Improvised Learning

Introduction: Comic Argument

You jump on stage.

The audience is small, exactly the right size. You get a suggestion from them, and immediately start talking, using, as much as possible, your normal, naturally occurring voice and thoughts. Honesty is key. In order to improvise well, you have to be at peace with the most stupid and embarrassing aspects of yourself.

Trying to be funny rarely works. The audience may laugh, but it will be at things you don't expect.

Gradually, you start to build a story, trying to use everything: the responses from the audience, the little malapropisms and mistakes. The optimal unfolding of the scenes depends upon an irrational acceptance, even love, of everything that happens. "There are no mistakes," your little troupe of improvisers tells each other, one of the maxims of improvised theater that have dripped down into the more rural Midwest from brighter lit stages in Chicago.

It is a wonderful feeling, when it goes well. More than that, the wonderfully weird effectiveness of live collaboration seems important. The feeling is so good, the creative telepathy of close and fearless friends so striking, that you will write a book decades later trying to explain it.

Plants and Vampires

The sunlight in the morning would cover, by the time the exercise class was supposed to start, a bright crescent on the edge of the octagon-shaped gazebo. This was one of the first things we would do in the morning, after we had met at the corner of town and walked down along the wall past the fields of quinoa, to the organic farm on terraced fields by the train station, looking out across the river to the mountains. They would put their bags in the two room schoolhouse, water the herbs and flowers in the garden they had designed and planted, and then meet in the thatched roof structure we called the “yoga studio.”

After several months of teaching at the Kuska School, the thirty or so kids and I had a fair amount of games and exercises to draw from. Some mornings I would have them walk around the space, calling out in English different animals for them to impersonate. Sometimes we would turn the corners of the gazebo into stations, with a different exercise (jumping jacks, running in place) for each. We might play duck-duck goose, or a memory game, or do actual yoga. Most of the time I would come up with the activity on the spot, improvising from what I, or the children, were feeling like at the time. Often I’d try to relate it to previous games, stories, or lessons.

This particular day, the idea came from the shrinking patch of morning sunlight, slanting down through the wooden posts. Little pairs of shoes were lined up by the edge. We had been playing games with vampires, so I tried one with vampires and plants. The idea was to have dramatic vampire deaths when they wandered into the sun, slowly collapsing onto the floor. Then I could call out "plant" and they would be invigorated by the light and heat. They could then wither away if dragged into shade, only to revive again once the “vampire” turn was called. I’m not sure how or why they moved as plants. Maybe they were plant people? Since it was an on-the-spot inspiration, I hadn't really thought it through. I must have explained the rules in a combination of pantomime and broken Spanish. The plant thing related, though, to hands-on biology lessons other adults had been giving them on the farm. That was the philosophy of the school, that the kids' education should be grounded as much as possible in the world around them.

Lessons, in order to maximally relate to other material, as well as what is happening in a given moment, can't be planned. They have to be improvised. Teaching improvised lessons not only makes the information more interesting and relevant, but at another level, also teaches the students how to have an alert, open mind, one ready to find inspiration in what is happening, rather than how to go through a predetermined routine.

The game didn't really work, and we moved onto something else. There was, at the school, a fair amount of resistance to new games, but occasionally I would pull up something from my dimly remembered past, like four-square, and it would become a fad, a sensation, among the school. Some games I thought sure to succeed failed, proving to be too complicated, and others I was sure would be too complex ended up as their favorites. I was flexible enough, and non-attached enough to what I had expected or planned, to be able to adapt to these unpredictable preferences.

The school was near the train station one stop away from Macchu Piccu, in Ollantaytambo, the only still inhabited Incan village. It was as picturesque as possible. The experimental grade/primary school been started, and was run, by a couple who also owned the nearby hotel, the restaurant of which got most of its food from the organic farm the gazeebo looked out on. Tourists would come by and visit the school, watching the children, a mix of indigenous and international, play or learn. It was a project-based school, meant to showcase a certain pedagogical approach, so it seems appropriate that I also start my own narrative there.

Negocios

On spring evening in 2019, I stepped into Aula 9 at the Universidad de la Cañada, where I’d been teaching for a little over a month. That school, also, was picturesque, and also situated in remote mountains, not in Peru, but in the Oaxaca region of southern Mexico. The class was from 6:00 to 7:00 pm, the last one of the day before I would take a moto-taxi back to the nearby puebla of Teotitlan de Flores Magon. The other English teacher, Emily, and I had so many students between us that we split our classes, teaching different groups on alternating days of the week, so I sometimes got confused as to what activities I’ve used with each group. This particular evening I had planned on using a game with colored chips, plates and cups, where they have to give instructions to classmates using prepositions (“put two red chips behind the plate,” “put one blue chip in the cup,” etc.), but as I walked in I realized I’d done a similar exercise with them before.

"Crap," I thought. This, though, is where decades of experience in improvisational thinking and teaching saved me.

I asked them what they wanted to learn about, and they said, “negocios,” or business. “Okay,” I said, my mind racing through different ways I could fill the next hour of class time, “what are different kinds of businesses?” I wrote them on the board. I then made a table, with a column for units per month, cost to buy, and selling price. A shoe store, for example, could deal in 300 pairs of shoes a month, buying them for 600 pesos and selling them for a thousand. A real estate business might only sell two houses in a month, but for a profit of 100,000. I had them bet, based on imaginary figures, which business would make more money for the month, and gave them an appropriately colored chip depending on their bet. We did the math, and then those who bet correctly got an extra token. We then played the game again, giving out a new chip representing their choice of business, but this time those with three chips could invest up to two, and lose or win accordingly.

Pausing to explain vocabulary and practice pronunciation, we went through several rounds, and towards the end I introduced a taxation rule, with one business (a casino) being taxed at a higher rate than another.

The point of this anecdote, and this book in general, is not that I am a great teacher. Nor is it that I am an amazing writer. It took me a while, but at some point in my life I realized that you could never know, no matter how intently you tried, to accurately estimate or understand your own ability in some kind of subjective skill like writing or teaching, nor could anyone else reliably tell you.

Even later in life did I begin not to care. More accurately, I began to care more about actually learning than about comparing my ability to learn with others. This book is intended to entertain you rather than convince you of anything, and the point of it is meant to point outward to some idea worth your attention, not necessarily to myself.

The point, as far as my own role in the following narratives is concerned, is that I am a teacher, and a human being in general, that relies heavily on various types of improvisation. Sometimes I even wonder if I have gotten good at improvising lessons because of my deficiencies in other aspects of teaching, like organization and time management.

This isn’t a guide on how to teach, and my hope is that it will be interesting to those outside of the field of education. This is the first non-fiction book, not counting my dissertation, that I have ever written. The idea of improvised learning stood out to me among all possible subjects as the one that was central, for better or worse, to the way I live, work, and think.

Improvised Everything: No Rehearsals

This book distills what are, to me, the most meaningful aspects of improvisation into general principles. Foremost among these is that whatever you are doing now—at any given moment, is important.

“How can you rehearse for improv?” the joke went in college, whenever I would tell people I was going to improv rehearsal. That was why I liked improvisation more than traditional theater—there wasn’t such a strong difference between preparation and performance. There was no way to prepare fully for shows, and all of our rehearsals felt like performances, putting on scenes and plays for ourselves. You could plan general structures: games, patterns, in-jokes you could keep circling back to, but you couldn’t script anything or memorize it.

My approach to teaching, once I started working as an instructor for literature classes, followed a similar method: I would have a rough plan, or outline, of how I imagined the hour would go, but I left enough flexibility that both I and my students could feel the nervous charge of indeterminacy, and feel the space left for new, tangential topics to emerge. Both teachers and students are drawn more into alertness to the present moment when it still contains ambiguity and potential.

You and I should have a sense of what this book is about, but neither of us are certain.

One thing I can tell you is that improvised learning is a metaphor, and I will take liberties to extend it beyond the context of both theater and education, using it as a thematic framework for short narratives taken from my experience.

As I get older, it becomes more important that I no longer think of myself as preparing for anything, or if I am, the preparation, in itself, has to be significant and fulfilling. There are no prerequisites, no more certificates, qualifications, training programs. Everything is what it is, and the worth of an activity must stand entirely on its own merits, not on some anticipated, future, reward.

I had a sense of this all the years in school, taking things more seriously than I might have been expected to. I never saw papers or assignments as mere preliminary steps to a grade, as necessary antecedents to a degree, which itself would just be a requirement for a job, more than likely viewed, once attained, as a stepping stone to that imagined final position from which you can say and do the things that you intended to do all along.

"You aren't at the stage of your career yet where you can write things like this," I was told by an adviser in graduate school. I want to write, though, at every moment, as uncompromisingly honestly as I can.

This book can be thought of as an extended series of scenes based on the word “improv” that past versions of my self have shouted, rather insistently, as a suggestion for the present. As tended to happen in those shows (and as my life has played out), the starting point is spun onto so many tangents that the initial suggestion becomes incidental to the emergence of something more complicated and multi-valent. I don't really do or watch “improv” any more, but I use it in the way that I teach, and learn, and write.

This is not a manual of improvisation, or a guide for a certain style of teaching. While the description of the games is hopefully useful, I am using them primarily as a way to illustrate my experiences teaching and living in various countries, and studying improvisation academically in the United States.

The idea of improvised learning is also meaningful to me as an ex-academic struggling to find the time and means to maintain an intellectual life beyond the jealously guarded support systems of official institutions. Most of my new knowledge acquisition has been, by necessity, auto-didactic and online.

In such a rarefied and generally useless discipline as the study of English literature, the pursuit of interesting and presumably accurate models of reality can be justified as an ends in itself. I might, as will be discussed in later chapters, have overdone this disinterested acquisition of understanding, to the detriment of an actual career. The idea of being a professor was, for me, was always a subsidiary goal to that of becoming a writer.

What you lose in a University setting, I’ve come to understand, is an underlying sense of purpose, and the struggle with internal motivation. Students are captive audiences in a way that you, dear reader, are not. A salary is a more certain source of income than speculative book sales.

When I graduated from the University of Iowa, rather than following the traditional career path into a post-doc and then teaching position, I moved to France with a sociologist I had married, and by the time we got divorced I wasn't sure if I had the desire or ability to teach at a University level. Instead, I spent a year in Peru at an experimental farm school.

Since then, I’ve had to improvise other ways to learn, and new ways to communicate that learning to others. This book is also, then, about finding modes of scholarship improvised outside of institutions. New digital landscapes are making this possible in ways they never were before.

Not Funny

I am not an especially funny person. You might expect the author of a book on improvisation to have a marginally comedic personality. That is not the case.

To the casual observer, I'm painfully boring. In real-time, outside of written words or music, I'm only really interesting to myself, because I can see all of the murals I'm painting on the inside of my skull. In groups of people I don't know well, I'm exceedingly quiet and introverted. Paradoxically, this has allowed me to perform well on stage. The normal, human response to public speaking is to soak up the adrenaline and attention by talking too fast, becoming jittery and nervous. As someone who is normally slow, being on stage somehow just brings me up to the state of energy and animation normal for most people, creating the effect of my being perfectly comfortable performing. In reality, the shock of stage-fright just ratchets me up to relative normalcy.

Improvisation is not necessarily about humor. At Grinnell, where my involvement in actual theater peaked, my main interest was in long-form, which was more about telling stories and developing themes.

We would, the long form group that was a sub-set of the comedy troupe, stage epic multi-scene full-length productions, sometimes only for ourselves in one of our college-owned housing rooms, or outside, for whoever was walking by. We had so much patience and energy for each other, stalking the smallest joke over scenes that would have been tedius to anyone not acting in them.

Any broad claims about learning, improvisation, games, and stories, should be balanced in this text with a pull towards the particular. My experiences have been different from yours. I'm just adding another point of reference to existing maps.

This book, as I envision it, does have some of the qualities of an improvised performance. In both, I think it is important not to wish for a larger audience than the one already listening, the one in range of your unamplified voice.

This book, as an example, may only ever be published on the smallest of scales, but that won't diminish the generous readings of those to whom I will give it in these early stages, or the conversations I've had and which I mean to expand and continue.

The stage I'm standing on, though, is always the right size. The world is reliably there, ready to absorb any words I throw out to those points of conscious light.

Small scale productions have more value, in my view, than those copied from distant celebrity platforms. Books are best by people that you know.

Social Cognition

At the University of Iowa, where I went to graduate school between 2004 and 2010, I became obsessed with the idea of literature (my area of study) functioning like an ecology, where certain species of texts, or organisms of ideas, would selectively replicate and go extinct.

This book has already gone through many iterations, or generations or replicating and testing, starting with a document I put together when teaching high school English and theater in Romania with the Peace Corps.

Similar to theatrical improvisation, then, this text is both scripted and unscripted, pulled between opposing forces of precedent and innovation, a desire to finish what I've started, and to start something new.

The goal of improvisation, and the thrill of it, is to try to synchronize your thinking with other people, in order to come up with ideas and stories as a collective more effectively than you could as individuals. When you listen to and draw inspiration from those with whom you stare a stage, you become a kind of super-organism, more clever and entertaining than the sum of its parts.

The same holds true with improvised music, "jamming" with other people, harnessing a creativity and sensitivity otherwise unobtainable.

Neurons are to individual humans as individuals are to a society. Neither neurons nor individuals can function in isolation. Societies, though, require a diversity of thought and behavior, a way of entertaining and testing out different hypotheses. In the same way, individual humans need ways to push their cognition in new, counterfactual directions: this is the role of storytelling.

I'm writing, then (this book and in general) both in order to connect myself to other humans, especially those already close to me, to plug myself into the parallel processor of conscious experience, and also in order to develop and maintain a neural elasticity, to grow thoughts and narratives that I couldn't sustain in any other way.

Chapter Descriptions

This book isn't a memoir or autobiography. It isn't about my life as a whole, but rather my experiences seen through the selective filters of improvisation and learning.

The choice of learning rather than teaching has let me include different types of stories and ideas. My goal is to create a compelling narrative that will also give useful examples of how the "games" described in the first half of the book might be used in life, with my own as an example.

Certain types of readers may find different chapters most suited to their interests. The chapter on Iowa, for example, will appeal to you if want to hear my opinions about improvisational theory, and how they relate to academic studies.

I've alternated between experiences in the United States, and stories of living and working around the world, which has been an important part of my adult life. The subject matter will accordingly alternate between improv in the context of theater and writing, and improvisational games that might be of use to a teacher or learner of non-native languages.

• The Chapter on Romania will focus on fears and honesty, chronicling the high and low points of teaching English and Theater classes and adapting to a different environment and world-view.
• Chicago: Long and Short Form deals most directly with improvisational theater, which I imagine most readers will associate with "improv games". The chapter also describes a pivot in my life between performing and studying improv—in other words when I decided to become a more boring person, but a better writer.
• Another reader I've imagined and written this book with an eye to is the teacher of English as a Second Language. Beleaguered, overworked, but eager to explore ways to incorporate their culture-shock into their coursework. The chapter on China might appeal most strongly to that sort of reader, and will connect most closely to the list of games in the first half. Many of the games, and certainly the philosophy of improvisational teaching, can be applied to other educational situations as well, such as teaching in the United States, although I imagine teachers in the American school system will have less time and liberty to experiment, or deviate from proscribed curriculum.
• Iowa: Game Theories, will be the most long-winded and digressive, where I give my writing habits formed from decades of academic speculation fullest reign. Peru: Storytelling, by contrast, focuses on a short but formative experience I had in 2015, teaching at an elementary school in Ollantaytambo.

While I was writing this book my good friends from college, who I will talk about later, wrapped up a ten year run of a podcast and stage show called Improvised Star Trek. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours, my enjoyment of the improv heightened by my knowing the actors. While each of the episodes were improvised, they were also edited. Long hours were spent selecting the best material, adding sound effects, and polishing up the audio. That is the stage of this book that I'm at. The structure and scenes are set, the bulk of the language already on screens. The important thing now is to expand on what seems important, and delete whatever does not.

The people I knew in college that have gone on to actively pursue improvisational comedy make me hesitant to declare myself an improviser. I only identify what I do as improv through a stretched metaphor. I use improvisational thinking in the way that I learn, write, play music, and live. Improv, the experience and idea of it, played a large part in my academic writing, back when I was in graduate school, and continues to influence how I think about creativity, culture, and consumerism.

Writing and editing this book is enjoyable to me because these are topics and parts of my life that I love to think about.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading this sample. I am looking for beta reader for one or all of the chapters. You may also pre-order the book, or sign up for the New Language Studio mailing list.