One Hand Clapping: A Round of Applause from a Teacher Who Became a Student

All teachers, perhaps to shore up their secret insecurities as educators, maintain a private list of favorite students.  My list includes, but isn’t limited to: the first student I ever had a secret handshake with, the only student ever to have his own “cheer”—his class and I did it with gusto—and the only section of freshman theology ever to declare themselves an autonomous planet, elect a president and secede from their north chicago high school.  We stopped short of armed rebellion.

I have another list: a list of students who became teachers to themselves, and in so doing, if only briefly, became teachers to me as well.  This post is the story of how that list began.

I went into education already frustrated with the field’s inadequacies.  Clinton-era educational reforms had reduced mastery to regurgitation of facts.  In the discipline of theology, they had reduced faith to knowledge of the articles of faith.  They had reduced "trust in God" to recalling orthodox tidbits about him, to be scribbled in blue books in exchange for red, chicken-scratched A’s.

With a healthy dose of guidance from sympathetic colleagues, I decided to teach Koans.  The unit's general subject was "conversion," and I wanted to teach my students that transformational process by guiding them through it.  I’d been a flunky as a monk, and knew only a bit about buddhism, but I needed to teach what happens when life gets hard and faith defies logic.  Koans could do that better than most western resources.  I settled on a "Koan" definition palatable to 9th graders: they’d be “illogical riddles that, in order to be answered, require the person attempting them to change.”

After a week of hammering out the particulars, I put a tempting prospect before the students.  There’s a way to get a perfect score on the unit's test without studying or taking a single note, I said.  A student could take it two ways: straight up, where correct answers would earn them points, or “as a koan.”  There was a “correct” way to answer the test as a Koan, and it would earn them an effortless 100 percent.  Incorrect answers to “the Koan” would earn them an immediate zero, and the burn of the risk blowing up in their faces. 

To my knowledge, I have, in my lifetime, answered two and a half Koans correctly.  From this experience I was able to identify steps of solving Koans, which might, if followed, yield results.

“Remember,” I told them, “Koans are illogical.  You cannot use logic to answer them.  Western people are so addicted to logic that they go absolutely deer-in-the-headlights in the face of Koans.  We’re actually afraid when things are illogical.  Can anyone tell me why that is?”

When Devin Murray spoke, it was without raising her hand and in open prediction of her future for the coming weeks.  “We’re afraid of illogical stuff” she said, “because we fear being wrong.”

For the first, and not the only time during the teaching of that unit, I was aghast at the speed with which the truth had vacated a cake-hole. “Absolutely, Devin, we’re afraid of being wrong.  So the first step of answering koans is, ‘admit your fear.’”

Then I introduced a Koan: “What is the sound of one hand, clapping?”  No one moved.  I called Tara Hagerty to the front of the room.  “Tara, the question I just asked you—please ask it to me.”

“Mr. Warner,” she said, “what is the sound of one hand, clapping?”

Careful with my body language, I raised a hand between us.  I gave it a moment to sink in.  Then I asked “What level of certainty, high or low, did my body language reflect?”  

“High” the class replied.

“Tara, how would my body language have changed if I was uncertain?”

“You would have raised your hand more tentatively.  There would have been a look on your face that showed doubt.”

“Except, if I get it wrong, I know y'all are gonna think I'm an idiot.  I’m just as afraid of being wrong as the next guy.  What was different?”  In the distance, crickets chirped.  “The second step is ‘make a decision to accept your fear.’”

I sent Tara to her seat, and called Jimmy Oddo to the front of the room, holding my open hand eye-level with his face.  “Jimmy, what do you hear?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Everyone always says that.  It’s because you’re trying to think of a logical answer.  The working of your mind is closing your ears.  Don’t let it do that.  I’m gonna hold up my hand again, this time tell me what you hear.”

He paused, briefly closing his eyes. “I hear the sound of traffic outside school, the vents in the classroom, and people shuffling at their desks.”

“Good” I said. “You just stopped listening with your mind, and started listening with your ears.  The third step to answering Koans is ‘answer with your body, not your mind.’”  I sent Jimmy to his seat.  “Now for the last step, I just have a question.  If I’m on the phone and I want to tell someone how to get to chicago, what do I use to do that?

Two guys in unison: “Words.”

“If they followed those instructions, it makes sense that they’d end up where?”

Three people, sporadic: “Chicago.”

“So answers with words are answers that make sense.  But Koans are illogical questions, with illogical answers.  What, then, can’t you use in the answer?”

Tara Hagerty: “You can’t use words” 

“The fourth step is ‘make a nonverbal response.’  When I was asked what ‘one hand clapping’ sounds like, raising my hand confidently was a nonverbal response.”

To end the day, we wrote the steps in our notebooks.  Treating the test as a koan would have to conform to the steps to be considered correct.

*************

I was not telling them this, but I had, in the back of my mind, an ideal response for “taking the test as a Koan” .  I never told them what it was.  We simply began equipping each class with the pieces they’d need to put it together themselves.  I showed the courtyard scene from Dead Poet’s Society.  This was the one where everyone goofy-walked, to buck the tendency to conform.  My students eventually pointed out that, by not “finding his own way to walk” as Robin Williams’ character instructed, the character Knox Overstreet had to overcome a fear of being wrong.

I played the Dead Poet’s Scene where they ripped up the textbooks because the introduction had tried to measure poems in words.  Poetry was like God, I said.  My students eventually got it: God could not be measured in words.

I read a buddhist master’s answer to a five year old, asking where her dead kitten went.  He struck the floor on which they sat cross-legged, teaching her to do the same at each deep question he posed.  My students eventually recognized: the five year old was making a nonverbal response.  

Signs of struggle and insight began to emerge.  Devin Murray had a small meltdown overflowing with transitional angst about how confused she was.  One day, I posed a Koan.  I said to the class “Every time you open your mouth, you’re wrong.”  Tara Hagerty, thoughtful but confident, opened her mouth.  I simply pointed.  “There!  Tara accepted her fear of being wrong, and made a non-verbal response!  Admitting your fear of being wrong, in this case, leads to correct answers.”  The students were making my job easy.

For homework, I’d told them to meditate 10 minutes each night.  Jimmy Oddo came to me one day and said “Mr. Warner, last night, I was meditating.  I realized it’s like listening to myself.  I haven’t figured out the Koan but I think I’m gonna keep doing this meditation thing.”

One day I gave a class about John of the Cross and the Cloud of Unknowing author, how they’d taught we wouldn’t get close to God by understanding him.  Mid lecture, Devin Murray yelped. “I GET IT!”

After class, I called her over, “What do you think the answer is, Devin?”  She told me.  I didn’t confirm it, I just told her to follow the steps and trust herself.  “Illogical questions,” I said, “aren’t answered by reason.  They’re answered by realization.”

On the day of the test, students entered the room abuzz with nerves.  There were a range of responses, all of which placed the serenity of the confident alongside the fidgeting of the doubtful.  Not all attempted the test as a Koan, and some of those who did received zeros.

There wasn’t one answer. Everyone who followed the steps, passed the test as a Koan.  Jimmy Oddo, Tara Hagerty and Devin Murray all took the route that risked grand and spectacular failure, and received immediate full points for their responses.  I could not have been prouder, and probably wore too much of that pride on my face, despite myself.   Everyone who didn’t follow the steps, after the big “reveal” later that week, was given the opportunity to correct their answers.

Tara Hagerty, after the test, said “This is the first unit you’ve taught us where absolutely everything made sense.”  I thanked her, secretly abashed that my presentations of more logical content were missing the mark that often.

To this day, I have no stronger example of students looking inside themselves, and facing their fear to find answers.  And to this day, I have never been more grateful for the questions I found in myself. 

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