I Am This Woman

(1 of 50)

I am still learning how to ask. It’s a very simple lesson. Perhaps such a nuanced one that it requires teaching over a long period of time.

After years of teaching English to first and second-year college students, I still found it amazing that none of them really knew how to ask a question. We spent at least two weeks on Inquiry, which is learning how to ask a question so that the answer will elicit a response that is likely to be useful, helpful, detailed. I had students who not only didn’t know how to ask, but they did not really feel comfortable with the Yellow Pages, the dictionary or a directory of any kind. Little did I realize in early 1990s that the Yellow Pages would soon be replaced by Google, and the method of inquiry was not how good you are with subject headings, but your ability to string together search terms in a little box. (Not knocking that at all, and this soon became part of the curriculum.)

Are we all TALK TALK TALK and very little ask? not enough inquiry? But now that I’ve written this, I wonder if perhaps, in the rush of formal education, we have forgotten how to ask. As we have textbooks and flash cards and videos and test prep crammed into us, we are so busy trying to have the answers, and have them memorized, categorized, researched and articulated, that we actually very uncomfortable with questions left unanswered, but then perhaps those questions become as invisible to us as the little bumps that define highway lanes.

I had a recent encounter with a young man of approximately 3.25 years of age. Hang around with a 3 or 4 year old long enough, and you will be asked “why?” many times. And now, reflecting back on it, one of the best things about that day was the “why?”

At a Sat. morning park clean-up a couple of weeks ago, “Baseball Player” is how the little dude introduced himself when I said, “What’s your name?” So, Baseball Player it is, even though his brother and mom called him by some other more conventional name. I didn’t question it. It seemed rude to ask him why. My classroom and life policy is to call people how they asked to be called. His mother supplied an alternate theory: “He likes to be someone else.” Yes, I gathered as much. And I was very familiar with the concept, having been M’Bear to Little Bear for a while when my son was that age.

Baseball Player and I were lagging behind the group as we searched for bits of trash in a fairly pristine park. In the process of lollygagging… really, that’s what we were doing under the guise of a service project… Baseball Player and I discovered several ladybugs and grasshoppers, some very tiny little yellow flowers and lots of puffy dandelion seed heads. The sun felt good, he and I both had plastic bags and rubber gloves, and I let him hold the grabby stick that worked kind of like scissors to pick up trash without having to touch it.

We had much to talk about but one line of conversation went like this:

“Look, that ladybug is walking up the leaf.”

“Why?”

“Maybe that ladybug is looking for something to eat.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he is hungry. Bugs need to eat too.”

“Why?”

“Eating is how we live.” A pause.

“Why?”

I had no ready answer. This is indeed something to wonder about. I was thinking about metabolism and the food chain, about commonalities between plants and animals, about mouth parts and Weight Watcher Points(tm). Baseball Player may have been thinking about Life Savers or donut holes or more ladybugs. But we were both comfortable with the open-ended, unanswered question – the “why?” left hanging there on the grassy hillside in the April morning sunshine. We were content to watch the ladybug crawl and disappear, for the dandelions to offer up their fluffy seeds to the breeze (when whacked by a grabby stick), and for the tiny scraps of paper we located to go live in the plastic bags.

Figuring out “why?” seemed a bit irrelevant at that point. But it will be good to go back to that place of green grass, tiny little yellow flowers, soft breezes and sunshine, and visit that “why.” I look forward to more conversations with Baseball Player, or whomever he is when we next meet.

So that’s my desire today: to live with the “why” if it wants to hang around, without rushing to chase it away with a “because of THIS.”

(In writing this, I thought of another cool aspect of this, so this is part one. Part two will follow tomorrow or the next day…)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Woolgathering, fifty-to-fifty, literacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.