Barrel Strength

This entry is about learning and teaching. In an earlier posting I ranted about how no one actually knows how to do anything practical anymore, such as observe the problem, reframe it if necessary, and solve it.  Today’s sermon is taken from recent experiences with the people mentioned in the title to this posting.

I have three kids of my own, two step-children by a recent marriage, aged 18 and 26, and a son-in-law, aged 41.

There comes a time when the young ones are ready to learn. Once upon a time, it might have been when they were twelve or thirteen; now with advances in technology and the extension of schooling, it seems to come after they have turned twenty five.

Three cases in point:

Story#1: Step-daughter, aged 18. We gave her the key to the house and we left to go to the cottage. Some hours later we turned on our cell phones to find that she had been unable to open the lock to my house.  She had arrived after we had left for the country. She had been unable to open the door with her key, which had always worked before. So she phoned her sister to come and pick her up. Her sister lives half an hour away. Her take-away from her inability to open the door: would we please always keep on our cell phones so she can reach us. Several  messages were left on all available storage media for us to contemplate our thoughtlessness.

What actually happened was this. I have two locks, one in the door knob, and another below it, a dead-bolt, which is turned by a key only. She had tried the upper lock in the door handle and had not not even tried the lower lock which turns the bolt. Thus her attempts to open the door by means of the key in the door-knob were fruitless. The key-slot for the dead bolt lies three inches below the door-knob. Rather than reframe the problem, that is, allow the possibiliy that she was doing something wrong, or knock on the neighbour’s door (three feet to the side) to ask for help , she phoned her sister, who had to come from miles away to pick her up, and, having arrived at sister’s house, proceeded to fill our various message machines with complaints about how inconsiderate we had been to keep our cellphones off. She herself, it should be pointed out,  is the master of not returning calls from either her mother or sister. Apart from a rich sense of justice, it makes one wonder whether she should be allowed out of the house without active parental supervision.

Story #2. Son-in-law, PhD, professor. My daughter and he were staying in my cottage. The small propane tank - standard barbecue size - feeding the stove ran out. He picked up one of the two propane tanks, which were side by side, but not the one which had actually run out. He went to the propane supply place 10 miles away. The guy at the station picked it up and told him the tank was  full. Thus, rather than pick up the empty tank, son-in-law had picked up the one beside the empty  one and had not compared the weight of the two tanks.

 Son-in-law is the son of two Ph.D.s, both mother and father. His biggest problem with me is trying to figure out whether he should listen to me about anything, because my views are so outrageous to his sensibilities. He has spent until the age of 40 in universities and post-doctoral fellowships. Though he tries hard to be fair-minded, I think – and I could be wrong – that he starts from the point of view that practical matters do not require the same serious attention he gives to his lectures, or that somehow he might be diminished by paying too much attention to material reality. I hope he and the rest  of us  will not have to pay a high price to keep him insulated from learning about the mundane.

Story #3. Son, aged 27, got back from summer camp where had been a counsellor. A man who has not been interested in work until now wanted to help me with trimming a tree-line, which involves cutting small trees, and stacking them in an orderly way. This requires patient, hot, sweaty work with a chain saw. A chainsaw is dangerous and aggressively noisy, and involves significant risk of injuring oneself.  The saw must not hit the rocks in the ground (stone beats scissors),  but a tree line grows precisely where the farmers stacked the rocks taken from the plowed fields. Trees grow where the blades will not cut.

After years of work avoidance, son #1 was wielding the chainsaw, learning the many dozens of ways the blade will jam in trees when you cut fron the wrong side (the pressure of the falling stem jams the blade), how your face and arms will get smacked with thorny branches, learning that the primary directive not to cut your feet off is no joke: leaves constantly try to obscure what you are cutting. Impatience, anger, and fatigue are enemies to be watched out for. I do not say chainsawing is as difficult as golf. I do assert that chainsawing involves a continuous effort to remain calm and focussed in an environment of serious danger, while engaging in brutish work in an intelligent fashion.

In a transformation that seems to me to be sudden, and almost miraculous, I was able to communicate to him  a great deal of information about chainsaws, running  the tractor, and other aspects of  practical work. His mind was open. What I am communicating to him about these experiential matters was  making sense to him. Rapid learning was taking place.

His parting gift was to load the woodshed with firewood, using the wheelbarrow to bring the wood in from the edges of fields. Having done this by hand, I think I will now be able to teach him about changing out the equipment on the tractor, so that he has a machine to do most of the work for him. Now that he has done it the hard way, I think he will be ready for the easy way.

Lesson to be derived?

Learning takes place when a person realizes he does not knows enough.  The subject must be valued before learning can happen: opening a door, changing the propane tank, or operating a chainsaw. They do not teach this stuff in school. The same has applied to me, I assure you. The topics were different.