Totoya Hokkei: Trained Monkey Performing with Jingle and Gohei (1824)

" … many had been successfully entrained …"

I might be untrainable. I know something about training because I worked as a trainer for many years. Those who participated in the workshops I facilitated insisted that I was pretty good at training, too. I didn't often disclose my secret, that I steadfastly refused to train anybody, if only because I firmly believed that my "students" were much better positioned to train themselves. I'd give them permission and assign the odd exercise, but these most often served as useful distractions to direct attention away while the actual learning occurred elsewhere. My techniques would have probably proven to be lousy ways to train airline pilots, but I was never Training airline pilots. The usual cram and recall schtick couldn't help anyone learn what I was teaching, for I traded in life skills rather than theories, the knowledge that resides more in muscles than memories.

I believe that most knowledge resides somewhere other than the head and that our most significant difficulty lies in our unshakeable belief that our brains are in charge. We assume them to be our Grand Central Station. We think if we don't forget, we've remembered. We believe that if we can successfully explain, we possess knowledge. We think others can implant their understandings in us. We enroll in classes hoping to gain wisdom. Training carries a perverse reputation for many of us, one of unsettling discoveries and serial disqualifications. Some attended school to learn how to dependably shut down and graduated with degrees in dissociation. The mere mention of Training sends me fleeing for an exit. The suggestion that I might be Training others dredges up all the humiliation I first encountered in classrooms. I mostly do not want to know. I don't feel as though I can afford to.

At university, I one year volunteered to lead a student group that coordinated work-experience internships for international students. That year, our chapter got lucky and ended up with the most internships of any chapter, so I was rewarded with a trip to New York City to meet with other chapter presidents and share our knowledge. After I arrived, I learned that headquarters had designed some Training for the attendees. We'd be tasked with selling an internship to an executive in Manhattan, an experiential simulation of what they'd imagined we would be doing upon our return to campus. Except I had not organized my chapter in that fashion. We had salespeople do the actual calling. My role focused solely on facilitation, so I played hookey from the training, choosing to spend that day wandering around mid-town Manhattan.

Some usual Training patterns seem to make it worse. Any situation assigned "for your own good" feels more like a sentence than an opportunity to learn anything useful. It's more of a curse, and the convict should properly feel moved to ensure the Training doesn't work, if only to teach the sentencing judge a lesson. Stacking people up like cordwood in hotel conference rooms often proves counterproductive. This induces a trance that successfully deflects most information, especially the more useful. Engaging in something more resembling play often proves more successful, especially if the 'players' get to choose what learning they're pursuing and are not forced to swallow whatever their facilitator's offering.

I might have been a successful trainer because I was never successfully trained. I didn't know—and certainly not for certain—what might constitute Training. Those with curriculum in their blood always struck me as far too certain. They seemed as if they'd forgotten their own innocence and their once-inspiring ignorance. Their approach seemed to lack impedance; they offered juice that too easily overwhelmed my circuits. Their Trainings didn't compute for me. Gratefully, though, the metric by which success was judged rarely included anything meaningful to us students, only to those who devised the Training. I understood that those classes existed to satisfy the teachers and that we students were little more than placeholders. I never once ever treated my students like that, though many had been successfully entrained to expect a teacher who would torture them into "learning" without once ever asking them what they wanted to learn.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz