Talent
Caution, more thoughts on "natural teachers" ahead!
Question: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Answer: Practice.
The prevailing theory is that some people are born with certain genes that give them the capacity for more talent (in some areas) than others, whether this be music, math, or teaching. At the elite end of the spectrum are geniuses, people who are simply born with an extraordinary talent. Now, it turns out, that research is proving this theory to be false. Turns out the old chestnut about Carnegie Hall is much more accurate.
The leading expert on this subject is Anders Ericcson. Here is a good article that sums up his research (AA, I think you will especially enjoy this article because it starts with an anecdote about futbal). Here is one of Ericcson's academic papers on the subject.
This being the wired age, David Shenk, a writer working on a book about this subject, has a blog, titled, appropriately enough, "The Genius in All of Us."
My Groups
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Mississippi Teacher Corps Updated: May 9, 2008
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Peace Corps Updated: Nov 28, 2007
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Mississippi Teacher Corps (host) Updated: May 15, 2007
Comments
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.
How do you get to be an immortal composer? Genius. Bach, Mozart, et al, had many contemporaries who were well-respected in their day, as musicians and composers, but who now line the dust heaps of musical history. What made Mozart such a giant? He worked harder? I seriously doubt it. They were all professionals. He was just more clever and original. He did things that were beyond his time, which eventually came to define his time.
http://www.fsu.edu/indexTOFStory.html?lead.expert
http://geniusblog.davidshenk.com/2007/05/what_is_absolut.html
Creativity is far from perfect. It is risky and sublimely rule-breaking. Perfect and genius are similar like rich and happy are similar.
See, you and Ericsson both confuse performing someone else's music with genius. Renowned classical performers nowadays very rarely compose their own music. They are not creative any more than a marathon runner is. They simply train for a very specialized task and then perform it at a very high level.
Creativity is the proclivity to generate original thoughts, ideas, expressions, etc. Original means that these thoughts begin within the inner, absorbed characteristics and experiences of the author, rather than derived by directly mimicking the work of someone else. The process itself is exceedingly difficult to explain. It seems to bubble up from within, when conditions are right. Ever feel struck by an idea you never thought of before, and as soon as it hits you, it seems so powerful and right? Sort of like that. My feeling is that you cannot force it. Maybe you can cultivate the conditions that make you creative, but you cannot just say, okay, today I am going to be creative from 9:00 until 11:00.
Then again, sometimes I do wonder if creativity is nothing more than a frame of mind, an attitude really. The reason so many people are NOT creative is possibly--just perhaps--because they are unwilling to adopt such a frame of mind (not having a set of instructions to follow can be a little bewildering) or they are unaware that such a frame of mind even exists or is possible. But it is definitely not a skill learned by sheer repitition and concentration in the way you normally describe practice. Or maybe it is. Meditation is also an extraordinary frame of mind, after all, which can, I think, be learned with self-discipline and practice.
Interesting to think about. I have enjoyed this little debate.
The concept of charisma as we know it may not even be understood by different culture groups and different language speakers. I know that what is considered "charismatic" in parts of America is considered arrogant and ridiculous by some Mongolians. I know that Americans think that many Mongolians are "shy," but Mongolians would never call these same people “shy.”
There is no "charisma gene" because there is no such thing as a uniform concept of charisma across humanity. And genes are something that we all share. There is no "natural teacher " because there is not a uniform definition of a "natural teacher" or even "good teacher" across humanity. Qualities of "good teachers" are very culturally defined, even in our own country.
I feel that for the conversation to progress, we need to use concepts and words that are not so culturally defined. Even the concept of "creativity" is not the same everywhere. First we would have to describe attributes and traits that are common to all humans.
But we all can’t ignore that certain people are born able to do certain things better than other people. We are animals, and if we can breed certain characteristics into dogs or horses such as speed and size, then we have bred certain characteristics into ourselves as humans. Certain groups of people are taller and faster than other groups of people. And these attributes can also be things that reside in our psyches as our personalities develop. And these characteristics are different across different places across different groups. Therefore, there are skills that certain people and even certain culture groups are able to learn faster or better than others because they are born with traits that allow them to learn these skills faster. It doesn’t mean that these people are born natural teachers or natural anything. But I think that certain people are born with traits that, combined with the appropriate environmental influences, can nudge a person down a path towards acquiring the other necessary skills associated with a “good teacher” in the Mississippi Delta.
Nature versus nurture is bullshit. They are not against each other. They work together and influence each other to create who we are. They are both inseparable parts of our psyches. The cultures that socialize us were not developed randomly. They developed from the currents of our genetic predispositions, interactions with each other, and interactions with the earth. They are constantly defined and redefined by our needs, interactions, and experiences, even across generations.
If creativity were an inherent trait then creativity would stretch across all disciplines. It does not. A creative composer is not a creative basketball player is not a creative physicist is not a creative composer.
My point is that creativity is not a trait that people are born with. What you see as creativity is actually years of work and study and practice. By practice I do not mean simply repeating the same activity over and over again, but rather what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice", about ten years worth according to the research. This thorough understanding of a discipline leads to decisions that seem, to others, as incredibly creative. In reality, the individual has just worked at understanding the discipline.
Mr. A, let's say you teach Algebra 1 for twenty-five years. At the end of each year, in addition to thoroughly reviewing your student's test scores, you assess your own methods and strategies. You research the best practices and try new things. At the end of 25 years, a student in your class might remark to his friend, "Boy, Mr. A is a natural at teaching this stuff. He seems to anticipate issues before they come up and he has some really creative ways to get us to understand the material." What, to the student, seems like "natural teaching" or a natural creativity for teaching math is, in reality, years of hard work, practice, and feedback. A student in your classroom in your first year teaching would, most likely, have a different view. We make the mistake of assuming that someone is a natural teacher, or naturally creative, because we have not seen the years of hard work that go into it.