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 th