Tony Danza's "I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had" is an excellent and highly empathic book about his year teaching English in an inner city high school in Philadelphia. He says the short-lived reality show Teach was from his desire to teach, not vice versa; he found he could qualify to teach under TFA (Teachers for America.)
Every word is Tony Danza, the sappy schlub who made "Who's the Boss" a hit.
He can take a fall, he accepts fun being poked at himself, he admits he was a lousy student in HS and ADD before that was a diagnosed disorder. It's quite funny in places. The book takes off once the reality TV cameras leave and he gets down for the long haul, finishing the year out.
His desire to do a good job is not atypical for a novice teacher, and along the way he gets and shares with the reader about every problem and responsibility he has as a teacher, and his eagerness to give moral lessons and to learn how to engage students instead of talking/ passively entertaining them.
Tony Danza also sketches his students well with considerable empathy for them, whether their problems are small drama or serious, serious trouble as in the case of some foster kids he taught. He talks about cheating and other problems of technology. He shares advice and perspectives other teachers have given him.
This book is a top recommend for anybody interested in teaching and education, and the politics creating failure.
The second book, well. I"ll say that the use of "deaf-mute" wasn't even what made me stop reading "The Guardian of All things: The Epic Story of Human Memory" by Michael S. Malone. It's his crude understanding of humans differ from other animals, including our closest relatives. He claims the overall view of Neanderthals is that they lacked language in more than crude form and that is why they were outcompeted-- their lack of chins meant they couldn't make click sounds and have more sophisticated language. He falsely equalizes technology with reason and language, and misunderstand language itself.
One, chimpanzees do have less acute hearing for phonemes, which means they can't hear distinctions between words as clearly. This is normal for most mammals; dogs lack such phonetic discrimination. This does not mean mammals lack language-like systems; prairie dogs have been shown to have surprisingly sophisicated vocabulary. Even bees have structured communicative language and memory.
But he shrugs off sign language the neanderthals and our common ancestor H. heidelbergensis had as like Native American sign language and inherently not as sophisicated or communicative as speech.
This bespeaks a fool who knows nothing about linguistics, neuroscience, never interviewed a linguist or seriously read up about gesture. So much for his book; he should have tackled what he knew and discussed that, rather than taking on human brains, much shaped by evolution, with his Silicon valley concepts.
Now I want to talk a bit about gesture, language, human minds, and technology. Some points are obvious but bear remembering everytime you read this kind of "Go Homo Sapiens" jingoistic hooey.
Native American sign languages aren't full languages with grammar, but a codified gesture system serving as an adjunct to existing languages-- but what is recorded doesn't capture it in action, and the sign "languages" do not have many if any fluent native speakers left to show their full potential.
Malone's concept that past and future are not communicated with gesture echoes an early academic notion that American Sign Language does not convey the same information, which is erroneus. But really, the idea that language is necessary for any concept of past and future is an absurdly strong and distorted form of the Sapir-Wolof hypothesis. This approach is so anthropocentric that it is absurd. It was the final straw for me.
Everybody who has a dog knows they explore the past all the time-- with their noses. Bears, cats and dogs all use scratch marks to display their size and embed their scent more deeply in trees or the ground. This drive existed long before humanity. Animals can also distinguish between memory and current reality (although this ability fails when humans hallucinate.) which is basic to past/present thinking. Animals can also act to obtain goals, which is a form of very-short range future thinking.
This was just one of assorted top-down reasoning fallacies which emerged in how he speaks of animals, namely in speaking of them as a vast, homogenous categories, and stating they have "changed little" in the last 4,000 years-- so, no culture or change in behavior due to human contact, no hybridization, no mass extinctions?
But let's leave his book aside. I stopped after 30 pages. Let's instead talk about learning, which can create both memory and new reason.
Tony Danza's book was quite remarkable in his insights on many things, and he made me think again about what wisdom means.
Experience is always specific, and generalizations come only after experience is sufficiently broad and varied to make such connections as to what remains constant across those memories, and to apply it then to a new scenario. There's good reason to think animals can in fact generalize from experience.
They just don't do it as quickly or as well as we would, because their very difference in rich sensory experience and overall life experience means that the generalizations cannot be identical. Different details are far more salient to them than to us, and their survival needs drive the conclusions they may make.
As Mark Twain once wrote, "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on the hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more."
From: Following The Equator.
Only when the cat could directly observe the difference between hot and cold lids before sitting, and the cat has had prior experience with cold stove-lids, would the cat even be able to make the choice to sit on cold stove-lids but not hot ones. And even then the painful memory, well-etched, might make the cat decide the risk is not worth taking in case he made the mistake again. This isn't "worded out" but rather may happen as an interplay of emotion, memory, and physical acting-out-- hestiation, pausing, retreat.
Despite our cultural conceits, then, reason is not derived from language.
Language allows us to pool experience which in turn can allow us to generalize less from a given experience-- storytelling, explanation, or education. Or language can push us to say, fearfully overgeneralize on the side of safety-- a well known experience called mass hysteria.
Language, then, exponentially boosts the learning power of a single individual, and by implication, the individual's ability to reason more finely-- but the two are not always in lockstep. You can learn a lot of words and yet fail to reason well. For instance, highly fluent people may still fail to: pass a logic test, display the ability to reason visuospatially either in math or in working with objects, or display the wisdom to solve interpersonal problems.
In fact I would argue that reason may be even more necessary, if much more erratic, without the safety net of language, since acting with greater unknowns is much more risky, and requires more advance planning and recall of multiple strategies.
Our increased brains and memories, our ability to store language and other information visually (art, writing, etc.) has been a major factor in our species' success in the last 10,000 years. But so was the ability to farm, store food, and store in silos or in livestock, the ability to count, and the ability to make tools. Language alone is not "advance" and there's no reason to think our ancestors (Homo heidelbergenis or our cousin Neanderthals) lacked language just because their technology did not reflect our innovation.
Hunter-gatherer cultures with stone age technology are certainly able to remember and name thousands of animals, plants, their habits, talk about cycles of drought and famine, remember what to gather, what to avoid, what seems to be good medicine. They can remember their kin and recognize them years apart, and identify strangers as kin based on customs and oral information. They have internal self, sense of past, present, and future. They love, have jealousies, worry about their kids. Everything we recognize as human. Why should we think our immediate ancestors, with their modern size brains, lacked language simply because we do not recognize their technology as advanced? Many have practiced horticulture (gardening) or basic agriculture, as well.
What creates the advances we associate with civilization, then?
Cities-- settled populations with key population densities. Humans are designed to live in groups, and language cannot truly exist without constant speakers. The more speakers, the more information is accessible. Cities are good for this.
Secondly, those same people must have a diverse base of experience and the ability to reason on their own, away from their familiar groups, problem-solve, and have be highly familiar with physical objects in their world.
This is not a condition always met by city upbringing and life: diversity of skills are common, as hundreds of occupations flourish, trade and social living meet continual challenges.
However, raw exploration, interaction with non-human creatures, object play, and independence becomes severely limited, especially for the poor who cannot visit the countryside as often. Enrichment, then, must also be physical not merely social.
The golden age of classical Athens, for instance, came when its population jumped to 150,000 thousand after it rebuilt from the last war. They had many slaves, immigrants, and soldiers who had worked out solutions to scenarios not existent in peacetime. More people with diverse experiences and cultural technologies, interacting. A recipe for innovation. America has benefitted similarly and continues to do so by its rural-urban heritage and immigration.
Writing helped store information before it stored language. One of the earliest forms of writing, cunieform, actually came from the need to keep accounts- numbers, not stories. The Andean civilizations used knots in strings as tallies called quipus. The abacus preceded the moveable type by thousands of years.
The Greeks came up with great ways to use geometry to calculate numbers without having to write them down. Many cultures have developed counting traditions that use body parts (not just fingers) to tally numbers. The Venerable Bede's dactylonomy system allows a person to count up to one million on the body.
Even to this day, we find it more effective to encode spatial and numerical information by gesture rather than language. Just have somebody give you directions, and they'll gesture at least a bit. Ask them to describe an animal you've never seen, and after gesturing a bit, they may wind up trying to draw it for you. So, even information can be conveyed without language.
Gesture. What was dismissed as a poor ancestor to language, in fact, is one of our best memory tools. It's been shown to increase recall of language itself, to facilate thinking in math and other disciplines. It probably is why we doodle, as well. Gestures communicate to others, but also allow us to recall sequential steps of actions to hone our learning and spatial reasoning-- needed for toolmaking or building.
Because other mammals (even birds) have mixed gesture and vocalization systems, and humans have innat nonverbal behavior and gestures common to all culture. It's logical to believe this innate gestural system is the scaffold of language. In fact, gesture (vocal, visual, or tactile) may be integral to teaching, learning and remembering language for everybody.
As an argument for this perspective of gesture as basic, consider this: the best way to talk to somebody who doesn't understand your language is in gesture, sketching, nonverbal body language, and exchanging vocabulary by pointing. Creolization.
In my drama class, I was told the best way to remember my lines was to ham it up, really exaggerate how the scene would go, so I would remember the emotions, the gestures, and then things would flow from there. It worked, and I not only memorized it well, but also understood it better than I had on a cold read.
Danza, when told he had to engage students, not talk to them, engaged them in physical and artistic activities, and his students showed excellent recall of material and passed his comprehensive end-of-year exam. Teenagers absorb information like sponges without trying, but they actually thought about the material and were able to apply the details in new situations.
Drama therapy even helps patients with Alzheimer's reorient to reality, for brief periods of time, and art therapy is said to help improve their memory.
Therefore, you'll learn more and benefit more memorywise by applying the ideas from Tony Danza's book than you will from reading that technology writer's book. Ay-Oh!