The Skillful Teacher

Roadrunning
As learners speak about how they experience learning new skills,
knowledge, and concepts, they describe a rhythm that might be
called incremental fluctuation. Put colloquially, this learning
rhythm can be understood as one where the learner takes two steps
forward, one step back, followed by four steps forward, one step back,
followed by one step forward, three steps back, and so on in a series
of irregular fluctuations marked by overall progress. It is a rhythm of
learning that is distinguished by a gradually increased ability to learn
new skills and knowledge juxtaposed with regular interruptions and
dissonances when it seems progress is impossible. When these
apparent regressions to earlier ways of thinking and acting take
place, they are felt as devastatingly final. Instead of being viewed as
the inconvenient interludes they really are, they seem like the end
point of the process. Learners believe they will never “get it,” that
the learning concerned is “beyond them.” They are tempted to
return to tried and trusted ways of thinking on the grounds that
even if these didn’t always work or make sense at least they were
familiar and comfortable.
The way this halting, jagged, incrementally fluctuating rhythm
of learning is spoken of reminds me of the long-running Warner
Brothers Road Runner cartoon. In the cartoon the same scene is
repeated endlessly. The Road Runner is hurtling along the highway,
his “beep beep” cry raising Wile E. Coyote’s frustration to ever
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higher levels. The Road Runner comes to the edge of a canyon and,
because he’s possessed of supernatural powers, he leaves solid ground
to go into mid-air. Suspended several hundred feet above the
canyon floor, he turns around and makes a face at the coyote who
is himself coming to the rim of the canyon.
The coyote’s adrenaline is already pumping through his veins
with the thrill of the chase, and he becomes even more incensed by
the Road Runner’s evident temerity. The coyote picks up his speed
and hurtles off the edge of the canyon into thin air in frantic pur-
suit of the Road Runner, his legs pedaling in space. After about
three seconds, however, the coyote realizes his situation. He freezes,
looks down at the canyon floor several hundred feet below, and 
then looks back at the camera with a goofy, quizzical, deflated
expression. Realizing the nature of his situation causes an immedi-
ate existential crisis. Until he realizes where he is, he’s safe. But at
the moment of awareness of his situation hundreds of feet in mid-
air, physics and perception cohere and the law of gravity takes
effect. He plunges to the canyon floor, and the screen is a mess of
limbs and disconnected but bloodless body parts. In the next frame,
of course, we see that the coyote has been magically reassembled off
camera and that the chase has begun anew.
The moment when Wile E. Coyote realizes his predicament and
crashes to the canyon floor has the same emotional quality as a par-
ticular moment in the incremental rhythm of student learning. It
is the moment when students realize that the old ways of thinking
and acting no longer make sense for them, but that new ones have
not yet formed to take their place. This state of limbo—similar to
the coyote’s suspension several hundred feet above the canyon
floor—is frighteningly uncertain.
Like the coyote, students experience the beginnings of college with
boundless energy and an optimistic sense of how it will make their
lives better. Entranced by the prospect of transformation—of learning
new skills and knowledge that will open new employment opportuni-
ties, bring self-knowledge, or help them develop self-confidence—they
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embrace the changes they know college entails. As they begin strug-
gling to discard or reformulate assumptions and understandings that
now seem not to explain the world adequately, there is a sense of 
forward movement, of progress toward true clarity of perception. The
struggle to learn, with its attendant aspects of impostorship, cultural
suicide, and lost innocence, is seen as worthwhile because of the trans-
formative fruits it will bear.
But as students leave behind the solid ground of their old ways
of thinking and acting, their enthusiasm sometimes turns to terror.
They realize that they have nothing that supports them. Their pre-
viously solid and stable assumptive clusters and skill sets have evap-
orated, but no substitutes have solidified to take their place. This is
the moment when their confidence drains away. They crash to the
floor of their emotional canyons resolving never to go through this
experience again.
However, in the same way that the coyote is reassembled off
camera to begin the chase anew in the next frame, so the quest for
learning is not put off so easily. Sooner or later, students are con-
fronted by whatever hopes and dreams, or niggling anomalies or 
discrepancies, that spurred them to enroll in college in the first
place. Learning begins anew, but this time students know that at
some point they will find themselves perched precariously above the
canyon floor. Out of such knowledge comes the ability to stay dan-
gling for a few seconds longer than was formerly the case and the
forethought to bring along a parachute in the form of a supportive
learning community.