Asking Not Telling

<p style=”clear: both”>There exists, apocryphally (does apocryphal existence count as existence?) a Suzuki teacher in Portland who uses a squirt gun on parents who cannot keep their traps shut during the lesson. I don’t know how such a teacher would have any students come back, but, I am grateful the lessons my kids get are with teachers who recognize that we are all learning in the room.

Because three of the boys get lessons with the same teacher, it’s interesting to watch themes emerge in the lessons, different for each child, for the level each child is at, and still, the same truths. This week was a lot about attention. Of course, it’s always about attention, but when Soren, tired, clearly wants to please, wants to do what’s asked of him, and telling him to “pay attention” to how the teacher is doing something repeatedly doesn’t work, I suddenly realized that he has to learn how to focus his attention, and that the key to this was giving him questions to ask himself; paying attention to bowing, he could ask where the bow was set, ask what direction the bow moved, ask about the speed, the pressure, how loud, how smooth it was. I timidly suggest that these are the questions that the teacher wants him to ask himself as he is watching the teacher play, and all three of us light up, that this has opened a crack in some wall that stood between Soren and doing what he was asked to do. There are further questions. Which things will his eyes tell him, which, his ears? How does the adult working with him know when something has clicked for him?

Questions suddenly seem to me a miracle tool for focusing. I realize that as much as any physical change yoga precipitates, I have learned to ask my body questions, what’s the alignment I am working towards? It changes the way that I respond to discomfort, I first ask what is this discomfort telling me, how would I report this discomfort to Dana? Which instantly calms me down, engages me differently.

The nineteen Bahà’í months are named for attributes of God, glory and splendor, knowledge, perfection, power, loftiness and mercy, words and will — and the one that is surprising, I think is questions. Aren’t questions the opposite of assertion? And if you get lazy and reduce God to the “I am that I am!” assume that to be faithful is to be a sort of English infantryman, ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die, isn’t questioning the opposite of faith? Only this morning, it all looks different, I don’t want a fragile faith that falls apart under the force of a small question.

In one of my favorite classes at UNM we were charged with keeping journals that we never turned in, they were just supposed to be a practice, and every class we would be given a few questions to act as prompts, I don’t even remember what they were, but they tended to be surprising and thoughtful, of the sort, what weighs more, a kiss or a blow, do you prefer memory or anticipation, how do we know when something is finished? Even though I had come from a program that was supposed to be shaped around the Meno and the Socratic method, it was still startling to realize that a question could teach so much more than a lecture. Some questions were more leading than others, they would reflect to various degrees our professor’s interests and biases, and there was no pretense they weren’t, what was sure was that the answers were to be our own, not written to please him as he would never read them. I wish I could find them again.

It’s in my favorite book for Suzuki parents, Sprunger’s Helping Parents Practice, that children will retain the things they have been allowed to discover as they will not retain things that have merely been told to them. It’s better to ask “What tone are you getting? How can you change it?” than to say “Less pressure, less pressure, less pressure!” But it is so very hard to have faith that the child will find it on his own. it’s hard to find the right question. It’s easy to ask the leading question, to satisfy the form. Most children, I suspect, are smart enough to see through that.

I re-read this, and some of it seems so basic, so obvious. I never know whether I am talking about pedagogy, theology, philosophy, or psychology and I muddle terms from all of them, I continue with ambivalence about technical language. I think that in the history of my blog there is a clear tracing of a wrestling with a perceived deficit, that I ask questions where I would be assertive, that among the things that being me feels like, there is occasionally bewilderment to be surrounded by people who comfortably sound judgements and say how things ARE, when I feel fuzzy with possibilities, tentative with suggestion. And it is a gift to accept one’s own questioniness.