Hi-Ho

There was a teacher at my university who literally changed the course of my life. I don't want to go into the details, because this is already going to be a long post, but I can say that she was responsible for giving me a sense of self-worth and value such that I was able to achieve things which I am sure I would not have otherwise achieved. The path she helped me find my way onto lead to the life I have now and it is a life that I believe has been extraordinary in many ways. Most of all, I'm certain that I never would have found or had the relationship with my husband that I have without her influence because the person I was before she came into my life could never have acted in a way that would have secured a partnership with such an extraordinary person.

Today, I was searching for this professor's phone number and e-mail address so that I could use her as a reference on a volunteer application. I don't have many American contacts after having lived in Japan for over two decades so I had to dig deep into the past to locate people who could vouch for me. During my search for this information, I stumbled across a site devoted to student ratings of teachers at my alma mater. I'd like to say that I was stunned that she was the lowest rated professor in the psychology department, but I am not shocked at all.

The reason that this bad rating didn't surprise me was that people were whining about her teaching even back when I was taking her classes from 1984-1986. Her classes were tough and her assignments demanding. However, she worked hard and was an excellent teacher. I remembered things that I learned from her nearly 20 years ago because what she required actually educated me rather than required me to regurgitate for tests and then forget.

The main problem with her classes beyond the fact that she made you work and prove that you had learned things was that she operated from the mindset of a very smart person and she had a quirky personality. It is very difficult for people who are quite intelligent to operate in a manner that conveys information clearly to people who are less educated than themselves. It doesn't help that she is a professor who is married to another professor and they both are very clever people.

I have learned from personal experience that two intellectuals cohabitating and communicating on a regular basis tends to only heighten the disparity between the level of  their discourse and that of those around them. In fact, it is an issue that my husband and I are battling in our lives at present. We are both very smart people who read a lot, have an interest in expanding our knowledge, and talk to each other frequently about what we learn and believe. Our level of discourse can get very lofty and removed from that of other people. We have to make an effort to operate at a simpler level for those who are younger, less educated, and less experienced in this sort of talking. There is a risk that we will be incomprehensible at best, and considered snobbish and intentionally talking above others at worst.

Fortunately, both my husband and I were language teachers in Japan and we know how to find the listeners level, provided that the level is clear. I've made the mistake of talking to his former graduate school acquaintances as if they were people who actually learned something at a post-graduate level. Most of them did not really study much and the academic rigor of his graduate school was on the laughable side. That's my way of saying that they couldn't understand me or him when we talked about the sort of things they should have learned in the classes they shared.

At any rate, I think that my former professor, and her husband who also works at the same university, may lack the ability to modulate the level of their discourse and that is, at least in part, a reason for the complaints of their students. That's only a piece of it, however. The larger bit of it is that the students are lazy, dim, or just taking the class to get credit and therefore lacking in commitment. I do not consider myself a genius (and I'd bet my I.Q. wouldn't test at super high levels), but I did very well in her classes because I attended all of them, paid attention, read the books, and wrote the papers slowly rather than trying to rush them at the last minute. I am aware, however, that not everyone who takes a class was willing or able to devote the attention required.

After reading the reviews of my former teacher and her husband - reviews which ranked them as 2.5 and 2.6 out of 5 respectively - I wondered more about something which has been on my mind in the last few years because of the way things have been for my husband and me. There is a book called Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut which is about two genius twins who everyone thinks are mentally disabled in some fashion. They speak in their own language and come across as utterly stupid to everyone, but they communicate with one another at a high level which others simply cannot access.

In the book, Vonnegut frequently punctuates his paragraphs with the words "hi-ho". I've thought of that book as my husband and I have grown more and more incomprehensible to others. I've considered that we are becoming more and more like the twins in his story all of the time. We spend so much time together and operate at a specific level discussing atypical topics that we continue to move further and further away from others. We are not trying to do so. It just so happens that this is what we enjoy. It is where we are at now in our lives and we just keep getting further along in our intellectual interests. The problem is that there is no going back to simplicity once you've found complexity.

I wonder if my former teacher and her husband with their bad ratings and student complaints about how they don't communicate what they want clearly are in the same boat and don't even know it. Are they also moving further away because their association with one another is carrying them further afield? I cannot know for certain, but I do know that people develop their own language when they spend most of their time together. It doesn't have to be a series of incomprehensible grunts and sounds like the twins in Vonnegut's story. Sometimes it can be topics and vocabulary that are lofty and specialized that get used so frequently between partners that they seem mundane, but are actually very far removed from the average discourse of people in the world at large. I guess I will never know.

Hi-ho.