تمرین سوم

THE THIRD PRACTICE

Giving an A

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF Southern California, a leadership course was taught each year to fifty of the most outstanding students out of twenty-seven thousand in the school, hand-picked by each department. At the end of the semester, the grader for the course was instructed to give one-third of the students A’s, one-third B’s and one-third C’s—even though the work of any member of this class was likely to surpass that of any other student in the university. Imagine the blow to the morale of the eager and hardworking student who received the requisite C.

Not just in this case, but in most cases, grades say little about the work done. When you reflect to a student that he has misconstrued a concept or has taken a false step in a math problem, you are indicating something real about his performance, but when you give him a B+, you are saying nothing at all about his mastery of the material, you are only matching him up against other students. Most would recognize at core that the main purpose of grades is to compare one student against another. Most people are also aware that competition puts a strain on friendships and too often consigns students to a solitary journey.

Michelangelo is often quoted as having said that inside every block of stone or marble dwells a beautiful statue; one need only remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within. If we were to apply this visionary concept to education, it would be pointless to compare one child to another. Instead, all the energy would be focused on chipping away at the stone, getting rid of whatever is in the way of each child’s developing skills, mastery, and self-expression.

We call this practice giving an A. It is an enlivening way of approaching people that promises to transform you as well as them. It is a shift in attitude that makes it possible for you to speak freely about your own thoughts and feelings while, at the same time, you support others to be all they dream of being. The practice of giving an A transports your relationships from the world of measurement into the universe of possibility.

An A can be given to anyone in any walk of life—to a waitress, to your employer, to your mother-in-law, to the members of the opposite team, and to the other drivers in traffic. When you give an A, you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves. Your eye is on the statue within the roughness of the uncut stone.

This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.

BRIGHT FUTURES

Thirty graduate students are gathered at the New England Conservatory for the first class of the year on a Friday afternoon in September. The students, all instrumentalists and singers, are about to undertake a two-semester exploration into the art of musical performance, including the psychological and emotional factors that can stand in the way of great music-making. I promise them that if they attend my Interpretation class regularly and apply themselves to mastering the distinctions that are put forward in the course, they will make major breakthroughs both in their music-making and in their lives.

Yet, after twenty-five years of teaching, I still came up against the same obstacle. Class after class, the students would be in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance that they would be reluctant to take risks with their playing. One evening I settled down with Roz to see if we could think of something that would dispel their anticipation of failure.

What would happen if one were to hand an A to every student from the start?

Roz and I predicted that abolishing grades altogether would only make matters worse, even if the Conservatory could be persuaded to support such a plan. The students would feel cheated of the opportunity for stardom and would still be focused on their place in the lineup. So we came up with the idea of giving them all the only grade that would put them at ease, not as a measurement tool, but as an instrument to open them up to possibility.

“Each student in this class will get an A for the course,” I announce. “However, there is one requirement that you must fulfill to earn this grade: Sometime during the next two weeks, you must write me a letter dated next May, which begins with the words, ‘Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because …,’ and in this letter you are to tell, in as much detail as you can, the story of what will have happened to you by next May that is in line with this extraordinary grade.” In writing their letters, I say to them, they are to place themselves in the future, looking back, and to report on all the insights they acquired and milestones they attained during the year as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as “I hope,” “I intend,” or “I will” must not appear. The students may, if they wish, mention specific goals reached or competitions won. “But, “ I tell them, “I am especially interested in the person you will have become by next May. I am interested in the attitude, feelings, and worldview of that person who will have done all she wished to do or become everything he wanted to be.” I tell them I want them to fall passionately in love with the person they are describing in their letter.

Here is one letter from a young trombonist who took that instruction to heart and discovered the poetry of self-invention.

Thursday 15 May, nighttime

Dear Mr. Z

Today the world knows me. That drive of energy and intense emotion that you saw twisting and dormant inside me, yet, alas, I could not show in performance or conversation, was freed tonight in a program of new music composed for me… . The concert ended and no one stirred. A pregnant quiet. Sighs: and then applause that drowned my heart’s throbbing.

I might have bowed—I cannot remember now. The clapping sustained such that I thought I might make my debut complete and celebrate the shedding of the mask and skin

that I had constructed

to hide within,

by improvising on my own melody as an

encore—unaccompanied. What followed is

something of a blur. I forgot technique,

pretension, tradition, schooling, history—

truly even the audience.

What came from my trombone

I wholly believe, was my own

Voice.

Laughter, smiles,

a frown, weeping

Tuckerspirit

did sing.

Tucker Dulin

And here is another one of the A letters written by a young Korean flute player who entered wholeheartedly into the game, capturing perfectly its playfulness, while addressing in the process some of the most serious issues facing performers in a culture of measurement and competition.

Next May

Dearest Teacher Mr. Zander;

I received my grade A because I worked hard and thought hard about myself taking your class, and the result was absolutely tremendous. I became a new person. I used to be so negative person for almost everything even before trying. Now I find myself happier person than before. I couldn’t accept my mistakes about a year ago, and after every mistake I blamed myself, but now, I enjoy making mistakes and I really learn from these mistakes. In my playing I have more depth than before. I used to play just notes, but, now, I found out about the real meaning of every pieces, and I could play with more imagination. Also I found out my value. I found myself so special person, because I found out that if I believe myself I can do everything. Thank you for all the lessons and lectures because that made me realize how important person I am and also the clear reason why I play music. Thank you, Sincerely, Esther Lee

In this letter, the young performer focuses her gaze on the person she wants to be, momentarily silencing the voice in her head that tells her that she will fail. She emerges like the graceful statue from within Michelangelo’s marble block. The person that I teach each Friday afternoon is the person described in the letter. The student reveals her true self and also identifies much of the stone that blocks her expression. Chipping away at the stone that encases her becomes our task in the class. Our job is to remove the extraneous debris that stands between her and her expression in the world.

Next May

Dear Mr. Zander,

I got my A because I had the courage to examine my fears and I realized that they have no place in my life. I changed from someone who was scared to make a mistake in case she was noticed to someone who knows that she has a contribution to make to other people, musically and personally…. Thus all diffidence and lack of belief in myself are gone. So too is the belief that I only exist as a reflection in other people’s eyes and the resulting desire to please everyone…. I understand that trying and achieving are the same thing when you are your own master—and I am.

I have found a desire to convey music to other people, which is stronger than the worries I had about myself. I have changed from desiring inconsequentiality and anonymity to accepting the joy that comes from knowing that my music changes the world.

— Giselle Hillyer

Small wonder that I approach each class with the greatest eagerness, for this is a class consisting entirely of A students and what is more delightful than spending an afternoon among the stars? Most members of the class share this experience, and some even report that as they walk down the corridor toward the classroom each Friday afternoon, the clouds of anxiety and despair that frequently shadow a hothouse American music academy perceptibly lift.

When I come to your class, Ben, I feel the glow coming as I walk down the corridor, and by the time I’ve arrived—I’ve arrived happy and excited and ready to go.

— Carina

We in the music profession train young musicians with utmost care from early childhood, urging them to achieve extraordinary technical mastery and encouraging them to develop good practice habits and performance values. We support them to attend fine summer programs and travel abroad to gain firsthand experience of different cultures, and then, after all this, we throw them into a maelstrom of competition, survival, backbiting, subservience, and status seeking. And from this arena we expect them to perform the great works of the musical literature that call upon, among other things, warmth, nobility, playfulness, generosity, reverence, sensitivity, and love!

It is dangerous to have our musicians so obsessed with competition because they will find it difficult to take the necessary risks with themselves to be great performers. The art of music, since it can only be conveyed through its interpreters, depends on expressive performance for its lifeblood. Yet it is only when we make mistakes in performance that we can really begin to notice what needs attention. In fact, I actively train my students that when they make a mistake, they are to lift their arms in the air, smile, and say, “How fascinating!” I recommend that everyone try this.

Not only mistakes, but even those experiences we ordinarily define as “negative” can be treated in this way. For instance, I once had a distraught young tenor ask to speak to me after class. He told me he’d lost his girlfriend and was in such despair that he was almost unable to function. I consoled him, but the teacher in me was secretly delighted. Now he would be able to fully express the heartrending passion of the song in Schubert’s Die Winterreise about the loss of the beloved. That song had completely eluded him the previous week because up to then, the only object of affection he had ever lost was a pet goldfish.

My teacher, the great cellist Gaspar Cassado, used to say to us as students, “I’m so sorry for you; your lives have been so easy. You can’t play great music unless your heart’s been broken.” Dear Mr. Zander,

I got my “A” because I became a great gardener to build my own garden of life. Till last year I was intimidated, judgmental, negative, lonely, lost, no energy to do what-so-ever, loveless, spiritless, hopeless, emotionless … endless. What I thought so miserably was actually what really made me to become what I am today, who loves myself, therefore music, life, people, my work, and even miseries. I love my weeds as much as my unblossomed roses. I can’t wait for tomorrow because I’m in love with today, hard work, and reward … what can be better?

Sincerely, Soyan Kim

THE SECRET OF LIFE

A few weeks into the first year of the giving the A experiment, I asked the class how it had felt to them to start the semester off with an A, before they had had to prove themselves in any way. To my surprise, a Taiwanese student put up his hand. Apart from a natural diffidence to speak up in a foreign language, it is rare for students from Asia, often among our most accomplished performers, to volunteer to speak in class. A few of the Asian students have tried to explain to me why this is so. In some Asian cultures, a high premium is traditionally put on being right. The teacher is always right, and the best way for students to avoid being wrong is not to say anything at all. So when this young student raised up his hand quite enthusiastically, of course I called on him.

“In Taiwan,” he explained,

I was Number 68 out of 70 student. I come to Boston and Mr. Zander says I am an A. Very confusing. I walk about, three weeks, very confused. I am Number 68, but Mr. Zander says I am an A student … I am Number 68, but Mr. Zander says I am an A. One day I discover much happier A than Number 68. So I decide I am an A.

This student, in a brilliant flash, had hit upon the “secret of life.” He had realized that it’s all invented, it’s all a game. The Number 68 is invented and the A is invented, so we might as well choose to invent something that brightens our life and the lives of the people around us.

OFTEN PEOPLE ARE quite uncomfortable with the idea of granting the unearned A because it seems to deny the actual differences between one person’s accomplishments and another’s. We are not suggesting that people be blind to accomplishment. Nobody wants to hear a violinist who cannot play the notes or to be treated by a doctor who has not passed the course. Standards can help us by defining the range of knowledge a student must master to be competent in his field.

It is not in the context of measuring people’s performance against standards that we propose giving the A, despite the reference to measurement the A implies. We give the A to finesse the stranglehold of judgment that grades have over our consciousness from our earliest days. The A is an invention that creates possibility for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.

The practice of giving the A allows the teacher to line up with her students in their efforts to produce the outcome, rather than lining up with the standards against these students. In the first instance, the instructor and the student, or the manager and the employee, become a team for accomplishing the possible; in the second, the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.

One of the complications of working with standards is that those in charge—be they teachers, school systems, CEOs, or management teams—often fall into the trap of identifying their own agendas with the standards. How often in a business situation does a manager find himself at his wit’s end when he discovers that work has not been done by others the way he would have done it himself? A common response is to deliver the ultimatum, whether explicitly or implicitly, “Do it the right way—my way.” Not only does this latter message tend to squelch innovation and creativity, but it also trains students and employees to focus solely on what they need to do to please their teachers or their bosses, and on how much they can get away with. The mentor’s disappointment with a student whose style and interests vary from her own is often what is measured in the grade she gives. Instead of providing real information to a student on his learning, it tells him by how much, in the eyes of the authority, he has fallen short.

THE SENIOR PAPER

ROZ: As a high school student I clashed with my English Literature teacher in just this way over our senior project, a semester-long comprehensive study of one author’s work. I was notorious for leaving papers and assignments until the very last minute, and this one was no exception. I had decided to write about Nathaniel Hawthorne; then, after reading most of his work, I changed my mind. It was only two or three weeks before the paper was due that I decided firmly on Thomas Hardy. I worked through the whole of the final night under what was for me a happy mixture of intense pressure and focused interest, and at school the next day I spent every free moment typing feverishly in the senior room. Predictably, at ten minutes to five, I submitted the completed draft to our teacher, receiving, like water off a duck’s back, the requisite lecture on the folly of my organizational methods. The papers were to be graded by an outside reader, a teacher from another school who was unfamiliar with the students in our class.

For two weeks, the class awaited the results of our efforts with trepidation. Finally, the papers came back. Our teacher handed them out one by one, smiling at each student encouragingly. But when she came to me her expression was strained and unhappy. My anxiety shot up. In dread, I turned the paper over to see the comments on the back, but there, in soft dark pencil at the top of the page was a bold A. The reader praised the composition’s ideas, organization, writing style, and grammar.

Our classroom teacher had a different agenda, presumably that students must learn to do their work at a certain pace, with certain preparatory documents. She said to me later, “I was very disappointed that you got such a high grade. I was hoping you would do badly so that you would learn a lesson about preparation.” I felt as though I were being exiled from the sunny schoolyard where I had long played so enthusiastically. I began to defend my last-minute work style and to attach pride to habits that up to that point I had felt were simply a matter of personal style.

In retrospect, I am sure that my English teacher had my best interests at heart. She was probably worried that when things became tougher I would lack the skills to succeed. And she must have predicted that the A would validate my style, keeping me from ever trying a different approach. Yet, imagine if she had reacted to my A by giving me a “high five,” and had invited me into a game: to try my hand at an outline well in advance of the due date of the next assignment, just to see if it would help me do an even better job. I know I would have agreed to play. By stepping down and meeting me in such an engaging and imaginative way, my teacher would have recovered the leadership role in my education. In our vocabulary, she would have given me an A, and, in the process, gained one for herself.

IN THE REALM of possibility, the literal or figurative giving of the A aligns teacher with student, manager with employee, and makes striving for a goal an enlivening game. Within the game, a standard becomes a marker that gives the pair direction. If the student hits the mark, the team is on course; if not, well, “How fascinating!” The instructor does not personally identify with the standard; nor does the student identify personally with the results of the game. Since the teacher’s job is to help her students chip away at the barriers that block their abilities and expression, she aligns herself with the students to whom she has given an A, and lets the standards maintain themselves.

THE A BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER UNDER A COMMON PURPOSE

Even in a symphony orchestra, where the conductor and the hundred players have something collective at stake—namely a great performance—standards can wreak havoc. Not every conductor is capable of moving beyond his own agenda and his own prejudices to see how he supports or undermines the players’ performance. Just before the oboist puts her reed to her lips for her big solo, she looks up at the conductor, and along with information about tempo, phrasing, shape, rhythm, color, and the character of the music, comes a message that includes a grade—and that, as much as anything else, will determine how she plays.

The freely granted A expresses a vision of partnership, teamwork, and relationship. It is for wholeness and functionality, in the awareness that for each of us, excess stone may still hide the graceful form within.

In the absence of a vision, we are each driven by our own agenda, finding people whose interests match ours, and inattentive to those with whom we appear to have little in common. We automatically judge our players, workers, and loved ones against our standards, inadvertently pulling the wind from their sails. But with our new practice of granting an ongoing A in all our relationships, we can align ourselves with others, because that A declares and sustains a life-enhancing partnership.

TANYA’S BOW

BEN: Throughout the rehearsal process of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, I had been aware that one of the violinists had been sitting in an overly relaxed, almost slouched position. By the time of the dress rehearsal, her posture, still unchanged, was in noticeable contrast to the other players, who were now fired up and physically demonstrative. Although her playing was completely professional, the gut-wrenching intensity of Mahler’s final testament made her indifferent manner, dispiriting in any performance, seem particularly incongruous in this one.

At the end of the rehearsal, I went up to her and asked whether anything was amiss. Her response surprised me. “Are these your bowings?” she inquired. When I told her that these were the bowings we had used in our last performance in Boston, she commented, “The music goes too fast for all these bow changes. I just cannot get into the string.” Since I know how difficult it is to apply a fast-moving bow to the string with enough pressure to make a big sound, I suggested that perhaps we should take a slower tempo. But she was taken aback. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she remonstrated, “you should perform it the way you feel it. But you did ask.” This was a revelation to me. A player’s outward demeanor, her whole physical appearance, even her mood, were connected to her comfort with the bowings! One should remember that the conductor of the orchestra is not actually playing the music, however attuned he or she is to each instrument—and as a string player, I consider myself particularly sensitive to the physical motions of the bow. However, in my eternal quest to find the right tempo for the music, in my desire to reveal the aching, arching long lines and the turbulent frenzy of Mahler’s expression, I had probably been led to move the tempo somewhat faster, thereby sacrificing the player’s vital kinesthetic relationship of bow to string. The cost was the discomfort and finally the resignation of a valued member of the violin section of one of the world’s greatest orchestras. That was too high a price.

My usual routine on the day of a concert is to go to my room after the morning’s rehearsal and take a long sleep, then shower, eat two English muffins and a scrambled egg with some nice strong English tea, and return to the hall to give my customary preconcert talk. This time, however, it all changed. I went back to my hotel room and spent the afternoon with Mahler’s score, imagining how it would feel to play each passage on the violin. It was obviously not all too fast. Maybe this passage? Maybe that one? At the concert that evening, I slightly broadened each of the passages that I had decided might have presented a problem for Tanya’s bow.

During the performance, I frequently glanced in her direction, and there in her seat was an impassioned, unabashedly demonstrative player totally enraptured by the music. Although we would have played a more than respectable performance without the full participation of Tanya, the engagement of that extra 1 percent caused a disproportionate breakthrough because once she and I were in relationship, I too could be fully present. When I had been viewing her as an unimportant casualty, I had to pretend it did not matter that for some reason she was not engaged. Meanwhile, I wasted energy both watching and ignoring her.

After the concert Tanya was nowhere to be found, but a few weeks later I decided to track her down to thank her for the lastminute coaching that had helped us give such a stirring and satisfying performance. I obtained her phone number from the Philharmonia office and called one morning from Boston to the London suburb where she lived.

Tanya seemed audibly shaken when I identified myself. She confessed that she had never received a call from a conductor at home before. She responded with delight as I expressed my deep gratitude for her contribution to our performance of Mahler’s Ninth. It emerged that Mahler was her favorite composer, that she was passionate about all his work, and that the performance we had done together was one of the high points of her musical life.

The lesson I learned is that the player who looks least engaged may be the most committed member of the group. A cynic, after all, is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again. Tanya, the Mahlerian par excellence, had decided to “sit out” that performance because it was going to disappoint her again. I learned from Tanya that the secret is not to speak to a person’s cynicism, but to speak to her passion.

When I initially approached Tanya—not to reprimand a recalcitrant member of the team for not pulling her weight, but rather with the attitude, the certain knowledge, that she loved the music, that she wanted the concert to be a success, that she wanted to “get into the string” with her bow—I gave her an A. My question to her, “Is there anything amiss?” was a question to someone I imagined to be completely committed to the project we were engaged in together, someone who, for whatever reason, was having a hard time.

When I returned to the Philharmonia the next season, Tanya greeted me enthusiastically. As a result of my experience with this violinist, it seemed that I had a warmer relationship with all the players there. During the break at one of the rehearsals of Mahler’s Second, after we had been working on the subtly lilting, Viennesewaltz-like second movement, I slipped into the chair beside my new friend. “A tiny bit slow, don’t you think?” she murmured.

THE PRACTICE OF giving the A both invents and recognizes a universal desire in people to contribute to others, no matter how many barriers there are to its expression. We can choose to validate the apathy of a boss, a player, or a high school student and become resigned ourselves, or we can choose to honor in them an unfulfilled yearning to make a difference. How often, for instance, do we see teenagers slumped into that same resigned position in which Tanya sat through those rehearsals? How differently would we understand and speak with them were we to hand them permanent, unqualified A’s, without denying anything that happens in our dealings with them? Starting from the conviction that adolescents are looking for an arena in which to make an authentic contribution to the family and to the community, the first thing we would notice is how few meaningful roles are available for young people to fill. Then we might see how, in the absence of a purpose greater than themselves, adolescents retreat to the sidelines as though their existence were inconsequential.

SECOND FIDDLE-ITIS: THE HABIT OF THINKING YOU MAKE NO DIFFERENCE

BEN: After the initial discussion and excitement over the A subsides, I predict to the students in my Friday class that it will not be long before a voice in their heads will whisper something along these lines: Why should I bother to go to class today? I already have my A. And I’ve got so much to do; I really need to practice on my own. Anyway, it’s such a large class, he probably won’t even notice.

I tell the students that this is the first symptom of a widespread disease called “second fiddle-itis,” popularly known as “playing second fiddle.” People who perceive their role in a group to be of little significance (second violins for example) are particularly vulnerable to its ravages. The string players in an orchestra often see themselves as redundant foot soldiers, virtual cannon fodder for the egotistical whim of the conductor. Many other players, after all, duplicate their part. This is not true for the lead trumpet or the main wind players, who are soloists within the orchestra.

A string player just entering a new position in an orchestra will often start off with great enthusiasm, take his part home at night, and continue to do careful and regular practice in his spare time. However, when it begins to dawn on him that his stand partner stopped practicing years ago and that the conductor does not seem to care or even to hear when players are out of tune, he too quickly begins to show signs of the onset of the disease.

A first oboist, on the other hand, is unlikely to give up making reeds or to miss a rehearsal. It is simply too noticeable. In all my years of conducting, I do not believe I have ever known a first oboe to be late for a rehearsal. Is it because the oboe has to be there at the beginning to tune everyone to the A?

“So,” I tell the class, “the next time you hear the little second-violin melody in your head that says, ‘I’m not going to class because I’m too tired,’ or ‘I have too much to do, and I know it won’t make any difference anyway’—remember that you are an A student. An A student is a leading player in any class, an integral voice, and the class cannot make its music without that voice.” Once, in Spain, I saw a big sign outside a little shop. It read:

ALVAREZ

Shoemaker

and

Lessons in

Second Violin

I found myself hoping that Alvarez’s great humility did not irrevocably limit the aspirations of his students.

However, when I myself had the privilege of playing string quartets with Robert Koff, the founding second violinist of the Julliard String Quartet, I came away convinced that the real leader of the string quartet is the second violin. Not because Koff dominated the rest of us, but because in his part he had all the inner rhythms and harmonies, and he gave them such clarity and authority that we were all tremendously influenced by his playing. He was leading us from the “seconds.” In a truly great string quartet, all four players are doing that simultaneously.

ROZ: One year, part way into the second semester, Ben asked me to teach his graduate class at the Conservatory while he was conducting in Europe. The students were always interested in learning new techniques for dealing with stage nerves, and he felt I had something important to offer them on that subject.

However, as I was driving to the Conservatory, I was dismayed to find that I was the one who was unaccountably nervous. My thoughts flew with horror to the next two hours: I pictured myself in front of the class, white-faced and shaken, while we discussed the students’ performance anxiety. This was likely to be completely humiliating.

The first thing I did was attempt to manage the fear: I instructed myself to “stay with the emotion,” an idea that proved singularly unhelpful. Then I berated myself for not being able to handle my own anxiety.

It did not occur to me to look to see what grade I was giving the graduate students I was about to address.

When I stepped in front of the class, I was still intensely anxious and self-absorbed, but as I started to speak, things shifted. “I’m thrilled to be here,” I said (a lie in transition toward the truth), “because … (I didn’t yet know what I was going to say) … because you are a group of artists … and I couldn’t possibly have a better audience for a discussion of a subject in which I have a passionate interest: creativity.” And suddenly it was all true. Once I had given my audience an A and invented them as colleagues, they were precisely the people with whom I wanted to converse, and I was exactly where I wanted to be. If we really do have the choice of saying who is in the class we are teaching, or the orchestra we are conducting, or the group we are managing, why would we ever define them as people we cannot effectively and enjoyably work with?

Time flew as this A class invented stories to live and work by, stories that enhanced their passion and creativity. The answer to the mystery of stage nerves turned out to be the same as the secret of life: it’s all a matter of invention.

GIVING AN A is a fundamental, paradigmatic shift toward the realization that it is all invented—the A is invented and the Number 68 is invented, and so are all the judgments in between. Some readers might conclude that our practice is merely an exercise in “putting a positive spin” on a negative opinion, or “thinking the best of someone,” and “letting bygones be bygones.” But that is not it at all. No behavior of the person to whom you assign an A need be whitewashed by that grade, and no action is so bad that behind it you cannot recognize a human being to whom you can speak the truth. You can grant the proverbial ax murderer an A by addressing him as a person who knows he has forfeited his humanity and lost all control, and you can give your sullen, lazy, secretive teenager an A, and she will still at that moment be sleeping the morning away. When she awakes, however, the conversation between you and her will go a little differently because she will have become for you a person whose true nature is to participate—however blocked she may be. And you will know you are communicating with her, even if you see that she is tongue-tied or too confused to answer you just then.

When we give an A we can be open to a perspective different from our own. For after all, it is only to a person to whom you have granted an A that you will really listen, and it is in that rare instance when you have ears for another person that you can truly appreciate a fresh point of view.

In the measured context of our everyday lives, the grades we hand out often rise and fall with our moods and opinions. We may disagree with someone on one issue, lower their grade, and never quite hear what they have to say again. Each time the grade is altered, the new assessment, like a box, defines the limits of what is possible between us.

MAHLER AND KATRINE

BEN: A member of my orchestra demonstrated the miracles that can happen when you drop all your limiting assumptions about a child’s interests and understanding, without applying expectations of any kind.

The Boston Philharmonic had scheduled a fall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and because of the extraordinary difficulty of the music I decided to send a tape of the piece out to every member of the orchestra, so they could get to know it over the summer. One of our violinists, Anne Hooper, took the tape with her to an island off the coast of Maine, where she was visiting with her family, and played it on her boom box.

Her five-year-old niece, Katrine, stopped to listen for a while, and then asked, “Auntie Anne, what is this music about?” Anne set out to weave a wondrous tale for the little girl, telling her a story about a wild and fearsome dragon and a beautiful princess who is locked up in a castle. For the duration of the ninety-minute symphony, Anne spun her tale of the princess and her handsome prince.

The following day, little Katrine asked to hear the music about the beautiful princess again. So once again Anne put on the tape and let it run its course, only occasionally reminding Katrine of her invented story line.

When the piece was playing for the third time at Katrine’s request, about halfway through she asked, “Auntie Anne, what is this music really about?” Anne regarded her five-year-old niece with astonishment, and then began to tell her the true story of Mahler—how sad his life was, how he’d lost seven brothers and sisters from sickness during his childhood so that the coffin became a regular piece of furniture in his house. She told Katrine how cruel his alcoholic father had been to him, and how frightened his invalid mother. She told her that Mahler’s little daughter had died at the age of four, that he never really got over that loss, and that he’d been forced to quit his important job at the famous Opera House in Vienna because he was Jewish. “And then, just before he wrote this symphony,” Anne said, “Mahler was told by his doctor that he had a weak heart and only a very short time to live. So now, Mahler was really saying good-bye to everything and looking back over his life. That is why so much of the music is so sad and why at the end of the piece it dies out to nothing—it’s a description of his death as he imagined it, his final breath.” Anne went on to explain that Mahler wasn’t sad all the time. He was a great lover of nature and a powerful swimmer and he loved to walk. He had a magnificent laugh and a huge love of life, and all this is in the music too, as well as his sadness and anger about his illness and the brutality of his father and the vulnerability of his invalid mother. In fact, Mahler thought that he should put everything in life in his symphonies—so anything that can be imagined can be heard in them if you listen carefully enough.

The next day, Katrine came running up to her aunt and said, “Auntie Anne, Auntie Anne, can we listen to that music about the man again today?” Well they did, and again the next day, and in fact Katrine’s parents told me that she listened to it nearly one hundred times that summer. The following October, the entire family made the four-hour drive from upstate New York to Boston to hear our performance in Jordan Hall. Katrine sat wide-eyed through the whole piece. Later, she wrote me a thank-you note.

art

I carry this note with me everywhere I go. It reminds me how seldom we pay attention to, or even look for, the passionate and the extraordinary in children—how seldom we give children an A.

WHEN HE RETIRED from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was asked of what accomplishment he was most proud. He answered, simply, “That I did the best I could with what I had.” Could there be any greater acknowledgment? He gave himself an A, and within this framework he was free to speak of errors of judgment, of things he would have done differently had he had access to other views.

Giving yourself an A is not about boasting or raising your self-esteem. It has nothing to do with reciting your accomplishments. The freely granted A lifts you off the success/failure ladder and spirits you away from the world of measurement into the universe of possibility. It is a framework that allows you to see all of who you are and be all of who you are, without having to resist or deny any part of yourself.

RECONSTRUCTING OUR PAST

The pathway of the A offers us a profound opportunity to transform our personal histories. It allows us to reevaluate the grades we assigned to others when we were children, grades that affect our lives now, as legends we live by. How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are but assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.

Usually the impetus for transforming your own past will come from a feeling of hopelessness in the present, a sense that you have been through the same frustrating experience time and again. Our analytic powers don’t seem to help, though some of us never weary of exercising them. The people we are involved with seem so fixed in their ways. How can we get them to change? We tend not to notice our own hand in this ill-starred situation, so rarely are we looking in a productive place for the answer. Why not give some attention to the grades we are handing out?

ROZ AND HER FATHER

ROZ: I discovered this some years ago, after a wearyingly familiar argument with my husband, one that left us both irritable and a little desperate. I used the moment, alone with myself, to go down the path of the A, rather than to follow the usual route of reproach and blame. Well-trained to look into the past for the source of current interpretations, I asked myself what grade I’d given the first man in my life, my father, and why. My father had been dead a dozen years, but with his memory came the marks I’d given him.

My parents had separated shortly after my birth, and my contact with my father had been sporadic from then on. He lived with his new wife and child nearby, until I was six or seven years old. My older sister and I would visit him every other week or so, but when he took his new family across the country, our contact dwindled. I waited two years after my sister had gone with him to Florida on a deep-sea fishing adventure to ask him to take me on a solo journey. I was eight. He turned me down. In my teens I tried again, with an unsatisfying outcome: my request resulted in a generic invitation to my sister as well. Not until I was eighteen did I finally get a chance to spend time with my father on my own.

When I was in my twenties, I would visit with him briefly whenever he passed though New York City, en route to some other destination. Things were not working out for him the way he had hoped. He had looked forward to retirement and a life of leisure in Florida, but when it came, it seemed not to have fulfilled its promise. We got the shocking news that he had died suddenly, by his own hand, at the age of sixty-five.

Sitting in an armchair a few years later, I asked myself some basic questions. Do I think he had loved me? No. But, to be fair, how could he have? He hardly knew me. That was the problem, I had always thought, so little one-on-one contact. And what grade had I given him? B–, maybe C. On what basis? Because he hadn’t made the effort to get to know me, his own daughter. He hadn’t known me and he hadn’t loved me. Had he known me, had he taken the time to get to know me, he would have loved me.

Sitting there reflecting on this, I recognized what an appalling premise I had been operating under—though ostensibly so real—that my father had not loved me. I looked to see whether I had brought this assumption to other relationships and found that indeed I had. In fact, I recognized that it was the box that every intimate relationship of mine had come packaged in. And when I felt unloved, had I striven patiently to make known my desires and to be understood and acknowledged? Absolutely, in every case. And always I had been left with a feeling of failure.

Could the practice of giving an A do anything for my father and me? Could it get us out of this box? I would probably have to start with the notion that he had loved me, at least somewhat, but where would I go from there? How would I explain the facts?

Here is how I gave him an A. I said:

He loved me.

“Well,” I told myself, “if I’m willing to say that he loved me, I can grant that he knew me, at least somewhat.” He loved me;

He knew me.

Why then had he not wanted to be with me?

Why had we lost contact?

An answer unfolded from the new premises:

He loved me;

He knew me;

He felt he had nothing to offer me.

Of course. My father was not happy with himself. Who would take himself so thoroughly away from the world, but a person who felt he had nothing of value to offer?

For the first time, tears sprung to my eyes for him—or for us, I couldn’t tell which—but they were not tears of self-pity. The rearrangement of meaning seemed to me more real, and attuned to a wiser part of me, than the story I had previously sworn by. I looked at other relationships I had had and saw how absurd it was to characterize a man who had chosen a partnership with me as not loving me and not knowing me. And furthermore, how exhausting to feel I had to work so hard for recognition and acknowledgment!

I began to write a different narrative: that my husband did indeed know me and love me, and was offering me the best he had to give. Then when I talked with him, I spoke from within the framework of the A, to someone I had defined as able and willing to hear me. As long as I practiced in this manner, I found that virtually all the conversations we had were productive in a way I had never before imagined they could be.

A few days after rethinking my relationship with my father, I was rummaging through a box of books I had found in the basement, when a letter slipped out and fell resolutely to my feet. It was in my father’s hand, dated some twenty years previously. I looked at it as though I had never seen it before; indeed, I would have said that I had never received a letter from my father in my entire life.

Dear Rosamund,

It was wonderful to see you. I hope you choose a profession that involves working with and helping others, because I think you are really talented at that.

Love, Father

He knew me exactly the way I would have wanted to be known.

It works that way. As soon as you have the grace to give people A’s, all sorts of things are revealed that were as though hidden behind a veil. Letters pop out, memories return. There are new openings. When the relationship itself is no longer in question, we can ask ourselves, what now do we want to create?

MANY OF US suffer from the conviction that our parents withheld from us an A. Often the advice we receive, delivered with an earnest, pitying look is, “You can’t change people,” though most of us will go to our graves trying. That adage is true, of course, in the world of measurement, where people and things are fixed in character. However, in the universe of possibility, you certainly can change people. They change as you speak. You may ask, “Who, actually, is doing the changing?” And the answer is the relationship. Because in the arena of possibility, everything occurs in that context.

Here is a letter from a man who heard about the practice of the A, gave way to the power of music, and transformed his life, all in the space of an afternoon.

My Dear Benjamin Zander,

You have just completed a presentation to the leadership of the North Shore–Long Island Jewish Health System. I “should” be immediately returning to my job as one of the System’s Vice Presidents (such a fancy title, no?), but not without first sitting down and briefly telling you of how your words, energy, and humour affected me this day.

I am the man who approached you and told you of my emotional “reunion” with my father through your presentation. He was Swiss-German, and throughout my adult life I have struggled to explain to myself why, in the 25 years that he was with me, he could never, even once, say to me “I love you.” Oh, we did many things as a family, and I suppose his “teachings” in the form of admonishments have always remained with me, though softened, as I had the joy of becoming a father myself to 5 beautiful children.

You told us, as you were about to play Chopin, to use the time to reflect on someone no longer in our lives. I thought about my father and again about that nagging question which I could never answer—why couldn’t he say “I love you”?

And then, as if delivered by a bolt of lightning, I recalled an incident that occurred between us at least 45 years ago. I was an asthmatic child, and on so many evenings could not run to the door (as instructed to do by our mother) to say hello to my father and give him a hug and a kiss when he came home late each evening from the hotel kitchens. I would instead remain upstairs, bedridden, gasping for every breath, waiting expectantly for Father to come upstairs and just say hello to me and maybe, just maybe, for the first time, say “Hello, Jeanot, I love you.” But those words never came.

And then, as I listened to your music, the memory came back of an evening, more than 45 years ago, when I was again sick, and Father came upstairs. But this evening was different. He sat next to me on my bed and, as I was sitting upright and struggling for the next breath, he began gently stroking my hair for a period of time that I wished would have lasted an eternity.

Today, as you played us the Chopin, tears came to my eyes. It struck me that while Father could not say these words, “I love you,” they were expressed even more poignantly in the gentle stroking of a little boy’s hair by his father’s powerful hands. I recall that as he sat with me my asthma attack subsided.

I had completely forgotten that incident. I must have buried it in my own desire to perhaps keep my father at a distance, to continuously prove either that I was unlovable, or that he was just a cold son-of-a-bitch who only knew work, work, and more work. But not so. My father showed me love in so many ways.

We keep looking so hard in life for the “specific message,” and yet we are blinded to the fact that the message is all around us, and within us all the time. We just have to stop demanding that it be on OUR terms or conditions, and instead open ourselves to the possibility that what we seek may be in front of us all the time.

Thank you, John Imhof

THE ONLY GRACE you can have is the grace you can imagine. An A radiates possibility through a family, a workplace, and a community, gaining strength, bringing joy and expression and a flowering of talent and productivity. Who knows how far it will travel? An old parable adds a touch of grace to the practice of giving an A.

The Monks’ Story

A monastery has fallen on hard times. It was once part of a great order which, as a result of religious persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lost all its branches. It was decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the mother house: the Abbot and four others, all of whom were over seventy. Clearly it was a dying order.

Deep in the woods surrounding the monastery was a little hut that the Rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. One day, it occurred to the Abbot to visit the hermitage to see if the Rabbi could offer any advice that might save the monastery. The Rabbi welcomed the Abbot and commiserated. “I know how it is,” he said, “the spirit has gone out of people. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.” So the old Rabbi and the old Abbot wept together, and they read parts of the Torah and spoke quietly of deep things.

The time came when the Abbot had to leave. They embraced. “It has been wonderful being with you,” said the Abbot, “but I have failed in my purpose for coming. Have you no piece of advice that might save the monastery?” “No, I am sorry,” the Rabbi responded, “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.” When the other monks heard the Rabbi’s words, they wondered what possible significance they might have. “The Messiah is one of us? One of us, here, at the monastery? Do you suppose he meant the Abbot? Of course—it must be the Abbot, who has been our leader for so long. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas, who is certainly a holy man. Or could he have meant Brother Elrod, who is so crotchety? But then Elrod is very wise. Surely, he could not have meant Brother Phillip—he’s too passive. But then, magically, he’s always there when you need him. Of course he didn’t mean me—yet supposing he did? Oh Lord, not me! I couldn’t mean that much to you, could I?” As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect, on the off chance that one of them might be the Messiah. And on the off off chance that each monk himself might be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect.

Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, people occasionally came to visit the monastery, to picnic or to wander along the old paths, most of which led to the dilapidated chapel. They sensed the aura of extraordinary respect that surrounded the five old monks, permeating the atmosphere. They began to come more frequently, bringing their friends, and their friends brought friends. Some of the younger men who came to visit began to engage in conversation with the monks. After a while, one asked if he might join. Then another, and another. Within a few years, the monastery became once again a thriving order, and—thanks to the Rabbi’s gift—a vibrant, authentic community of light and love for the whole realm.