In my last post, I wrote about my initial reflections of kairos. I used examples from all over the cultural landscape to explain how I understand the concept of kairos. It seems to be everywhere, and, to a certain degree, it seems to be contained in everything we do.
In this post, I'm still focusing on kairos, but instead of focusing on the role and influence it plays outside the writing center, I am going to focus on the role it plays inside the writing center when a consultant and a writer introduce themselves and begin a session.
According to Carl Glover of Mount St. Mary's University, the initial assessment of a tutor must balance several different exigencies, each one related in some way to the cultivation of kairos for that particular session. As a tutor or consultant, I need to quickly assess the following:
1. Time constraints.
2. The needs of the client (the writer).
3. The demands of the assignment.
4. The kairos of the paper itself.
If a student walks into a writing center at Noon with an 2000 word poetry analysis assignment due at 12:30, and he only has twenty-two words written down, it's not the sort of circumstance that will create an auspicious environment for kairos.
Kairos is subject to certain temporal laws of nature, just as humans beings are. A student who has not left himself adequate time to complete an assignment will probably be too psychologically distracted either from anxiety or from regret to experience a kairotic moment, no matter how talented a consultant might be. Thus, when hunting for kairos, a writing consultant must be aware of how much daylight he has left. If twilight is near, he must be realistic about his opportunities.
When a writer comes to a writing center, presumably he has needs that the writing center can help him to satisfy. Some of the needs or desires a writer may have can be elicited from him during the check-in process by asking some initial questions. For example, you might ask: "Have you ever visited the writing center before?"
This will indicate whether or not the student has any experience at all with the writing center and its philosophy. Another question that will help to clarify the needs or desires of a writer during the check-in procedure might be: "Have you ever been to the writing center for this assignment before?" This question can help the consultant avoid repeating material that the student may have already covered satisfactorily. Without this information, a consultant may unintentionally make a student feel uncomfortable by beginning the session in a place the student does not want to begin at. If the student is shy, polite, or intimidated, he may not speak up. Instead, he might get quiet and distracted thus undermining the potential for any future kairotic moments.
The consultant needs to understand what the student's assignment instructs him to do. If he doesn't have this information, it would be very difficult to cultivate any kairos. If the student is expected to examine two sides of a controversial issue and argue for one of the sides, then the consultant needs to keep this rhetorical purpose in mind. The consultant can help cultivate a kairotic moment by asking the student questions that are pertinent to the purpose of the assignment. The questions the consultant asks for this assignment will probably be different than the questions the consultant asks a student who brings in an assignment for a personal narrative essay. Knowing the professor's instructions is an important part of generating kairos in the writing center.
Sometimes a student may have his best ideas buried in the second paragraph. As the consultant reads the paper out loud to the student, he should looking for sentences or ideas that could be used to drive further discussion with the student. If the student's best ideas are expressed by a sequence of two sentences in the second paragraph, and if the consultant can identify this feature of the student's paper, then perhaps the situation would be ideal for kairos. Some students may resist the suggestion to wholly revise the entire paper, but some may be excited by the prospect of improving their writing by starting over.
A writing consultant must quickly establish the restrictions which impound any single session. These restrictions are, in the words of Carl Glover, "a balance between the abilities of the client and the demands of the paper" (16). It is only after these contingencies have been assessed and understood by the consultant that the session can be expected to produce any kairos.
However, because every session is a dynamic enterprise of negotiation and interpretation, the mere satisfaction of a stipulated number requirements will never guarantee kairos. Its achievement can never be reduced to a set of instructions or directions. Instead, the consultant must always look for its beacon. Once the dim pulse is apprehended, then you must be ready to follow it.
After introductions have been made, reading a student's paper out loud is the preferred technique to commence a session at the writing center that I work at. This allows for both the writer and the consultant to actively engage the material the student has written.
Learning how to guide the process toward kairos is more an art than a science, but it does seem like focusing on grammatical mistakes or colloquialisms should be avoided. This recommendation may not hold in cases where a student is fixated on grammatical mistakes, but as a general rule it seems sound.
As the paper is being read, the consultant may pause occasionally to ask the writer questions. It's during these interrogative moments that the consultant needs to be on high alert. Is the student making eye-contact with you? How long does the student take to begin to answer the question you have asked? Do you notice any change in the student's posture or in the student's tone of voice? Does the student seems perplexed by your question, if so, how does the student respond to this complexity? Does the student get quiet and disengage or does the student become more loquacious and engaged?
All these different questions have answers that affect how a consultant may diagnose the imminent likelihood of a kairotic moment. No consultant is perfect in his diagnoses; but, the goal of a consultant should be to improve our ability to diagnose as accurately and consistently as possible these potential kairotic moments.
Here's a link that could provide some helpful information.
http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/284
Showing posts with label Kairos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kairos. Show all posts
Friday, October 12, 2012
Saturday, October 6, 2012
A Neophyte Reflects on Kairos
In 1993 a movie entitled Searching for Bobby Fischer was released. It dramatized the early life of a chess prodigy. It included the usual lessons not only for young people but also for adults. If improperly aggrandized, competitive activities can bring out the worst in parents, as anyone who has been the unfortunate witness of shrill epithets coming from the stands of a little league game can attest. I don't want to ruin the ending, but since it is PG, I don't think I'm violating any morality of spectatorship when I confirm that the movie ends happily.
The young boy whose life the movie was based on is Josh Waitzkin. Aside from doing many other interesting things with his life, he provided annotations and commentary for the Chessmaster computer game series. In Chessmaster 9000, Mr. Waitzkin annotates about a dozen of his personal games. In one of these games, after the opening moves have been played and the middle game has been reached, he describes himself as entering into a deep-think.
He then describes a moment during this deep-think in which he realizes that, given the unique placement of pieces on the board in this game, he had a problem. If he followed the general prescriptions of chess, (get a knight to a central outpost, try to secure the two bishops, don't push pawns around your king, etc.), which strong players are inclined to do, his attack would be stifled, his opponent would have equalized, and, thus, his position would be weak. Mr. Waitzkin did not want to have a weak position, so he needed to figure out a new plan over the board.
During his deep-think, it occurred to him, however dimly or imperfectly, that every attack in chess and also every defense in chess requires an ideal temporal moment. To begin an attack at move 21, when it would have been better to begin it at move 22, will, assuming the defender seizes the initiative, blunt the attack. In his final analysis of the game, which he won, Mr. Waitzkin focuses on the temporal intricacies, not only of this game, not only in the game of chess, but in almost all human activities. When I think about his commentary from the perspective of a neophyte writing consultant, I think of kairos.
I've only recently been introduced to this very rich and complicated concept, but already I've begun to consistently reflect on it. Some of the most famous names of ancient Greece have given a definition of kairos, including Plato and Pythagoras, but these proposed definitions, although similar, do not perfectly square with each other. For Pythagoras, kairos is both a cosmological force and a force that grounds human relations. As a cosmological force, it acts as a kind of ontological bridge that unites the disparate four classical elements (fire, air, earth, and water). In other words, the existence of matter requires kairos.
As a force that grounds human relations, kairos governs the appropriateness and morality of our actions. Quoting from Imblichus's "Life of Pythagoras," Carl Glover a professor at Mount St. Mary's University writes: "For those of us who are angry or enraged, some are so seasonably, and some unseasonably [. . .]"
Here's how I cash this idea out: if I am driving home, I may experience judicious (seasonable) anger if another driver is nearby and operating his vehicle recklessly. But if I hold on to this anger too long, say, by subjecting a fast food employee to a profane tirade because he forgot my BBQ sauce, my anger becomes vicious (unseasonable) because I have allowed it to transgress the kairotic boundary.
Plato's definition seems to lack a cosmological component. It seems to be more focused on rhetoric and the interaction between human beings.Taken from the Phaedrus, Glover quotes the Platonic Socrates. He writes: "It is only when he has...grasped the concept of the propriety of time (kairos)--when to speak and when to hold his tongue...It is only then, and until then that the finishing and perfecting touches will have been given to his science."
The definition given in the Phaedrus has a certain simplicity, a kind of forceful colloquialism. If I were to paraphrase Plato's definition to contemporary people, I might once again draw an example from film: in "The Godfather," before the violence begins, Marlon Brando's character chastises his son, played by James Caan, who has spoken out of turn, by saying to the other crime syndicate representatives something along the order of, "Once again my son speaks when he should be listening."
Since, for Plato, kairos is an awareness of knowing when to speak and when to remain silent, and then having the moral strength to respect this knowledge in practice, the character of Sonny Corleone would never experience it.
Like the word katharsis, kairos is a Greek word that seems to defy the modern attempt to understand it completely. Unlike katharsis, kairos has not been incorporated into our vernacular, which seems strange to me, given its ubiquitous nature to our endeavors.
In the writing center, consultants are encouraged to understand kairos, to think of ways to cultivate it. In the writing center, the importance of each temporal moment of a session provides an opportunity to maximize the intellectual and emotional interaction between the consultant and the writer, thus it makes sense that kairos would be so important in this community. But it seems like an appreciation of kairos has as much to offer to those outside the writing center as it does to those of us inside it.
Have you ever told a joke that was intended to make someone laugh? I know I have.
Sometimes we achieve our intended effect, and sometimes we do not. Only now do I realize the importance which kairos plays in the success or failure of a joke. And more than the success or failure of a single articulation of a single joke at single moment, kairos provides the foundation for the concept of "sense of humor."
To borrow an idea from one of Thomas Edison's most famous (and probably hyperbolic) aphorisms, we might say that having a good sense of humor is ninety-nine percent kairos, and one percent humor. I think most people intuitively understand how important timing is to humor. An improper understanding of timing will not only ruin the potential humor of a situation; it will, in many instances, actually turn the situation hostile. Anyone who doubts me, imagine the following situation: Eddie Murphy's Raw being shown in a 3rd grade classroom. Not so funny anymore, is it.
Have you ever heard the phrase esprit de l'escalier? Even if you are unfamiliar with this darling little French idiomatic phrase, I would guess that you are familiar with the the cascade of emotions it encapsulates.
Normally, this cascade of emotions begins with you uttering the f word, some of you express yourselves raucously, I usually whisper my cusses. Regardless of how loud you howl, I would imagine that the pain we experience is fairly uniform. Now you know what you should have said then. Now you know the words. Now they are being ejected like pumice from a volcano. Now you have the instruments to efface his contemptuous smirk. Now you can metamorphose his fleer into a frown.
But the moment is gone. The past cannot be retrieved. "^%&*!" Now you feel twice-cursed. Not only are you cursed to know now what you should have known then, but the curse is redoubled because you know now that the then which you squandered can never be redressed. Kairos has its complications. I guess every rose has its thorns.
Have you ever watched a high-level athletic contest? (Anyone who has read my other blog posts probably knows where I'm headed with this line of thinking.) For example, in 1997, The Chicago Bulls played The Utah Jazz in the NBA finals. In game 1, the score was tied with 7.5 seconds remaining. The Bulls had possession of the ball, but more importantly, they had a shooting-guard by the name of Michael Jordan. In situations like these, Jordan needs to recognize the various contingencies of the moment, and then balance those contingencies that compete with each other.
Jordan needs to get a shot off, preferably a good shot--a high-percentage shot that gives him a clear look at the rim--but he doesn't have a lot of time, so correcting a strategic miscalculation isn't possible. Of course, if he begins his maneuver too early, even if he makes the shot, the Jazz still may have time left to either tie the game or win it with a 3. Thus, in an ideal situation, the ball will fall through the hoop as the buzzer sounds. Bulls win.
Jordan is not playing in an empty gym, though. The Jazz will try and stop him; they will use the clock to their advantage. If, before the ball is inbounded, Jordan commits himself to one course of action (shooting the ball), then he will not have the nimbleness to adjust to The Jazz defense. If The Jazz double-team him, he may have a wide-open teammate who would, if a good pass is delivered, be in a better position than Jordan would be to win the game.
But if the pass is delivered too early, The Jazz might be able to rotate over to the shooter and contest or block his shot. If the pass is delivered too late, then either the shooter may rush his shot and miss or he may not have enough time to get a shot off in the first place. In either case, Jordan will have frittered away an opportunity.
Lots of contingencies to consider, all of them dependent on the temporal moment of the game. What does this remind you of? It reminds me of kairos. Michael Jordan had kairos: he surveyed the floor; he identified the positions of the defenders; then, he made his move, but not too quickly; he got to a spot on the floor that would allow him to put up a high percentage shot; he got a clear look at the rim; he got feet set; he released the ball from his hands with about a second left. The buzzer sounded, then the ball went into the hoop. Bulls win. Kairos wins.
The young boy whose life the movie was based on is Josh Waitzkin. Aside from doing many other interesting things with his life, he provided annotations and commentary for the Chessmaster computer game series. In Chessmaster 9000, Mr. Waitzkin annotates about a dozen of his personal games. In one of these games, after the opening moves have been played and the middle game has been reached, he describes himself as entering into a deep-think.
He then describes a moment during this deep-think in which he realizes that, given the unique placement of pieces on the board in this game, he had a problem. If he followed the general prescriptions of chess, (get a knight to a central outpost, try to secure the two bishops, don't push pawns around your king, etc.), which strong players are inclined to do, his attack would be stifled, his opponent would have equalized, and, thus, his position would be weak. Mr. Waitzkin did not want to have a weak position, so he needed to figure out a new plan over the board.
During his deep-think, it occurred to him, however dimly or imperfectly, that every attack in chess and also every defense in chess requires an ideal temporal moment. To begin an attack at move 21, when it would have been better to begin it at move 22, will, assuming the defender seizes the initiative, blunt the attack. In his final analysis of the game, which he won, Mr. Waitzkin focuses on the temporal intricacies, not only of this game, not only in the game of chess, but in almost all human activities. When I think about his commentary from the perspective of a neophyte writing consultant, I think of kairos.
I've only recently been introduced to this very rich and complicated concept, but already I've begun to consistently reflect on it. Some of the most famous names of ancient Greece have given a definition of kairos, including Plato and Pythagoras, but these proposed definitions, although similar, do not perfectly square with each other. For Pythagoras, kairos is both a cosmological force and a force that grounds human relations. As a cosmological force, it acts as a kind of ontological bridge that unites the disparate four classical elements (fire, air, earth, and water). In other words, the existence of matter requires kairos.
As a force that grounds human relations, kairos governs the appropriateness and morality of our actions. Quoting from Imblichus's "Life of Pythagoras," Carl Glover a professor at Mount St. Mary's University writes: "For those of us who are angry or enraged, some are so seasonably, and some unseasonably [. . .]"
Here's how I cash this idea out: if I am driving home, I may experience judicious (seasonable) anger if another driver is nearby and operating his vehicle recklessly. But if I hold on to this anger too long, say, by subjecting a fast food employee to a profane tirade because he forgot my BBQ sauce, my anger becomes vicious (unseasonable) because I have allowed it to transgress the kairotic boundary.
Plato's definition seems to lack a cosmological component. It seems to be more focused on rhetoric and the interaction between human beings.Taken from the Phaedrus, Glover quotes the Platonic Socrates. He writes: "It is only when he has...grasped the concept of the propriety of time (kairos)--when to speak and when to hold his tongue...It is only then, and until then that the finishing and perfecting touches will have been given to his science."
The definition given in the Phaedrus has a certain simplicity, a kind of forceful colloquialism. If I were to paraphrase Plato's definition to contemporary people, I might once again draw an example from film: in "The Godfather," before the violence begins, Marlon Brando's character chastises his son, played by James Caan, who has spoken out of turn, by saying to the other crime syndicate representatives something along the order of, "Once again my son speaks when he should be listening."
Since, for Plato, kairos is an awareness of knowing when to speak and when to remain silent, and then having the moral strength to respect this knowledge in practice, the character of Sonny Corleone would never experience it.
Like the word katharsis, kairos is a Greek word that seems to defy the modern attempt to understand it completely. Unlike katharsis, kairos has not been incorporated into our vernacular, which seems strange to me, given its ubiquitous nature to our endeavors.
In the writing center, consultants are encouraged to understand kairos, to think of ways to cultivate it. In the writing center, the importance of each temporal moment of a session provides an opportunity to maximize the intellectual and emotional interaction between the consultant and the writer, thus it makes sense that kairos would be so important in this community. But it seems like an appreciation of kairos has as much to offer to those outside the writing center as it does to those of us inside it.
Have you ever told a joke that was intended to make someone laugh? I know I have.
Sometimes we achieve our intended effect, and sometimes we do not. Only now do I realize the importance which kairos plays in the success or failure of a joke. And more than the success or failure of a single articulation of a single joke at single moment, kairos provides the foundation for the concept of "sense of humor."
To borrow an idea from one of Thomas Edison's most famous (and probably hyperbolic) aphorisms, we might say that having a good sense of humor is ninety-nine percent kairos, and one percent humor. I think most people intuitively understand how important timing is to humor. An improper understanding of timing will not only ruin the potential humor of a situation; it will, in many instances, actually turn the situation hostile. Anyone who doubts me, imagine the following situation: Eddie Murphy's Raw being shown in a 3rd grade classroom. Not so funny anymore, is it.
Have you ever heard the phrase esprit de l'escalier? Even if you are unfamiliar with this darling little French idiomatic phrase, I would guess that you are familiar with the the cascade of emotions it encapsulates.
Normally, this cascade of emotions begins with you uttering the f word, some of you express yourselves raucously, I usually whisper my cusses. Regardless of how loud you howl, I would imagine that the pain we experience is fairly uniform. Now you know what you should have said then. Now you know the words. Now they are being ejected like pumice from a volcano. Now you have the instruments to efface his contemptuous smirk. Now you can metamorphose his fleer into a frown.
But the moment is gone. The past cannot be retrieved. "^%&*!" Now you feel twice-cursed. Not only are you cursed to know now what you should have known then, but the curse is redoubled because you know now that the then which you squandered can never be redressed. Kairos has its complications. I guess every rose has its thorns.
Have you ever watched a high-level athletic contest? (Anyone who has read my other blog posts probably knows where I'm headed with this line of thinking.) For example, in 1997, The Chicago Bulls played The Utah Jazz in the NBA finals. In game 1, the score was tied with 7.5 seconds remaining. The Bulls had possession of the ball, but more importantly, they had a shooting-guard by the name of Michael Jordan. In situations like these, Jordan needs to recognize the various contingencies of the moment, and then balance those contingencies that compete with each other.
Jordan needs to get a shot off, preferably a good shot--a high-percentage shot that gives him a clear look at the rim--but he doesn't have a lot of time, so correcting a strategic miscalculation isn't possible. Of course, if he begins his maneuver too early, even if he makes the shot, the Jazz still may have time left to either tie the game or win it with a 3. Thus, in an ideal situation, the ball will fall through the hoop as the buzzer sounds. Bulls win.
Jordan is not playing in an empty gym, though. The Jazz will try and stop him; they will use the clock to their advantage. If, before the ball is inbounded, Jordan commits himself to one course of action (shooting the ball), then he will not have the nimbleness to adjust to The Jazz defense. If The Jazz double-team him, he may have a wide-open teammate who would, if a good pass is delivered, be in a better position than Jordan would be to win the game.
But if the pass is delivered too early, The Jazz might be able to rotate over to the shooter and contest or block his shot. If the pass is delivered too late, then either the shooter may rush his shot and miss or he may not have enough time to get a shot off in the first place. In either case, Jordan will have frittered away an opportunity.
Lots of contingencies to consider, all of them dependent on the temporal moment of the game. What does this remind you of? It reminds me of kairos. Michael Jordan had kairos: he surveyed the floor; he identified the positions of the defenders; then, he made his move, but not too quickly; he got to a spot on the floor that would allow him to put up a high percentage shot; he got a clear look at the rim; he got feet set; he released the ball from his hands with about a second left. The buzzer sounded, then the ball went into the hoop. Bulls win. Kairos wins.
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