read in the paper that he was in failing health and, obviously, would do no more books, and he's since passed away. and so at some point, i can't remember the moment, i thought what if i were to try to do one myself? as a student, i'd been a journalist, and so i thought, gee, maybe i'll give it a try. i'll do a few sample interviews and see how they work and see if they work and see if i find it interesting. and so i did. and i didn't just find it interesting, i found it fascinating. i was so compelled by talking with people about what it was like for them to be teachers that i was hooked. and there were two decisions to make fairly early on. one was would i just do a sampling of teachers, you know, good teachers, mediocre teachers, lousy teachers and have it be democratic in terms of ability, or would i try to focus on great teachers? and i quickly decided to do the latter. i somehow felt that there are great teachers in this country and in this world, and i wanted to honor them and give them voice and also have the book be a way of exploring what is it that makes a good teacher. the other decision that i made soon after i started the book which was somewhat accidental is that it occurred to me that, certainly, there were great teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade and the university, but no doubt there were also good teachers beyond. pause in some -- because in some ways every aspect of society needs to be taught, it needs to be transferred to other people from generation to generation and that a lot of teaching takes place beyond the classroom, beyond the secondary school and the university. so i branched out. is and in the final -- and in the final form the book has more than half of the interviews with people who teach in unconventional ways. there's someone who teaches in ballet school. one of my favorite examples is a man who teaches alligator wrestling. there's a major league manager who teaches the art of playing the infield. that's actually ron washington whose team is in the playoffs at the moment as we speak. and so that was the other decision that i made. so it became a book about great teachers in the all aspects of life. so what i want to do tonight is is just tell a few stories about the people that i met along the way and read a few excerpts from the interviews. when i think about the book, one of the stories that often comes to mind is interviewing a retired fencing teacher who was in his 90s, and he retired from teaching when he was 91. and he started to tell me what it was like to teach fencing, and we were in his bedroom in the house where he lives. and he picked up a fencing foil, and he demonstrated. and, you know, here's a man of 91, and he stands with this very erect posture. in fact, i kept sort of checking my own, you know, sitting across from him. and he picked up the foil and suddenly became a 25-year-old and showed me the moves going back and forth across the room. and then he said one of the first things i always teach is is how to hold the foil. and he put the foil in my hand, he said, just pick it up, and i did. and then he adjusted my grip. and he took his hand away after he had my grip the way he wanted it, and i had this odd sensation that i could still feel his hand on mine after he took it away. and so in come ways that became a sort of metaphor for me. i often would think about these interviews in the terms of that lingering touch and how in some ways that was symbolic of everybody that i talked to whether they taught in medical school or first grade or taught fencing. and so i almost felt that in some ways every, every story about teaching is in some ways a kind of replay of that metaphor of the miracle of teaching. someone doesn't know or doesn't understand or doesn't have a skill, and then after the interaction with the teacher, after the touch then they do. it's a kind of miraculous ion metmation. was a man named stephen levey who teaches in massachusetts. he was a teacher of fourth grade. and he was an explorer in something that now is called project-based learning. and what he did is he fashioned the fourth grade curriculum around projects. and so he talked to me about the projects that he did, and can i remember one of them he said he had his fourth graders bake bread. and i immediately had this image in my mind of, you know, these little munch kins with getting flour on their faces, and i thought, that sounds really precious. so i said do you mean they baked it from scratch? i mean, you know, the yeast and the whole business? he said, oh, no. we started by growing the wheat. and, you know, it took the whole school year, but by the end of the year we had grown the wheat, harvested the wheat, ground it into flour, you know, used it to make bread. and he explained that, first of all, he could build a lot of the curriculum into that, the science curriculum, math in terms of measurement and so on. but also for him he said that because he was teaching in an affluent suburb, one of the primary things he wanted to teach these little children is that everything in life is not given to us. that bread doesn't grow on trees. my mother used to say that about money all the time, that it doesn't come from a store, that everything in life has to be made by someone. and so he wanted to get them out of that sense of entitlement that he thought they might have and teach them that things had to be made deliberately and through human effort. and so what i found about a lot of the teachers that they often taught on two levels. they taught their specific content, but they also taught metalessons, the sort of larger lesson that surrounds the particular skill or body of knowledge that they were teaching. and so one of his other projects was that before school started in september he had the classroom cleared out. so the students came to school on the first day in september, and there was nothing there. it was a bare room. and he said, okay, this is our project for the year. we have to design and build our classroom. so the first thing they thought about was desks, and they, you know, talked about what a good student desk would be. and then they went out in the community and found a carpenter who would help them with it. and part of the curriculum for fourth graders in massachusetts is to study the pilgrims. so he said, gee, we're going to need money for this, so let's study how the pilgrims got money for their voyage 689 and they learned the pilgrims sold stock in their company, so they sold stock in their little classroom and went around the community doing that. they got a volunteer from the bank to teach them accounting and how to keep track of the money, so the math lesson was built on that. and, you know, he based the fourth grade curriculum on the idea of projects, and at one point i said to him something that i asked a number of the teachers, and that is what is it that makes you good as a teacher? and it was an interesting question because even though most of the people that i talked to were very loquacious and spoke easily about teaching, that was the one question that gave a lot of them pause. maybe out of modesty or maybe because they hadn't reflected so much on it before. so he thought for a few minutes, and this is how he hasn'ted the question -- answered the question. he said, i think it's something about seeing in every student their particular genius. something about their particular spirit, something that was fully formed for them though it was trapped in a 9-year-old's body. it's about seeing the potential. well, potential is kind of a trite word, but just seeing qualities that are sometimes not at all represented by their behavior. so in miserable kids that are haughty or bossy, you see qualities of leadership. or in be people who are whiny or always complaining you see a depth of ability to turn suffering into something golden. i used to pray a lot about that, to always see what is the genius in each child that makes him or her absolutely unique? i can think of a number of kids who descended into a kind of beasthood when they entered seventh and eighth grade, and then at some point begin to emerge, and they decided to become human beings. at that point they are able to reflect on themselves, and once the light begins to shoin inward -- shine inward, they see two things. one, god, i was really a jerk and, two, wow, he somehow liked being with me day after day. i've had several kids come back later and express that in one way or another to me. so there are those troubled kids who you didn't think you were having any impact on, but then they come back later, and you realize that you did have an impact. when you teach these kids, you have no idea what they are going to become. you don't know who's going to become a fireman or who's going to become a neurosurgeon or who's going to work in a factory. but what you hope for them is that whatever they become they will somehow be able to see all of life and learn the lessons of life and relate that to bigger principles of who we are and how we are related to each other. that would be my hope for the kids i've taught. speaking of metalessons, another one of the teachers that i spoke with, an english teacher at the high school level, thought for a minute about what he really taught, and he said, you know, i think what i really try to teach is pleasure. and he spoke about teaching the deep pleasure of reading literature and responding with heart, with soul as well as with mind to the content of literature. often people will ask me about my own reflections on the book, and, you know, it's a fair question because i think in some ways it's a different book to every person who reads it. because the interviews in some ways really comprise raw material. and the reflections are going to differ with every reader, and the lessons that you draw from the teachers are going to be different with every person. nevertheless, i've tried to think about what some of my own are, and it occurred to me, you know, long after the book was finished that one of the lessons i drew from it is that in some ways teaching seems not so much like a separate art, but an extension of expertise. that is, a person becomes an expert in something. might be neurosurgery, it might be mathematics. and at a certain level of becoming truly knowledgeable in that area, truly wise about that area, having made that area of knowledge and skill truly one's own, there comes with that the ability to transmit it to others. and i think in some ways that might pose an interesting question for, well, ed schools that, you know, have you major in something and then teach teaching as a separate kind of art. now, this is not to say things can't be learned in ed school. i know a lot of people who have. of but doing these interviews made me wonder if teaching wasn't more a kind of an extension of being an expert. so, for example, i interviewed a man named doug butler who spent decades becoming one of the bester ifiers in the world -- fairiers, that's the art of making and applying horseshoes, and finally opened his own school and is now, you know, known throughout the world. and students come from all over the world, ireland, the states, saudi arabia to study the art of fairiering under him. and for him learning how to teach the art of making and applying horseshoes was the ultimate extension of his own acquisition of that skill and understanding. another was alan shriedman a neurosurgeon who operated on ted kennedy when he had his brain tumor. now, here's someone who, obviously, doesn't have to teach, but he does. and not only does he teach his own residents, he teaches undergraduates at duke because he's so committed to it and because for him one of the ultimate expressions of knowing brain surgery is the ability to pass it on to others. the same was true of suki shore, a former ballerina who herself studied under ballen sheen for those of you who know the ballet world and now teaches at the abt school in new york. and, again, for her being as good and as accomplished as she was in ballet, the ultimate expression of that was to know how to teach it o others -- to others. now, like a lot of these people, she may well have had the teaching gene because when she was very young, when she was 22, ballensheen saw in this her a teaching ability and had her to start doing some teaching even while she was at the peak of her career. another was ron washington, you know, known in the baseball world for his ability to teach other players to play the infield. and, again, for him the ultimate level of his skill was to begin to understand how he did it, what were the principles that made him so accomplished as an infielder and then knowing those principles, how he could pass it on to others. in a similar vein, i met a man, a fascinating man named tom nordland who when he was in high school had been mr. basketball in the state of minnesota which meant he was the number one-rated basketball player in the state. and his primary skill as a player was that he was a phenomenal shot. he set a record for consecutive free throws that still stands today, 35 years later. so he went to stanford on a basketball scholarship, and the first day in practice he got a lot of these shots blocked. it completely broke his confidence. he lost his shot. the coaches, apparently, didn't see what was going on or figured they didn't have the time to spend with him, and so he spent four years at stanford riding the bench. never played in a game. left stanford, went to work for apple computer, got interested in golf and tennis, didn't pick up a basketball for years. and one day on his lunch break at apple he went out to a basketball court and started to shoot. within five minutes he was swishing every shot. and so he started to think how is it that i can do this? and he began to think about it week after week, month after month and finally came up with what he believed were the four basic principles of shooting. which he found to be unique and different than the way other people including the great john wooden, coach at ucla, taught the art of shooting a basketball. and so he began to teach it, and today he's known as a teacher of the art of shooting, and his students range from 9-year-olds to nba basketball players who hire him as a private coach. and so again, for him a certain level of expertise then made the transition to understanding how he was such an expert and then, finally, the ability to pass it on to others. i think that's particularly important to me because one of those sayings that's always irritated me beyond belief is is the saying those who can do, those who can't teach. i'll save the expletives since this is being taped, but, you know, i've always found that to be in the some ways a helpful saying because it's one of those sayings that's idiotic in a way that makes you think about what's wrong with it. and to me what's wrong is with it is is that it misses, you know, the entire point of the greatest teachers. that they, in fact, are people whose teaching depends upon not only the ability to do, but then further, the ability to reflect on what they do, know the essential aspects of it and, finally, pass it on to others. one other story of experts is, you know, one of the real treats of doing this book was being able to spend an afternoon with the great actor, martin landeau. and he was explaining to me what -- in the his point of view -- what it meant to act and how even though you might be in an air-conditioned sound studio, you know, you might have to pretend it's 105 and in involuntary new orleans, and you better start to sweat so much that you believe in it. and so he said, oh, excuse me, and he took his bare hand and pretended to be answering a call on his cell phone. and it was really convincing, and i thought, well, this is clever. but he continued to talk to this imaginary person, and, you know, covered up the phone and said, excuse me. and went back to talking. and the seconds went by, and i thought -- i began to doubt my own experience. i thought, wait a second, i thought it was his bare hand, but, you know, cell phones are small, his hands are big. i think he's really talking on the phone. and so it went on for another 30 seconds, and then he just, you know, he said good-bye to the person, and this is true, i really did this, i reached across the table, and i opened up his hand. and it was empty. and i thought, he is good. a half hour later his real cell phone rang, and he had to take a call, and i realized that the imaginary call was more real and convincing than the real call. and i thought, my god, this man is talented. and not only is he talented, but he has known how to pass it on to others and generously does so. you know, when jack nicholson was interviewed by new york magazine, he said i can act for one reason, because martin landeau put me through exercises over and over and over again until i could finally get them right. okay, finally one more doing story. vince dunn for many years was a firefighter in new york, and he eventually became a teacher of fire fighting. this is what he said in our interview. he said for the first 20 years in the fire service, i didn't think about anything. i would go into these burning buildings and run in and run out, and when it was all over, i'd come back to the firehouse and say, whew, and have a few laughs, and then i'd put it out of my mind, go home and have dinner with the wife. then all of a sudden when i became a deputy chief and got assigned to the bronx and had a lot of people under my command, i said, wait a minute, i'm responsible for them. and can then i started to think about what i did. once you start thinking about what you do, you start writing and then you start teaching. you think, so exactly what happened here today and why did it happen? we had this fire, and we put the fire out, and during the fire a part of the floor collapsed, and the chimney fell and almost hit a guy. that's pretty interesting. i need to figure out why that happened and how to understand it. one day i remember rescuing a battalion chief. i had to go up the ladder and get him from the roof of a burning building. he was trapped up there. it was easter sunday, early morning. i took him down and gave him a hug, and this was a big, rough guy. and i'm sure he went home and had dinner with his family and never said a word about it. but i went home and started writing an article about how he got trapped up there. over the years i've written maybe 50 articles that got published and a couple of tensionbooks, and -- textbooks, and it all came from just thinking about what i did. most people in the police, fire and military tonight really think about what they do. so the most important lesson i would tell anyone -- and i know it sounds corny -- is to go back and write about what you do. because once you start to think about it, then you realize everything. okay. another general theme that i found in a lot of the teachers was their sense that teaching was not so much transferring something from themselves to the student as it was drawing out of the student some kind of a seed that was already in them. for me it's reminiscent of one of the well known i do logs of plato -- dialogues of plato in which socrates begins a conversation with a slave boy who has no education whatever, begins to ask him a series of questions and based on the way the slave . >> mathematics, rhythm, music and dancing. human beings are natural dancers. i don't want to call it magical, but there's something very natural about the patterns. human beings are very receptive to the patterns and learn them very quickly. another teacher i interviewed named jan bays who is a teacher of zen up in oregon and a former pediatrician, incidentally, says almost everybody who has spiritual life has a co-on that they're carrying around inside them. for example, i had a catholic woman who came to a retreat, and i asked her what is the question that you carry around with you all the time? she said, my question is is is there anything -- is, is there anything outside of god? this for example, how could there be children caught in the bombings in iraq? how does god allow this? so we melted it down to this: is there anything outside of god? so she spent the week pondering that question and looking around her. is your computer outside of god? is your hand outside of god? this is the home less person at the side of the road with a sign asking for a handout outside of god? so the co-on is a way to dig down through the layers of confusion to have insight into a deep truth. if you read about co-ons, they sound nonsensical. people often read about the co-on, what is the sound of one hand clapping. that's actually a very deep inquiry into sound, first of all, and then into deep listening. with all co-ons you have to parse them of the extra words so it becomes what is the sound of one hand, or what is the sound of one, or what is the sound. so the teacher will help the student refine the essence of what the question is and then guide them into learning so you begin to listen to all of the sounds in the world without listening to them. listen to them as if you've never heard them before. it leads people to some very interesting insights. so, again, it's that theme of teaching as drawing out from people what latently has already been there. one of the things that was really special to me doing this book -- this is a bit of a personal confession -- is, you know, i came of age in the '60s. and part of that, of course, was having great hope, but another part of that was having deep anger and each bitterness -- even bitterness at a lot of the institutions and people in american society who were in those institutions. and one of the things that was sort of-in -- liberating for me about doing this book was to meet so many people who were so good and so dedicated and so much giving their life to bringing about new knowledge and bringing about new wisdom. a personal test for me was going to interview former secretary of state george shultz. his politics and mine do not coincide, and i thought, i wonder if i'll be able to maintain my demeanor as a polite southern gentleman when i talk to this man who i once actually heard speak just before the war with iraq and say, you know, the weapons of mass destruction are certainly there, and if there's a rattlesnake in your yard, you have to kill it. that was his metaphor. and i wail -- actually went in to see him because he's frequently mentioned as a mentor for condi rice, and i wanted to talk about that and maybe other mentor relationships that he's been a part of. it was clear early on that he didn't want to talk about that in particular, and so i thought, okay, this is probably an interview that i'm going to scrap. but then he said, you know, he said the reason i decided to do this interview with you -- i had written him about the book -- he said, i believe teaching is really important. and he said, in thinking about it, i realize that in every job i've ever had in my life, i've basically been a teacher. and that for him the first teaching experience was coming back to princeton as a senior thinking it was going to be his year on the football team. but he got his knee blown out in practice, and so one of the coaches saw in him a potential as a teacher and so put him in charge of the freshman back field. and he said, that was my first experience of teaching. and i felt hike every job i ever had in my life whether the, in fact, being an economics professor at the university of chicago or being secretary of state or any other cabinet position that he held. he said, basically, what i felt like what i was trying to do was is et up an environment in which everybody on my staff was learning. and he said, i feel like if people feel like they're learning, it'll bring out the best in them, and they'll do the best job that they're capable of. and so i realized at that point, okay, i was willing to forget the rattlesnakes in the backyard analogy, and i realized, you know, we were just two teachers sitting down to talk about the nature of teaching. and in that context he was not nearly so dour as he used to come off, you know, on television. and, you know, though we have our disagreements was a nice man and one who had, indeed, always been sensitive to what it mean to teach and someone who with had always taken that goal very seriously. sometimes people ask what was your favorite interview, and that's hard because i really love doing them all. but this is the up one that probably rises to the top of my mind most often. a woman named rodessa jones who teaches in prison. she actually lives in the bay area, some of you may know of her. and she is actually one of three people interviewed who teach in jails or prisons. and in a previous appearance, someone asked me, gee, why three people out of 51 who teach in jails and prisons? and i didn't know the statistic, but i looked it up, and at any given moment 2.3 americans, 2.3 million americans are incarcerated. that's a large population, so on reflection, you know, three people who teach them is just about right. rodessa jones mostly teaches incarcerated women. and this was the story that she told. she said, i was hired by the california arts council 15 years ago to go into the city jail and teach aerobics to incarcerated women. for me as an artist getting this call, i was ugly mystified. but i answered the call. so i just improvised every day for the first month. i strutted in there looking very fashionable, looking like danielle from solid gold which was a television show from around that time. i had just turned 40, and the women were just fascinated. i was black, and o most of the -- so most of the women were black or latina, so the black and brown women really sat up and took notice. at 40 i was in great shape. i'm doing walkovers, hand stands, backbends, bridges, splits, and i'm talking about my own life. i'm merely telling the story of my life. i'm taking them on the journey that has brought me to this place, to this jail in this city on wednesday morning at 3 -- 3 3 -- 11:00. i talked about having a baby at the age of 16. i talked about my own dance with drugs and dangerous men. i talked about my own experience of looking for love in all the wrong place. and they were mesmerized. it nudged their memory. you know, the cheerleaders, the dancers. there was even a contender for miss black california who had gotten strung out on cocaine and was in for mid. my purpose was to take people out of this space where they say i'm a ho, i'm a dope fiend, i'm a crackhead, i'm a speed freak. these are titles that people lay on themselves, and i'm saying you are so much more before this. before this who were you? who were you and where were you, and what was going on before life started to hurt? and all of a sudden it was like we were all homegirls, just kicking it. i remember another incident where a young woman was talking about something horrific that had happened to her. she had been abducted and raped by a man who had been stalking her at school. and so she's telling the story, crying, hyper ventilating, shaking, and another woman gets impatient with listening to her and says, oh, that's not nothing. let me tell you what happened to me. and then as a teacher i step in and say, wait, what do you mean? how can you sit there, and we've all been crying, and say that this woman's story is nothing? everyone's story is valid. everyone's pain is priceless. and i just need to say in this moment to everybody that i am sorry these terrible things happened. but don't ever say that that ain't nothing pause she's giving it up -- because she's giving it up in this moment. i could see that the woman who had been telling the story who was about to react with anger and with withdrawal was all of a sudden listening to the fact that i was saying her story was valid. just being able to reiterate this horrible thing that had happened to her was valid. and good for us all. i don't think anybody had ever said to that woman, i'm sorry. i don't know if she had even told the story to anyone before. as a teacher, you're always watching for that place where as they say in hip-hop p you drop some knowledge. and also where you've opened up an avenue for new thought. two or three days later the young woman who had said that was nothing came back into our circle and said, i have something i want to say to alice. i'm sorry that i said that ain't nothing, and i've never said i'm sorry to any bitch before about anything. but ms. jones, you were right, and, alice, i'm sorry. and i'm sorry that that happened to you. then she broke down and started to cry, and i'm like, wow. now, as any teacher will tell you, you're going to learn as much from your students as you're attempting to impart from them. -- to them. and i tell you, it changed my life to be working with incarcerated populations, mainly women. it made me much more grateful. it makes me practice gratitude. i really do. and that leads me to to the last reflections on these stories. you know, i thought about that it makes her practice gratitude. and at first i thought, well, i guess she meant, you know, these women are incarcerated, and be i'm free, and so i'm grateful that i'm in, you know, privileged in the way that i am in life. but i realized that later probably wasn't her primary meaning. and and i think this was something that was pretty universal among the person that i taught, and can that is there was something about them that was so generous in their hearts, that their souls were so giving that giving and receiving made it. so for them giving was to feel grateful for their ability to give. for them giving was receiving. thank you. [applause] okay. so we now have time for questions, and if you'd like to ask a question, it's necessary that you step to the microphone here and speak the question into the mic. that's for the recording purposes. so don't be shy. if i can do it, you can. >> mr. smoot, i guess i want to give a pitch for good teachers, not great teachers. and i think of public school situations where somebody might have five classes, 150 students a day and that they are struggling and trying to be the best teacher they can and maybe they have teachable moments where they're a great teacher, but on the whole they could be a good teacher and that maybe we could create environments where instead of five classes they had four classes with 80 students and that they could make it as a good teacher, not have to kill themselves, you know, the time grading papers, not spend their life being always evaluated on test scores and that if we could create this environment where a good teacher could be successful, i think this is what like a public school system would need. what would your response to that? >> well, i think that's very well said. and i think your point is, is deeply true about teaching and about many things in the life. i mean, it's true, we can't all be martin landeau or ron washington. and i do think that in some ways the function of being able to admire and recognize great teachers and read about them is, first of all, it's inspirational for all of us. but also it's a way of reminding us that, you know, the great people don't mean the good people don't measure up. quite the opposite. it's a way of reflecting back on the good people that they are good. i mean, to use an example from another aspect of my life, i've done a certain amount of fiction writing over the years, and i've had a couple of short stories published. well, i'm not a great writer. but to me, you know, what i've sort of realized is that the fact that i'm not faulkner or any number of 5,000 other people i could mention doesn't diminish the value of my own modest little achievement. in fact, it reflects on it. because what it means is that, you know, i'm this small echo of these larger people. and so, you know, i can feel a kind of modest pride in that. and i think your point is well taken, that, you know, in some ways there's a sense in which i hope this book will cast a kind of, a kind of echo of value and worth over all of the teachers in the world who are good or even have, as you say, moments of goodness or moments of greatness. so i thank you for your comment. >> let's go to sports. >> when you were sitting in the front row, i thought, okay, this is the guy who's going to save me. >> no, there's this image that great players do not make great coaches or teachers. and i think underlying it is it came too easy for them. not that -- well, they work at it, but it did come easy and that they have trouble communicating it to others. and now you've picked some examples of people who were great practitioners and great teachers, but what would your response be to this, that great players don't become great coaches or teachers? >> i think very few of them do because, you know, i do think there's a difference between a great talent and a great skill. and then, you know, as i said earlier, i think we can almost see that there are two more levels. there's, one, the understanding of how it is that you do what you do which, you know, some people don't have, they're just great and they don't know how they do it, you know? you ask a great tennis player, how do you serve, you know, a ball at 125 miles an hour, and they say, i don't know, i just throw it up and hit it. so i think the next level is, one, understanding how you do it, and then the level even beyond that is understanding how you take that wisdom and pass it on to others. because, you know, let's face it, there are a lot of great ballerinas. there aren't very many suki shores who could both be a great ballerina and also teach it to others. or ron washingtons who could, you know, play the infield but then figure out what are the principles that allows him to play the infield error-free and pass that on to others. so i think it's a completely different skill, and i think you're right that there's a big difference between talent and being able to teach. and i think there are also people who can figure out the principles and how to teach who weren't themselves particularly endowed with the natural talent. >> why do you think, for example, like a basketball player like shaq o'neal, no one seems to be able to teach him how to do free throws? you've mentioned -- >> he should call tom nordland. and, you know, i asked tom nordland, i said, so can you compare teaching a 9-year-old to teaching an nba player? and he said, oh, yeah. the 9-year-old's much more teachable. they're open, they don't have the ego, you know, they're not surrounded by all the trappings. and so they're, they're completely open. and i went on to say, so how do you teach? i mean, suppose you were trying to teach me. i played basketball when i was younger and wasn't very good. i said, would you just have me shoot the ball and say, how does it feel? and he said, no, i wouldn't ask how does it feel because the answer could be it feels great. he said, the questions i would ask would be what questions; what just happened, where was your elbow, was the ball lined up with your eye and the basket? because, he said, ultimately everything depends on awareness and and self-awareness. and the only way, he said, that i can build awareness is by asking questions. and he said, he said, i think i could help someone with their, with their playing of the violin even though i can't play the violin. and i said, really? how? he said, i'd say play this piece and rate it between 1-10. and then i'd say, okay, play it again and rate it between 1-10 again. okay, what was the difference between the 7 and the 5? and he said, you know, just by asking questions you can try to get someone into the awareness mode. and that was a theme that came up in if a lot of the teachers, namely the importance of asking questions as opposed to giving answers. >> i also work in the schools, and i find the topic both very inspiring and very intimidating. and it's hard enough to be a good enough teacher, let alone a good teacher. but i'm wondering in our own lives we're all kind of teachers and learners. and, you know, it might be one relative, a brother or sister or a kid on the block. how does this relate to being someone who relates to people in their own life as both a teacher and a learner? this does this have any -- does this have any relevance to the topic of conversations with teachers? >> well, i think it does, and, you know, one of the reasons that i branched out into so many areas of life was i do think that teaching and learning are, i mean, they're the glue that holds life together. and they happen in form always, you know, you learn to do brain surgery, you learn to make horseshoes, you learn high school mathematics or college physics. but you're absolutely right. i mean, every day we all teach things to one another. they can be, you know, little things like how to start the car, or, you know, larger things like, hey, here's a way that, you know, i think maybe you can deal with your co-worker. and i think, you know, in every, every successful society whether it's family, a neighborhood, a town or a nation there have to be teaching constantly going on. and that, you know, ultimately you're exactly right, we're all teachers, and we're all learners. and one of the things, certainly, that characterized, you know, this very select cast of great teachers is that they all had an enormous curiosity, and they had not ceased to think of themselves as still learning. learning from their students and learning from other sources about, you know, about their subject area. you know, and sometimes making radical changes. i mean, i interviewed a fascinating physics professor at harvard named eric who had been teaching successfully, you know, at harvard, large lecture hall class in physics. and got good student evaluations. but by giving a certain kind of test which he actually got from another source, he began to think, you know, my students don't really understand the physics that i'm teaching them. and based on that completely revolutionized his way of teaching. and so, i mean, i think another part of it is this, you know, this constant drive to get better and the sense that teachers are lifelong students themselves. >> i'd like to know how you identified the people you were going to interview, how you approached them and then how you prepared for your interviews with them. >> okay. >> i'll take my answer off the air. [laughter] >> all right. i identified people in a variety of ways. sometimes i might have googled certain teaching awards. i tried for every person to have two separate reasons to believe they were great teachers. in some cases, for example, a couple of people in the sports world -- ron washington and tom nordland -- i got from a sports writer. i just e-mailed a sports writer and said, you know, you know the world of sports, are there people in that world that you really believe are great teachers? and he wrote back and said, absolutely and gave me those two names. and then in finding out other things about them, you know, that was confirmed. in some cases i got an idea and then pursued the person. so, for example, i thought -- i like ballet. watching it. i thought, somebody's got to be a great ballet teacher. and so i started looking at dance magazines and dance articles in places like "the new york times" and the name suki shore kept coming up over and over again, so that's how i contacted her. the wild ideas, i remembered from when i was a kid that there was such a thing as alligator asking, and i even knew that it had a long history, it goes all the way back to the seminole indians and it's passed on. i thought, somebody's got to be teaching this. so i set out there to find out in particular by googling alligator wrestling, and sure enough i found this man who's really good at teaching it, and it was a fascinating interview. and, you know, he had real insight into teaching. and all the things you need to do to really train a competent alligator wrestler. so it was in, you know, a wide variety of ways. then what i did was i just contacted the people, usually by e-mail, sometimes by letter. and i was expecting to get turned down a certain amount of the time, especially as i got into people who were very busy or were well known. i got turned down by virtually no one. and i later -- and some were people who turned down a lot of interviews. so i later realized that the reason was these were people who were so dedicated to teaching that the fact that they were going to be interviewed about teaching as opposed to, you know, what it's like to be rich and famous or powerful or something of the sort made them incredibly generous with their time. and so, you know, i virtually got no "no" answers. you know, they all agreed. okay. we are about out of time. i would like to thank you all for coming. i've enjoyed talking to you, and i hope you've enjoyed listening. thank you. [applause] >> for more about author bill smoot and his work, visit billsmoot.com. >> history, biography and public affairs. you're watching booktv on c-span2. "parallel >> here with michele norris, the author of "the grace of silence." tell us, how did you come up h with the titleer for this book, and what is it about? >> it's interesting you askedice about the title because i wrestled with it, so the title actually came to me when i was on a walk with the kids, and i w settled on this because this is a book about the things that my parents didn't talk to me aboutk painful experiences that they had that they chose not to share with me and my sisters because they didn't want to clutter the path forward. and based on some of the things they experienced, it would have been easy for them to pass on their pick and their -- pain and their frustration, and they decided not to. they didn't want to gunk up the engine of upward mobility.ngi >> you're talking about, in particular, the smooting of your father. tell us about that, and how did that set the path to your writing this book? >> i originally set out to writi a book about the hidden abo conversation of race in america and the wake of the election of president barack obama. i was planning to write a book about other people. a when i started listening to the hidden conversation in my own family, i discovered someami secrets that had been kept from my generation, and among those was the fact that my father was shot years ago when he had returned from his military service in birmingham. he was shot by white police officers at a time when black veterans were coming back to the city and trying to assert their rights as full citizens, their right to vote, their right tossr participate fully in american r life. and he never talked about it. he never told the kids, he never even told my mother.on and once i discovered this, i needed to know more about my own family history. and so i wound up pivoting and can writing a very differentriti book.ffer i set out on one path and instead wound up writing thisea accidental memoir. >> the phrase postracial has been used a lot since the election of barack obama. in terms of what you've learnedt particularly about your father's shooting and moving forward, what does that phrase postracial mean to you? >> you know, i'm going to be pos really honest, i'm sort ofl confused by the phrase. when people talk about a postracial society, it almoststa means in many cases they're talking about getting past race, you know, this point where it nt longer mattersti or we no longer have to talk about it, and, andn i think that people often confuse two terms. there's racism which is sort of an ugly term and is what toxic and at one point was quite common in america because of laws and customs and still exists today, but then there's race which is not such a toxic t term. it's just a distributer. -- descriptor. it describes lots of different people. fro we're at the book festival, look around. there's a lot of different people from different races here. and that's what makes america interesting, and i think it'snte part of what makes america great, so i don't know why we want to get past that. why take all the color out of the picture? there's a reason we don't watch black and white television anymore. >> the book is called "the grace of silence." thank you very much for being on. >> seth stern and steven wermiel recount the term of justice william brennan. using documents which will not be released until 2017, the authors detail the negotiations and debates that occurred on the high court during justice brennan's tenure. they discuss the book at politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c. the program is just under one hour. ..

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