Fun for amateurs

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

Hunter S. Thompson

Sometime in the summer I had two women ask for test prep classes, one for TOEFL and the other for IELTS. On a whim I said I'd teach former for free and I charged the latter my normal fee. Both women were [are] attractive and smart, although the TOEFL one turned out to be more motivated and hard-working, but that may've been because she had to earn her class with homework.

What happened happened very quickly - I realized that I enjoyed teaching the free class far more than the paid one. Doing it for free was fun, there was no pressure, and I was happy when things went over time. It was an interesting experiment, which I continue now by doing some work for free if the person seems like they'll make it worthwhile. Otherwise, I take the money and do the work, but this is a tiny part of my income compared to the editing + reading, hardly enough to keep me in beer. I'd rather keep teaching as a hobby than a living.

Anyway, Isabella, the student in question, is taking her TOEFL this weekend, so an online thanks for the interesting classes and a wish of good luck for Sunday.

Theory / practice

Busy and tired, but want to post something, and this idea came to surface in a lull during class, when I was feeling particularly 'on' about my ability to teach a certain thing, a skill that I never got from reading books but had to learn, like a craftsman, by doing again and again, (and failing - I'm not a natural teacher).

The idea was that however foolish people are in vast areas of their lives, everyone has an area of expertise, something that they know way more about than they should and from which something useful can be extracted. Although, of course, like craftsmen, not all knowledge can be easily codified, and most of what is important remains tacit - things that can't be learned from books.

Anyway, as with everything, it's been expressed better elsewhere before, and this time it's from Geoffrey Miller's answer to The Edge question for 2008 [What have you changed your mind about? - many interesting answers, worth a download / print]. Excerpts follow:

I used to think ... that the intricacies of human nature were not just dark, but depopulated — that a few exploratory novelists and artists had sought the sources of our cognitive Amazons and emotional Niles, but that nobody actually lived there.

Now, I've changed my mind — there are local experts about almost all aspects of human nature, and the human sciences should find their way by asking them for directions. These 'locals' are the thousands or millions of bright professionals and practitioners in each of thousands of different occupations. They are the people who went to our high schools and colleges, but who found careers with higher pay and shorter hours than academic science. Almost all of them know important things about human nature that behavioral scientists have not yet described, much less understood. Marine drill sergeants know a lot about aggression and dominance. Master chess players know a lot about if-then reasoning. Prostitutes know a lot about male sexual psychology. School teachers know a lot about child development. Trial lawyers know a lot about social influence. The dark continent of human nature is already richly populated with autochthonous tribes, but we scientists don't bother to talk to these experts.

[...]

For example, suppose a psychology Ph.D. student wants to study emotional adaptations such as fear and panic, that evolved for avoiding predators. She learns about the existing research (mostly by Clark Barrett at UCLA), but doesn't have any great ideas for her dissertation research. The usual response is three years of depressed soul-searching, random speculation, and fruitless literature reviews. This phase of idea-generation could progress much more happily if she just picked up the telephone and called some of the people who spend their whole professional lives thinking about how to induce fear and panic. Anyone involved in horror movie production would be a good start: script-writers, monster designers, special effects technicians, directors, and editors. Other possibilities would include talking with:

• Halloween mask designers,
• horror genre novelists,
• designers of 'first person shooter' computer games,
• clinicians specializing in animal phobias and panic attacks,
• Kruger Park safari guides,
• circus lion-tamers,
• dog-catchers,
• bull-fighters,
• survivors of wild animal attacks, and
• zoo-keepers who interact with big cats, snakes, and raptors.

A few hours of chatting with such folks would probably be more valuable in sparking some dissertation ideas than months of library research.

Back to work

The Chinese New Year is almost over, and now I don't know when the next break is. Ten years ago I became an English teacher by default, and ran on the illusion that the entire educational economy in Taiwan was primarily a system to provide me with $$$ and a reason to stay sober before nightfall. I hardly worked at all until I was I was over 30, and when I finally buckled down, about five years ago, to pull myself out of various increasingly bad situations, I worked really hard at a job in which I had very little confidence.

I'm not a natural teacher. I'm not a people person, nor entirely comfortable on stage. Each class used to be a battle between my 'true nature' and events as they unfolded, and so I disliked teaching, and hated myself for what I'd become.

But now things are different. It has been a long process, and I'll keep slipping back to incompetence and doubt, because it's on the edge of those that exhilaration and forgetfulness thrive, the ability to overcome the self and experience the work as something that happens through me, not by me. To do this required years of practice to get enough tacit skills to function smoothly within a loose framework. And even with all that, I don't often rise above the level of basic professional competence.

Last night I was IM'ing a friend in London and whose life is almost entirely opposite to mine. Whatever his problems are, I'm living the answer, and vice versa. Together we've got it made, although it's clear that, as a professional writer, he's been the more faithful and courageous with regard to his dream. The thing is, like Sisyphus I've learned to love my rock, and how much this is good and how much this is bad is something I don't know if it's worth thinking about. This is either the wisdom or the compromises and narrowing dreams that come with age, but even through the form of my ambitions didn't play out as planned the content is doing fine.