there's no recording and you weren't there. how do you deal with it? >> those are lines that get blurred a lot, and students asked me that before. where do you draw the line? for me, i'm a purist about it. ..me directly from them, usually in that same dialect. i don't ever paraphrase for them. i take it as it is. it comes from their personal material like diaries and letters. >> this is pretty frustrating for narrative nonfiction writers because people read narrative material and assume you were not there, you had to have made some of the up. you can reconstruct it accurately. this is why it took ten years to write the book. every narrative detail is verifiable right down to it was raining, the room looked like this. those things are very easy to

recreate. dialogue is more challenging. there is stuff that appears on paper and in my case medical records, journals and things like that were important. the opening scene of the book where she gets out of her car and walks up to the front counter of a hospital and says i have a knock on why will in, term medical record says patients says found tumor on cervix. she did not walk up to the desk and say i have found a tumor on my cervix because that was not who she was. i interviewed all of her living relative is, everyone from that time and have them tell me the stories of what happened and the way they told the story is she said i got a knock on my womb. the quotes recreated from interviews are direct quotes from the way they were reconstructed from people who heard them and i talked to her doctors and people and i verified them with as many people as i could.

various narrative moments in the story fact that i wasn't there for all had multiple sources. i would not say to them did she walk up to the desk and say i have a knock on my will but tell me what happened and they would come back with the same story and when you hear the same story from five or six people that is as close to accurate as you're going to get when there is no written documentation. i had fact checkers to verify all the information. these were recorded by other people. every detail in a story is like that. if it reads like fiction some of it might be made up. that is unfortunate. >> my question is mostly for molly but i teach economics which is another discipline that struggle with education. i wonder what insights or advice you have for the educational process in science and you need changes in high school or college teaching? >> couple people who read my book recently said it is a shame

more kids aren't reading books like this in their science classes because especially for kids, high-school or college age, the human stories, the connections are what they take away from it. they connect to those people and i say i don't write about disease. i wrote about people who have disease. as far as education goes, kids would learn a lot better if they were given that kind of context that they can put those facts in. >> my book has been really widely -- is being documented in colleges and a lot of universities where all freshmen are required to read the book. in medical schools kids are required to read the book. i spent a lot of time talking at universities and high schools. that is exactly what the take home point for all these kids really is. this is the first science book -- i had a kid come to me last

week and said this is the first book i have ever finished in my life. i hate science and the story really got me to go through it. in my case the book is actually a lot of it is about the importance of education. her family had no access to education and a lot of trauma that happened to them happened because they didn't understand what was going on and no one tried to explain it to them. there's a lot of access to education for the poor and minorities. have seen kids excited about the book and asking important questions and i realized the the future scientist. they need to get these stories and their siblings often come to my events. i want to read your book but high and 10. so i ami and 10. so i amm 10.

so i am writing it for them. >> a woman called from a cathedral and said i came in and one of the medical students asked what i was doing there and we heard the story of yellow fever and doctors gave their lives in the course of medicine and want to come to the place where that happened. one of the most rewarding experiences. the way they practice medicine. [talking over each other] >> i am so sorry. we have two minutes left. i am very sorry. i wonder if you could both in one minutes a what is next for you. >> i signed on for my third book. it will have an element of science writing with scotland yard, forensic work and scotland yard detective tracking down a group of thing that took place in edwardian london. a lot of early detection and

forensic psychological play. >> for me, the story is like the film, they have taken over everything. i am working on a young adult version and a consultant on the film so i will be working on that and so is the family. we will be part of that. i have other ideas i will begin to work on but i am still focusing on this talking at different universities pretty much every day. >> i can't tell you how much fun this has been for me. and three women talking about science, a wonderful morning and wonderful way to kick off the texas book festival. i hope you will join us in 15 minutes in the book signing tend. thank you. [applause]

for more information, visit texas book festival to work.org. up next, bill smoot talks about conversations of great teachers, to find out what makes them so affect taste. mr. smoot spoke at books inc. in berkeley california. >> 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 by just saying a

word about how i wrote this book. its origins go far back into the 70s when i was a graduate student in chicago and i discovered the works of studs terkel. how many of you have ever read any of studs terkel's books? great. as you know, use this wonderful old radio journalist who started doing books and interviews with people. and the one that i read first first division street. and soon after that his book, working, interviews people about their jobs. at some point over the decades i remembered linking, i wish he would do a book of interviews with teachers. i was a teacher, my mother was a teacher. and i thought it would make a great book. in some time a few years back i read in the paper that he was in failing health and obviously would do no more books. and he's 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 am a journalist. and so, i thought she, maybe i'll give it a try. i'll do a few simple 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 compiled a talking with people about what it was like for them to be teachers that i was hooked. and there were two decisions to make fairly early on. one was, what i just do a sampling of teachers, you know, good teachers, mediocre teachers, lousy teachers and have it be democratic in terms of ability? or what i try to focus on great teachers? and i quickly decided to do the latter. i somehow felt that they are a great teachers this country and

in this world and i wanted to honor them and give them voice and also have the book be the way of exploiting what is it that makes a good teacher? the other decision that i made soon after i started the book, which was somewhat accidental, is it occurred to me that certainly there were great teachers and occurred in a garden through 12th grade on the university. but no doubt there were also good teachers beyond. because in some ways, every aspect of society needs to be taught. it means to be transferred to other people from generation to generation and that a lot of teaching takes place beyond the classroom, beyond the secondary school and the university. so i branched out. and in its final form, the book has more than half of the interviews with his people who teach in unconventional ways. there's 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 art of playing the infield -- that's actually one washington whose team is in the playoffs at the moment as we speak. and so, that was the other decision i made. it became a book about great teachers in all aspects of life. so what i want to do tonight is just tell a few stories about the people that i've met along the way and read a few excerpts from the interviews. when i think about the book, one of the stories that often comes to mind is interviewing a retired fencing teacher who was in his 90s and he retired from teaching when he was 91. and he started to tell me what it was like to teach fencing.

if we were in his bedroom in the house where he lives. and he picked up a fencing foil and he demonstrated. and here's a man who's 91 and he stands with this theory correct posture. in fact, i kept sort of checking my own, sitting across from him. and he picked up the foil and suddenly became a 25-year-old and showed me their lives going back and forth across the ground. and then he said one of the first things i always teach us how to hold the foil. and he put the foil in my hand. he said just pick it up and i did. and then he adjusted my grip. and he took his hand away after he had my grip the way he wanted it. and 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 for me. i often would think about these

interviews in terms of that lingering touch and how in some ways that was symbolic of everybody that i talked to come up they taught in medical school or first grade were taught something. and so, i almost felt that in some ways every story about teaching is in some way a kind of replay of that metaphor as the miracle of teaching. someone doesn't know or doesn't understand or doesn't have a skill. and after the interaction with the teacher, after the touch they do. it's a kind of a miraculous transformation. one of the teachers that i met with a man named stephen leavy who teaches in massachusetts. he was a teacher fourth-grade. and he was an explorer and something that is now called project based learning. and what he did is he fashioned

the fourth-grade curriculum around projects. and so he talked to me about the projects that he did. i remember one of them he said he had his fourth-graders bake bread. and i immediately had this image in my mind of these little munchkins getting flour on their faces. i thought that sounds really purchase. and so i said, do you mean did they get from scratch? you know, the use of the whole business? he says now, we started by growing the wheat. and you know, it took the whole school year, but by the end of the year we had grown the wheat, harvested it, ground into flour, you know, use it to make red. and he explained that first of all he could build a lot of the curriculum into that. the science curriculum, not in terms of measurement and so on. but also for him, he said because he was teaching an affluent suburb, one of the

primary things he wanted to teach little children is that everything in life is not given to us, that bread doesn't grow on trees. remember they used to say that about money all the time, that it doesn't come from a store, that 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 about a lot of the teachers as they often taught on two levels. they taught their specific content, but they also taught mental lessons, the sort of larger lesson that surrounds a 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. and he said okay, this is our project for the year. we have to design and build our classroom. so the first thing i thought about was tasked and they talked about what a good student desk would be. and then they went out in the community and found a carpenter who would help them with it. i'm part of the curriculum for fourth-graders in massachusetts is to study the pilgrims. so we say gee, we're going to need money for this, so let's study how the pilgrims got money for their voyage. and they did that and learned that the pilgrims sold stock in their company, so they sold stock in their little classroom and went around the community doing that and they got a volunteer from the bank to teach them accounting and how to keep track of the money so the math lesson was looked 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 that i ask a number of the teachers. and others said what is it that makes it good as a teacher? it was an interesting question because even though most of the people that i talk to are very loquacious and spoke easily about teaching, that was the one question that gave a lot of them pause. maybe out of modesty of her maybe because they had reflected so much on it before. so i thought for a minute after a few minutes and is that minutes and affiliates of the question. he said, i think it's something about seeing them every student they genius, something about their particular spirit. something that was fully formed for them, that was trapped in a nine-year olds body. it's about seeing the potential. well, potential is kind of a

trite word, but just in qualities are sometimes not at all represented either behavior. so when mr. bought kids that are hardy or bossy, use the qualities of leadership or in people who are whiny and always complaining you see a depth of 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 each unique? i can think of a number of kids who descended into a kind of beast had when they enter seventh and eighth grade. and then at some point begin to emerge when they decided to become human beings. at that point, they're able to reflect on themselves. and once the light begins to shine inward, they see two things. one, thought it 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 that in one way or another sunni. so there are those troubled kids he didn't think you are having any impact on, but that may come back later and you realize that she 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 or who's going to become a neurosurgeon overs going to work in effect very. 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 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 the kids i taught. speaking of mental lessons, and another one of the teachers that

i spoke with, an english teacher at the high school level up for a minute about what he really taught. and he said you know, i think what i really try to teach us pleasure. and he spoke about teaching the deep pleasure of reading literature and responding with heart, whistle as well as with mind into the content of literature. often people will 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 different for every person who reads it. because the interviews and someone is really comprise from material. and the reflections are going to differ with every reader. and the lessons you chart from the teachers are going to be different with every person. nevertheless, i try to think about what some of my own our and it occurred to me, you know, long after the book was

finished, that one of the lessons i drew from it is that in some way of teaching seems not so much like a separate art, but an extension of expertise. that is a person becomes an expert in something. might be neurosurgery. maybe mathematics. and at a certain level of becoming truly knowledgeable in that area, having made that area of knowledge and skills truly one so, there comes with a the ability to transmit it to others. i think in some ways that might pose an interesting question for well, as schools that, you know, have you major in something as a separate kind of art. this is not to say things can be learned and at schools. i know a lot of people who have.

doing these interviews made me wonder if teaching was that boy kind of an extension of being an expert. so for example, i interviewed a man named doug butler who spent decades becoming one of the best barriers in the world as the art of making a playing horseshoes. and finally opened his own school and is now, you know, known throughout the world and students come from all over the world. ireland come in the, saudi arabia, to study the art of inferior underhand. and for him, learning how to teach the art of making and playing horseshoes was the ultimate ascension of his skill and understanding. another was how much treatment, a neurosurgeon at duke university, happens to have been

a neurosurgeon who operated on 10 kennedy when he had his brain tumor. now here's someone who obviously doesn't have to teach, that he does. and not only does he teach his own neurosurgery residents come he undergraduates at duke because he is so committed to it and because 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 scheuer, a former ballerina who herself studied under balanchine, those of you who know the ballet world and now teaches at the abt school in new york. 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 have had the

teaching gene because when she was very young, when she was 22, balanchine saw him here a teaching ability and harder to start doing some teaching, even while she was at the peak of her career. another was from washington, you know, known in the baseball 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 with the principles that made him so accomplished as an infielder and then knowing those principles that we could pass it on to others. in a similar vein, and that's a fascinating man named tom gordon and, who when he was in high school have 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 is the 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 day of practice he got a lot of the shots blocked. it completely broke his confidence. he lost his 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 stanford writing the bench. never played in a game. let's stanford, went to work for apple computer, got interested in golf and tennis, didn't pick up a basketball for years. and one day on his lunch break at apple he were not a basketball court and started to shoot. within five minutes, he was swishing every shot.

and so he started to think, how is it that i can do this? and he began to think about a week after week, month after month and finally came up with what he believed was the four basic decibels of shooting, which he found to be unique and different than the way other people, including the great john putin coach at ucla taught the art of shooting a basketball. and so he began to teach it and today he's known as a teacher of the artists tooting and the students range from nine euros to nba basketball players who hire him as a private coach. and so again, for him, a certain level of expertise that make the transition to understanding how he was such an expert. and then finally, the ability to pass it on for others. i think that's particularly

important to me because one of those things that's always irritated me beyond belief is the same, those who can do and those who can't teach. i'll say the expletives since this is being taped, but i've always found that to be in some ways a helpful thing because it's one of those sayings that is idiotic in a way that makes you think about what is wrong with it. and to me what is wrong with it if it misses, you know, the entire point of the greatest teachers, that they in fact are people whose teaching depends upon not only the ability to do, but then further the ability to reflect on what they do, note the essential aspects of it and finally pass it on to others. one other story -- you know, one of the real treats of doing this book was being able to spend an afternoon with the grayed out

author, martin landro. and he was explaining to me what in his point of view this sort of a status cost and method actor type, what it meant to act and how even though you might need an air-conditioned sound studio, you know, you might have to pretend it's 105 and and new orleans and you better start to sweat, so much do you believe it. and so, he said excuse me and he took his bare hand and pretended to be answering a call on his cell phone. and it was really convincing. i thought this is clever, but he continued to talk to this imaginary person and covered up the phone and said excuse me to move back to talking. and the second went by. and i thought -- i began to downplay an experience. i thought wait a second, i thought it was his bare hand. the cell phones are small.

his hands are big. i think he's really talking on the phone. and so went on for another 30 seconds. and then he said goodbye to the person. this is true, i did this. i reached across the table and opened up his hand and it was empty. and i thought, he is good. a half-hour later, his real cell phone rang and he had to take a call. i realize that the imaginary call was more real and convincing them they will call. and i thought, my god, this man is talented. not only is he talented, but he has known how to pass it on to others and generously does so. you know, when jack nicholson was interviewed by new york magazine, is that i cannot 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 more doing story. they've done, for many years was a fire in new york. and he eventually became a teacher firefighting. this is what he 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 building and brought in and out. when i was all over her come back to the firehouse and save you, and have a few laughs. and then i put it out of my mind, go home and have dinner with the wife. all of a sudden when i became a tippee chief and got assigned to the bronx and had a lot of people under my command i said wait a minute, i'm responsible for them. and then 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. during the fire a part of the floor collapsed in the chimney fell and almost had a guy. that's pretty interesting. i need to figure out why that happened and how to understand it. one day i remember rescuing a battalion chief. i had to go up the ladder and get them from the roof of the building holding good he was trapped up there. it was easter sunday, early morning. i took them down and gave him a hug and this is a big rough guy. i'm sure he went home and had dinner with his family and never said a word about it. but i went home 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, and 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 theme that i've found in a lot of the teachers, with their sense that teaching was not so much transferring something from themselves to the student as it was drying out of the student some kind of a seed that was already in them. for me it's reminiscent of one of the well-known dialogues of plato called him a note in which socrates begins a conversation with a slave boys with no education what other, begins to

ask in a series of questions. and based on the latest playboy answers the questions, he asks more. and by the end of the dialogue, he has led this playboy into what is basically a proof of the collector area ferrum, merely by asking questions. so the implication if he had this knowledge or at least the building blocks of this knowledge and understanding in himself all the time. and the genius of socrates as the teacher was to extract it and develop it. so one of the young teachers that i interviewed -- a lot of the teachers were wrong and the truth like myself, but a couple were in their twenties. one was a young man named plug we told haney, who is an aztec dance teacher. and he said about his teaching, we, meaning teachers of aztec

and 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 collect magical, but there's something very natural about the patterns. human beings are very receptive to the pattern and learned very quickly. another teacher interviewed named jan davis who is a teacher and then up in oregon and a former pediatrician infinitely says almost everybody who has spiritual life as a koan that they are caring around inside them. for example, at a catholic woman who came to a retreat. and 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? shows she spent the week pondering that question and looking around her. is your computer outside of god? is your hand outside of god? is a homeless person at the side of the road with the a sign asking for a handout outside of god? so the koan is a way to take down through the layers of confusion to have insight into the deep truth. if you read about koans, they sound nonsensical. people 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. without koans you have to parse and that the extra word so it

becomes what is the sound of one hand? or what is the sound of one? or what is the sound? said the teacher will help us to refine the 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 that if you've never heard of before. it leads people to some very interesting insight. so again, if that theme of teaching as drying out from people who blatantly have dirty been there. one of the things that was really special to me doing this book -- this is a bit of a personal confession, if they came of age in the 60s. and part of that was having great hope. but another part of that is having deep anger and even

bitterness and a lot of the institutions and people in american society who were in those institutions. 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 and bring in about the wisdom. a personal test for me was going to interview former secretary of state, george shultz. his politics than mine do not coincide. and i thought, i wonder if i'll be able to maintain my demeanor as a polite southern gentleman when i talk to this man who i once actually hurt speak just

before the war with iraq and say, you know, the weapons of mass distraction for search later. and if there's a rattlesnake in your yard, you have to kill it. that was his metaphor. and i actually went in to see him because he's frequently mentioned as a mentor for condi rice and i wanted him to talk about that and maybe other mentor relationships that is a part of. it wasn't clear on early on that he didn't want to talk about that in particular. and so i thought okay, this is probably an interview i'm going to scrap. but then he said, you know, he said the reason i decided to do this interview with you. i had written about the book, i believe teaching is really important and in thinking about it i realize that 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 bone not impact is. and so 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 ever had in my life, what there was in fact be an economics professor at the university of chicago for being secretary of state or any other cabinet position that he held. he said basically i felt like what i was trying to do was set up an environment in which everybody on my staff was learning. and he said i feel like if people feel that their learning, it will bring out the best in them and they'll do the best job that they are capable of. and so, you know, i realized at that point i was going to forget, you know, the

rattlesnakes in the backyard analogy. and i've realized 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 he used to come off, you know, on television. and you know, though we have our disagreements, with a nice man and one who had indeed always been sensitive to what it means to teach and someone who would always take in that goal very seriously. to these people i ask, what was your favorite interview? and that's hard because i really love doing them all. but this is the one that probably rises to the top of my mind most often. it was a woman named podesta

jones who teaches in prison. she actually lives in the bay area. some of you may know of her. and she is actually one of three people interviewed who teach in jails or prisons. and in a previous appearance, someone asked me g, y three people at a 51 teaching jails and prisons? and i didn't know the statistic, but i look it up. and an avid any given moment, 2.3 million americans are incarcerated. that's a large population. so on reflection, three people who teach them is just about right. where does the edessa jones mostly teaches incarcerated 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 and

teach aerobics to incarcerated women. for me as an artist, getting this call, i was ugly mystified, but i answered the call. so i just improvised every day for the first month. i started in there looking very fashionable, looking like danielle from solid gold, which was a television show from around that time. i just turned 40 and the women who are just fascinated. i was black and so most of the women were black-white latina. as of the black and brown women billy sat up and took notice. at 40, i was in great shape. i'm doing walkover's, handstands, that dense, bridges, splits. i'm talking about my own life. i'm merely telling the story of my life. i'm taking them on the journey that has brought me to this place, to this jail in this city on wednesday morning at 11:00.

in the course of that, i talked about having a baby at 16. i talked about my own dance with drugs and dangerous man. 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 even a contender for ms. black california woodcut and strung out on and was in for murder. my purpose was to take people out of this base where they say i'm a, i'm a dope fiend, i'm a, i'm a speed freak. these are titles that people land themselves. and i'm saying, you are so much more before those. before this, were you? who were you and where were you from what was going on before play started to hurt? and all of a sudden it was like

we were all home girls just kicking it. i remember another incident where someone was talking about something horrific that it happened to her. she had been abducted by a man who had been stalking her at school. and so she's telling the story, crying, hyperventilating, shaking. and another woman gets impatient with listening to her and says, that's not nothing. only tell you what happened to me. and then as a teacher, i stepped in and say wait, what do you mean? how can you sit there? and revolving crying, and say that this woman's story is nothing? everyone's story is valid. everyone's pain is priceless. and i just need to say in this moment to everybody that i am sorry these terrible things happened. but don't ever say that that

ain't nothing because she's giving it up in this moment. i could see that the women who have been telling this story, who was about to react with anger and withdrawal, with all of a sudden listening to the fact that i was saying her story with salad. just being able to reiterate this horrible thing that had happened to her with salad and could, for a song, i don't think anybody had ever said to the woman i'm 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, were as they say in hip-hop you drop some knowledge. and also, where you've opened up an avenue for new thought. two or three days later, the young woman who had said that ain't nothing came back into our 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. and alice, i'm sorry and i'm sorry that it happened to you. then she broke down and started to cry. and i'm like wow. 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 made me much more grateful. it makes the practice gratitude. i really do. that leaves me to my last reflection on the story. you know, i thought about her last remark, that it makes her practice gratitude. at 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 that i am in life. but i later realized that probably wasn't her primary meaning. probably what she meant is -- and i think this is something that was nearly universal among the people that i talked. and that is there was something about them that was so generous in their hearts, that their souls were so giving, the giving and receiving meat. and so for them to give boost to feel grateful for their ability to give. for them, giving was receiving. thank you. [applause]

okay, so we now have time for questions. and if you'd like to ask a question, it's necessary that you stick to the microphone here and speak the question into the night. that's where the recording purposes. so don't be shy. if i can do it, you can. >> mr. smoot, i guess they want to get a pitch for good teachers, not great teachers. and i think the public school situation where somebody might have five classes, 150 students a day and that they are struggling and trying to be the best teacher they can, but maybe they have moments where they're great teachers. but on the whole if they could be a good teacher, maybe we could create environments where instead of five classes they

have four classes with 80 students and they could make it as a good teacher, not to kill themselves, you know, the time grading papers, not to spend a all-you-can-eat always evaluated on test scores. if we could create an environment where good teacher could be successful, i think this as well but a public school system would need. what is your response to that? >> well, you think it's very well said. and i think 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 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 the way of

reminding us that the great people talking the good people don't measure up. quite the opposite. it's a way of reflecting back on the good people that they are good. i mean, to use an example from another aspect of my life, i've been a certain amount of fiction writing over the years and i've had a couple of short stories published. well, i'm not a great writer. but to me, you know, what a sort of realized is the fact that i'm not falconer for any number of 5000 other people i could mention, doesn't diminish the value of my own modest little achievement. in fact, it reflects on it. because what it means is i in the small echo of these larger people. and so, you know, i can feel a kind of modest pride in not. and i think your point is well

taken but in some ways there's a sensor which i hope this book will cast a kind of -- a kind of atco 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. soy thank you for your comment. >> let's go to sports. >> when you were sitting in the front row, i thought okay, this is the guy who's going to save me here. the next know, there's this myth or image that great players do not make great coaches were teachers. and i think underlying it is a came too easy for them. or they work at it, but it did

come easy in that they have trouble communicating it to others. nine depicts some examples of people who are great practitioners of great teachers. but what would your response be to this the great players don't become great coaches are teachers? >> i think very few of them do. i do think there's a difference between a great talent and a great scale. and that's as said earlier, i think we can almost see there are two more levels. this one, the understanding of how it is that you do what 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 a great tennis player, had usurped a ball at 125 miles an hour? they say i don't know, i throw it up in handy. so i think the next level is

one, understanding how you do it. and the level even beyond that is understanding how you take that wisdom and pass it on to others. because let's face it. there are a lot of great ballerinas. there are very many suki shores who could both be a great ballerina and then also teach it to others. or ron washington who could play the infield, but then figure out, what are the principles that allows him to play the infield error free and pass that on to others? so i think it's a completely different film and i think you're right that there is a difference between talent and being able to teach. and i think there's also people who can figure out the principles and how to teach, who want themselves particularly endowed with a natural talent. >> whitey think for example, a basketball player like shaq

o'neil, nobody can teach them how to throw free throws? >> you should call tom wirthlin. and you know, asked tom moreland. i said, and so can compare teaching a 9-year-old to teaching an nba player? and he said yeah, the 9-year-old is much more teachable. pharaoh pinned. he got to the eco-commie know, they're not surrounded by all the trappings. and so, they're completely out then. and i went on to say, so, how do you teach? suppose you're trying to teach me. i played a little desk about when i was younger and wasn't very good. i said what would you just had to shoot the ball and say how does it feel? and he said no, i wouldn't ask how it would feel because the answer would be it would feel 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 on the basket? because he said ultimately, everything depends on awareness and self-awareness. and the only way i can build awareness is by asking questions. and he said i kievan think i could help someone with their playing of the violin, even though i can't play the violin. i said really? how? if they play this piece and read it between one and 10. and then i'd say okay, play it again and read it between one and 10 again. okay, what was the difference between the seven and five? they say just by asking questions, you can try to get someone into the awareness node. and that was a theme 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 unfriended topics very inspiring and very intimidating. and it's hard enough to be a good math teacher, let alone a good teacher. but i'm wondering and our allies come over all kind teachers and learners. and you know, and maybe one relative, a brother, his sister, a kid on the block. how does this relate to being someone who would people in their own life is both a teacher and a learner? does this have any relevance to the topic of conversations with teachers? >> well, i think it does. and one of the reasons i branched out into so many areas of life which i do think that teaching and learning are -- and

mean, they are the glue that holds life together. i may have been informal ways, you know, you've archduke brain surgery. you learn to make war shoes. you learned high school mathematics or college physics. but you're absolutely right. i mean, every day we all teach things to one another. they can be coming in now, little things like how to start the car or, you know, larger things like hey, here's a way that i think maybe you can do with your coworker. and i think that, you know, in every successful society, whether it's a family, a neighborhood, a town or a nation, there has to be teaching constantly going on and ultimately you're exactly right. for all teachers and we're all learners. and one of the things certainly that characterizes this very

select cast of great teachers if they all had an enormous curiosity and they have not ceased to think of themselves as still learning. learning from their students and learning from other sources about, you know, about their subject area. you know, sometimes making radical changes. i mean, i interviewed a fascinating physics professor at harvard, named eric missouri. he had been teaching successfully, you know, at harvard, large lecture hall class in physics. and got a good student evaluations. but by giving a certain kind of test, which he actually got from another source, he began to think coming in now, 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 mean, i think another

part of this is this constant drive to get better in the sense that teachers are lifelong students themselves. >> i'd like to know how you identify the people you were going to interview, how you approach them and how you prepared for your interviews with them. i'll take my answer off the air. [laughter] >> all right. identify people in a lot of ways. sometimes i might have googled certain teaching awards. i tried for every person to have two separate reasons to believe they were great teachers. for instance, some people the sports world, tom washington and tom nordland i got for a