What Is the Eskimo Word for Snow?
Or how we talk and think about knowing and learning
I was recently accused of solipsism and bad teaching because I tend to live in my head and think about my own thinking too much. The shot at my teaching from someone who’s never set foot inside of my classroom didn’t bother me much. I know what my students and I have done, and the relationships we’ve developed, together; that doesn’t happen if you’re controlling and ego-driven. However, I tend to be highly analytical, which causes some people to assume I lack emotional intelligence and am terrible at collaboration and dialogue.
True to my own nature, I analyzed my own behavior leading up to this event, and I realized I usually write about the results of my analysis, not the process. This can make me come across as some kind of automaton. I immediately resolved to do better by installing a new sensor in my primary feedback loop to detect whenever I’m processing noisy analog signals into a stream of clean digital data without telling anyone. Just kidding. Sort of.
To reestablish my street cred in this postmodernist world, I decided to write an article on intuition, experience, and dialogue by overanalyzing an incisive thought shared by Seymour Papert in Mindstorms. My entrée into this article was going to be the large number of words for snow in the Eskimo language; but, of course, it turns out the number of words is hard to determine and the claim is now considered more than a little dubious.
Nevertheless, I shall push on. Even if the underlying facts are uncertain, the claim has a certain level of truthiness, or verisimilitude, about it. It just makes sense that, if we grow up in an environment where paying attention to and distinguishing between types of snow matters, we’ll develop certain heuristics and intuitions about snow. And if we live in a community where people share their experiences, we’ll invent ways to articulate what we know.
One of the important questions Papert raises in Mindstorms is this: How many ways do we have to talk and think about knowing and learning in our culture? The implications are: (1) we don’t have very many; and (2) if we lived in a culture where learning is truly valued and omnipresent, we’d have a whole lot more. As Papert points out, some people (the mathetically sophisticated) end up using certain metaphors to talk about their experiences out of necessity. In my own writing, I describe myself thinking by probing, playing with, sleeping on, turning over in my mind, exploring, grappling with, teasing apart, shining a light on, getting to know, taking a pass at, pushing on, drilling into, building on top of, and too many other phrases for me to list here.
I didn’t invent these ways of thinking, at least not consciously. I observed my brain doing something interesting, and my conscious mind attempted to make sense of it. In Two Views on Drilling Down, Building Up, my writing creates the impression that drilling down and building up are intellectual processes or algorithms which I developed and run through manually—and that my goal is to “teach” these algorithms to kids via direct transmission. In reality, my brain started drilling down and building up on its own; decades passed before I ever noticed I was doing it; and another decade passed before I could describe and even talk about what I felt my brain doing.
So, what does this mean for teaching kids to drill down and build up on their own? Well, for starters, we could encourage them to observe and try to describe what their own brains are doing as they’re thinking and learning. It’s the only way to establish a mathetically rich dialogue and create the feedback loop I mentioned earlier. Then, it might make sense to place them in contexts where drilling down and building up tend to occur naturally—where you can model and discuss what these processes look like and feel like to you. But don’t try to push your ways of thinking onto them. The value of drilling down and building up is integrating mental models. Help them experience the power of integrated mental models, and then help them identify, amplify, and revise the processes their brains have been using to integrate models all along by sharing and talking.
Now for a brief addendum where I take my analysis to eleventy…
The people accusing me of solipsism and overanalysis seem most concerned with my habit of raising intuitions or unconscious heuristics to the conscious level. They’re concerned that, by making my internal processes public, I will lock them down and systematize them—for myself and others.
Even though I can understand their concerns, choosing to operate as one big black box seems antithetical to Papert’s vision of a learning culture. Sure, if I identify and invent language to describe my ways of thinking, I’ll oversimplify what I’m doing—and I may stop developing my intuition and evolving my internal processes if I replace the unconscious with the conscious. And if I go out and share my vocabulary with my students, I may stunt the development of their own vocabulary and metacognition. That would really suck—but the alternative would suck way worse. No self-reflection. No way for us to correct unconscious errors. No dialogue since no words. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater!
How do we learn not to over-systematize and then impose our vocabulary on our students? We go out and do, make mistakes, and give our brains a chance to learn from our mistakes—so it can develop the heuristics to avoid mistakes in the future. It’s how we learn.
