Who Are These People?

“ So God created humankind in his image,/ in the image of God he created them. . . God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” –Genesis 1:27

At a conference for high school teachers and administrators during my halcyon days with the California Literature Project, I approached the reception table for my name tag and was asked to choose a tag that best described me. My choices were:

Activity makes my world go round,
Ideas make my world go round,
Love makes my world go round, or
Security makes my world go round.

Easy choice – ideas excited and delighted me, but after that as first choice, of course, it would be love. But what was the point of this exercise for all these 200 or so school personnel? During a keynote speech, the speaker pointed out he had done some research asking students and teachers to make this choice of their preferred interests. He said he had found that most teachers chose ideas and most students chose activity. This information is important for schools. Elementary teachers know the importance of hands-on learning, concrete examples and assigning work that engages all the senses. But secondary teachers often assume their students were, like them, fascinated by the big picture, the long view and influential ideas. Some are, of course, and such students usually get the best grades. But all students can learn when given the right approaches.

The question English teachers always ask is how can we make reading literature more engaging? When the Literature Project was putting together a Sourcebook for teachers, we found that the two most popular and successful methods of teaching literature both involved students in interpersonal and multi-sense activities.

One method was called “Into, Through, and Beyond,” in which our students were motivated to read and remember important works by first discussing events and attitudes related to both their own lives and the piece of literature they were reading (going “into”). Then they went carefully and intensely through the reading, discussing it in class as they went along (“through”). Finally they created some meaningful, concrete expression of the work (“beyond”) which they would present to the group.

A major approach the Project directors took with teachers was to have them try to do what they were asking of their students, but at a higher level of course. For example, when they wrote short essays and had their peers respond them, they realized the last thing a writer needs is to have someone pick at commas or word choices. They wanted reactions to the substance of their work; the other responses could wait until the final phase after they invested in the essays. I asked the teachers (from various parts of the state, about 30 in each seminar) who attended our UCLA institutes to get in groups and practice this “into, through, beyond” progression themselves. I can still see one faculty group’s handling of a poem they had chosen, Theodore Roethke’s “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.” Their creative presentation going “beyond” their reading brought engagement, fun, memorability and color to the class. A sampling from the poem and how this group went “beyond” it in personal ways follows. Roethke’s poem in part said

“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one
The shape a bright container can contain
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak.
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
. . . I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand
. . . What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she casts a shadow white as stone
. . . I measure time by how a body sways.

One teacher brought up an easel and water colors and painted a collage of the images in the poem. As a chorus of three chanted the words rhythmically, another teacher, dressed in an ballet outfit “moved more ways than one” and a sixth member wrote a “creative imitation” of the poem, a method we had been trying out, one that Roethke himself preferred. At the end of the institute, teachers voted for this method as one of those they wanted to go into our book: “Literature for All Students: A Sourcebook for Teachers.”

Another reminder of how differently we and our students learn came from Harvard professor Howard Gardner whose 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, New York) suggested the many ways various people learn. He named seven: Logical-mathematical, musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and later added two more: naturalistic-existential and moral. Most of us have all these kinds of intelligence or faculties but we prefer certain ones: thus, the use of small group work (interpersonal) and various projects (visual-spatial).

Once when I was asked to give a talk at my St. Ambrose High School alumni reunion, I took Gardner’s schema and applied it to the kind of learnings we had found in our Catholic school classrooms. Despite tiny budgets our school always had some exposure to arts (visual-spatial), moral, and musical-rhythmic methods as well as the universal emphasis on logical-mathematical and verbal-linguistic work. Demonstrating the use of music at St. Ambrose, on the spur of the moment, I referenced some songs the whole school knew by heart. Despite my mediocre voice, I began singing Mother Beloved: “Join your hands, loyal bands, while we pledge one another; unity and fealty to our queen and our mother.”

To my surprise, the whole crowd joined in. One of my sisters said she began crying to see her extremely shy older sister leading such a group, musically–even the half drunk ones joined in.

In any case, the idea of how different we all are and why we are so was one that had long interested me. While at the all-state conference I firsst mentioned above, I mentally placed those tags on people I knew. My mother-in-law, I thought, would to choose, “Security makes my world go round,” My most romantic sister, I saw wearing the “Love makes my world go round” tag, and any number of my young friends and students, of course, would wear “Activity makes my world go round.” Yes, my teacher friends, like me, enjoyed ideas most and then would choose love.

I began to recall other explanations for our differences. We are all temperamentally somewhat alike and somewhat different. The first time I learned of the categories in to which one could divide people came while studying Latin. In ancient times, the temperaments were described through their theory of bodily humors. There were four basic temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic (also called “leisurely” in modern parlance), so named because of a predominance of one bodily fluid or “humor.” Sanguine types, who were generally cheerful, sociable and pleasant, were so called because of the preponderance of blood, the ancients said. Choleric people, usually ambitious and gifted in leadership, had much yellow bile; melancholic folks were analytical, literal, and serious and the fourth type, with an excess of phlegm were called phlegmatic and presented a relaxed and thoughtful persona. The survival of this schema in the culture can be seen in George Balanchine’s 1946 ballet The Four Temperaments.

Modern medics and psychologists often reject such divisions and assert we all have each “humor” as needed. But they give wider credence to the analysis of temperaments extrapolated from the work of Carl Jung and known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment.  The personality traits designated are described in words with slightly different interpretations than are in general use. But the pairs of contraries used are interesting and seem intuitively meaningful. How do we experience the world? What underlies our divergent values, needs and motivations? Why are our learning styles so different. The best known of the Indicator pairs is that of introvert and extrovert. I remember agreeing wholeheartedly when I first heard that as an introvert, I shouldn’t be judged as liking people the less, but only that too much society drained my energies. The most extrovertive of my sisters, however, still finds herself energized by people, the more the merrier. A second pairing relates to our predominant mode of learning: through our senses or through intuition. Thinking versus feeling predominates in how we more strongly react to our lives conditions and events. And finally there are differences called judging, a reaction preferring definite closure, versus perceiving, meaning keeping your mind open. After choosing the one of each pair best describing you, you combine four initials to sum up your dominant traits. I found I had a rather rare combination of pairs, a set belong to only about 2% of human beings: INTJ–introvert, intuitive, thinking, perceiving.

Our interest in and understanding of differences has serious origins. The early Hindu thinkers worked out their sense of the several major paths individuals follow during life. The branch of Hinduism called Vedanta specifies certain paths that seem to grow from temperamental differences. Each path directs the devotee to higher spirituality. The Path of Action called Karma Yoga refers to a life lived in selfless service to others. The Path of Knowledge called Jnana Yoga suggests a life focused on learning and thinking. Practitioners of Bhakti Yoga, the Path of Devotion, choose a life of loving kindness, including a preference for a personal rather that an abstract God. A fourth path, called Raja Yoga, leads to the godhead or bliss through meditation. All of these paths assume a common preparation practicing truthfulness, cleanliness, self-discipline, contentment and other virtues. Originally, Hatha yoga served as preliminary to the other yogas, but in American culture today it has become mainly a form of gymnastics whereas the bodily control originally was meant to enhance a person’s path to meditation.

When I asked my World Religions professor Diana Eck what religion she would chose if she had had a choice at birth, she said she thinks it would have been Hinduism. Strictly speaking, Hinduism is many things and we use the term to refer to religious beliefs begun in India. I should also point out that none of this categorizing can be empirically proved; these are just helpful metaphors that help our understanding. They prevent the expectations we have that others will think and behave exactly as we ourselves do, and minimize the repetition in our lives of “I just don’t understand him” or “How can she behave that way?”

At the University of St. Louis, one of my fellow students copied down a plaque she saw on the desk of one of our favorite professors, Father Walter J. Ong. It was written in German, a language she knew and translated: “Few people know how much they must know in order to know how little they know.” This from the most brilliant man I have ever known. During one of his classes once (called “Existentialism and Personalism in Modern Literature”), he used this metaphor. We dip our minds, our nets, into the watery sea of knowledge. We draw up all we can. What our minds can absorb can be found in the wetness of the net’s cords. In other words, our intellects are limited and we remain relatively ignorant of all there is to know in this vast mysterious universe. I think that, for most of us, other people are the most mysterious of all. And so we create little nets, like the temperaments, the kinds of intelligence and the paths of yoga to have something to grasp.