What Can Jerry Seinfeld Teach Teachers?

To be a “comedian’s comedian” usually means that regular people don’t think you’re funny. A happy exception is Jerry Seinfeld. He is recognized by comedians and non-comedians alike to be among the greatest funny men of all time.

Jonah Weiner from the New York Times Magazine just wrote a remarkable profile of Jerry Seinfeld. Weiner covers a number of Seinfeld’s practices that not only make him one of the funniest people alive, but also make him a role model for teachers.

First, a great quote from Seinfeld on why stand up comedy is important in this age of digital media: “We’re craving the nondigital even more these days, the authentically human interaction. We need to see some schmuck sweat.”

It’s true for in-person classes, too; students respond more to a teacher in the room than to a few lines of text on a screen. When someone literally puts themself out there, you pay attention.

Seinfeld structures his comedy routines carefully to make the whole one-hour set as funny as possible. “There’s different kinds of laughs… It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.”

This is a complex skill beginning teachers lack – the ability to meaningfully order activities to best help students learn. Too often, new teachers will cram a class with one “fun” activity after another. The problem is that you often need some boring activities up front to learn the new information or skills you will practice through the fun activities. In fact, for adult learners, an activity divorced from meaning is rarely fun at all – no matter how interactive or creative it is. The point isn’t to have your class be a series of awesome activities; it’s to for your class to have a series of thoughtfully chosen activities that will best help students learn what you’re teaching them.

You start with something interesting to get your students’ attention, you push them a little, let them breathe, surprise them, entice them and end on a high note – not unlike a good comedy show.

Seinfeld is above all else a craftsman. He’ll work on a joke for years, tweaking his wording and delivery at countless performances around the country until the bit is as funny as it can be or he has to let it go. I’ll quote him here at length:

“I had a joke: ‘Marriage is a bit of a chess game, except the board is made of flowing water and the pieces are made of smoke… This is a good joke, I love it, I’ve spent years on it. There’s a little hitch: ‘The board is made of flowing water.’ I’d always lose the audience there. Flowing water? What does he mean? And repeating ‘made of’ was hurting things. So how can I say ‘the board is made of flowing water’ without saying ‘made of’? A very small problem, but I could hear the confusion. A laugh to me is not a laugh. I see it, like at Caltech when they look at the tectonic plates. If I’m in the dark up there and I can just listen, I know exactly what’s going on. I know exactly when their attention has moved off me a little.

“So, I was obsessed with figuring that out. The way I figure it out is I try different things, night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point, or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait. If it takes me three years, I’ll wait… The breakthrough was doing this” [Seinfeld traced a square in the air with his fingers, drawing the board.] “Now I can just say, ‘The board is flowing water,’ and do this, and they get it. A board that was made of flowing water was too much data. Here, I’m doing some of the work for you. So now I’m starting to get applause on it, after years of work. They don’t think about it. They just laugh.”

I’ll be honest; I don’t get exactly how Seinfeld’s drawing the board. Does he still say the pieces are made of smoke? In any case, I bet it’s hilarious when he delivers it onstage. More importantly, he recognized that audiences’ laughs were a bit thin, that the joke could be funnier, that it was the cognitive load keeping them from fully processing it, and finally, the slightly out-of-the-box thinking (drawing in the air with his hands) to allow his audiences to think less and laugh more.

Of course, our goal is to make students think more. But it’s also to make sure they’re thinking more about what they need to learn. How many times have I spent more time setting up an activity than students spent doing it? (Many.)

Almost every teacher can stand to do a little more of this: To carefully assess our activities – and that’s the most beautiful line in the whole story, “If I’m in the dark up there and I can just listen, I know exactly what’s going on” – and then systematically determine what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.

What I learned about teaching from Jerry Seinfeld is that we should treat any activity which doesn’t reach its full potential like a failure: We should think about it, tweak it, and do it again and again until the activity best helps students learn what we’re teaching.

Or, if all else fails and only then, we should let it go.

How to Ask Good Questions, Part 1 in a Series

From cheezburger.com

People ask me what my next book will be about. I answer that I’d like to investigate how to ask good questions. It’s one of those skills we’re all presumed to have – like how to participate in a work meeting - but that no one ever teaches us.

So after some cursory googling I came across a blog post by Peter Wood called “How to Ask a Question” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which focuses particularly on asking questions after a talk or debate. I give myself bonus points for reading his post because Wood’s politics appear to be diametrically opposed to mine. But, using basic critical thinking skills, I knew that just because he’s opposed to “diversity” and “multiculturalism” doesn’t mean he has nothing to say about asking good questions.

Indeed, he has some useful, practical, specific advice. Just the kind I like. Here’s a sample:

Weigh the usual interrogatory words in English: who, what, where, why, when. If you can begin your sentence with one of these you are more than half-way to a good question.  “Who gave you that scar, Mr. Potter?”  “What is a black hole, Mr. Hawking?”  “Where is the Celestial City, Mr. Bunyan?”  “Why are you wearing that letter, Ms. Prynne?”  “When will our troops come home, Mr. Lincoln?”

Unfortunately, Wood does not acknowledge how culturally specific his conversational style is. He values brevity and detachment over spontaneous discussion and emotional content. (As it happens, I do, too.)

Here’s some more of his advice:

Don’t engage in meta-speech. “I was wondering, Ms. Steinem, if I might ask you a question that I am really curious about.” Go directly to the question. “Ms. Steinem, who is the man you admire the most?”

I think a little meta-speech is ok. After all, we’re motivated to go to a talk or debate because we care about the topic. Not talking about such things is a preference, not an imperative, and a typically male preference at that.

That’s one of the reasons why the topic of asking questions is so interesting. The distinction between a good and bad question is deeply informed by our preferences. But there are still better and worse questions.

What advice do you have for asking good questions?

Three Lessons Teachers Can Learn from Scientology

Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright

I just finished Going Clear, the eye-opening, bone-chilling, spleen-emptying account of Scientology, from the earliest days of its founder to the state of the church today.

There are any number of lessons to draw from Lawrence Wright’s book. One may conclude that what sets Scientology apart from mainstream religions is the coercive nature of the Church, rather than the particulars of its belief system. One could also learn about how a marginalized group used its resources – particularly its access to celebrities and its zealous followers – to grow into an institution powerful far beyond its numbers. (Only about 54,000 Americans identify as Scientologists, according to the US census.)

But I’m a teacher. So, for me, what’s most interesting is what the story of Scientology can illuminate about teaching. Here are a few lessons:

SCIENTOLOGY LESSON 1: People will work hard in the pursuit of meaningful goals.

Too many teaching tips comes down to entertainment. What activities are the most fun? How do we get students out of their seats? Going Clear shows us, with fresh eyes, that people are looking for purpose – and that, in the pursuit of purpose, they are willing to work hard. Like for a billion years. (see below)

Scientologists spend many thousands of dollars on auditing (counseling + e-meters) and study mind-bending theology to go up a spiritual hierarchy known as “the Bridge.” Many words have been used to describe this grueling process. I don’t think “fun” is among them.

Teachers need to spend more time on meaningful lessons and less on “fun” activities. (Indeed, few things are less fun than wasting time in class.) Teachers also need to be more comfortable with students getting bored and frustrated in the service of learning something important. Students come to class to pursue the kind of learning that can only be achieved outside of one’s comfort zone.

Most of us can have fun at home. We come to class to be in an environment where someone else will make us work hard to do something meaningful. Make your lessons meaningful and students will work harder than you’re probably willing to push them.

SCIENTOLOGY LESSON 2: People want to help.

Scientology entices new members with the promise of awesome powers: levitation, mind control, remote viewing… But it is also built on the premise of saving the world. Scientologists believe that only they can save the human race.

Granted, this is what many religions believe. The difference between many Scientologists and most Christians (for example) is that, to build an organization able to save the world, hundreds of Scientologists have signed billion year pledges to the church. How’s that for commitment?

It’s easy to write that commitment off as crazy (and unenforceable). But I think it’s more interesting to ask,  What makes someone sign a 1,000,000,000 year pledge? The Church of Scientology insists that it’s symbolic. But even then, do people make that symbolic statement just to make more money? I have to think they are motivated by service to teach other, their institution and to humanity at large.

The overwhelming trend in education today is to focus on how students can make more money. But none of us are motivated by cash alone. Like society itself, education should be founded on the notion of working in the service of our fellow citizens, in the broadest sense of the word. To ignore the notion of service is to go down a slippery slope of teaching only what is guaranteed to help students earn more money at the expense of everything else.

And if you only teach job skills, when will you teach critical thinking?

SCIENTOLOGY LESSON 3: Critical thinking is as important today as it ever was.

No discussion of Scientology would be complete without at least acknowledging its tremendous human rights abuses. False imprisonment, corporal punishment and child exploitation by the Church of Scientology are all well documented, both by investigators and former Scientologists themselves. (Disclaimer: The Church of Scientology denies all claims of abuse.)

What makes people sign themselves and their kids up for this abuse? The possibility of achieving one’s goals and saving the world – the same forces I just suggested harnessing for the good of teaching.

But something else is obviously at work, and that is the forceful suspension of disbelief. Scientology trains its members to ignore anything that contradicts its belief system. It does so through estranging members from non-believers (“suppressive persons” in Scientology-speak); through physically isolating its clergy from the rest of the world; and through the teachings of the church itself, which are so convoluted or absurd that they defy rational analysis, which forces the individual Scientologist to accept them en toto or risk losing their souls. (There’s a reason Wright calls the religion a “prison of belief.”)

What defines a cult? I’d hazard that, rather than focusing on whose belief system is more absurd (spoiler alert: It’s a tie), we should instead ask which religions allow critical thinking and which suppress it. Catholics routinely ask if Judas really sinned, because Jesus had to die to save humanity. Jews have millennia of debate about how to best interpret the Torah. And millions of Muslims define their own personal jihad, the nature of their individual spiritual struggle.

Part of what defines critical thinking is the ability to dispassionately analyze one’s own beliefs, to be able to ask, Why do I believe ‘x’? What if ‘x’ isn’t true? There’s none of that in Scientology. Everything L. Ron Hubbard ever said is gospel – to quote Ned Flanders, “even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!”

Perhaps the most chilling words in Going Clear come from Wright’s original Scientology story in the New Yorker, where Academy Award-winning director Paul Haggis says, “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.

Haggis was up against a religion that he had already put countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars into, one which preyed on his best instincts and subverted any thoughts that contradicted it. If education has any greater purpose, I think it’s to prepare students to hold their own against such predatory institutions.

Do you agree?