Crossgrain No. 3: What Is Talent?
When a student corrects a wrong answer, what has the student learned?
I asked a student to find where a passage changed direction. The student reread it, found the turn, and worked out the answer. In the weeks that followed, given another passage, the same student often read past the same kind of turn. When I reminded the student to look for it, the student found it again.
The student had understood the lesson and used it well. Yet something the student needed for the next passage still came from me.
In difficult passages, the writer very often hedges, shifts tone, or introduces something that does not sit comfortably with what came before. My rule for students was short: “Stop. What was the writer saying just before this?”
When a student got this kind of question wrong in front of me, I asked, “What are we supposed to do when the writing starts moving in two directions?”
“Oh, right.”
The student went back, found the change, and usually solved the question. When I showed another passage and said, “Find where the direction changes,” the student found it.
Then the student would go home. The next week I would put a new passage in front of the same student and say nothing about a change in direction. The student would read straight through and pass the turn without stopping. The old reading had returned.
A wrong answer shows itself. This habit had hidden behind a right answer.
Some of these students went on to get perfect SAT scores. Some went to Harvard. Some went to Penn. I did not know how to reconcile those results with what I was still seeing in our lessons.
They had sat the exam without me, and they had done extremely well. Yet I had watched the same students read well when I pointed to what mattered, and read badly when no one pointed. A perfect score could not tell me whether the judgment I had been supplying in our lessons had become their own.
So I kept thinking about my own question to them. “What are we supposed to notice here?”
I had not supplied the answer. I had not interpreted the passage. I had only reminded them what to look for. They did the rest.
But could they notice the change on their own, while they were still reading?
I once had lunch with a group of parents. Our conversation concerned a recent school exam. On one question, only twenty-six students out of five hundred had answered correctly, and the parents knew all twenty-six by name. They knew the question writer’s earlier work and which cram schools understood his habits. Nearly three hours passed without anyone having to explain what made the right answer right.
I teach the subject, yet I did not know who had written the question. My work had given me no reason to know. My task was to understand what a student had failed to see when a wrong answer looked attractive. I had never thought this required knowing the names of the twenty-six who got it right.
So I mostly smiled. They were parents trying very hard for their children. What troubled me was how convincing they sounded. They seemed to know something I did not. After three hours, I remember feeling, to my embarrassment, that I might be the ignorant person at the table.
They knew the question’s history. I had mistaken that for knowing the question. One parent named the teacher; another recalled an earlier exam. No one discussed how to get it right. We had the satisfaction of having studied something we had barely examined. We left feeling we already knew what was going on, with little reason to find out what we still could not do.
In college, I studied for the GMAT and the LSAT with friends from school. There were no enormous online banks of explanations then. We had Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barron’s, whatever official questions existed, and one another. We met, solved things together, and talked about what we had gotten wrong.
Because people took the tests on different dates, somebody would occasionally come back after taking the real thing. I was always amazed by what happened next. They could tell you what had been on the exam. Not just whether it was hard. They remembered the passages. There had been something about penguins and how far they traveled, something about a queen bee, some argument followed by a weakening question, some answer choice that almost worked except for one particular reason. They could practically reconstruct the test.
I could never do this. I would finish one of those exams completely drained, walk outside, and remember almost nothing. If somebody asked me what passages I had seen, I had no useful answer. Even if I sat there and deliberately tried to reconstruct them, very little came back. Once again I had nothing to contribute to the conversation. Other people appeared to possess this extraordinary map of an exam I had just taken. I appeared not to.
Then the scores came back. I was in the 99th percentile on both the GMAT and the LSAT. None of the people who could reconstruct the exam in detail came close. But at the time I drew nothing from it. I thought, oh my goodness, it is over, and the thought went no further.
Years later, sitting at that lunch table listening to parents recite correct-answer rates and the names of the twenty-six students, the memory came back.
I see now that I had treated what a person could say about the exam afterward as evidence of what that person could do inside it. The scores had already told me these were two different things. I had left the questions in the room and still done the work. Others had brought the questions home and done the work less well. The conversation afterward made memory much easier to see than reading.
They took the tests more than once, remembering the passages in astonishing detail while their scores stayed low. I never saw any of them wonder at this. Their scores were telling them the same thing. They remembered the exam too well to hear it.
I think their remarkable recall had done them harm.
By my late twenties I had taught hundreds of students and talked with their parents. Many were doctors and professors, graduates of schools I had grown up regarding with automatic respect. Harvard PhDs. Physicians trained at Seoul National University. People who cared enough to put their children in expensive schools, hire tutors, call the tutor, ask questions, and call again. Until my mid-twenties, I had simply assumed that these were the smartest adults.
Then I started noticing something I could not explain. A mother would tell me, “My son is very bright, but he reads and immediately forgets everything. What should he do?”
I would tell her what I was seeing. His eyes were passing through the sentences, but the ideas were not being rebuilt in his own words. Sentence by sentence, there was a feeling of comprehension. But one thought was not being held long enough to be compared with the next. By the end, this student had the sensation of having read a hard passage and almost nothing stable to work with.
Many parents would question me, “But how do we know that putting things in your own words works? You keep saying this. What is the evidence?” So I would send research. They had asked me to send it. And then nothing would happen.
At the next consultation the same parents would say, “My child reads something and forgets it immediately. What should he do?” I would explain it again. A month later, we would have the same conversation again.
Their children at least understood me in the lesson and forgot at home. The parents did not listen even while I was speaking.
They had not read what I sent. When I asked whether they had, they became flustered. After that, they stopped calling and found another teacher.
Throughout those years, I was still playing the piano. I had started when I was six. I had been teaching reading for years, but I had not completely given up the thought that I might still do something with the piano. Even when there was no particular professional reason to keep studying, I kept finding pianists to take lessons from. I needed somebody to listen to me.
Around then I was working on the Bach-Busoni Chaconne. Pianist after pianist told me some version of the same thing: my sense of rhythm was weak. I knew.
I had known since my late teens. One pianist had told me to record myself constantly, so I did. I recorded Chopin ballades and listened back. I practiced with a metronome. I played with one hand while tapping my shoulder with the other. I watched a pendulum. I isolated measures. The defect was not hidden from me at all, and I genuinely wanted to fix it.
I could hear it on the recordings. Here I rushed. Here I dragged. Here the pulse loosened for no musical reason. And then I would fix it. I would listen, go back to the piano, and think: do not rush here. Keep this moving. Do not let this phrase collapse. Then I would play it again, and the rhythm would improve. Sometimes it improved a lot.
But why did I never know that I was slowing down while playing?
Could I hear the moment it happened, while my hands were still playing?
I think about myself at twenty-seven. I would finish the Chaconne, turn on the recording, and hear the problem. Here. This measure. Too fast. That phrase. Too slow.
I would sit back down at the piano. This time I knew exactly where to listen. I would play it again. Better.
Then a week later, I would play the piece again. Into the phrase, the sound, the shape of the thing. I would finish.
Then I would play the recording. Why am I rushing here?
Again.
The knowledge was there. It had been there for years. But when I needed it, I was already inside the phrase.
At twenty-seven, I stopped playing the piano.
Every recording told me the truth, but it told me a few minutes too late.
Between doing something and knowing how we are doing it, there is a distance. For some, it is almost nothing. They hear themselves while they are still playing. They notice the turn while their eyes are still on it. For others, the knowledge waits in a recording, an answer key, a test score.
That distance is what I mean by talent.
Where it is short, one moment of practice can teach the next. A parent sees how a child is reading at the kitchen table, while there is still an evening in which to help.
Where it remains long, effort can be water poured into a jar with no bottom. We correct what we can finally hear, then return to work we cannot hear ourselves doing.
For twenty-five years I have watched students and the parents who love their children pour that water.
I poured it for twenty-one.