This
is a reflection on the 10th Anniversary of The Mind at Work.
It first appeared in The
Hedgehog Review, Summer, 2014.
***
There was a wood table
covered with slick plastic in the center of my grandmother’s kitchen. My Uncle
Frank, a welder for the Pennsylvania Railroad, would come in from work, soiled
denim, his face smeared with soot, and wash at the kitchen sink, sleeves rolled
up, angling his arms under the faucet. He’d settle in at the table where my
grandmother had placed a large plate of steaming macaroni. A fork in one hand,
a big chunk of bread in the other, Frank ate with a focus and capacity that I
can still remember. As I always did, I’d ask him questions about the railroad.
He’d pause, and in the learned, methodical way he had, he’d explain in detail
how something worked. Then he’d tear off another piece of bread and lean back
into his plate, a deep pleasure against the bitter cold and exhaustion of the roundhouse.
I grew up around
physical work, my uncles in the railroad, then the auto industry, my mother
putting in split shifts as a waitress to keep food on our table. This kind of
work represented security and competence to me, and it shaped the rhythms of
our lives, the stories told at dinner, the satisfaction of warm food, the tired
relaxation after, then bedtime and the cycle begins again. Through my mother’s
iron-willed determination, a string of committed teachers, government aid, and
unexpected opportunities, I do a very different kind of work today: I study
teaching and learning and the many manifestations of intelligence in the
schoolhouse and the workplace. In The
Mind at Work, I tried to bring these two worlds of mine together, examining
the sometimes hidden intelligence of the kind of work my forebears did with the
analytic tools of social science—but also using my forebears’ work to test
these analytic tools and revise some of our commonplace ideas about skill and
intelligence. I wanted to change the way we see the everyday work that
surrounds and sustains us.
Once the book was
out, there were letters and emails and radio interviews where listeners could
call in. I heard from waitresses, welders, and carpenters, a drill press
operator and a landscaper, a hairstylist and an electrician. They described
some aspect of their work: its pleasures and difficulties, what they saw as key
to expertise, a success or horror story, frustration at the lack of
understanding of what they do. It was particularly gratifying when people would
write that they had been reading the book in a restaurant and started watching
the waitresses with a fresh eye or that they bought a copy for their
hairstylist, so that they could talk about the work. A sociology professor who
assigned the book wrote to me about one of his students whose father was a
waiter, and how she began to “look at the work he does in a different way.”
Many people wrote
or spoke about their families: a tanner, a stone mason, a milk-truck driver,
farmers and factory workers, day laborers and beauticians, a butcher whose
“mental arithmetic skills were prodigious,” a missionary father who could
repair anything, including grinding the valves on the old mission truck, a
mother who was a welder during the Second World War, and an uncle “who made
money for everyone on his crew because he was so smart and strong and hacked
more brick than anyone else in any of the five brickyards around.” A number of the people being remembered had
limited formal education and acquired their knowledge and skill from others and
by doing the work itself. And some of the forebears were immigrants, bringing
their skills with them, repeating a pattern that is as old as the republic.
People also bore
witness for others beyond family, for local tradespersons or friends who had
dropped out of or barely made it through high school. A physician characterized
the young man remodeling his kitchen as brilliant in the way he could figure
out angles and visualize what he was going to do. Another writer described a
specialty machinist who rebuilds auto and marine engines from the 1890’s to
1940, fashioning some of the parts himself. And some people who contacted me
were professionals who either from their blue-collar upbringing or through
years of trial and error had become competent at carpentry, mechanics, or a
craft—and, in a few cases, had abandoned their white-collar occupations for the
physical challenge and satisfaction of working with their hands. “We’ve been
imprisoned,” one wrote, “in our heads.”
Some of the people
I met through this book were, like me, studying the mind at work. A former NASA
employee was doing research on aircraft maintenance, for example, and a small
team of social scientists was detailing the many skills of so-called unskilled
immigrant laborers. There were also community activists involved in labor
education and living wage campaigns. And there were sobering reminders of work
being lost. A woman teaching in a retraining program for silversmiths describes
“the pride these men felt for their craft, and the sadness they felt as they
saw their work disappearing.”
During the time I
was writing an earlier book about our nation’s public schools, I drove across
the United States to try to get a feel in one long arc of this vast, diverse
country, its varied landscape, its languages, dialects, and cultural practices,
its local economies, its multiple histories, manifest in everything from residential
patterns to a figure of speech. Sorting through the radio notes and
correspondence generated by The Mind at
Work, though a stationary and solitary act, had a similar effect. So
many of the themes are central to who we are right now, to America finding its
way through the early decades of a new century: The nature and meaning of work
and the connection of work to one’s identity; the loss of work; social class
and class divides; education; immigration; maximizing our national
intelligence. All of this emerged from particular stories, particular lives, a
machinist in California, a cabinet maker in South Carolina, a New Englander
reflecting back on the work that surrounded him as a young boy. A wide sweep of
work in the moment and in memory.
***
When my mother
Rosie would come home after a long day waiting tables, she used to spread out
on the bed an old white kitchen towel turned gray from years of coins and dump
her tips on it. As she told my father and me about her day—a fight with the
cook, a regular’s troubles at home—she would count and separate the coins. I
had a weird fascination with that towel. Old, dirty, but the grime had a silver
cast to it, the color of money. “If it wasn’t for the tips,” she told me many
years later, “we wouldn’t have made it.” There was a front and back counter in
the restaurant, and she described working with her sidekick, Ann, another
career waitress, how they’d listen—when they could slow down enough—“listen
real hard” for the sound of the tip and know if it was a dime, a quarter, a
half-dollar, “or no sound at all…you either got stiffed, or they left a
dollar.” I don’t remember many dollars on the bed.
I take some coins
out of my pocket, close my eyes, and give each a short toss onto the table. She
was right; they have distinct sounds, a tink,
a thunk. The sound of groceries, of
rent, of school supplies, of gas for the car.
There is a direct
line between those tips and me being able to sit here and write about my
mother’s work, and my uncle’s, and all the other people who make so much
possible through their labor. There are about two million waitresses in the
United States. Through a combination of physical and social skill and the
ability to think on their feet, they support families and put kids through
school, or pay for their own school, or help aging parents. They make
restaurants function at the point of service. They contribute to the social
fabric of the neighborhoods where they work.
There are roughly
two million home health care workers in our country, tending to those who are
too sick to care for themselves. There are somewhere around one and one half
million plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, daily clearing the flow of
water, completing a circuit, building and repairing our shelter. The list
continues, outward and across the country: ranch hands and farm workers,
long-haul truckers and local drivers, firefighters and miners and welders, the
untold numbers of people who work in factories, canneries, and meat-processing
plants.
Collectively,
these men and women form a massive web of skill that makes our country
function, that maintains and comforts and, at times, rescues us. They are so
present, their mental and manual abilities so woven into our daily lives that
their skills are taken for granted, at times slip out of sight. I wrote The Mind at Work to document their
ability and pay homage to it.
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This piece made me flash back to my tip-counting ritual of my 6-month stint as a Denny's waitress. It was a form of winding down and a moment of satisfaction after tough physical and mental work (preceded only by removal the binding L'eggs "massaging" support hose!): emptying the pockets, counting the money, pleasure at making more than my below-minimum-wage job payed me. I had never been a waitress before and somehow was placed with the breakfast waitresses for whom this shift was a reward. One was a great-grandmother with a naughty sense of humor ("What does the handle of this ice scoop feel like to you? Here, just hold it.") and who protected me from the horny chef ("Kiss my ass, Al-BER-to"). I made so many mistakes. They always knew the flooding, the pocket ticket, the incomplete sidework was mine. By the time I left, though, I was proud that I finally got it all down and was deeply honored by being invited out for a drink after work. I will never forget that job or those co-workers.
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