The Art of Asking
I TOOK A SHAKESPEARE COURSE in college. Our class met in a kind of long, rectangular, nondescript classroom on the top floor of the library building. It was a handful of upperclassmen—mostly English majors, though not necessarily English Education majors— and me. Our Shakespearean textbook was an enormous red hardback with print smaller than the type in my King James Bible. Reading one page was a job. I remember being terrified from the outset that I would have trouble keeping up.
The reading assignments were massive and the thinking even harder, but I never missed a class. We didn’t have quizzes. The professor didn’t take roll. But I couldn’t not go, because magic happened there every day at 3:00 p.m.
And how it happened shaped my life as a learner and a teacher. I remember the room having an extra-long chalkboard, almost as long as the wall. Most days, it had absolutely nothing on it. Some days, Dr. Darryl Tippens would stride in and whip a question across it. Or maybe a statement. Or maybe he’d just jot down a few phrases or ideas in a cluster for exploration. Then he’d perch on the edge of the table, swing one leg, and let us talk.
I walked out every day thinking I had never met a more brilliant man.
And he was pretty smart. In fact, he was a scholar. A guy who’d read more Shakespeare than most fanatics ever would, the kind of instructor who knew not just what he was teaching but where it came from, and why, and how. I admired all he knew, but I admired what he did with it even more.
I don’t remember Dr. Tippens ever telling us anything: what we should think about a scene, how we should feel about a character, why one word was used instead of another. He just picked the threads of our thought patterns like my Granny used to pick the stitches when she let out seams. And given the room, his classroom of vagrant becomers grew.
I’m certain there were lots of times he ignited the conversation. And I’m sure he gently steered when we got caught in the whirlpool of what we couldn’t know. But all I really remember are the nudges. The figurative elbow to the ribs when we weren’t digging deep enough, or the pregnant air he held after one of us finished a thought. He didn’t tell us what we needed to know; he let us find it. And he kept the air so charged that we wouldn’t quit until we did.
Socrates would have been so proud of the professor’s perfectly pressurized cocoon.
I learned more about how to think in Dr. Tippens’s class than I did about Shakespeare, but I haven’t forgotten much about either. That’s the magic of the method. As we searched and stretched for understanding, we built ruts to be reused. His questioning and blatant unwillingness to give us the answers made us work for our conclusions. The process and the product stayed with us. We learned that what we strain for, sticks.
I took the skill of questioning into my gym as a coach, asking players what they noticed, what they discovered, how it felt, and why they did what they did. My goal was to expose the holes in their thinking without telling them where they were.
But this is not a natural road for a coach. Coaches are, by trade, extraordinary tellers. About as good as it gets when it comes to feeding with spoons. “Put your left foot here, put your right hand there.” Do this and do that and do it just the way I tell you it needs to be done. That’s how you build a muscle memory pattern, and it’s an important part of physical performance, regardless of the field of play. But so is thinking and decision-making and figuring out what you believe to be true. All are necessary cogs of competition whose spoils linger far after the game is played.
Sometimes, while patiently waiting as my players squirmed under the subtle press of a question that had no right answer, I would think of Dr. Tippens and grin. I think he’d like the fact that young minds were having to reach for what they thought and hunt for what they knew.
And sometimes I’d sit on the edge of the scorer’s table and swing one leg in his honor.
P.S. We Teach Who We Are