When One Is Holding A Hammer ... Part 2
The troubles with teaching how to use hammers.
This is part 2 of a series. You can read part 1 here and part 3 here.
When I first learned about attachment theory, it was because I had a nail in need of a hammer. I was fresh out of a relationship, and I was confused as to why it didn’t work out. A nagging suspicion was forming that all of my relationships were sharing some disturbingly similar pattern.
A respected instructor described Attachment Theory in a workshop as something they were thinking about and immediately I knew I had found my hammer.
Of course. It was so obvious. I was avoidant in relationships and it explained everything!
Naturally, there’s nothing quite like the motivation to better understand the theory that feels like it will “explain everything”. I poured over the texts and I latched onto the experts.
“Explain to me how! Explain to me why!” I inquired.
And explained they did. Pieces slotted together. More and more behaviors started to make sense. Not just mine, but other people’s. My parents did such and such because they had these attachment patterns. My friends had challenges in their relationships because they had those attachment patterns.
I can see the matrix.
Relationship – Solved.
Now, for better or for worse, I also sometimes teach. By the grace of the universe, every so often, a group of people will sit down for a while and listen to what I have to say.
So, of course, I need to tell them this incredible solution to relationships. I would craft workshops to enlighten people on the whys and hows of their relationships. Partially thanks to some good training in building good classes, I would even have people come up to me after sessions and tell me how much they are seeing their relationships now in a new light. Hearing comments like “Wow, I feel like you finally helped me make sense of my relationship of many years” is quite an encouragement to keep working. Clearly, I’m doing sacred work.
Inconveniently though, there comes a time when Attachment Theory (or any model for that matter) reaches its limits. Post-surprise, not everything in human relational dynamics can be boiled down to a two by two of {avoidant, non-avoidant, anxious, non-anxious}. More and more models were discovered and explored in the intersubjective realm (communication, relational) and subjective realm (contemplative, developmental) which expands the scope beyond what one model can handle. In the case of attachment theory, I found that different ways of defining and pursuing “Secure Attachment”, are no longer sufficient or satisfying.
Bizarrely, I found that the more I learned beyond the model, the more I lost my ability to teach Attachment Theory. I didn’t lose what I know, if anything I know even more now, yet my teaching is worse. How could this be?
When holding a hammer, especially if one can be sufficiently articulate or charismatic, one not only convinces oneself that everything is a nail, they could also convince everyone around them that the hammer is the solution to everything. Given that sometimes these tools do address important problems – attachment theory is a powerful model for relationship development for children and adults – the enthusiasm from an advocate can dazzle an audience. Thus, when in a position to teach, this can have an unexpectedly large effect since, usually, we are teaching those less informed than us.1
In my experience, there are three buckets of “teachers” I mostly see, in a 90/9/1 type of distribution.
The first 90% is, unfortunately, what we are probably most familiar with. These are the teachers who themselves are uninterested in their own content, drilled by years upon years of standard school constraints that, barring the few heroic souls, languish in regurgitating what has been written in lesson plans formed years ago. Let’s label this group “Soul-Drained Teachers”.2
The second 9% would be the those who have genuine passion for the subject they are talking about. These are usually the few heroic souls in calcified institutions as well as the many teaching figures found often in niche circles or highly effective institutions.3 This can be startups, a local comic book store, or exceptional think tanks4. Let’s label this group “Passionate Enthusiasts”
Lastly, the rare 1% are the ones who have moved beyond passionate enthusiasm and matured into having a deep reverence for the crafts they hone. These are the masters of their respective crafts not only in terms of subject matter knowledge, but also in how to teach the subject matter. This group is able to simultaneously keep in their mind the interactions between: the nature of the content, the student’s mind, and their own mind – an exceptional feat. One can recognize this type by the experience of being taught. We walk away feeling like we have been taken for a personalized ride through a beautiful world, awed but never quite overwhelmed. Let’s label this group “Tempered Masters”.
In some way, we could see the “Passionate Enthusiasts” as the starting point of any would-be teacher feeling the spark to share and instill in others the wonder they experienced. They could either become “Soul-Drained Teachers” or “Tempered Masters” over time.
By the grind of bureaucracy and many other factors, one can become disillusioned that despite eroding passion, one is stuck in the position of teaching – a most unfortunate lose-lose outcome that constitutes the current norm.
However, by some factors, a minority of these people go on to form mastery instead, enthusiasm tempered to form the kind of quality that becomes the greatest teachers, masters, coaches, mentors – an elusive grail in all forms of education.
What could be these factors though? And why is the distribution so lopsided that so few becomes the kind of teachers we wish for?
In my own experience of finding Attachment Theory harder to teach as I learned beyond it, I found that, when faced with the option to offer multiple tools to a student, I was at a loss for which is the right tool to offer.
It’s cognitively much easier when I have one tool for everyone. My job is just to teach that tool well by applying it to as many situations as possible to help students internalize the idea. However, when a student presents a problem with multiple feasible solutions, how am I suppose to know which is the right solution for a particular student with a particular problem.5
In this case, in order to keep teaching well, I am deeply pressured to reconstruct and evolve my model of “Relationship”. With Attachment Theory, I only had a model of Relationship seen through the eyes of Attachment Theory or “Relationship Qua Attachment Theory”. However, that model of Relationships is naturally a compressed version due to the limits of the model I’m using to understand it. By gaining “Relationship Qua Non-Violent Communication”, “Relationship Qua Buddhist Suffering”, “Relationship Qua Poly-Vagal Theory”, and (let’s say controversially) “Relationship Qua Astrology”, Relationship as an object gains profound dimensionality. Now the model is far more complex, rich, informative, and powerful. Yet, not only would I need to attempt to integrate these sometimes contradictory models for myself, I would also have to discern the appropriate compressions (i.e. slices from the more complex idea of Relationship) for a student.
This pressure forges mastery.
There are times when pursuing this can be challenging. I have had cases where I do my absolute best conveying what I thought was the coolest, best possible slice for what a student’s asking for, only for it to fall completely flat. It would be unreasonable (and often counter productive) to then complain to the student why they should have gotten my super awesome analogy. As teachers, we can lack the contexts to reflect on these experiences and long durations of these experiences can be quite deflating.
While due to the nature of the roles between Teacher and Student makes it such that there are times when the Teacher ought not to reveal information for pedagogical reasons, we are Humans, not just roles. Since we are always learning, all the time, we don’t have to force any given Teacher-Student pair to break limits to pedagogy to support our learning or teaching. In a culture where peer-to-peer mutual learning support can be assumed, I can support a different teacher-student pair while another person would support mine.
To the extent that I have received positive feedback from when I have taught and to the extent that I have retained my passion and soul in teaching, it’s thanks to the various contexts that created this atmosphere. I’m blessed to be in a few contexts where mutual interest in each other’s learning can be assumed and thus sharing becomes an ecstatic practice that enhances all participants in their capacity to learn and to teach.
As a result, it has brought me a greater degree of salience to the need for compassion when we are sharing what’s important to us. As we reveal a part of the world that marvel us, it can be disheartening to have it be dismissed or even immediately debated over. Allowing a space for the appreciation of the fact that there is something to marvel at all, and that we are beings capable of marvel, seems to me always, a worthy thing to create.
I believe if we treat those who teaches (which is really anyone who shares anything) in the same spirit, we’d find a lot more of these Tempered Masters in our world.
P.S.
As a not-so-tangential extension, we can replace “Teacher” with “Parent” here and access yet another bundle of complexity.
There is the saying that “no one knows how to parent … until they start parenting”. I think there’s a lot of truth to this. What it implies can also be awkward. As a child, forming our consciousness for the first time in this universe, we can’t be expected to model our parent’s learning – we are busy with other things like Breathing and Speech.
I think it shouldn’t be controversial to claim that “Parents” are in the category of people who “teaches” things. Yet, we probably give the least amount of learning support to them as a category.
When we also shift from “The Parent” to “My Parent”, the difficulty of staying connected with this radically jumps up. The same could be said for anyone playing the “Role of Parent” as well. Parental figures can sometimes have it just as hard.
Many of us could probably imagine the friction that lies in a parent learning to finally take time for themselves after many years of work grind and a youth finally starting to learn the value of striving for greatness. Similar pedagogical limits seems binding in this pair. Ancestrally, at least, larger families can help, but also often enough exacerbates through the act of taking sides. I hope to expand on this in the next part.
Lastly, a song.
When connected to a financial incentive, it’s also far easier to sell ideas when they are singular with claims to extraordinary effect.
This isn’t just school. I put quotes around “teachers” because the senior engineer at a stereotypical large company would likely be teaching in a similar way to an incoming engineer.
Often highly correlated with how much they are beloved by students, yet also often disliked by the institutions themselves!
Great universities should be in this category too, but this appears much less the case today than it was perhaps 100 years ago.
Not to mention the additional difficulty when there are more than one student with more than one variations on the problem.