Dad left the family when I was four. I would have almost no contact with him for another eight years, and not much contact through my adulthood. Mom was there every day until I left home, and she deserves credit for coping with the angry and willful child that I became. But even so it was my nearly absent father who, more than anyone or anything else, shaped me as a man. The way I challenge the world, relate to people, and most of all how I learn, is deeply influenced by Richard Bach the man, and his writings.
(Oh, he hates it when I tell him that. “You did it yourself!” he says, waving his hands as if dismissing imaginary mosquitoes. Still, the truth must be told.)
I dedicated my Buccaneer-Scholar book to him, over his objections. He suggested I honor instead self-educated people everywhere. “Dedicate it to your readers, not me.” I replied that I had to acknowledge the one person who is responsible for me writing it at all. I wrote that book for him. I would not have written it if not for him.
I have to tell you, my approach to life and learning is based on Dad’s book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I owe a lot to that talking gull.
Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar is a book about how I created myself as a free thinker. It’s about how I left school, educated myself, found success and colleagues and even have students now. Anyone else can do the same kind of thing I did. But to do that you have to learn how to walk through certain kinds of walls. I learn without teachers, I get recognition without degrees, I accept no limits on what I may study or believe.
As it turns out, my life is basically the plot of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
I read JLS nine times before I was twelve. While I did not understand its metaphysical bits at the time, I knew it was a book about leaving the insidious prison of social convention. Even as a kid I looked for ways out. If everyone wanted something, I would want the opposite. Although I didn’t get to talk to my Dad, he was famous enough that I sometimes felt as if I were the son of an Olympian God. I saw myself as Hercules, who must prove himself worthy.
In the fleeting visits I did have with the man, Dad made it clear that he wasn’t interested in limitations. We weren’t allowed to use the word “can’t.” (of course I constructed an argument why “can’t” is a useful idea, and that established a pattern that would last until my thirties– debating with Dad about details and dynamics, while in my behavior mostly living in a way I felt he would approve of. Dad approved of bold and brash challenges to perceived authority.)
There were really just two sentences in the book that did it for me. Two sentences that set the arc for my entire professional life. The first was in the scene where Jonathan Seagull take on a new student, Fletcher, who is already good at flying. He says to Fletcher “Let’s begin with level flight.”
What a puzzling thing for Jonathan Seagull to propose as a first lesson. Fletcher already knew how to fly! Every time I read that, I would stumble on it. My eight year-old brain goggled. Is Jon teasing Fletcher? Why is he wasting his time like that?
Years later that line would come into my mind spontaneously, an echo from the past that found its way across the void to where I was teaching testers how to see what is right in front of them. I teach experienced testers, mostly. And I often find myself posing very simple problems that have subtle and powerful solutions. I do this because I need to break down the assumptions my students have made about the way technology works and how it ought to be tested. I could teach them with complicated and advanced-sounding examples, but instead I start with ones that seem to have simple answers (but they never do!)
Begin with level flight. Begin deep learning by reinventing what seems obvious.
A lot of my deepest learning has come from trying to do something very simple, but to do it very well. I’m in the midst of one such project now: trying to describe a stone. That’s all. Just describe it. Well, I have read two books from cover to cover, so far, and have skimmed about fifty others, in my quest to learn how properly to describe one humble stone! I also have a stack of academic papers to go through.
For the last ten years or so, since I first recalled it from my childhood reading, Jonathan’s prescription to Fletcher “begin with level flight” has resonated inside of me.
Now, just tonight, I remembered another line, too. It’s the last line of the book: “His race to learn had begun.” The line refers to Fletcher, who, with his teacher’s blessing, had graduated to a teacher himself.
Dad is against gurus. He won’t let me be a guru, either, unless it is a way to lead my students to self-reliance and self-possession. JLS is a book about learning and also about freedom. I talk about collegiality, in my book, as a loose confederation of fellow students helping each other learn. Dad shows what that looks like in the pages of JLS. Elegantly and simply.
Father’s Day is coming up. I live in hope that I am a good example and model for my son in the way that my Dad has been for me.
