On Being Smart

I was never good at tests. Multiple choice. True/false. Fill-in-the-blank. Never good at these.

And yet, these were the instruments--at the micro-level, weekly, in the classroom, and at the macro-level, in the form of things like the SATs or the AP test--that provided you and your parents and your friends and your community with information about what you know.

I have felt, my whole life, that I am not intelligent or not as intelligent as others because I have never been good at taking the kinds of tests that are commonly acknowledged to measure what you know and, by extension, how smart you are. Sure, there were occasions in my early schooling when I was asked to write papers to demonstrate what I knew, but these papers were often just tests by a different means.

Something about the way I thought of myself, about my intelligence, began to change when I came to UNH. It didn’t change while I was a business major, during the first year and a half. The old way of thinking was just reinforced by my business classes, where exams where the primary means of assessment and I scored, predictably, average on most. No, it changed when I shifted over to English. And it began, really, in Freshman English.

There were no tests in Freshman English. Writing was the means by which you were assessed in this class and in most of the others I took as an English major. So the first step in feeling different about myself came about as a result of the fact that quizzes and tests has been mostly removed from the picture in most of the classes I was taking. Without quizzes and tests, there weren’t these constant reminders that I was somehow less intelligent than my peers.

But it was not just the absence of quizzes or tests which changed things for me. As I said, before, writing papers was something that I was very much accustomed to prior to the time when I declared an English major at UNH. What replaced quizzes and tests and papers-as-quizzes-and-tests in the English Department was this thing called the weekly one-pager and one-pagers were entirely different (and new) beast.

With a quiz or test, the teacher asked you to demonstrate that you actually knew the thing(s) he or she already knew. With a one-pager, it was the opposite: you were asked to demonstrate not what the teacher already knew, but, instead, what you knew or what you were coming to know or what you were trying to come to know. One-pagers were not demonstrations of mastery, they were openings for conversation. They were not regurgitations of someone else's thinking, they were instances of your thinking written down.

The best part of writing one-pagers was that, unlike the scores I received on tests and quizzes, the feedback I received from my teacher on my one-pagers was almost always positive, encouraging, supportive. Knowing that I was writing one-pagers well made me feel smart in a way that school had not really allowed in the past. A well-written one-pager could be a different kind of demonstration of intelligence, one at which I could, I learned, excel.

My point: joining the UNH writing tribe gave me a means of thinking differently not just about myself as a writer, but about myself as a person. Okay, I'll say it: my membership gave me the experience of feeling smart in a way which I had never felt before.

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This is about Tom's essay "The Art and Science of Forgetting."

In this essay, you do something that I feel is very much in the UNH writing tribe spirit or tradition or ethos, something that is perhaps unique to you, but may also be attributed to your membership in the tribe and/or your friendship/colleagueship with Murray and Graves (or maybe its a outcome of all three of these things). This thing you do is something I’ve experienced many times over the years of my association with the tribe and it’s not something I have, yet, found a way to work into my memoir, in part because I’ve not yet entirely found a way of expressing it for myself. But here goes:

So you write this article about forgetting. You start the article by conceding that you have a hard time remembering the things you read and you announce that you want to explore this…issue? Problem? Reality? Whatever. You know you forget the things you read, you are maybe troubled by this, you want to understand it further. 

What is the effect of your words on the reader—on this reader?

I have thought about this topic of forgetting many, MANY times myself. I, too, have wondered why I cannot recall things I’ve read even a few hours after I’ve read them. 

I’ve usually seen it as a deficiency in me. As a personal failure. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but I’ve sometimes felt alone in it, as I’m sure many of us have.

But when a college professor confesses to not remembering things he reads, when a college ENGLISH professor confesses to this, when a college English professor or your stature confesses to this, well, that somehow changes things. It levels the playing field. And, I suppose here I have written myself to the point I’ve been trying to make: the move of confessing your struggles with comprehension decentralizes or deconstructs your authority. If the authority figure(s) struggle with these things that I struggle with, one cannot help but conclude, than this thing I struggle with cannot just be about me. I think a big part of being a student, though, is feeling that these things I struggle with ARE just about me.

Something else is deconstructed, though, by your piece: you argue that there is good reason why we don’t remember things. In other words, it’s not just that you deconstruct your authority, it’s that you offer an alternate explanation for a very common thing that many people may sort of feel bad about (poor memory).

You suggest that “poor memory” may be the natural state of affairs, and for good reason. This pushes back against the common explanation for how all of this work (i.e. some people have better memories than others), a way of thinking about the problem that makes it very personal, a kind of personal failing on the part of those (like me, perhaps like you) who aren’t able to remember things as easily or as often as they think they should.

So:

Move #1: Deconstruct your Own Authority

Move #2: Help readers understand a very common problem in a way that shifts the…guilt? responsibility? off of the individual and locates it within the activity itself.

Back to Move #1 for a moment: It’s a kind of giving-the-game-away that you do when you share personal things like this and make them the topic of exploration and reflection. And giving-the-game-away is not the typical mode of college professors, at least not in my experience. College professors don’t usually or often pull back the curtain, give the game away on what they DON’T know and CAN’T do (or struggle to do). Teachers must maintain their authority and the way to do so is…not confessing to the things you struggle with. 

Now, here’s the cultural point: this sort of giving-the-game-away thing that you have done in this piece happened ALL THE TIME when I was an undergraduate student at UNH and then again as I got older and went through graduate school. It was a stance, an ethos, a way of being in the world that many of my UNH professors inhabited. It has become something I have come to inhabit and the odd thing is that in inhabiting, I have gained greater confidence in myself as a thinker.

I’ll close with this: a student, a junior, sends me an email this morning. It reads:

"Next, I love my paper topic...BUT I am not coming up with really well thought out ideas for a thesis. I have always struggled with writing a thesis and I don't want to have a mess or bad paper, but what should I do if my thesis is not strong?" 

I know why she is struggling. Finding a well-thought out thesis is something pretty much ALL of us struggle with MOST of the time. It’s inherently a challenging intellectual activity, developing a thesis. It's not about her. I know this. But she doesn't. She seems to understand this problem, as I understood the problem of reading comprehension, as a personal failure or struggle ONLY on her part (or, that’s how I interpret her words).

What the UNH tribe has done for me, I think, and I am reminded of this when I read a piece like your essay on reading comprehension, is it has shown me that a) I am not alone and b) that there are these things that are inherently complex (i.e. reading comprehension, constructing a thesis, etc.). If I struggle with these things, it’s not necessarily (just) about me and my intelligence or ability, it's about the task and how well I've been instructed in it.

Which takes me to the next key point: the UNH tribe doesn't just help me see that I am not alone, doesn't just help me to understand how certain tasks and activities are inherently complex, it also teaches me how to do the thing that I perhaps erroneously assumed I was or am “just not good at.” Tribe members say BOTH a) finding a thesis is inherently hard, AND b) here, watch me try to generate a thesis and see what you can learn. 

In doing so, the tribe empowers. It says BOTH "you are capable, this isn’t about you” AND “here’s how you do it.”

What a gift.

Do we date this back to something as simple as Murray and Graves getting up in front of people and writing, publicly? Is that where these gifts come from? These men? Their generosity?

I honor the gift by trying to pay it forward with my own students. 

In class last Wednesday, I took almost the entire period to show the students how to develop a question from a text (we are writing a rhetorical analysis paper). I identified four different potential topic areas from the short speech we watched and then I went so far as to identiy a question that, in answering it, you could develop a thesis and then showed them how that thesis might be supported or how I might support it. I did all of this on the screen, on a blank document and when I was done, one of the students came up to me and said—"can I have a copy of that, of what you just did?” I said sure. My guess is he had never seen someone do something like that before. 

Now he has.

But only because someone showed it to me or more importantly, showed me the need to show it to him.