Study for the essay questions

“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” – Alec Bourne, A Doctor’s Creed

Way back when I was learning my ABCs, names of state capitals, and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at happy Hillcrest Elementary School way up there on the crest of that hill, We the People of These United States weren’t offered the chance to take a foreign language. No, I had to wait until the 9^th grade when all those chatty and sparky synapses were concretized, making it almost impossible to create unusual, new sounds and different ways with sentences construct word order to.

Good instructional strategy, that.

In that Dark Insular Age (as opposed to our Transparent Yet Still Insular Age of 2005), the only language offered was French. Mais oui! Given the Massive and Unrelenting immigration of wine-swilling Frenchies to the hills of North Carolina, that monolithic linguistic choice made perfect sense, didn’t it? Mais non!

I was suspicious that my ninth grade French teacher might have taken one French class sometime in her life. Or not. Shortly into our class, it became abundantly clear that we wouldn’t be confused with native speakers after a year of listening and responding aloud in our sweet Southern drawls to her precious, scratchy 33 1/3 record of odd French phrases (“A what?” my daughter just asked. “A record?”). Indeed, come to think of it, I’ve never been asked to join the French Foreign Legion and I suspect that Mme. Brown is to blame.

The first time I crossed the big pond and went to Paris, I was proud to amaze and, I feel it’s quite fair to say, delight the good people of the City of Lights with my command of their language. “Il est au zoo!” I exclaimed with merry abandon. “Il est au zoo!” “What do you think of our museums?” my host asked over wine. “Il est au zoo!” “What are the most pressing problems in American corporations today?” one of the delegates at our meeting asked. “Il est au zoo!” I exclaimed loudly! “Is your CEO joining us this evening for dinner?” someone asked. “Il est au zoo!” I replied enthusiastically.

“He’s at the zoo.”  That’s the single phrase I remember from Mme. Brown’s “French” class. And trust me, this is not a phrase that comes up often in conversation. No, I had to work really hard to find opportunities to use it, even badly. The whole thing made me feel a bit like William Burroughs in his happy drug days chopping up pages of text on a tiny guillotine and throwing them into a circulating fan to see what fell where. I pretended I was an Avant Garde poet or Peter Sellers in “Being There,” my idiot savant messages too poignant, too powerful, too precious for comment or explanation.

Following in the Grand Tradition of Useless, Inexplicable, and Inapplicable Knowledge, I learned how to say "There’s a small brown dog" in Russian from the disembodied voice of a woman I could only imagine was knocking back frozen pepper vodka and caviar in between breathless renditions of this remarkable phrase. Need I tell you that it’s tough to find a way to use that phrase while in  Moscow on business?

My Russian hosts worked hard to find a small brown dog so I could show off my considerable linguistic prowess. Finally on my last afternoon there, we settled on a big brown slightly militaristic dog in Red Square. It would have to do; evidently the small brown ones were in hiding for the winter. “????? ????? ?????????? ??????!” I yelled, ????? ????? ?????????? ??????!” One tiny boy ran screaming toward his mother; others just stared, mouths agape, and the soldiers suddenly stood up straight, cocking their Russian Tokarev M1940 semiautomatic rifles in anticipation.

I realized from those two linguistic fiascos that information isn’t terribly useful unless you have a larger framework and context in which to put it, use it, apply it, alter it, frame it, change it. Learning one thing is not useful. Learning how to learn about that one thing is. Perhaps that marks the difference between mindlessness and mindfulness, between idiocy and fluency, or between buying tourist souvenirs and being on the short end of a firing squad.

Sometimes when I teach about cultural differences, I fear I’m channeling Mme. Brown and her scratchy recording in that room with no air and small desks. What I want students to learn is not specifics like “zoo” and “dog,” but what culture really is, that way of sense-making and meaning-making around common “dilemmas” in the world, and how our answers to those questions vary around the globe. But what they want instead of all that complicated stuff is how to hand their business card to someone in Tokyo, which countries consider it an insult to show the sole of your shoes, and what white flowers symbolize in China or Argentina.

I’m thinking that the need to know deeper isn’t true just of cultural or linguistic knowledge, either. Is it useful or dangerous to know a fact if you don’t really know why or what that fact illuminates deep down? Is information transferable? Is context important? Is knowing how to think about something as important as thinking about something? Is the concept of culture itself more important than knowing the “10 tips” for business success in Prague? And even before answering any of those questions, must I know my own cultural “answers” before studying those of other people?

Learning things on the surface of life doesn’t help me with the parts that are deeper down—how people think and think differently, how they make sense of what happens around them, how meaning is made around their dining room table that is different from my dinner time conversations over mac and cheese (homemade with a garlicky oat topping). How else does this play out in life? I learn one recipe, but have no idea how to make substitutions; I can play the piano but only with sheet music.  Maybe I can answer the multiple choice questions of life, but never, ever the essays.

Learning a formula or phrase limits rather than increases my ability to navigate real life. If that exact situation doesn’t arise—if he isn’t at the zoo and if there isn’t a small brown dog—if I run out of cumin or cinnamon, if someone asks me to play “Frosty the Snowman” instead of the theme song to “Spongebob Squarepants,”—then I’m lost, unable to make sense. What if a big white dog shows up or he’s at the museum instead of the zoo? I’m illiterate and impotent and ineffective, then. I can’t transfer the knowledge to any new situation; I’m stuck.

The students in an undergraduate course I’m teaching this semester are studying about culture and its impact on leadership. After reading Hall’s Beyond Culture and Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought, one student said she felt sorry for all those group-oriented people in Asian cultures because they must have no self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. After I nodded that nod that you nod when you’re trying to figure out how on earth to answer, I realized that her statement was actually a fantastic representation of how we usually see the world—looking at other people’s outsides from our insides.

Well, I explained, they do have self-esteem and self-worth—they just get theirs from being a member of a group while you get yours from being an individual, happily confusing the student’s own cultural norm about what self-esteem means and is. How much more important was that thought process than her simply learning that many Asian cultures are group oriented and being able to answer a multiple choice question about that?

I often frustrate people in my classes who just want the “10 tips for working in Asia.” Since all the countries in Asia are exactly the same, I think to myself, hey, no problem! “Well,” I say, “first let’s learn an important phrase. Repeat after me: ‘Il est au zoo!’”

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

The myth that life is simple undermines learning. Embrace the complexity. Don’t fall prey to the illusions of right answers, but go beneath the phrases to the meaning below. Don’t learn to hand your business card to a Japanese CEO; learn about how people in high context cultures make meaning instead. Don’t memorize one recipe to make when your in-laws come over for dinner; learn how flavors work together. Don’t look for a small brown dog; learn how to look for meaning and commonality and community instead. Don’t just go to the zoo.