Teaching

Teaching

Transcript for Teaching (full episode)

Today on State of the Human, we're talking about teaching.

So where better to start than with my first teachers?

You ready?

My parents.

Can you start by introducing yourself, please?

When you say that, am I supposed to say I'm a parent?

That's my mom, Chris, and here's my dad.

My name is Andrew Nelson.

I wanted to ask my parents about a story that's been told many times in my family.

The story of the day my twin brother Gavin and I learned how to ride bikes.

They were these adorable 12 inch wheels, which are these little tiny two wheel bicycles.

I mean, they look sort of cool.

They probably were in the correct scale because you guys weren't that big.

I think yours had the little streamers on the handlebars.

The streamers, yes.

That was, you know, you can't go to the prom without a corsage.

I think that was the same type of deal.

We had gotten these little bicycles for our third birthday.

It was the type of thing that once you got to ride them, I figured I could run next to you and you'd be able to keep up with me so you could go on my runs with me.

But before we could tag along on my mom's runs, my parents had to teach us how to ride the bikes, step by step.

First of all, get a helmet on.

Get the bicycle.

You put the training wheels on.

Teach you how to ride with the training wheels for a little bit and then you say, okay.

Take the training wheels off and we hold them back.

You know, help you get your head and knee pads and helmets and suit of armor.

Maybe we then let you ride without anything.

So those were the steps.

Those were what parents think.

That's what we had in mind.

That's not quite how it played out.

And so dad spent an inordinate amount of time trying to put training wheels on.

And Gavin came out to look at his bicycle and said, You know, why do you have the wrenches out and why are you putting those things on?

Because I don't need those things.

Gavin refused to let my parents put the training wheels on.

He didn't even let my dad hold the back of his seat.

He didn't want to be taught, and he certainly didn't want to follow the steps.

I don't think there was a discussion between us.

Gavin told us what was going to happen.

I don't think either one of us were overly nervous.

I mean, yeah, not nervous, just a little like, oh, my gosh, here he goes.

But as far as Gavin was concerned, a bicycle is meant to be a bicycle and not have extra wheels on it.

I think we probably looked at each other and raised our eyebrows, but no hesitation, just went for it.

Oh, there was probably a little hesitation on my part.

I vaguely remember us taking you a little bit up the driveway, and as far as I can remember, Gavin got on and just rode the damn thing.

Didn't crash, and, you know, how can you argue with that?

It was like, wow, he just did that without our help.

He didn't need us.

He just went down the driveway on the bicycle with the two of us standing there dumbstruck, thinking I guess he knew a lot better than we did.

Of course, if Gavin didn't have training wheels, you were not going to stand for training wheels either, so we chucked the training wheels.

My parents didn't get to teach me either.

I think it was that you taught us how to teach you, and that there are times when you're not going to need all the help and handholding and training wheels, and that there are times whether you do get scraped up or fall over or get banged up, that you're going to at times know when you can just take off on your own.

And I think that's what you did that day, is teach us how to teach.

Agreed.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Kate Nelson, and I'm Hadley Reid.

When my parents tried to teach my brother and I how to ride bikes, we ended up teaching them something about parenting.

But sometimes it's okay to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

But it isn't always that straightforward.

Like, if we're saying you taught your parents something, that you, at three years old, were a teacher, what do we even mean when we call someone a teacher?

It doesn't always mean the person who's standing in front of the blackboard or handing back your algebra test.

We can think of teaching as an action.

It's something we all do.

Each week on State of the Human, we pick a common human experience, like crisis or believing, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

And today, we're bringing you stories about teaching.

On the outside, teaching looks pretty straightforward.

Someone knows something better than someone else, and then teaches it to them.

When I was three, my parents obviously knew how to bike better than Gavin or I did.

Well, I mean, arguably, Gavin did pretty well at it.

Sure, okay, Gavin was a natural.

But we still think of teaching as a simple transfer of knowledge.

Here's how to put your feet on the pedals, here's how to use the brakes.

But we feel like so much more is happening than that.

Often, what's happening is happening to the teacher themselves.

Yeah, look at what happened to your parents.

Today on the show, we're wondering, if we set aside this definition that teaching is for the sake of learning, what's left?

How does teaching shape teachers?

And since we're all teachers, how does it shape us?

Today, we're bringing you five stories.

Six, if you count training wheels, Kate.

All about teachers who've been molded, prodded, occasionally mashed, and sometimes even sculpted into who they are today.

In our first story, we'll hear about how accusations of cheating in school affected one man, who's now a teacher himself.

In our second, a group of teachers are told what motivates them, and they're not that into it.

In our third, we go way back to a community whose existence relied on teaching and llamas.

That's a hard hack to follow.

But our fourth story comes from a woman who voluntarily signed on to live with 18-year-olds.

88 of them.

And finally, we take you to Ghana, where the cover of a newspaper does a whole lot of teaching.

Stay with us.

Before Gabriel Lomali became a teacher, he was a top student, though he didn't always look like one.

Producer Eileen Williams takes it from here.

I always had this dual identity going on.

Not only am I cool with my friends, and I know all the cool slang, and I could walk and talk and dress like them, but I also make my parents proud with my academic excellence.

So anyway, I was one of those kids that I was in the smart classes, quote unquote.

But I really was committed to this attitude of, I don't want to look like you guys, I don't want to look like the smart kids, I don't want to act like the smart kids, I don't want to talk like the smart kids, none of that.

The only thing that we have in common is our GPAs.

Gabe worked hard.

College was his dream, and he was determined to make it happen.

He was a serious student, no matter how he may have appeared on the outside.

But one day, something unusual happened.

We get our essays back, and on the top of the paper, it says, A plus, right?

And on the side it says, see me after class.

So sure enough, I stay after class, and the teacher says, hey, Gabe, wow.

This is amazing.

This is really great work here.

I'm impressed.

But I just need to make sure that you wrote this.

I remember when he said that, at first, I thought it was hilarious, like I'm laughing at it, like, ha, come on, man, for real.

Give me a piece of paper, I'll write you something right now.

And he just kind of gave me like a hmm.

Gabe brushed it off until it happened again.

This time it happened in calculus, pre-calculus.

Sure enough, I'll get a paperback that says, A+, please see me after class.

So I show up and the teacher said the same thing, Gabe, this is excellent work, I'm so impressed.

But I want to know how you did it.

I want to know who did this for you.

So it wasn't as funny this time.

It started to become a pattern.

Gabe's teachers would dismiss his work.

And that actually happened two or three more times.

Those things, those A-pluses, with the see me after class, the write this essay down for me again, all those were like little daggers, you know, sticking to my ribs, sticking to my chest.

One or two of those, they're not too bad to carry around.

But after a while, if you start collecting them and they start piling up, you can't breathe anymore.

And it got to the point where I felt my identity changing.

I remember thinking, hey, you know what?

Maybe I'm not who I thought I was.

Maybe I don't belong in these classes like they've always said.

But Gabe still kept his sights on college.

And after graduating high school, he enrolled at San Jose State University.

My first university assignment is given to me.

And it's, can you believe it, a book report.

The professor was Maria Ochoa.

She assigns us a book to read.

And I read it, you know, and we'll bang it out in like a week.

And I still remember, I still remember the night before that I had to turn it in.

I had written everything out, it's done.

It's all typed out and I'm looking at it and I'm going through it and I'm reading it and I'm saying to myself, I cannot make this essay any better.

I just can't.

This is literally the best that I can do.

And I'm not sure that it's good enough for San Jose State.

And I remember thinking, well, at least I got to experience at least two weeks here.

If this is not what I'm meant for, then at least I got here though.

I turned it in, and then it was the waiting game.

And I remember waiting to get my assignment back.

It was more excruciating than waiting to hear if I got into San Jose State or not.

I finally get the paper back.

And would you believe it?

I get the paper back, and on top it says A plus.

And on the side it says, please see me after class.

And I literally have like flashbacks of everything that's happened to me in elementary school, middle school, every teacher, every counselor, every peer that doubted me or said bad things, people I hang out with, or people who just, you know, made me feel like I was inadequate.

Like all that rushed back into me.

After class, Gabe follows Professor Ochoa to her office.

His heart is pounding.

So I'm in the office with Maria Ochoa and I have the assignment in front of me.

It says A plus, see me after class.

It's like deja vu, I've seen this, I know the script.

I know what happens next.

I look over the table and she looks at me and she says, this is one of the best assignments I've ever received for this book report.

I want to know if you can teach me how you structure your essays together because I'm a writer too and I like your style.

And when she said that, whew, she might as well have taken a torch and lit me on fire because that's exactly how I felt.

In that moment, Maria Ochoa turned everything about teaching upside down for Gabe.

I literally took like the next 30 minutes telling her the whole story that I just told you right now and she was like, hey, you know, and she's like, well, you know what?

Well, you're here now.

That's all that matters.

I told her, I was like, well, I use an outline, I use a little brain cluster, and she was like, can I keep these papers?

And she took them and held them close to her heart, and I'll never forget that.

Years later, Gabe became a teacher himself.

He worked at the School of Design and then at a music academy as a teacher.

Gabe encountered some challenging students of his own.

I had this student when I was teaching at the music academy.

He would get up and I would try to teach, and while I'm teaching, he just gets up, he just takes over.

And I could see how he could be a threat to other teachers, much like how my style in writing and arithmetic and not showing up for classes could be a threat to my teachers in high school.

I could see trying to get rid of the threat immediately.

Instead, he did what his college teacher did for him.

He sat the kid down and talked to him.

They became collaborators.

I kind of brought him in to be part of the solution.

He was the problem at first, but then I said, Hey, let's flip that and make you part of the solution.

And we could do this together, because you have something that everybody can benefit from, including me, and I want some of that.

And I think you can make this experience even better for yourself, for myself, for everybody else.

When Gabe talked to his student, he learned something about teaching.

He learned how to use humor and stories to improve his lecture.

And to this day, I use that.

For Gabe, teaching isn't just about controlling a classroom.

It isn't about shutting people down.

In fact, it's just the opposite.

For Gabe, it's about getting people to open up, about connecting with his students, and helping them realize the strength they already possess.

Gabe empowers his students.

He collaborates with them.

Teachers are the leaders in the classroom.

You're supposed to do that.

Teachers have the power to ignite these students.

But little do they know, they ignite the heck out of me.

That piece was produced by Eileen Williams and Emmerich Englund.

It featured music by Kai Engel and broke for free.

It feels like a lot of teachers, including Gabe, view their students as the ultimate motivation for teaching.

But is that really what's getting teachers into teaching?

We're going to go back for a second and look at what motivates teachers in the first place.

Turns out, it's not what you think.

And it made a whole bunch of teachers in this next story pretty upset.

Emma Heath brings you the story.

In the 1960s, psychologist David McClelland tried to explain why we do what we do, why we're drawn to particular professions or people, our basic human motivations.

And he called it all need theory.

I first heard about need theory from my friend John, who's training to be a teacher in the Stanford School of Education.

And John loves to talk about people and how we learn from each other.

One day, John told me about how his college professor, Dr.

Madonna Rizmi, who he calls Madonna, once assigned his class an activity to help figure out their own motivations.

Madonna told us to pull out a piece of paper and write a paragraph explaining why we chose the college we chose.

After we had done that, she walked us through the theory of this David McClellan guy and outlined that people are principally motivated by one of three obsessions, I think they're called.

Power.

This is the friend who's the president of eight different committees and who enjoys debating about everything from politics to breakfast cereals.

Affiliation.

This is the friend who eats lunch with a different group of friends every day or whose eyes light up at the idea of group projects.

Or achievement.

This is the friend who has a to-do list for their entire day and who includes tick boxes for waking up and eating meals just so they can check them off.

Madonna then had each student read through their paragraphs and see if they could guess what their main motivation was.

And I don't know about you, but it's strange for me to think of my motivations fitting into a neat box.

John, when he read through his paragraphs, didn't think his did either.

And I'm a pretty self-aware person, and I just remember looking at it and going, I don't know.

I mean, it's clearly not mapping on cleanly to any of the three.

Madonna then asked if anyone would be willing to read their paragraphs to the class.

I said, fine.

And so I read my paragraph.

And again, nothing's registering for me.

And she said, OK, well, what do you think?

I said, Madonna, I have no idea.

And the class just erupted, erupted in laughter.

And it was this really like, it's that moment where you go, I must have something on my face.

Like, everyone knows something that I don't know right now.

And I remember saying to her, I said, what's, like, what's going on?

And she said, every so often, somebody writes up a paragraph and it is so, it's such an archetype of how somebody with that orientation would be.

And you are achievement to a word.

And I remember looking back over it and going, oh, yeah, no, no, that makes sense.

But I totally missed it.

And John wasn't the only one without a clue.

Turns out Madonna had done a whole study about motivation and found that there was a very large group of people who were equally surprised with their own results.

Teachers.

What would you guess?

Would you guess teachers were more interested in the power or the achievement or the relationship?

I imagine my favorite high school lit teacher and how her brown eyes radiated warmth and her round face had this perpetual smile as students swarmed her classroom during lunchtime to chat about their favorite books or recipes or sports teams.

It seemed pretty clear in my mind.

It made sense for teachers to be affiliation motivated or focused on relationships.

And John agreed.

Well, my name's Madonna Rizmi, and I work at Washington University.

That's the woman who first introduced John to need theory.

Madonna first became interested in teacher motivation during grad school at Maryville University.

I was taking the class in human motivation, and one of the things we had read was, what sort of, what occupations are people who have a high need for influence often attracted to?

And one of them was psychology, and another one was teaching, and a third one was politics.

So I hit on the first two, and luckily didn't hit on the third.

In this class, Madonna learned that teachers are motivated by influence or power.

This came as a shock to her.

She wanted to be a teacher herself, and the news was a revelation.

Madonna wanted to see for herself if this was really true.

To do this, she went to a junior high school and administered something called a thematic aperception test.

But you never have to say that again.

Just call it a TAT.

For these tests, Madonna showed each teacher five photos.

Then she asked them to tell her what had happened, what was happening, and what was about to happen in each photo.

She gave them about five minutes to write, and then, depending on whether the details they chose were based on power, affiliation, or achievement, scored those stories.

You know, for example, one of the pictures is of a little boy who appears to be thinking, okay?

He's just kind of like staring off into space.

How the subject reacts to this picture reflects to Madonna what the teacher's motivation is.

This little boy is imagining what he's going to be up, you know, when he grows up, and he's going to be the best astronaut, the most famous astronaut the world has ever known.

And he's going to make a lot of money.

You know, this little boy is making a list about the things he's going to do.

Achievement.

You know, this little boy is, he's sitting here thinking about his family or he's missing his friends, and he can't wait to get home to see them.

Affiliation.

Most people might hope that they'd all be coming up with affiliation.

I certainly did.

But that wasn't the case.

So when I looked at these teachers' stories, they had lots of imagery about having influence.

Teachers were motivated by power, or what Madonna called influence.

Not by affiliation or even achievement, but power.

I had promised these teachers that I wasn't just going to use them as guinea pigs, that I would come back and tell them what I found out.

And they weren't happy to hear the results.

It made them very uncomfortable.

I don't remember exactly, but I do know that a couple of people got up in the middle of the presentation and walked out the door and slammed it as they left.

You know, when I left it alone, it wasn't my job to convince them that I was right.

I felt like they should be upset about the results.

Maybe it's because I think of teachers as selfless, and this seemed to reveal some darker side to all these people that I've always looked up to.

Power motivation somehow seems manipulative.

I picture my sweet high school teacher with her brown eyes and warm smile, rubbing her hands together, evilly giggling about how she has power over us.

But Madon herself wasn't troubled in the same way I was.

She was actually pretty comfortable with her position of power.

You know, what I was trying to tell them is, look, if you don't feel like you can influence people, you probably shouldn't be a teacher.

That seems to me to be critical to being successful at that vocation.

So, they didn't like that.

I guess it just made them uncomfortable.

I could see that expecting complete selflessness on the part of the teacher doesn't make sense, but the implication of power motivation still irked the teachers, and honestly, it still irks me.

So, I went back to talk to John.

After all, he's a teacher, and he didn't seem like a giggling, evil mastermind.

Think about it this way.

You have a professor who is deeply, deeply in love with Egyptian architecture, okay?

And the most meaningful thing that he thinks he can do in this world is to share that love of Egyptian architecture with other people, right?

Like, he wants other people to see the beauty in these structures and to understand the richness of the history.

And, I mean, that's influence, right?

He wants to influence other people to share his passion for this.

And it can be a really beautiful thing.

That piece was produced by Emma Heath.

It featured music by Podington Bear and The Losers.

Okay, I'm with Emma about teaching influencing us for good, but I've gotta say that Power Stuff felt pretty dark at the beginning.

Yeah, but not as dark as the inside of a cave.

What?

Sorry, I'm jumping ahead of it.

We'll get to the caves in a second.

But today, we're exploring how teaching shapes teachers.

And in our next story, teaching shapes the future of an entire community.

So does this community live in a cave?

I'll save that one for Jacob Wolf to answer.

We've been able to look at a very different type of data, and that's rock art.

Dr.

John Rick is an anthropologist at Stanford University.

He studies ancient hunter-gatherer societies, ranging from the American Southwest to the Andes Mountains in South America.

In 1986, Dr.

Rick was in Peru, researching a central Andean pre-seremic people.

They were a hunter-gatherer group, living and creating rock art in the highlands of Peru between 7,000 BC and 1800 BC.

Because these people lived so long ago, we don't know what they called themselves, and so archaeologists, including Dr.

Rick himself, mostly refer to them as pre-seremic peoples.

The highlands where these pre-seremic people lived are, well, high.

The sites are at 14,000 feet, as high as Mount McKinley.

They hunted the vicuña, which are, like llamas, just smaller and less furry, and they had in-depth knowledge of where these animals would be at any given time in the year.

So the Central Andean pre-seremic people were almost sedentary.

They moved around a lot less than most hunter-gatherers.

A group would stake out its own personal vicuña herd and then settle down nearby for a steady source of food.

When you stay in one place, you start to make things that you can't necessarily carry with you.

The pre-seremic people, for example, created rock art on the walls of some of their caves.

They would paint animal figures and sometimes human figures, sometimes very large scale, more than life size, on the walls of these caves.

The rock art that we analyzed had always been described as being hunting scenes.

That's why the animals were there.

But when you really look closely at them, they didn't show hunting scenes at all.

There were no humans running with weapons.

There were no animals wounded and dying, but there were animals doing all sorts of other things.

They were clearly displaying a social behavior of this particular prey species, the vicuña.

Dr.

Rick and his group realized that they could use this art to get a better sense of what life was like for these people.

And what they found was something like the prehistoric version of the parenting help section at Barnes and Noble.

What they were showing was two different things.

One was scenes of pregnancy and birth.

Reproductive scenes that were clear.

They were doing x-ray vision of the animals with little fetal animals upside down inside the abdomen of the adult females.

But the other one really told us something about the humanity of these people.

These were scenes of the expulsion of the yearlings.

These particular animals are very territorial and at one year of age, the animals born into these territorial groups are thrown out by the dominant male.

And it's not a pretty scene.

It's even bloody at times as these young animals are desperate to stay in their natal bands.

And their mothers are also desperate not to be separated from their children.

The idea of forcibly making baby animals leave their mothers, it's rough.

But the males in the Vicuña herd are innately programmed to drive away the one-year-olds.

By kicking out the new generations, the herd is able to prevent inbreeding, and the host of genetic disorders that go along with it.

They're doing it for the benefit of the group.

The Andean people's caves were absolutely covered with images of this process, and so Dr.

Rick and his team began to wonder about the connection between the people and the vicuñas.

Now, all you have to do is think about people of very low mobility and realize they were faced with the same problem.

These people didn't get around very much.

They didn't visit as much as hunter-gatherer usually do in the world.

Hunter-gatherers get out and go through social activities with neighbors whenever they can, and those are the conditions in which you find your mates.

Guys find women, and that's how spouses are generated in hunter-gatherer groups, is usually in these reunions that people have.

But the pre-ceramic people of the Andes were on the verge of settlement.

They had their bases near the vicuña, and the different groups and bases were not particularly close together.

When a young hunter-gatherer left the natal group, made up mostly of family and close relatives, it was unlikely that they would ever see them again.

The different bands were isolated and didn't socialize as much as other hunter-gatherers, and so the emotional stakes of leaving the group were much, much higher.

And thus the temptation might have been unusually great to find your spouse within your local group, but it would have had the same devastating long-term consequences as it would have in the animals.

So it looks like these people were using the animals as a justification for out marriage.

Why do I have to go away, daddy?

You have to go away because it's the natural way.

It's the way of the animals that we hunt.

It's the way of the world, and everyone must do it.

I think that's what these caves were all about.

They were instruction locales for adding an elaborate mythology around that.

It's a fascinating view into that issue of humanity where other animals do it by instinct, humans require an explanation.

That piece was produced by Jacob Wolf and Hadley Reid.

It featured original music by Christina Galisatus.

In our next piece, we're talking about teaching in a different type of harsh environment.

A freshman dorm.

At Stanford University, there are professors and senior staff members who volunteer, voluntarily, to live in dorms year round with students.

Linda Paulson, a resident fellow in Donner House, lives with about 90 freshmen, advising them, mentoring them, and teaching them.

24-7.

Linda tells us her story.

In 1986, I moved into Donner House, a 95 person, all-frosh residence, with what I now see as breathtaking confidence.

I was ready to represent the best parts of the adult world to a gang of smart and charming skeptics.

I just wasn't ready to do it in the middle of the night.

It must have been 3 a.m.

I was struggling to prepare a class and wondering where my orderly, early to bed life had gone, and someone was knocking at my door.

Now there's nothing quite like a purposeful, early morning rap at the door to awaken the apprehensions along with, in this case, a warm flush of anticipated usefulness.

Surely there's a problem in the house.

The police are at the door.

The lounge is on fire.

The basement is flooded.

At any rate, something extraordinary and in need of wisdom and guidance is afoot.

I opened the door, and there stood not tragedy, but eagerness and intensity.

Brian was clutching a paperback.

Linda, he said, I really need to talk about Proust.

I'm certain my jaw dropped.

I know my vision of my residentially significant self evaporated in an instant.

Do you have any idea what time it is?

I spoke, I'm shame-faced to recall, from a lofty understanding of unassailable ordering principles, like manners and expectations and time.

I said something huffy about not needing to do so myself just at the moment, and I smiled what I hoped was amusement rather than annoyance.

He apologized.

I said, sure, perhaps tomorrow, and I closed the door.

But as I withdrew into my apartment, I wasn't so much amused as troubled, even a bit deflated.

I remember the quick, almost physical sensation of having failed, of having misunderstood something that was less mediocre than I'd just proved myself to be.

I was restless for a few hours, but by morning, I had myself a tidy anecdote about passionate students for whom time, adult time, carried no meaning.

I've become used to this nocturnal activity over the years.

It no longer strikes me as exactly weird, just a little profligate.

Even students who arrive proclaiming themselves early to bed and early to rise types, this information usually confided in the presence of a parent on the first day of orientation.

Even they swiftly become citizens of this nighttime community.

But perhaps the profligacy is not theirs.

Perhaps I had been the one to throw away something precious.

First year students stumble naturally into new territory, seeking not only to understand the past, but to prepare themselves for the future.

They are my heroes.

By day, freshmen manage the ins and outs of academic and residential life.

They are dedicated students, loyal friends, committed musicians, gifted athletes, devoted community volunteers.

But an RF soon learns that this everyday world is to some extent a concession on their part.

They're generally very nice people and they bear us no particular grudges.

They'll play our detail and schedule-laden game if that's what we really want.

But when the adult world puts on its bathrobe and gets ready to turn in, another reality bubbles up in the hallways and lounges.

Late at night, when the everyday has lost its grip, convention, habit and expectation fall away in a general liberation from the demands of the clock.

There is no etiquette for pajamid encounters over Proust, Instagram, the Buddha, the Beatles.

There are no courtesies between two students with toothbrushes in hand and something on their minds.

During these clockless nights, students begin to find and educate themselves.

The conversations are not always tony ones on religion or philosophy.

Students also mix it up on the design of the dorm T-shirt, the no car policy for Frosh, the virtues of Willy Wonka, the difference between mankind and humanity.

And these discussions take place in the non-traditional space of no perceptible time at all.

The late night community students seem to create automatically is an important, perhaps even vital rite of passage from the world of inherited ideas to the world of real thought.

In this nocturnal place of chaotic challenge and revelation, new worlds can be contemplated along with the latest crush.

And it was an invitation to this conversation that I refused when I reminded Brian of the time.

Where then does this leave a residential educator?

Except in the classroom, most of us at the university have little to do with undergraduate life.

When we do become involved, we're often representing the university's authority to its most insistent and sometimes troublesome students.

As a resident fellow, I've had my share of difficult discussions.

I remember once having to remind a group of young men that when our facility supervisor was in the men's bathroom, they needed to refrain from using the urinals.

And I remember rather twitchily seeing the students out, carefully shutting my door and collapsing in laughter at the sheer ridiculousness of having to remind smart young people of such a normal courtesy, at the very real importance of it, and finally at the fact that no one had ever told me I'd have such a conversation in my own home.

But I've also known, and sometimes even been a part of, moments of unscripted undergraduate joy.

And that extraordinary privilege goes beyond the anecdotes, right to the heart of why an otherwise sane adult would choose to live with 90-odd new students every year.

To watch them dance, to watch them teach one another to dance, I love to watch a group of frosh move beyond the intimidation of the first day and find one another.

I love to watch them not just recognize the remarkable strengths of their fellows, a nationally ranked athlete here, a concert pianist there, but begin to give quiet consequence to their own extraordinary selves.

I believe in freshman energy and irreverence, and I am happy to know that these youthful virtues are honored and cultivated in the house.

Such attitudes are hardly lessons that can be taught.

RFs can have a significant effect on student life in our houses.

But let's be clear, we preside over the daytime realm.

Students drop by through the day, they need to borrow a hammer or a saucepan, they need to pet the cat, they need to have a cup of tea and a chat, they need to sit in a non-university issue chair.

Students check in with the RFs as they steer their daily course through some pretty unfamiliar waters.

Yet the kindest thing any of us can do is to unsettle them, to make them uncomfortable with their assumptions and to suggest the possibility of examining them.

If we cannot seriously recommend irreverence, we can at least provide daytime provocation for the nighttime conversations in which we will have no part.

I failed Brian, and I failed to understand the delicate process of residential education when I countered his ardor with an easy platitude.

To be an educator, residential or otherwise, is to recognize that the rich speculation one covertly hopes for won't take place in predictable time.

When Brian knocked on my door, I, silly, dutiful, habituated grown up that I am, didn't recognize the moment for what it was and offered to enter the world of free, youthful speculation.

My retreat into humor and stiff neck maturity embarrasses and disappoints me even now.

To be thoughtlessly adult, when vibrant and irrepressible curiosity is beckoning, well, what ingratitude, what profligacy.

I missed something when I turned down Brian's invitation.

Not a conversation about Proust, that can happen in a classroom.

But something far more uncommon.

We could for a moment have known a version of the Proustian experiment as, late at night in unclogged time, we cut through chronology and generation and wove a new tapestry of shared memories and perceptions.

My regrets and apologies to Brian, and to his expansiveness which embraced even me.

That piece was produced by Vanna Tran and Kate Nelson.

This piece first appeared in the September 2002 issue of Stanford Magazine as a story titled Tales from the RF Apartment.

It featured music by Alex Fitch, Chris Zabrycki, and broke for free.

A lot of the teachers we've been talking about are living with their teaching.

They're teaching within their own communities.

But what happens when you're a complete outsider?

That's what happened to Emily Polk.

Budaburum Refugee Camp lies just outside of Accra, the capital of Ghana.

It's a sprawling complex of corrugated steel roofs and winding dirt streets.

And in its heyday, it was home to over 50,000 refugees, mostly Liberian.

Central Park would fit in Budaburum 19 times with room to spare.

And by the mid 2000s, Budaburum was a semi-permanent structure.

People were born, lived and died there.

They bought groceries and went to school.

There was even a newspaper covering human rights in the camp.

It was called The Vision.

Emily Polk came to Budaburum on a post-graduate fellowship from Columbia University.

She was going there to teach journalism and oversee production of The Vision.

She was 29 years old.

I thought that in half a year's time, I would be able to teach people how to be journalists.

So, you know, the basics of both reporting, gathering the news, finding a good story and writing it well.

I liked to think at the time that I was not naive, but in retrospect, I think I was incredibly naive.

I think that my naivety was multi-layered around my expectations.

So the first thing I remember is that it was so hot.

It was always so hot.

And I'm not a hot weather person.

I get really grumpy in the heat.

And I remember I always had like a little bit of sweat like dripping on.

You know, it's just always this feeling of like, just the humidity and the heat.

So usually I would arrive on the Trotro, it was called, like the local bus, and I would be met by one of the journalists.

So the whole process of getting from the Trotro to where we were going in the camp was an entire experience.

We stopped and talked to everyone.

And so some of my richest memories from that time are actually the journey from the bus to the classroom.

And then the classroom was very rudimentary classrooms.

There was basic desks, dirt floors, no, sometimes nothing to write on or write with.

I can honestly say these journalists, this class, were some of the most genuinely kind and compassionate and earnest and vulnerable and funny people.

And we had a wonderful community.

So on this day, this unforgettable day of my life, I came to the camp, the vision had gone into production the night before, and I didn't know what would be on the cover.

I came in and I saw, taking up the entire half of the front page was a gruesome picture of a burned and mutilated woman's body.

It was a woman who had been killed in a domestic violence fight in the camp.

I remember seeing the image and looking away because it sort of took my breath away, and I was so taken aback that anyone would put a picture of a dead woman.

Can I even say, is this so too gruesome?

I mean, it was an awful, it was a brutal picture.

I remember thinking like, how could you guys do this?

How could you put this woman who is a mother and part of this community, how could you put her burned and mutilated body on the cover?

You So that was sort of what was going through my mind, as I said, okay, I really need to give this lecture now on sensationalism and what it meant to be a sensational journalist, and as the sweat kind of poured from my face, and I stood up and I said, you know, let's talk about this.

And so I said, you cannot imagine the effects of having such a violent image, that it doesn't accomplish the purpose.

It's as gruesome and it's not doing what you wanna do.

Everyone was sort of in a semicircle and I was facing them all.

And they were all looking at me and I was standing up and I was holding the newspaper.

God, I just went on and on.

And as I was talking, I was getting angrier and angrier and felt like they learned nothing.

And as I was talking, the room started to shift.

I felt muscles getting tighter and faces frowning.

And I thought, okay, am I saying something wrong?

Like this is not the reaction that I expected.

And when I was done with my big speech, thinking that I was teaching this really important topic, I think it was Joseph, he looked at me in the silence and he said, don't talk to us about violence.

You have no idea what violence means.

You have no idea what we've seen in our lives.

It was really, all of them were like, had the same exact response, like, you know, sit yourself back down, lady.

Like, this is our territory here, don't you dare talk to us about what violence means and what violent images mean, compared to what we've seen and lived in our own lives.

We'll tell you, you know, you back off here.

And then, one by one, slowly, they each went around the room and shared their experiences of what they had gone through fleeing the war.

Almost every single one of them had seen firsthand an immediate family member murdered, killed in front of their eyes, had witnessed horrors and atrocities, things that I couldn't fathom.

And I don't think up until then, and since then, have I ever felt so ashamed on so many levels?

Ashamed of my own righteousness?

So I sat and I listened, and that's when they said, we put this picture up here because it creates a sense of community and solidarity among all of us.

We put it up here because it lets people know this is not acceptable, and we will not tolerate violence and murder in our camp.

I don't feel qualified to speak for the experiences of these thousands of refugees.

I can only speak for myself as an outsider entering this space, but I think about it every day.

And as a teacher, I think we all have these moments where we're sort of struck open in ways that will always inform our teaching.

And so I think in that moment, maybe in that very moment, I felt like I'm a jerk and a privileged jerk, but I think it's our responsibility and our obligation to take those moments when we are taught something and use them meaningfully and to remember them.

And so I think that's a responsibility of a really excellent teacher, not to wallow in our mistakes or make light of them or ignore them, but I think a really excellent teacher is always being taught.

That piece was produced by Hadley Reid.

It featured music by Gila Cudi, Man of Suit, and Martin R.

Today's program was produced by Kate Nelson, Hadley Reid, Christy Hartman, Will Rogers, Claire Schoen, Jake Warga, and Jonah Willihnganz.

Special thanks to Chris Andrews, Andrew Nelson, Gable Molly, Madonna Rimsey, John Kleiman, John Rick, Linda Paulson, and Emily Polk.

Thanks to Emma Heath, Jacob Wolf, Dana Tran, Eileen Williams, Emrick Onklem, Nina Foushee, and Tamu Adelaire.

And to everyone at the Stanford Storytelling Project who helped workshop the stories you heard today.

Natacha Ruck, Jackson Roach, Justine Bede, Rosie Lapuma, Maddie Chang, Josh Hoyt, and Louis LaFaire.

Original music featured in our cave's piece was composed by Christina Galisatus.

Our show today featured sounds by Blau Hound, 15050 Francois, Corona 01, Damien Anonche, Felix.Bloom, Johnson Brand Editing, and Sardin 1972.

Music you heard during the introduction and transitions on this show was created by Podington Bear, Alex Fitch, Broke for Free, and Nick Jaina.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Program in Oral Communication, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Kate Nelson.

And I'm Hadley Reid.

Even here at State of the Human, we're still learning and teaching.

I'm gonna do it one more time because I was speaking really fast, but I think I've mastered the not uptalk.