The Mind at Work Ten Years After

            This is a reflection on the 10^th Anniversary of The Mind at Work. It first appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Summer, 2014.

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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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Portraits of Thinking: An Account of a Common Laborer

For the sixth story about cognition in action, I want to go back into history and reflect on the infamous description of a man named Schmidt, a common laborer in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s portrayal of Schmidt reveals an undemocratic and contradictory American attitude toward physical work, one that carries with it strong biases about intelligence. For those of you who missed the previous entries where I discuss the purpose of these portraits of thinking, I’ll repeat two introductory paragraphs now. If you did read the earlier entries, you can skip right to the reflection on Schmidt, which is drawn from The Mind at Work.

As I’ve been arguing during the year of this blog’s existence—and for some time before—we tend to think too narrowly about intelligence, and that narrow thinking has affected the way we judge each other, organize work, and define ability and achievement in school. We miss so much.

I hope that the portraits I offer over the next few months illustrate the majesty and surprise of intelligence, its varied manifestations, its subtlety and nuance. The play of mind around us.

***

Following is one of the most reproduced depictions of a laborer in Western occupational literature, drawn from Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management. It captures American industry’s traditional separation of managerial intelligence from worker production.

Taylor was a fierce systematizer and a tireless promoter of time study and industrial efficiency. He uses an immigrant laborer named Schmidt to illustrate how even the most basic of tasks—in this case, the loading of pig iron—could be analytically broken down by the scientific manager into a series of maximally effective movements, with a resulting bonus in wages and a boom in productivity. Schmidt, Taylor claimed, jumped his rate from twelve-and-a-half tons of pig iron per day—each "pig" an oblong casting of iron weighing close to one-hundred pounds—to an astonishing tonnage of forty-seven.

Before he introduces Schmidt, Taylor sets the scene with a dispassionate analysis of the loading of pig iron at Bethlehem Steel, Schmidt's place of employment. Enter Schmidt, "a little Pennsylvania Dutchman," seemingly inexhaustible (he "trots" to and from work), frugal, in the process of building "a little house for himself." Then comes this interaction between Taylor and Schmidt:

'Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?'
Vell, I don't know vat you mean.'
'Oh, yes, you do. What I want to know is whether you are a high-priced man or not.'
'Vell, I don't know vat you mean.'
'Oh, come now, you answer my questions. What I want to find out is whether you are a high-priced man or one of these cheap fellows here.
What I want to find out is whether you want to earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the same as all those cheap fellows are getting.'
'Did I vant $1.85 a day? Vas dot a high-priced man? Vell, yes, I vas a high-priced man.'
'Oh, you're aggravating me. Of course you want $1.85 a day—every one wants it!…For goodness' sake answer my questions, and don't waste any more of my time. Now come over here. You see that pile of pig iron?'…

Taylor badgers Schmidt for a little while longer—one wonders what Schmidt thinks of all this—and then introduces him to the supervisor who will direct his scientifically calibrated labor:

Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you to-morrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man does just what he's told to do, and no back talk. Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don't talk back at him.

"This seems to be rather rough talk," Taylor admits, but "[w]ith a man of the mentally sluggish type of Schmidt it is appropriate and not unkind." Later, Taylor observes that Schmidt "happened to be a man of the type of an ox…a man so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work, even."

There's much to say about this depiction, and a number of critics, beginning with Upton Sinclair, have collectively said it: the insidious mix of scientific pretension, class and ethnic bias, and paternalism; the antagonistic management stance, the kind of authoritarian control that would lead to industrial inflexibility; the absolute gulf between managerial brains and worker brawn; the ruthlessness of full-blown industrial capitalism. All true.

In addition, though, I keep thinking of Schmidt himself, rereading Taylor's rendering, trying to imagine him beyond the borders of Taylor's page. Let us follow him through the plant, out into his world, down the road home. Though Taylor claims that a man like Schmidt "is so stupid that the word 'percentage' has no meaning to him," Taylor also tells us that Schmidt is building a house from his meager earnings. So, Schmidt had to calculate and budget, and even if he could not do formal arithmetic—we don’t know if he could or couldn't—he would have to be competent in the mathematics necessary for carpentry. And for him to plan and execute even a simple structure, use hand tools effectively, solicit and coordinate aid—all this requires way more intelligence than Taylor grants him.

Taylor does not tell us if Schmidt is literate, but does note that many of the laborers "were foreigners and unable to read and write." If Schmidt were illiterate, did he develop informal literate networks to take care of personal and civic needs? We know that ethnic communities were rich in fraternal organizations that served as places of entertainment, but also as sites of political discussion and the exchange of news about the old country. Literate members would write letters, read newspapers aloud, both in their native language and English, and act as linguistic and culture brokers with mainstream institutions. The parish church or synagogue was another source of exposure to literate practices and social exchange, and, for some, a place of reflection.

Though Bethlehem Steel was not yet a site of significant union activity, labor unrest had already erupted in some sectors of steel, and discussions about safety, work conditions, and the length of the work day were in the air. Schmidt might well have heard the early rumblings about these issues and might have talked about them to others in the yard, the saloon, the neighborhood.

The point is that one cannot assume—as so many have—that the men looking back at us impassively from those photographs of the open ditch or the pouring of fiery steel, faded, blurring to silver, had no mental life, were sluggish, dull, like oxen.

Cognition and Diversity

Last summer the Conference on College Composition and Communication (which is part of the National Council of Teachers of English) asked me to contribute to their blog on diversity. What I wrote for CCCC resonates with issues that have been emerging on this blog, so I’m reprinting, with some editing, my post below. As its name suggests, CCCC’s primary focus is on college-level writing instruction, but I think the themes in “Cognition and Diversity” have broader application. See what you think.

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The issue I want to discuss is intelligence and the broader construct of cognition: attention and perception, conceptualizing, thinking, problem-solving, etc. We tend not to think about this cluster of topics when discussing diversity – unless we’re discussing exceptional children – but beliefs about intelligence are woven throughout beliefs about race, gender, social class, and ability.

I’ll begin with a little personal history.

I’ve been interested in the way we think for a long time. When I was an English major, I found myself drawn to accounts of a writer’s creative process: What was the inspiration for a story or a key defining moment or image that was the germ of the thing? Or what happened to a poem through various revisions; what did we know about why changes were made? Or I was fascinated by those bursts of creativity that seemed to come out nowhere: for example, how you couldn’t have predicted the intricacies of Moby Dick from Melville’s earlier novels.

Then came psychology and reading in perception and cognition, in child development, in cross-cultural studies. All this got me on the road, provided bodies of knowledge and ways to understand and study.

But not without complication.

The history of psychological and social science – and the humanities as well – is laden with research and writing that reflects the biases of the larger culture from which in emerges. So, as in the larger culture, you have claims about the intellectual inferiority of non-white races, or immigrants, or rural folk, or women. You have claims about linguistic inferiority. You have all sorts of claims about the working-class and the work they do.

I won’t weigh the present essay down with the details of how I found my way through all this and begin using the cognitive perspective toward what I hope are egalitarian ends. (Anyone interested in more of that detail can find it in a book of mine titled An Open Language.) But I do want to zero in on two things that I think are central to my own development, and are pertinent to the upcoming discussion.

One is my own background as the child of immigrant working-class parents growing up in a poor neighborhood. I know intimately many of the kinds of people who are the focus of claims about intellectual and linguistic inferiority. And what I heard and read didn’t always match up.

The second is that I started tutoring and teaching at a relatively young age in schools and programs that served poor and working-class people from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and the settings spanned kindergarten to college. So, again, I saw first-hand the processes of teaching and learning, and I saw what people can do with their minds.

Both of these elements of my personal history certainly contributed to the way I saw myself, my values and dreams, and they contributed as well to an empirical and skeptical bent, useful both to question the ugliness I’d hear on the streets, on the radio, in my own neighborhood and extended family as well as the claims made in some of the academic material I was encountering.

This empirical skepticism, this need to test what I was studying against my own personal and professional experience, enabled me to use cognitively-oriented research to both critique work within the cognitive tradition that diminished human ability as well as critique the many and ongoing claims that rise like crabgrass in our society about the intellectual capabilities of underprepared students, poor folks, people of color, women, manual workers, you name it.

So let me fast-forward now to a few quick summaries of this work.

My study of cognition combined with other areas of study in the humanities and social science led to a series of articles that, collectively, tried to do the following. I wanted to explore the way flawed assumptions about cognition and language have influenced remedial writing curricula; the limiting institutional definitions of remediation and of writing instruction; overgeneralizing explanations as to why some students have difficulty with writing; and the classroom processes by which some students get defined as intellectually and linguistically deficient.

In addition to critique, I advocated a richer, more multifaceted model of cognition and writing and a way to think about curriculum and instruction that honored that richness. (Some of my earlier entries summarize this approach, see 07/08/08 and 07/24/08).

All of this work played itself out in a series of articles that you’ll find in that Open Language collection and, in more narrative form, in Lives on the Boundary.

I can give you a flavor for this writing by doing a pretty unblogospheric thing here and quoting the closing paragraph from one of the articles, “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”:

If I could compress this essay’s investigation down to a single conceptual touchstone, it would be this: Human cognition – even at its most stymied, bungled moments – is rich and varied. It is against this assumption that we should test our theories and research methods and classroom assessments. Do our practices work against classification that encourages single, monolithic explanations of cognitive activity? Do they honor the complexity of interpretive efforts even when those efforts fall short of some desired goal? Do they foster investigation of interaction and protean manifestation rather than investigation of absence? Do they urge reflection on the cultural biases that might be shaping them? We must be vigilant that the systems of intellect we develop or adapt do not ground our students’ difficulties in sweeping, essentially one-dimensional perceptual, neurophysiological, psychological, or linguistic processes, systems that drive broad cognitive wedges between those who do well in our schools and those who don’t.

Though some of this work is of its time (it was written in the 1980s), it unfortunately is pertinent today. Consider the number of basic/remedial/preparatory writing courses that are still built on problematic notions of cognition and language, leading to deadening skills and drills curricula. Or an article that appeared in the June Atlantic Monthly (that we’ve discussed on this blog) in which a disgruntled community college professor depicts his students as academically dense and marginally literate. Or that old bad penny Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame peddling again in True Education methodologically flawed notions about intelligence and the social order.

O.K., one more fast-forward, this one to The Mind at Work, a recent book in which I continue exploring questions of cognition, intelligence, and achievement. I blend case histories of blue collar and service workers with cognitive and social analysis to challenge longstanding Western distinctions between mental and physical activity, offering, I hope, a more psychologically and educationally productive way to consider what we do with hand and brain.

From Classical Greece on down, we have tended to make sharp and value-laden separations between the mental and physical, between the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual versus the practical, applied, and concrete – and, more recently, between the academic and the vocational. These distinctions have affected the way we define intelligence, create curriculum, and organize work. This kind of binary thinking is inadequate to describe what actually occurs as waitresses or welders (or, for that matter, teachers or surgeons) apply knowledge, solve problems, arrive at decisions, and make aesthetic judgments.

This set of issues seems especially important for those of us who teach students from working-class families and/or who work in programs aimed at providing occupational training.

I think these issues are also important for all of us, for with our educations can come a predisposition to elevate the intellectual content and value of one kind of work over another and make cognitive judgments about people based on the work they do.

Having said that, I feel the need to explain further, and, if you’ll indulge me one more time, I’m going to do the boorish thing of quoting myself again, this time from The Mind at Work:

This is not a call for a simplified egalitarianism. I am not denying the obvious fact that people come to any pursuit with different interests, talents, knacks for things, motivations, capabilities. Nor am I claiming that all bodies of knowledge and expressions of mind are of the same level of cognitive complexity and social importance. All the cultures I’m familiar with make judgments about competence in the domains that matter to them. (Though ours is more obsessed than any I know with developing measures of the mind and schemes to rank them.) No, the distressing thing is that both in our institutional systems and in our informal talk we tend to label entire categories of work and the people associated with them in ways that generalize, erase cognitive variability, and diminish whole traditions of human activity. Attributions of merit and worth flow throughout the process. We order, we rank, we place at steps upon a ladder rather than appreciating an abundant and varied cognitive terrain.

In closing, let me offer a cautionary tale that illustrates how easily overgeneralized and ungenerous judgments about other people’s thinking can come to us.

About ten years ago a graduate student came to see me with a sketch of a dissertation proposal. It had taken this person a fairly long time to get to this place, having begun then abandoned a previous research topic. And the sketch I was looking at was also the result of many months of deliberation. Along the way another faculty member had commented to me that this person was a “weak” student.

I read the new sketch, and it wasn’t good at all. It was general in some places. In others, one claim didn’t line up with the next. Some sentences were difficult to understand. It was hard to know exactly what the research project was. The comment from my colleague flipped into my mind like a pop-up ad. And so did a sense that’s hard to describe, but was kind of a half-thought/half-feeling that this student might not have the ability to complete a dissertation.

We met and caught up a little, stuff about family and work. Then we turned to the proposal. I decided to avoid its problems and asked the student to talk to me about the project, not in dissertation lingo, but in everyday speech.

What followed was clear, elaborated, interesting. A solid, engaging project. We talked a while longer, getting some notes down on paper. I then turned to the piece I’d read and pointed out a few places where I had had trouble. And the student explained – frustration seeping out – that what I read was an attempt to reconcile conflicting advice from another faculty member, several peers, and an activist in the community to be studied.

This student’s dilemma is familiar to all of us, I’m sure – the way conceptual (and interpersonal) conflicts can negatively affect our writing. But look what went on in my head when I first read the proposal sketch. Without realizing it, I had absorbed the informal norms of graduate study: that, for example, time-to-degree is a measure of ability or that flawed writing equaled flawed thinking. I had drunk the cognitive Kool Aid.

As I write in that paragraph from The Mind at Work, I’m not trying to ignore the fact that we, all of us, do have different talents, interests, etc. It is possible that the student was, for all sorts of reasons, not ready or equipped to write a dissertation. And, after all, as educators we’re obliged to make judgments about performance and respond accordingly. What is troubling in the anecdote, however, is the ease with which a one-dimensional judgment about intellectual ability came to me.

But the anecdote also points to some ways out of this mess. It reminds us that we live tangled in systems of bias, and that we will always blunder, and, therefore, we need in our teaching some methods to keep us aware, some tools of mindfulness: asking different questions, shifting languages, listening closely. We need certain habits of mind, for example, a testing of our own judgments, a willingness to have them disconfirmed. We need to be alert to the social contexts we inhabit – this was the root of my error – and the norms and beliefs we absorb in them. We need to publicly question the vocabulary and assumptions that constitute these settings. (This blog is a tiny gesture in that direction.) We also need to be creative in fashioning other kinds of spaces within those worlds we inhabit.

These are the kinds of issues and questions we – I – need to keep raising. They keep in sight the ease with which we reduce each other. They contribute to a richer pedagogical imagination. Ant they can help fashion a more humane institutional and civic life.

My Readers Weigh In on Work, Intelligence, Education, Politics, Hope

I spent the morning rereading the comments on my eight entries spanning August to November. The entries concern work, education, opportunity, and politics—and most of them were in some way linked to the presidential election. It was a nice, quiet morning, a little brisk but warm at the desk by the garden window.

There were 31 reader posts, some a sentence or two long, others paragraphs and paragraphs. Many contained stories about work, or reflections on education and opportunity, or expressions of concern or hope about our political culture and its future.

***

A number of people wrote with great feeling about family and friends who work with their hands, paying tribute to their knowledge and skill and to the opportunity they created for others, in some cases for the writer her or himself. A woman writes about her father, a factory worker, figuring out a more effective and safer way to move heavy materials on the factory floor. And an anonymous writer—who was once a waitress herself—honors her waitress mother coming home exhausted from the graveyard shift. While her mother slept, the writer would count the tips in a worn, black apron, the tips that helped keep the family afloat. I remember doing this very thing.

There is a portrait of a railroad worker inebriated at the end of the day, labor behind him, declaiming in the middle of a small-town street lines from Shakespeare. And there are childhood memories from another writer of Italian construction workers in my hometown of Altoona, Pennsylvania. In addition to homage and memory, there are contemporary accounts of favorite restaurateurs, hairstylists, gardeners, even a chimney sweep. And a lovely point gets made about these workers: The importance of relationship, of familiarity and history, of trust—the giving oneself over to another person’s skill and workmanship.

All this becomes part of community, helps create it. One person writes of going to the same diner for forty years and the sense of belonging, even solidarity that fosters. Another writer quotes the manager of a favorite restaurant. He talks about the value of having a “third space,” a place in addition to home and work where you feel accepted. We share each others lives in such places.

There’s a Whitmanesque quality to all these tributes taken together: A celebration of a wide sweep of the citizenry, the work they/we do, our interconnectedness. I also think here of another American treasure, Jane Jacobs, who in The Death and Life of Great American Cities testifies to the importance of the street, the vibrant mix of apartments and shops and pedestrians, of mingling and interdependence in a common public space.

***

As I’ve been trying to argue in this last series of blogs—and generally in The Mind at Work—there are civic and political implications for the way we think about labor, intelligence, and the meaning of work, and a number of readers commented on this cluster of issues. In America we do live amidst an awful tangle of attitudes about intelligence: who’s intelligent, how intelligence is defined, its association with formal schooling, backlash to that association, a mean aristocratic streak in the culture in tension with a dangerous populist anti-intellectualism. Several wrote about teaching in the midst of this cultural mess, “working with students whose intelligence is obvious but who hold vastly different interests” than those represented in the traditional school curriculum but that hold real merit in the world of physical work.

Various writers decried our anti-intellectualism and the way some politicians play to it, the cynical manipulation of it. Several underscored the desperate need for critical thinking, for developing a healthier strain of it in civic life.

This leads to something I’ve been pondering for a while: The personification of the citizen that emerges in political speech. That is, who is the “American citizen” created in, say, FDR’s Fireside Chats, or Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech, or George Bush’s speeches after September 11, 2001, or Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention address or his speech on race? George W. Bush’s former Chief-of-Staff Andy Card once said that the President saw Americans as children he needed to protect. In several of my blog entries I wish for a much different construction of the citizen in political speech, for political discourse helps create a citizenry.

In line with this is my desire for a political environment that has mass educational potential, that instructs and encourages deliberation. A potent example is Obama’s speech on race. Whether you thought it was marred by missteps and omissions, or that it didn’t go far enough, it was still unlike any national political speech in recent memory. Newscasters and commentators scrambled to characterize it, and, suddenly, the adjective “nuanced” emerged with…well, with surprise. Nuance was that unfamiliar in political rhetoric.

There is so much national chatter about education, raising expectations and achievement, the need for 21st Century skills, etc. yet on the civic level we veer continually toward the shallow, the culture-war caricature, the sound-bite over substance (the average length of a president candidate’s television sound-bite in 1968 was 42 seconds, by 2000 it was 7.8 seconds), and debate formats that you wouldn’t find on the high-school circuit. We surely can do better.

Some blog readers expressed a cautious optimism, fearful, though, that our national strains of bigotry and xenophobia could trump an appeal to our better angels. But some writers expressed a deep, weighty hope—an act of faith, perhaps—that we might generate a different, more thoughtful, more democratic political culture.

***

I want to close by returning to the act of reading this last four months worth of posts. I started the blog at the end of February, 2008, and I think that I’m just now understanding something about the potential power and beauty of the medium.

Perhaps because I read the 31 posts all in one setting, I was struck by the choral quality of the experience, the many voices playing off the various themes of the blog entries. In their own tiny way, the comments, taken collectively, represent the kind of community of voices so many of us long for on a larger scale.

All you commenters—and all other readers, too—please chime in, keep us talking.

The Intelligence of the Waitress in Motion

Labor Day is almost here, so I’d like to stick with the theme of work a while longer. I’m reprinting below a tribute I wrote for my mother who worked in restaurants all her adult life.

This originally appeared several years ago in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

***

The restaurant was my mother’s laboratory of human relations and the place where she put her quick and inquisitive mind to work. I would visit her with my father, who was disabled, and sit at the back booth, where the waitresses took their break. There wasn’t a lot to do at home. Our neighborhood was poor, a mix of old houses and small stores, lots of retirees, few kids. The hours stretched out. So my father and I would take the bus downtown to pass the time with Rosie.

I remember her walking full-tilt with an armload of plates along one arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her other hand. Or her taking orders, pencil poised over pad. Or her flopping down in the booth, the whoosh of the cushion. “I’m all in” she’d say, and whisper something quickly to us about a regular customer: about his kids or why she thinks he’s having problems at work. She would stand before a table, her arm stacked with plates, picking one order off for this person, then another, then another – always seeming to get it right, knowing who got the hamburger, who got the fried shrimp. I remember her sitting sideways in the back booth, talking to us, her one hand gripping the outer edge of the table, watching the floor, and noting, in the flow of our conversation, who needed something, who was finishing up, whose order was taking longer to prepare than it should.

My mother immigrated to the United States with her parents from Southern Italy and grew up during the Great Depression. Her family was very poor, and Rosie was taken out of school in the seventh grade to care for her younger brothers and sisters. She started waiting on tables as a young woman and worked her entire adult life in coffee shops and chain restaurants. These places are fast-paced, and the work is hard and punishing, especially over the long haul. But given her limited formal education, my mother knew that she could always make a living in a restaurant. As she put it to me simply but powerfully much later in her life: “Dad was ill, and you were little…I had to get work.”

Most tributes to working-class parents stop here. We celebrate their work ethic, or their courage, or their love for us and the tenacity of their labor. My mother certainly deserves such testimony. But I think that she – and blue-collar and service workers like her – deserve another tribute as well: a tribute to the intelligence that it took to handle the many demands of her work.

As someone who comes from a blue-collar background and who now, as a professor of education, studies issues like learning and intelligence, I am troubled by the way we as a society readily acknowledge the intelligence required for white-collar and professional occupations, but rarely honor the thinking involved in physical work. Listen to the language we use. The work of the “new economy” is “neck-up” while old-style industrial and service work is “neck-down”. In the body only. Mindless.

But what I saw growing up was anything but mindless. My uncles—who were machinists, welders, and factory workers—would show me how to do things with tools or explain how something worked. And my mother was so competent in the restaurant, so in command of what seemed to me to be chaos. All this has affected how I understand intelligence, learning outside of school, and the immense knowledge and skill of the everyday work that makes life possible.

So about seven years ago, I set out to study the cognition of physical work, that is, the knowledge involved, the way information is used, the kinds of decisions made and problems solved. I brought my current intellectual tools, so to speak, to bear on the intelligence of the work that surrounded me as I was growing up: to the restaurant, the railroad, the factory floor. The project became both a fascinating study in its own right as well as a tribute to my family.

To do the work she did, my mother had to develop strategies to aid memory. As she stood before a table, taking orders, repeating them back while writing them out, making small talk, she would “make a picture in my mind” of the person giving her the order, what that person ordered, and where around the table he or she was located. She would do this for seven to nine tables, with two to six people each. She relied on physical appearance, dress, location at the table, and conformity to or deviation from social expectations – for example, the man who orders a chef salad while his wife orders a steak.

My mother had to keep all this in mind while rushing through a busy restaurant, watching over things, organizing and sequencing tasks, and solving problems on the fly. She describes a typical scenario where an obnoxious regular is tapping the side of his coffee cup with a spoon while she is taking an order. The cook rings her bell indicating another order is ready, and a few seconds later the manager seats two new parties at two of her tables that have just cleared. And, oh, as she is dashing back to the kitchen, one customer asks to change an order, another signals for more coffee, and a third requests a new fork to replace one dropped on the floor. “Your mind is going so fast,” she says, “thinking what to do first, where to go first…which is the best thing to do…which is the quickest.” How did my mother do it?

One thing the waitress does is try to see the big picture and stay vigilant. My mother talks about both standing back and surveying her station and “taking little glances” at her tables as she is moving through it. This mindfulness can reveal problems. “You’re keeping an eye on who is not served yet,” she says, “If it’s been too long, you go check on the kitchen yourself.”

The waitress gets very good at “working smart”. My mother would sequence and group tasks. What could she do first, then second, then third as she circled through her station? Or what could be clustered together at the coffee counter or when she’s going to the kitchen? This economy of movement called for a continual attentiveness to a dynamic, quickly changing environment. If my mother didn’t “make every move count,” as she put it, she would “run myself ragged.”

All of this fast thinking is taking place in an emotional field. Is the manager in a good mood? Did the cook wake up on the wrong side of the bed? If so how can you make an extra request or return an order diplomatically? And, then, of course, there are the customers. Customers enter a restaurant with all sorts of needs, from the physiological – and the emotions that accompany hunger – to a desire for public intimacy. The waitress’s tip is dependent on how well she responds to these needs – not always an easy, or uncomplicated, task. So she gets good at reading social cues and managing feelings, both the customers’ and her own. This self-regulation of feeling is sufficiently demanding that some sociologists refer to it as “emotional labor”. But what also strikes me too is the interpersonal smarts it takes to pull it off.

My mother was fascinated by psychology and was a keen observer of it. She understood the motivations of neighborhood kids better than some of our teachers, and she had a shrewd take on the politics of the restaurants she worked in. The restaurant became the place where she studied human behavior, puzzled over the problems of her regular customers, refined her ability to deal with people in a difficult world. She took pride in “being among the public.” The main floor became her informal classroom. “There isn’t a day that goes by in the restaurant,” she was fond of saying, “that you don’t learn something.”

Much of the thinking and learning in the restaurant is hidden from us. When dining out goes well, we experience “good service”, which typically means that our food got to us in a timely fashion, it was prepared well, and the interaction with the server was pleasant. But there is a mind at work in creating that service, the play of memory, attention, decision-making, social sensibility.

This is what engaged Rosie Rose, and getting it down in print as Labor Day approaches gives me a way to remember and honor her.