VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 18, SECTION 1

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 18, SECTION 1

Teaching the Craft, the Layer It Does Better Than a Person

At the end of the last chapter a new thing was brought on stage, and its place was set straight. It is an implement, not a person. But setting the place straight is not the end of it. What it can do, and what it cannot, is the thing to see now, layer by layer. This chapter takes a ruler that is twelve hundred years old, Han Yu's ruler, and measures it. This lesson measures the first layer. Teaching the craft.

Take the ruler out again. The third section of the fourteenth chapter brought in Han Yu, and his line is the ruler of this chapter, so read it once more. A teacher is the one by whom the Way is transmitted, the craft is taught, and doubt is dispelled. Three things. Teaching the craft is handing knowledge and skill into the student's hands, how to work this problem, recite this passage, write this brief, prescribe this medicine, a layer that can be taken apart, made clear, taught over and again. Dispelling doubt is untying the knot in the student's heart, why this step goes so, why that rule was set thus, a layer of reasoning, and it too can be made clear. Transmitting the Way is the hardest, the ruler in a person's heart when he meets a thing with no standard answer, the boundary of what he will and will not do, the line he holds when no one is watching. Han Yu put transmitting the Way first. Twelve hundred years ago, setting them in that order, he had in mind the scholars standing at the lectern. He could not, in his wildest dream, have known that twelve hundred years on a thing would come into the world that measures these three, layer by layer, for us. This chapter takes his ruler, and measures down. First, teaching the craft.

Admit a thing honestly at the start. Teaching the craft, it does better than a person. Not a little better. A great deal better. A problem in mathematics you cannot do, it explains a step at a time until you can, and where you lose the third step it explains again another way, and where you still cannot follow it tries a third way, and at the fifth time it is as patient as it was at the first. A passage of old writing you cannot get through, it renders line by line, and tells you besides what these characters mean in another text, what allusion that line is leaning on. A foreign tongue you want to practice aloud, it practices with you, corrects you without laughing, and if it is three in the morning you want to practice, it practices at three in the morning. A stretch of code you cannot write, it writes it out for you, and tells you why it is written so, and which line will throw an error. These are the nursery's work of watering and feeding. A teacher with forty or fifty to a class, and three classes in a day, cannot explain a thing five times to each child. He explains it twice, and by the third he has to move the lesson on, because a hundred more are waiting. And this thing can explain it fifty times. It does not tire, does not weary, does not glance at the clock, does not sigh. The second section of the fourteenth chapter spoke of a helplessness. Confucius could hold the nature of each of three thousand in his mind, and today's teacher, before a hundred and more faces, cannot, and so teaching each by his material cannot be done. This thing loosens that. It can give each child one of itself. It remembers where this child went wrong last time, and it can move at this child's pace. The thing that could not be done in twenty five hundred years, all at once, looks as if it can. And this is good. A real and solid good. A child in a mountain village who could never have afforded a good tutor now has at his hand a thing that explains more clearly than the best tutor in the city, and more patiently, and for nothing. Confucius pushed the door open, teach all without distinction. Comenius, in 1632, made that door into a road. And this thing lays the road up to the pillow of every child. Acknowledge that merit, and acknowledge it openly.

Now look one layer down. Teaching the craft saves the teacher's strength, and saves the child's. Where did the strength go that was saved? Take the teacher. He used to grade forty essays across three nights, and now the thing grades them in an hour, and finer than he did. Those three saved nights, what did the teacher do with them? By right they should go to transmitting the Way, to sitting ten minutes with the child who keeps his head down, to calling back the child who was wronged and saying, I know it was not you. The third section of the fourteenth chapter said today's teacher has no such ten-minute gap. Now he has three nights. But in fact those three nights were filled with more forms, more inspections, more materials, more class hours. Because time that is saved, once it is seen, gets filled. A labor-saving thing arrives, and the work does not grow less, the work grows more. Take the child. He used to sit stuck on a problem for two hours, and now it is three minutes. That saved hour, what did he do with it? By right he should go out and run, talk with his grandfather, sit and stare at nothing. In fact the hour was filled with the next worksheet. Because he does the problems faster, the teacher can set more, and because he learns faster, the parents can sign him up for more classes. What was saved got filled, and filled with the very same thing, more teaching. See it. A thing raised the efficiency of teaching tenfold, and the result was not teaching ten times less, it was teaching ten times more. The third section of the fifteenth chapter, come round again, and one layer deeper. Teaching grows heavier, steeping drains away. And this time the thing that makes teaching heavier is the very thing that saved us the strength. This is not its fault. It is only a very good hoe. It is the hand holding the hoe that took the strength it saved and turned more ground with it.

Look deeper still. The second section of the fifteenth chapter had the old book on learning give the three fires of teaching. Lead him but do not drag him. Brace him but do not press him down. Open the way but do not walk it for him. Take these three, and measure it. The first, lead but do not drag. Does it lead, or drag? Be honest here. It mostly leads. It does not force you, does not rush you, does not make a sound until you ask. It is less of a dragger than many teachers. This one it keeps. The second, brace but do not press down. Does it press people down? It does not. It never says, so simple and you cannot do it. It never says, how can you be this slow. It always says, good question. It always says, you are very close. This one it not only keeps, it keeps better than a person does. The third, open the way but do not walk it for him. And here, trouble. It is a thing that talks the road to its end. Ask it a problem, and it explains start to finish, not a step left out, not a drop held back, beautifully, watertight. It will not, at the most crucial layer, stop, and look at you, and say, this step, think it out yourself. It will not. It cannot. The moment it is asked, it lays the whole road down to your feet. The old book's open but do not walk it for him means to leave the last step for the student to cross himself, because that step, crossed by himself, is what makes the thing truly his. And it crosses that step for you. And crosses it fast and clean, without one second of your struggle. A problem a child ground at for two hours and finally saw through by himself, what did he get in that moment? Not the solving of a problem. He got, I can. And a problem laid out clear in three seconds, what did he get? He got the solving of that problem. That, and only that. Of the three fires, it keeps two and loses one. And the one it loses is exactly the one the old book set last, more than two thousand years ago. What is set last is often the hardest.

So here is where this section leaves us. Han Yu's ruler measured the first layer, teaching the craft, and it does the work better than a person, a great deal better, explaining a thing fifty times without wearying, so a mountain-village child has a tutor clearer than the city's best, the road laid to every pillow, a merit to acknowledge openly. But two things to see. The hours it saved did not become hours of transmitting the Way, the teacher's three nights filled with forms and the child's hour with the next worksheet, the efficiency raised tenfold and the teaching raised tenfold, the labor-saver the very thing that made the load heavier. And of the three fires, lead but do not drag it keeps, and brace but do not press it keeps better than a person, but open but do not walk it for him it cannot keep, for it talks the road to its end and crosses the last step for you, and a child's two-hour struggle gives him I can while a three-second answer gives him only the solving. That is the start of the eighteenth stake. Teaching the craft, it does better than a person, but it talks too fully, and crosses the step that should have been left. So the second layer? Dispelling doubt. The knots in the heart, can it untie them? A child who cannot solve a problem, it can help. But a child who cannot solve a person, a stretch of hard days, a hard place in his own heart? The next section measures the second layer. See you there.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

SECTION 2  Dispelling doubt, the layer, and how far it reaches