What are the differences between teaching a creative practice and doing the creative practice?
This topic has many branches. The goal of this talk is to chisel out the general considerations.
Creative practice as in painting, writing, dancing, singing, playing an instrument, composing music. The verbal phrase is explored too: compared to, along with, as opposed to.
What about when a teacher has a creative practice in the realm that they’re teaching?
Can we teach creative acts?
What are the differences between a teacher of great notoriety in a creative field or lesser notoriety?
Should the teacher within their teaching advocate for the stylistic approach that they emerge from? Or should they teach within their realm broadly while allowing students to go into their own direction?
What is any teacher’s role in the cultivation and construction of any student’s becoming as an artist?
The teacher doesn’t have the practice: what about when that’s the case?
A consideration of sports is brought up. I refer to an essay from Consider the volley. The essay is titled “Coaches and Judges” and is reprinted below in the show notes.
The following is an excerpt from my collection of essays Consider the Volley:
“Coaches and Judges”
I want to propose a thought experiment to you. It’s very simple in concept but not so easy to put into practice. It involves marveling at an existing scenario that seems well established but is not an absolute reality. And, in the course of this marveling, allow your thoughts to go where they might go. You might think about alternate realities in which this scenario did not exist. You might also think about the features, the tenets, the parameters of the current scenario. A real scenario is not an absolute reality. It just happens to be the case in the world as we know it. An absolute reality is that the earth revolves around the sun. But an existing scenario is that most people spend most of their waking hours during the daylight hours. There might be good reasons for this. And there might be many good reasons for a lot of the scenarios that exist. But they are not absolute realities that must exist. Existing scenarios might be strongly connected to facts, but they do not have to exist as such. Then you take an existing scenario and simply marvel at the fact that its existence is not an absolute result of fact, or facts.
This marveling can be emotive, as in, isn’t that something, it doesn’t have to be that way at all. Maybe you’ll start to realize what else might be otherwise if this weren’t the case. It may seem redundant to point out the fact that some of what exists must exist, and some of what exists doesn’t have to exist. But this seemingly redundant fact can lead to interesting insights about the parameters of what seems to exist.
I would like to try this thought experiment for a moment with judges. Let’s marvel for a moment at the fact that there is such a social role for judges. There are individuals whose job it is to make profound decisions that affect people’s lives.
Let’s consider how someone becomes a judge. At the federal level, they are appointed and then go through a confirmation process. At other levels, they are elected. What about outside of the realm of law? How about judges in competitions? The judge is expected to have some valued experience and a demonstrated ability to reason regarding the relevant phenomena of the arena. This differs from arena to arena. A judge in figure skating understands figure skating very well. But a judge in the court understands the law and its procedures, not necessarily every kind of case that appears before them. A criminal judge need not be an expert in crime, but in the laws and legal procedures pertinent to crime. This distinction is the difference between judging performance versus judging on the basis of procedures, principles, and precedents. I propose that whether in sports, legal matters, or other competitive situations, judges exist in arenas that are fundamentally non-volley. And I mean this in the literal and figurative senses.
A non-volley situation at the literal level does not contain the fundamentally intuitive nature of volley sports. Let’s suppose you are watching a game of volley ball and you’ve never seen this sport or any other volley sport before. How much would you need to be told to figure out what’s going on? If you were told nothing, you might at first think that the goal of the game was to keep the volley going. But after a few points, after a few disappointed expressions from the losing side, and after a few victorious mini-celebrations from the scoring side (and corresponding reactions from the audience) you would understand enough of the game to continue watching. Some of the smaller details of how the game works (those arbitrary add-ons about the fact that serving is different, or how scoring works) might enhance your experience of watching the game. But they are not necessary to the fundamental experience of understand what is going on. Volley sports need no judges. They might involve a referee, a decider for various rules or calling certain moments that are not easy to discern. But you will never have a judge fundamentally decide who the winner is the way you would in judgment sports.
Figure skating is a judgment sport primarily because it is a turn-taking sport. I am not on the ice at the same time as my competitor. If my competitor is a professional and I am an amateur, they may only need to score a 4.5 to beat me. But why would they only want to score a 4.5? In judgment sports it would be absurd to have such a stratified competition. The better competitor would basically be faced with two possibilities, both of which are doomed: either perform just well enough to win (which would be far below normal capacity), or perform at normal capacity thereby illustrating the absurdity of the match in the first place.
This particular kind of turn-taking sport is also non-interactive and, for most observable features of reality, non-causal. In other words, if my opponent goes before me and gets a perfect score, that does not have an effect on what I do in an absolute sense. It might psychologically affect me. But it is not the same as an opponent returning the ball to me over the net. Baseball is turn-taking equivocally. Opposing teams swap roles. And the opposing teams are always interactive. This is also a turn-taking sport where the interaction is causal. I hit a grounder towards left field. You rush to get it in time to get the player out who is “forced” to second base. I make it safely to first because your side couldn’t make both plays. In baseball, and in all interactive sports, there is a need for someone with judgment capacities. The referee is there to make occasional calls and to enforce rules that, to most, are obscure. But these referees are not judges. They are not calling the entire game at all times. The interactivity renders the judge unnecessary.
But a judgment sport is not interactive. A volley sport, on the other hand, requires a contradictory cooperation. You and I create a back and forth because of two complementary and contrasting wants: the want to win, and the want to sustain the gameplay.
When I am returning the tennis ball to you, there are two things in my mind: to make sure that I at least return it, and to hopefully return it in a way whereby you cannot. If I am too frequently over-concerned with mere return, then maybe you’re too good for me to be playing. The opposite is true if I am frequently certain that you will not return.
In a mismatched volley, a conscious adjustment has to be made on the part of the better-skilled player. The lesser-skilled player just has to play to their optimal performance. In this case, the play, the volley, becomes central. We can look on as outside evaluators, as judges. But such a looking-on will only be peripheral to the actual doing. The better player, in this instance, becomes like a judge by leveling their play down to their opponent’s. My father teaching me to play chess in “Consider the Volley:” he took on the judge role as the better player.
By taking on the judge role as the better player, you are also becoming like a coach. Realizing that you could actually win, you place the continuity of play above winning. But, in so doing, you are giving your lesser opponent a unique opportunity to constantly play at their pique level. Playing easily enough so that the opponent can stand a chance while pushing the challenge so that they’re always on the edge of defeat elevates you from player to educator. You have left the domain of trying to win this game and entered the realm of bettering the overall play of the game as it exists.
Coaches are kinds of educators. In order to be a coach, some ability to judge in that realm is necessary. But the role of the coach goes far beyond the role of judge, of decision-maker. A coach must articulate—in language—so much that is difficult to describe. A coach must see the player’s current state of being and next possible state of being better than the player can. Coaches have better sight into the sport. But here’s the interesting thing: they might not necessarily be better at playing. The experience required to be a coach often ages the coach out of their optimal skill.
Many coaches arrive at the state of coach-hood at a point in their lives when their conceptual ability in the sport (the ability to understand the problems, solutions, the ways and means of confronting the issues in the sport) far outranks their actual playing ability. It’s a strange thing about sports to realize that the accumulation of strategic expertise often arrives long after the window of peak performance. But it suggests that strategic insight in the play of a sport (and possibly things other than sports) is not necessarily demonstrable in one’s current abilities.
This is a compelling situation, a wonderful valley in the landscape of reality. But it could be easily taken to mean its opposite: that not doing something extraordinarily well is a prerequisite to being able to pontificate and advise on it. To be sure, great coaches at least had, at one time, professional-level abilities in whatever they are coaching. And it is simultaneously the case that one might rise to a mid-range level in their playing career but become an outstanding coach. In short, the ability to do the thing you are coaching does precede the coaching. But it does not necessarily correlate in ability and it certainly does not need to exist simultaneously.
This reversal of reasoning is different. It is the idea that in all things, the conceptual and the application are separate. And therefore, anyone can advance in either realm regarding a particular activity. Of course, anything is possible and human reasoning and imagination are powerful suppliers of advancement. It is certainly possible that I (someone who is not a good cook) might be able to imagine and reason my way into being a great advisor, a great coach, on the art of cooking. That possibility is dim.
The ability to dole out “here’s how to do it,” is far different from what I am doing as an essayist. As an essayist, I use whatever is in the environment of my thought in order to arrive at a conceptual quagmire, in order to elucidate, question, leave you baffled. I don’t need deep experience playing volley sports in order to use them as central placeholders to illustrate a concept. I’m not advising you on how to play the game. But if I were to try such a thing, I’d be going beyond the reasonable bounds of being an essayist.
In the next essay, “Stop the celebrity hegemony,” I’ll refer back to this reversal as an important mistake. (the belief in the all-purpose sage, embodied in the celebrity). In short, just because they can write songs and sing, or act in films and shows, does not mean they have good ideas about politics or how to live life.
And therefore we have bigger questions to ask. To whom do we give credence? Who can tell us about the things we do? Can I not do the thing and advise on it?
But credence is connected to the very things we’re talking about. Who has the authority to talk about “how to” is also connected to how we define the parameters of precisely what the activity is in the first place. Is the volley only what happens during the volley? Or does it include what leads up to and follows the volley? Replace “volley” with any other activity. Where does any activity begin and end? What are its parameters?
The coach and the judge are societal roles that legitimize interesting quagmires about the differences between doing and thinking, between strategizing and playing. The mere existence of these roles ought to remind us of the fact that even if we are very good at doing something, we might not fully comprehend every aspect of why we’re good and what exactly we are doing.
More broadly, the existence of the coach and the judge roles demonstrates that we are capable of making sense of things that are out of the bounds of our current doing. Coaches and judges can make better sense of what is happening (or has happened) without engaging in the happenings. The existence of these roles also illustrates our reliance on and reverence for people who take on the role of explainers, of sense makers for things they are not currently doing. So we make sense of things after a long career of doing those things at a point in our lives when we no longer have the same capacity to do those things (coaches). And we make sense of things in a conceptually procedural and theoretical way applicable to limitless possibilities that we never need to participate in (judges). And we make sense of things by relying on such commandeers of sensibility.