don't mean the good people don't measure up. quite the opposite. it's a way of reflect them back on the good people that they are good. i mean, to use an example from another aspect of my life. i've done amount of fiction over the years and have had short stories published. well, i'm not a great writer. but to me, what i sort of realized is the fact that i'm not faulkner or any number of 5000 other people i could
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mention, doesn't diminish the value of my own modest little achievement. in fact, it reflects on it. because what it means is i'm the small echo of these larger people. and so, you know, i can feel a kind of modest pride in that. and i think your point is well taken that in some ways there's a sense in which i hope this book will cast the kind of -- a kind of echo of value and worth over all of the teachers in the world who are good or even have as you say moments of goodness or moments of greatness. so i thank you for your comment. >> let's go to sports.
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>> when you are sitting in the front row at that okay, this is a guy who's going to save me here. >> now, this image that great players do not make great coaches. and i think underlying it is it came to bc for them or they work at it, but it did come easy to me it trouble communicating it. now, you pick some examples of people who were great practitioners and great teachers. what was your response be to this, that great players don't become great coaches that teach? >> i think very few of them do. because i think there is a difference between a great talent and a great skill. and then as i said earlier, i think we can almost see there's two more levels. there is one, the understanding of how it is that you do what
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you do, which some people don't have. they're just great and they don't know how they do. it. you know, you ask the great tennis player, how do you serve it fall of 125 miles an hour? they say i don't know, i could have been handed. so i think the next level is one, understanding how you do it and then the level even beyond that is understanding how you take that with some and pass it on to others. because let's face it, there's a lot of great ballerinas. there very many suki shores who can be a great ballerina and also teach it to others. parwan washington who could play the infield and figure out what are the principles that allows him to play the infield error free pass on to others? i think it's a completely different scale. and i think you're right that there's a state difference
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between talent and being able to teach. i think there's also people who configure other principals who were themselves particularly endowed with a natural talent. >> why do you think, for example, a basket player like shack, knowing can teach them honeydew streakers. >> he should call tom gordon. and you know, i asked him. i said, can you compare teaching a 9-year-old to teach in an nba player? he said the outcome of the 9-year-old is much more teachable. they're open. they don't have the ego. you know, they're not surrounded by all the trapping. and so, they're completely open. and i went on to say, so how do you teach? suppose you were trying to teach me.
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i used to play basketball when i was younger and was a very good. i said, which just had to shoot the ball and say how does it feel? and he said no, i wouldn't ask how does it feel because the answer could be it feels great. he said the questions i would ask would be what questions. what just happened? where was your elbow? was the ball lined up with your eye in the basket? because he said, ultimately everything depends on awareness and self-awareness. and the only way, he said, but i can build awareness is by asking questions. and he said, i even think i could help someone with their playing of the violin, even though i can't play the violin. i said really? how? i'd say play this piece and read it between one and 10.
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and then it's a-ok can play it again and read it between 110 again. what was the difference between the seven in the five? he said by just asking questions, you can try and get someone into the awareness mode. and that was a thing that came up in a lot of the teachers, namely the importance of asking questions as opposed to giving answers. >> i also work in the schools provide the topic both very inspiring and very intimidating. and it's hard not to be a good teacher, let alone a good teacher. but i'm wondering, in her own life, were all kind of teachers and learners. and it might relative brother, sister, kid on the block. how does this relate to being someone who relates to people and that all life is both a teacher and learner?
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does this have any relevance to the topic of conversations with teachers? >> will come i think it does. and one of the reasons i branched out into so many areas of life was i to think that teaching and learning -- there is a clue that holds life together. and they have been informal ways, you know, you learn to do brain surgery. he went to make horseshoes. you learn haskell not manic sort college physics. you're absolutely right. every day we all teach things to one another. they can be, you know, little things like how to start the car or larger things like hey, here's a way that i think maybe you can deal with your coworker. and i think every successful society, whether it's family,
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neighborhood, town or nation, there has to be teaching constantly going on ultimately you're exactly right. were all teachers were all learners. and one of the things certainly that characterized his very select cast of great teachers is that they all had an enormous curiosity and they had not ceased to think of themselves as still learning. learning from their students and learning from other sources about their subject area. and sometimes making radical changes. i mean, i interviewed a fascinating physics professor at harvard and eric lesueur who had been teaching successfully at harvard, large lecture hall classes, physics. and got a good student
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evaluations. but by giving a certain kind of test, which he actually got from another source, he began to think you know, my students don't really understand the physics that i'm teaching them. and based on that completely revolutionized his way of teaching. and so, i think another part of it is, you know, his constant drive to get better in the sense that teachers are lifelong student themselves. >> i'd like to know how you identified the people you were going to interview, how you approached them and how you prepare for your interviews with them? i'll take my answer off the air. last night's >> identify people in a variety of ways. sometimes i might have googled search in teaching awards.
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i tried for every person to have two separate reasons to believe they were great teachers. in some cases, for example, a couple people in the sports world, ron washington and tom gordon and i got from a sportswriter. i just e-mailed the sportswriter and said you know the world of sports. are there people in that world that you really believe our great teachers? and he wrote back and said absolutely and gave me the two names. and finding other things said about them, that was confirmed. in some cases, i got an idea and then pursued the person. so for example, i like l.a., watching it. i thought, somebody has got to be a great ballet teacher. i started looking at dance magazines and dance articles in places like "the new york times"
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and the name suki shor kept coming up over and over again so that's how i contacted her. the wild ideas i remember from what i was a kid there was such a thing as alligator wrestling. and i even know that it had a long history that goes all the way back to the seminole indians. i thought, somebody's got to be teaching this. so i set up there to find out in particular by googling alligator wrestling. and sure enough i found this man was really good at teaching and was a fascinating interview. and you know, he had real insight into teaching and all the things you need to do to really train a competent alligator wrestler. so it was in a wide variety of ways. and then, what i did i just contacted the people, usually by e-mail, sometimes by letter. and i was in to get turned down
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a certain amount of the time, especially if it got into people who are very busy bar were well known. i get turned on by virtually no one. and i later -- and some are people who turned out a lot of interviews. so i later realized the reason was these were people so dedicated to teaching that they would be interviewed about teaching as opposed to what it's like to be rich and famous or powerful or something of the sort made them incredibly generous with their time. and so, you know, i virtually got no answers. you know, they all agreed. we are about out of time. i would like to thank you all for coming. i've enjoyed talking to you and i hope you've enjoyed listening. thank you.
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[applause] >> for more about author bill smoot and his work, visit bill smoot.com. >> coming up next, booktv presents afterwards, an hour-long program where we invite guest hosts to interview authors. this week, u.s. residential author, nigel hamilton discusses his new book, american caesars about the 12 u.s. presidents since world war ii. the award-winning author of jfk reckless youth and the two volume biography of bill clinton and examines each man's path to the white house and his particular strengths and weaknesses. he also takes a close-up of the more challenging issues of each administration and the fashion
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in which the president tackled them. he speaks with fellow historian and author, richard norton smith. >> host: nigel hamilton, author of american caesars. you have spent a lifetime thinking about and practicing the art of biography. this book is among other things may be grouped biography of the last 12 american presidents. when you think a buyer for both his substitute? >> guest: the first thing he does is true. also, i think he owes -- or she, a degree of curiosity. i think it's fatal for the biographer to go into a project with the said opinion. i think the biographer needs to have an open mind and clearly you need some driving interest of curiosity.
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but i think you've got to be willing to change your mind if they found some of the documents to the g2 a character. and that happened several times in american caesars. >> does the biographer of his subject and the? and i mean by that the majority of quarters. i mean that a biographer is engaged in the almost godlike presumptuous that every creed and life. and if you're going to explain another human being's carried her, motivations, presumably you need to try to step into issues, perhaps even inside his skin. is that something you think is necessary? >> i don't know that i would say it's necessary because it depends on what kind of biography according to write.
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personally, i have always, until now, always written biographies about people i don't like because as you say it's difficult to empathize with them. and you may end up judging them unfairly or not been able to put yourself in their shoes. but if you do have to read about people you don't necessarily care for them in this book, among the 12 presidents, there were several i basically didn't like. i think you over to them -- at an off empathy is the right word, but you over to them to try and keep an open mind. ..

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