"Instead of Education" John Holt, 1976

Another common and mistaken idea hidden in the word "learning" is that learning and doing are different kinds of acts. Thus, not many years ago I began to play the cello. I love the instrument, spend many hours a day playing it, work hard at it, and mean someday to play it well. Most people would say that what I am doing is "learning to play the cello." Our language gives us no other words to say it. But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exists two very different processes: 1) learning to play the cello; and 2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process and begin the second; in short, that I will go on "learning to play" until I "have learned to play," and that then I will begin "to play."
Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one. We learn something by doing it. There is no other way. When we first do something, we probably will not do it very well. But if we keep on doing it, have good models to follow and helpful advice if and when we feel we need it, and always do it as well as we can, we will do it better. In time, we may do it very well.

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Educators talk all the time about "skills": reading skills, writing skills, communication skills, even listening skills. It may be true, at the level of words, to say that anyone doing a difficult thing well is using a variety of skills. But this does not mean the best way to teach a different act is to break it into as many separate skills as possible and teach them one by one. As Whitehead said years ago, we cannot separate an act from the skills involved in the act. The baby does not learn to speak by learning the skills of speech and then using them to learn to speak with or to walk by learning the skills of walking and then using them to walk with. He learns to speak by speaking, to walk by walking. When he takes his first hesitant step she is not practicing. He is not getting ready. He is not learning how to walk so that later he may walk somewhere.

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Here we see some of what the true teacher, the master, does for the student. He breaks down the large task so that whatever he may ask the student to do, the student, with effort, will be able to do, and from doing it will get greater powers, with which to do the next task. He gives a model, shows what is to be done. He may say something that will make it easier for the student to know and do what needs to be done. He gives feedback, makes the student see and feel what in fact he did. He makes a correction, shows the student the difference between what he did and what he was supposed to do, and shows how to close that difference. Most important, by doing this, he tries to give the student (or help him make for himself) standards, criteria, a heightened awareness, a model in his own mind/body, from which he will in time get his own instructions, feedback, and correction. Thus, as he sharpens the student's movements, he sharpens the criteria by which the student will later judge and correct his own movements. The true master does not want to make the student into a slave or puppet, but into a new master. He is not a behavior modifier. He does not move the student by imperceptible steps toward an end which only he, the master, can see. He seeks instead to give the student greater control of his own behavior, so that he may move imself toward his own ends...

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Before we can do the task in reality, we must be able to do it in our mind. I don't mean, just think "I can do it." I mean, get a picture, a total body feeling of what it would be like to do it. If we can't see and feel ourselves doing it, we wont be able to do it.

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The teacher's work, therefore, begins when that other person asks a question. No question, no teaching. But it is important to understand what a teacher can do and does with his answers, and what he cannot do. He does not give knowledge. Knowledge cannot be *given*. If you ask me a question all I can do in my reply is try and put into words a part of my experience. *To make meaning* out of my words, you must use your own experience. If you have not seen or done at least some part of what I have seen and done, then you cannot make any meaning from my words.

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Instead of Education , John Holt, 1976

23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does not Appear in This Space, LA Magazine 12.07

Carroll gave up fear long ago. He gave it up the way people give up carbs. Fear now has no part in his daily life. Fear is like an old, distant friend. They know each other well, talk once in a while, but they’re not close like they used to be.

In meetings, practices, pregame talks, fear is Carroll’s theme. “That’s what we’re all about,” he says, lying back on the leather sofa in his office one night. “Our entire approach is to come to the point where we have the knowing that we’re going to win. There’s nothing to stop us but ourselves. To do that is to operate in the absence of fear.”

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These are some of the things Carroll doesn’t do:

Eat.

Drink.

Sleep.

Pee.

Vacation.

Think negative.

That is, I haven’t seen him do any of these things, not the way most people do them, with regularity. I, however, do all these things, sometimes at the same time, and following Carroll around, therefore, doing everything he does, not doing anything he doesn’t do, I’m always hungry, tired, thirsty, and need to find a men’s room. He pushes me to the limits of my endurance, until I’m barely able to function.

After we’ve spent the night cruising South-Central, after Carroll has catnapped on the floor of his office, I expect to find him exhausted the next morning. I want to find him exhausted. Instead he looks as if he’s slept ten hours, eaten a heart-healthy breakfast, then enjoyed a 90-minute deep-tissue massage.

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When he’s not helping them conquer their fear, Carroll is preaching to his players about fun. He urges them, if they do nothing else, to have fun, because fun is a natural antidote to fear and a prime motive for most of the things we do.

People who know him best invariably seize upon fun to describe Carroll, either saying it’s fun to be around him or that he’s forever having fun. His emphasis on fun comes mainly from his DNA but also from his reading, specifically W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, a 122-page book with a cult-like following. (The latest edition features a foreword by Carroll.) Using tennis as a prism through which to view all human endeavor, Gallwey says we focus too narrowly on results. “The three cornerstones of Inner Game,” he tells me, “are Performance, Learning, and Enjoyment . Usually people put Performance first, and Learning and Enjoyment are almost absent.”

If we focused more on Enjoyment and Learning, Gallwey says, we’d perform better and we’d be a lot happier: “You look at a child. He learns while he plays. Anything he tries to do, or win at, he’s playing, he has a wonderful time doing it. They’re not separate things for a child. That means to me these things are inherently built into human beings. Most human beings, you have to coach what’s already inherent—that is, the drive of excitement to learn and keep learning, and the drive to enjoy. It gets really covered up when winning is everything. I agree with Lombardi: Winning is everything. It’s just what your definition of winning is.”

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Shortly before arriving at USC, Carroll sat down and drew up three rules, three basic imperatives that are central to his view of coaching. The three rules are among the first things a freshman learns when he steps on the USC practice field. The three rules must be memorized, internalized, or the player is out. The three rules are:

1. Protect the team.

2. No whining. No complaining. No excuses.

3. Be early.

No matter how many times I add them up, the three rules look to me like five rules. I feel like a malcontent, a contrarian, for raising the point, for even noticing, but I can’t help it.

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Carroll stumbled on a concept called “Long Body,” a way the Iroquois thought of the tribe. One feels pain, all feel pain. One triumphs, all triumph. Long Body. He began applying this idea to football. “Things were occurring,” he says. “I didn’t know—I had a meeting with players and coaches, and I was telling them about this Iroquois concept. Connection of the tribe. They live together, they hunt together. They become one. So I’m telling them about this concept—this is really far out—and I say, ‘As we go through this camp, go through this season, we’re going to get so close, we’re going to connect in this true fashion. Long Body. It’s going to take us to places we’ve never been before.’ And at the end of my talk I say, ‘As we get through it, I’ll explain it more to you, and I know this to be true so much right now that thunder will strike—’”

At that moment, Carroll says, he struck a table with his fist and a clap of thunder shook the building.

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Something about the discipline of writing every day made him look inward, a thousand miles inward. A logjam loosened; the universe got clearer. Eventually it all came pouring out, his principles, his beliefs. He wrote and wrote, page after page, caught in the grip of inspiration. He laid out the Carroll Doctrine, a battle plan, a battle cry, a manifesto, stressing the value of Fun, Competition, and Practice in helping athletes “self-actualize.” In other words, know themselves. An athlete who knows himself, Carroll says, is unstoppable. The Soul is the Zone that every athlete must strive to enter. Before a big game, Carroll is likely to remind his players to be themselves. “Be who we are. Don’t make shit up, ever!” He says this to his men before their game against Nebraska, a street fight in which they put 49 points on a stunned Husker team that thought it had improved.

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it’s perfect that Heritage Hall sits 20 feet from USC’s music school. Whenever Carroll walks to or from practice he passes through a wall of music.

Not music, actually, but scales, exercises. Students sit outside at all hours, rehearsing on their cellos and oboes and French horns. They unwittingly provide a sense of perpetual overture and underscore a central tenet of Carroll’s coaching—practice, practice, practice.

“One thing I’ve learned, which I was taught a long time ago but didn’t grasp at the time, is the power of practice,” Carroll says. “The discipline that comes from practice, that allows you to transcend the early stages of learning and take you to a point where you’re freefloating and totally improvising. Through the discipline, the repetition, you become free.”

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23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does not Appear in This Space, LA Magazine 12.07

Building a Better Teacher , NY Times Magazine 3.7.10

Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.
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Zimmerli got the students to pay attention not because of some inborn charisma, Lemov explained, but simply by being direct and specific. Children often fail to follow directions because they really don’t know what they are supposed to do.
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All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.” So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”
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Ball began to theorize that while teaching math obviously required subject knowledge, the knowledge seemed to be something distinct from what she had learned in math class. It’s one thing to know that 307 minus 168 equals 139; it is another thing to be able understand why a third grader might think that 261 is the right answer. Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it...At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”
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Buidling a Better Teacher, NY Times Magazine 3.7.10