The Subtle Art of Turning the Conversation

I hope, dear reader, that you were blessed in school days with at least one teacher who, as the trite saying goes, “changed your life.” For me, I’ve had about a half dozen, though they’ve been less in the “Just need someone to believe in me” mode and more in the way of challenging me intellectually and shifting the currents of my thought. Roughly half of these teachers came during my time as an undergraduate philosophy major (a good time to have the riverbeds of your intellect redirected). One in particular I owe a huge debt of gratitude. I walked into Jake Howland’s Honors class on Ancient Greece in my first semester of college unsure of what I wanted to do in life or major in, and totally unaware that his class would compel me to become a philosophy major.

We have a misguided notion in contemporary pedagogy that learning should be “fun,” a cavalcade of diversions. Jake was fun, and funny, in class, but he revealed a deeper truth: that it’s better to be compelling than fun. The gravitational force of the ideas he presented, and his own insights on those ideas, formed an intellectual black hole for me, an inescapable pull toward the “love of wisdom”. In my freshman year I had no notion of going on to become a professor or teacher myself, so it’s only in retrospect that I’ve come to appreciate how deeply Dr. Howland’s teaching has influenced my own style in the classroom.

One of the best classroom tools I learned from Dr. Howland is what I will call the subtle art of turning the conversation. During my junior year, I took a class from him that, like his Ancient Greece class, would change my life. Though trained in ancient philosophy, Dr. Howland had discovered mid-life a passion for the writings of Kierkegaard (you know where this is going). Anyway, I took his class on Kierkegaard, and beyond all the great exposure to that great Dane, I saw in that class Dr. Howland’s command of the art of turning conversation.

If you’ve ever been in a classroom, you’ll know the dynamic: there’s always a handful of people (usually somewhere between 2 and 5) who marry a talent for intellectual insipidity with an absolute confidence in sharing their opinions. Chances are you’ve even been that person on occasion (I have). Under the wrong guidance, these students can be conversation stoppers, rambling on to no effect while sucking the air out of the room. They talk and talk but never arrive at a destination.

It’s about to go down in Alberta. Image courtesy of “Mike.”

Dr. Howland, though, was very adept at subtly turning those awful digressions back to some worthwhile pursuit. My then girlfriend (full disclosure: now wife) and I would frequently marvel after class at how skillfully he had taken a dull, go nowhere comment from someone who had clearly not read the passage carefully enough, and pluck “garlic and sapphires from the mud,” as T.S. Eliot might say. This subtle art involved a double move: first, he had to make the speaker feel as if his or her contribution was, frankly, much more valuable than it actually was. Then he had to perform a 180 to move the comment in a direction that was actually productive.

I’ve worked to hone my own skill in this department. It’s not easy, faced with a comment from left field, or one that thuds well below the threshold of basic competence, to prevent this intrusion from sinking the momentum of discussions. How do you gently guide the erring student without making them feel the full weight of their failure? Fall on one side of the knife’s edge, and you have a discouraged student unwilling to share more. Fall on the other, and you’ve only fed the alligator of their own self-regard, and left their errors uncorrected. The basic trick, however you manage it, is to affirm their curiosity and willingness to share, while showing them better ways of thinking. Easy stuff, I know.

I’ve been working to sharpen this subtle art in another, very different context: that of podcast host. If you know my voice, or simply know me well enough to realize that I’d choose the nom de cast “Søren Rear-Guard,” you’ll quickly realize, listening to The Readers Karamazov, that I’m the spoon that stirs the pot. In FM rock radio morning show terms, I’m the guy with the normal name who gets the show named after him. I suppose that makes Friedrich the hot blonde woman and Karl the loose cannon with a wacky radio name like Boogerman. It’s a role I sort of fell into, since Karl and I started the cast without Friedrich, and Karl’s naturally a slightly more reactive type than I am. In this role I act as a sort of hub for conversation, making sure the others say what they need to say while keeping the conversation going.

The dynamic here is of course very different than in the classroom, since I’m working alongside two people whom I trust implicitly to have worthwhile things to say, and with whom I have a long, deep history and chemistry. Still, there are similarities. To give a peek under the hood, we don’t generally do much formal prep for each episode, outside of a hasty chat about big ideas right before we record. That is, we each do our own prep, but don’t work to overly coordinate our ideas. I know that some podcasts have an exhaustive road map, with every jot and tittle planned out, but that’s not what we do. Spontaneity is a key to real conversation, we think, so we work to come prepared individually, but do not try to force a top down approach on our talks.

This means that I have to act as ringmaster to move us through, to figure out when a particular vein of conversation has dried up, and to move us on. I can fix unproductive parts to an extent while editing, of course, but it’s much better for the flow of conversation if I lead us as we go, to keep up momentum. In this context, again, I’m not really “correcting” either of the other two — though we do sometimes have vigorous disagreements! — because no one is saddling the conversation with dead weight. But I do still redirect to make sure we connect our different thoughts together in ways that make sense. I love this part of recording, honestly, because it gives an edge of nervous energy to my thought processes. Not only am I thinking about what I want to say next, I’m also considering what nudges I should give to keep the ship floating in the right direction. It’s a way to connect what we do in the podcast with my classroom practices; I am, after all, working subtly to “teach” our listeners new ways of reading the books they love.