Bitter Grace

Most of the way down a New Yorker article reviewing parenting books, I found two sections that I wanted to quote and talk about.

In talking about a book on parenting to achieve a prodigy, or parenting prodigies, or something like that, Adam Gopnik writes,

"The secrets of that kind of athletic achievement are the subject of Karen Crouse’s book `Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town’s Secret to Happiness and Excellence' (Simon & Schuster). Crouse, a Times sportswriter disillusioned by drug-enhanced results and joyless competitions, stumbled on Norwich in the midst of her travels with more or less the same stunned enthusiasm with which Ronald Colman, in the movie `Lost Horizon,' stumbles on Shangri-La. In Norwich, no parent presses, no bar is set, and after a kid scores two goals in a soccer game he is sat down so that some other kid has a chance to score. Yet Norwich continually sends athletes to the Olympics and other competitions in numbers ridiculously disproportionate to its size.

"What we don’t get to see, in Crouse’s account, is the little town nearby, where, as must be the case, everyone coöperates and yet no one is a champion. (And there must also be, in Norwich, at least one Holden Caulfield type who thinks the whole Norwich thing is phony.) Looking at Norwich, we’re told that the non-competitive, non-pressuring approach is best because it gets us to the medal stand, or close. But what if it didn’t? If Norwich values matter, it’s because they’re good, not because they’re shortcuts to victory. The point of a non-competitive attitude can’t be that it makes us better able to compete; the value of an unpressured approach can’t be that it creates a more effective kind of pressure. In any case, one has the sense that what Crouse has found is not a `secret' but a well-known effect: unusual excellence emerges within tightly structured local traditions, whether they are in fifteenth-century Florence, in painting, or in San Pedro de Macorís, the `cradle of shortstops.' One good painter with an apprentice produces a Renaissance, just as one good coach with willing kids supplies the major leagues."

Here's what I'd say:

1. As for means to arrive at some achievement-end-- I think that part of what we're seeing in these instanced locations is a culture that embeds valuation of that end. Just as Amanda Ripley came to the conclusion, in The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, that Finland's culture of valuing learning and treating learning as a process results (by the way) in results that score high on international tests. But the important part is that those Finnish kids view education as vitally important and as a process they get resources for, not as some kind of totally artificial signal that might win you a prize. And-- I haven't read Crouse's book-- it looks as if the process followed in Norwich is one in which good team play-- the spreading of opportunity-- is what gets you the reward of longer playing time. (Some would say that individual excellence is punished-- but that only makes sense if you view team games as competitions for the display of individual point-scoring. Which I don't.) I don't imagine that, particularly in the US, this counter-cultural emphasis stifles individualism and competitive verve.

2. As hockey fan and parent of a hockey-player, I've found that part of my reason for loving hockey is that it is so integrally a sport in which cooperation is vital. Every sport*-- yes, even individual sports if they have any rules-- embodies a balance between cooperation and individualist effort. (When you can't work within rules, within a field, even if you use and borderline and sometimes violate the rules, you aren't playing a game. You are using a game as a cloak for marauding.) Hockey (the Very Best Sport) has legends who are brilliant skaters, brilliant perceivers of game flow, brilliant tactical disrupters, brilliant shooters, and so on. But a team that doesn't pass and pass intelligently is a team that will systematically lose. And the play of skaters who don't have the puck is crucial to the opportunities of the one(s) who does.

In the US we tend to dislike the idea of balancing factors-- we're addicts of the all-or-nothing. And we tend to emphasize individual competitiveness and to dismiss cooperation as sissy, the approach of losers. (And I see that among youth hockey players and their parents, often.)

And of course I wish we framed things less absolutely, less one-sidedly. Because I think that's actually more useful in nearly all life situations. (I am, confessedly, an economist, and addicted to marginal benefit/cost analysis.)

* Every sport that I can think of, offhand. Are there sports with no rules? The rule of Flux is to follow the rules of the cards played....

Next quote:
"But are results what we’re after? Timed and scored competitions aside, the results are far more relative to the eye of the beholder than any account of high-pressure child rearing can quite allow....

"Childhood should not be considered a chain of causes leading to an ultimate effect: you do this so that will happen. The popular motto of stoic acceptance, `It is what it is,' should be replaced by a stronger motto, embracing existence: `What is is what is.' The reason we don’t want our kids to watch violent movies is not that doing so will turn them into psychos when they grow up; it’s that we don’t want them seeing bloody movies now. As the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen said, after the unimaginable loss of a child drowned (in words famously adapted by Tom Stoppard in `The Coast of Utopia'), `Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. . . . Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.'”

1. I love this theologically and as a matter of practice. In particular this, about each point in time being itself. And more generally, in terms of how humans conceive things. When I was doing ordination work there were quite a few questions that I just couldn't respond to in the way they were framed. I can't recall the question that led me to say, "I mean, I think that The Meaning of Hummingbird is just Hummingbird, and that that's wonderful." We humans dash to bottom lines too quickly, too often discarding the rich story for its "meaning." And meanings are so often shabby little things.

When I first read about Zen, or rather something a lot more like Taoism, it hit my eigenvalues, and I've never looked back. And so when one of my economics students told me about Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's recognition of Flow-- immersion in process-- as a source of joy and a valuable concept, that made me happy as well.

(I left off writing this entry this morning just after making quick notes under 1 and 2 here, to remind me what I wanted to talk about. Returning now, after having done Noble Deeds, I suddenly remembered how my mother would say in a sticky sort of voice, "I always treat children as Becoming Adults." Which I think to her was a fine thing indeed. How much more I like to treat children and People Now, and contrariwise, elders whose abilities are in decline as People Now, whatever they were like in the past.)

2. I have been thinking lately about hockey goalies. The skaters are so much easier to think about from an observational POV. And I spent nearly all my time in earlier years thinking about the skaters, even though I read and loved Ken Dryden's The Game. (Dryden was a very fine goalie. His book is about hockey generally, but is also autobiographical and confirms my impression about the even-more-essential-to-goalies-ness of a sort of tranquil widespread focus to a good hockey player. It's a super hockey book, so if you want to read about hockey I recommend it wholeheartedly.)

For several months I have been wanting to ask goalies what made them want to b goalies. The really wonderful goalie on Chun Woo's current team is very reserved with adults, so I haven't pounced on him, though.

Anyway, reading the article I've linked here helped me solidify some thoughts on goalies and the game that I've had recently. Goalies are less intricately and essentially intertwined with the team as a whole than the skaters are. Their physical movement is, in practice, pretty limited, because they need to guard the goal and keep shot pucks out of the net. (They do pass to skaters. They do leave the net. These things are relative. (Now I wonder whether an own-team skater has ever passed to a goalie, in an NHL game.))

They depend on the skaters, though. If defensemen and forwards-without-puck-possession don't substantially engage the opposing team, the goalie will have an immense number of shots to block. Rebounds kill goalies, and the Zennest of attention flags. Of course skaters depend on the goalie, who is the Last Defense, the only true team specialist, and the Hero When Not Preventer of Lost Causes.

Among the skaters, good coaches and teams know that a line (three forward one being the center, two defensemen) cannot be much stronger than its weakest link. (Opposing teams know that as well-- they swiftly learn how to get round or exploit the weaknesses of a line.) But the goalie is an unavoidable weak link for the whole team.

If you have watched a hockey game you have seen the skaters kind of make a fuss about the goalie at the end. If you have watched a kid or college hockey game and stuck around for the quick post-game, you have seen that the goalie leads their team and the coaches in saying "Good game" to their opponents.

Goalies need the most process-oriented attention, the most flow, and yet are pretty isolated during game play (and for that matter mostly serve their colleagues in team practice rather than getting wonderful practice themselves). But they are so essential to team process, and so fragile in their one-player responsibility, that they are team centers in a way that surpasses the team's captain and assistant captains, who are pretty invariably skaters.