DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 6

Richard Jones and the Dull Roar

Richard Jones had not been in the classroom very long before I decided, with all the confidence and stupidity of a boy who thought order was the same thing as learning, that he had lost control of it. He walked in carrying that particular schoolteacher confidence that sat somewhere between authority and performance, but the room did not immediately fall at his feet. Boys kept talking, chairs scraped, someone laughed too loudly, and someone else appeared to be engaged in a private negotiation about a ruler, a pencil case or some other matter of national importance. Then Jones, instead of bringing the hammer down as I expected, looked across the room and said, “Keep it down to a dull roar,” and the fact that the room did not instantly become silent only confirmed, at least to my young and orderly mind, that the old rules had begun to fail.

I can still hear the line, not because it was shouted and not because it was especially clever, although in its own way it probably was. I remember it because it landed in me as a form of surrender, as if a man entrusted with a class had just announced that silence was no longer available and we should all settle for a managed level of livestock. To a boy trained by years of primary school order, rote learning, neat answers, report marks and the solemn business of getting things right, “a dull roar” sounded dangerously close to an admission of defeat. It was not attention, not obedience, not face the front and open your books, but a compromise with noise, and I was not yet old enough to understand how much of adult life is exactly that.

That was not how learning had been presented to me before. In the world I had come from, learning had a sound, and that sound was usually silence, broken only by the scratch of pencils, the turn of pages, the teacher’s voice and the answer being given correctly when called upon. There was a comforting brutality to it, because you either knew the answer or you did not, and if you knew it often enough the little boxes on the report card rewarded you for being the kind of child the system understood. Richard Jones walked into that certainty and introduced weather, not by giving a lecture on educational philosophy, but by allowing the room to be alive in a way I found both careless and threatening.

He was an English teacher, although that hardly seems enough of a description now. English teachers can be many things, from gentle gardeners of the imagination to failed poets with chalk dust on their cuffs, and occasionally professional torturers of children who have not yet developed a taste for metaphor. Richard Jones was not easy to place, because he had, to my eye at least, an extremely high opinion of himself, though I say that now with more affection than I would have managed then. He had presence, and he knew it, which is not always a crime, although it can be difficult to forgive in a schoolteacher when you are still trying to work out whether your own presence in the room counts for anything at all.

To us students, particularly at first, he presented as something close to a god, though not the humble kind with sandals and kindness. He was more classical than that, standing above the ordinary run of us with a faint expression suggesting he had already seen the ending and was disappointed by the cast. In his earlier days at Boorowa Central School, he drove an E Type Jaguar, which did nothing to reduce the impression, because an E Type outside a country school was not transport so much as an accusation. Among the more practical vehicles of the district, it must have looked as if it had taken a wrong turn on its way to Europe and found itself surrounded by dust, school bags, lunch orders and boys who were very good at noticing anything that did not quite belong.

Eventually, he traded the Jaguar for a Jeep Wagon, which made far more sense for the venue. The Jaguar had suggested style, appetite, speed and an unwillingness to apologise for any of it, while the Jeep looked like a concession to roads, weather and reality, which was the surface most of us were living on anyway. If the Jaguar said, “I am not entirely of this place,” the Jeep said, “I may not be entirely of this place, but I have accepted the corrugations.” That probably tells you something about him, or at least about the way I remember him, because he was both above the room and in it, both performing and teaching, both irritating and necessary.

He had the capacity to annoy me quickly, which was not difficult in fairness, because by then I had begun developing the early form of a lifelong condition: the inability to tolerate unnecessary disorder when I thought something important was meant to be happening. The dull roar became a problem for me because I took it literally before I understood it properly. I thought control was the first duty of a teacher, and I had absorbed the idea that a room had to be quiet before anything worthwhile could take place. In my mind, the teacher stood at the front, the class settled, the facts were delivered, the facts were received, and later the facts were returned in a form close enough to satisfy whoever held the red pen.

That bargain had served me well, which is one of the reasons I was so reluctant to let it go. Rote learning suited a certain sort of child, particularly one whose mind enjoyed patterns, order, repetition and the satisfaction of a completed task. I was good at the game because the game had rules, and if I learned the rule I could play it, and if I could play it I could win it often enough for adults to be pleased. It sounds narrow now, but to a boy trying to find a place in the room, there is real comfort in a system that tells you exactly what must be done and then rewards you for doing it.

The trouble with Richard Jones was that he did not appear to be playing quite the same game. He was not uninterested in facts, because no decent English teacher can be, and grammar, words and meaning all matter more than people sometimes like to admit. A sentence that says one thing when it means another is not a small problem, and I have spent most of my adult life discovering that the same principle applies to tax returns, board papers, client explanations and men saying, “It should be pretty simple.” Jones seemed less interested in whether we could repeat a thing than whether we could justify it, and that moved the lesson from memory into territory I had not been asked to inhabit with any confidence before.

It was one thing to know what a poem said, or what a character did, or what a passage appeared to mean. It was another thing entirely to be asked why you thought so, and then to discover that “because it is obvious” was not the intellectual triumph you had hoped it might be. Jones was asking for evidence, structure and a reasoned path from observation to conclusion, even if he was doing it in the irritating disguise of English. That did not feel like liberation at first, because it required the answer to come out from behind the shelter of correctness and show its working. I did not yet understand that he was shifting the centre of learning from the thing remembered to the thought built around it.

He brought things into the classroom that were closer to our own time than the usual museum pieces of English lessons. Not always, and not in some revolutionary way that made us clutch our chests and announce that literature had become alive, because teenage boys in country schools were not generally given to that sort of behaviour. But there were moments when the material was not buried under centuries of dust, and we were given songs and lines from people who were still walking around somewhere in the same world as us. That made the exercise more interesting, but it also made it more threatening, because it removed the excuse that meaning belonged only to old books and people safely dead.

I remember the hunt for alliteration, for the sound of language doing work before the mind had properly caught up with it. We could be given something like The Boxer, with that “lie-la-lie” chorus rolling through it, and be expected to hear more than a singalong line. We were meant to notice the pattern, the repetition, the way sound could carry something bruised and unresolved, even when most of us heard a tune, a famous chorus and a convenient place to hide if we did not know the verses. Jones wanted us to hear the ache underneath it, which was asking a great deal of boys who were still learning how to pretend that nothing much reached them.

That was the part of English that felt almost indecent, although no one would have said so. Boys of that time and place were trained, by life as much as school, to treat feeling as something best left unnamed unless there was blood, swelling or a bone pointing in a direction not recommended by the manufacturer. If you fell off a bike, copped a cricket ball on the thigh, split your lip, rolled an ankle or had your pride knocked sideways in front of half the playground, then feeling had a legitimate doorway into the conversation. You could limp, swear quietly, claim it did not hurt and get on with it, which was often the highest approved form of emotional expression available to us.

To speak of loneliness, longing, regret or the breaking heart of a love-struck poet was another matter entirely. That belonged to a foreign country, and we may as well have been asked to remove our shirts and discuss our souls in the quadrangle. Feelings were not absent, because of course they were not, but they were heavily policed and expected to travel underground until they could emerge safely as sarcasm, sport, anger, silence or the occasional act of idiocy performed for mates. Jones, inconveniently, kept pointing at them, though he did it through the structure of language, which gave us a kind of cover and allowed us to pretend the discussion was technical while something more dangerous was being smuggled into the room.

The haiku was worse in its own quiet way, because seventeen syllables seemed, at first glance, like another tidy school exercise. Five, seven, five if you wanted to be proper about it, although the main thing that lodged in my mind was the count, because numbers were far more manageable than emotions. Count them, arrange them, produce the little object and move on, which looked like rote learning disguised as art and therefore should have suited me well enough. But the brittleness of it was the trap, because a love haiku held inside those few syllables had almost no room to explain itself, no long speech, no emotional clearing of the throat and no opportunity to wander around the paddock until the point eventually appeared.

That sort of compression was unsettling, because I did not yet have the language to say that words could make something invisible suddenly present. I would not have trusted that sort of language even if I had found it, because a young male of that time did not generally say, “This poem has made me aware of emotional fragility,” unless he was actively seeking permanent exile. He was more likely to say, “Yeah, it’s all right,” and then look out the window as if the weather had become urgent. Yet that was the relevance of what Jones was teaching, because he was not simply asking us to identify a technique and pin a label to it like a dead moth, but to understand why the technique mattered.

Alliteration was not just a clever sound, repetition was not just words coming back because the writer had run short of imagination, and a syllable count was not merely a fence. These things shaped feeling, gave emotion a container, and sometimes made that emotion more powerful because it had nowhere to spill. For a boy who thought learning meant gathering facts and returning them in good order, this was a disturbance of the first order. Jones was suggesting that language was force, concealment, rhythm, wound, memory, persuasion and occasionally a small controlled explosion, and that a poem could hold a breaking heart without ever using the phrase.

Then came the request that should have suited me perfectly, because we were asked to write our own haiku. The rules, as I understood them, were clear enough, and the count sat in front of me with the neat authority of arithmetic. Seventeen syllables, not eighteen, not sixteen with good intentions, but seventeen, and I knew what to do with a requirement that could be counted. So I answered the question as it had reached me and wrote, “With hair flowing in the moonlight she waits for me. This the girl I love,” which I believed supplied the goods with admirable precision, even if the universe of haiku may have quietly winced.

I can still feel the odd little satisfaction of it, because the syllables worked and the image was romantic enough, at least by the standards of a boy whose experience of romance was probably more imagined than lived. There was moonlight, flowing hair, waiting, love and enough fragile yearning to cause a minor disturbance among the girls in the room. They went slightly ga-ga over it, or at least that is how memory has chosen to file the incident, and memory is not always a sworn witness but it does know where the emotional furniture was placed. For a moment, I had done well, not just correctly but publicly well, and approval from girls at that age was no small matter, even if none of us knew what to do with it once it arrived.

Then Jones stepped in, not harshly as I remember it, but with the irritating calm of a man who could see past the answer into the failure behind it. He told me, in effect, that it was not really what haiku was about, which felt less like a correction than a small theft. I had answered the question, followed the instruction as I understood it and produced the required number of syllables with precision, and precision had always been the safest path through school. If the question asked for seventeen syllables and I gave seventeen syllables, surely the transaction was complete, and surely the boy had supplied the goods and the teacher could stamp the invoice paid.

But Jones was not buying the invoice, which was the nuisance of the man and, I now suspect, part of his usefulness. He was not asking merely for a counted object, but for the spirit of the form, the compression, the turn, the observed moment and the small stillness that haiku was meant to catch without smothering it in explanation. I had treated the form as a container to be filled, while he wanted me to understand why the container existed. At the time, that felt unfair, because there is a particular frustration in being told that meeting the measurable requirement is not the same as understanding the task, especially when the measurable requirement has just produced a small flutter among the female population of the room.

Looking back, I can see he was right, which remains annoying. My little moonlit effort may have been seventeen syllables, and it may have won the approval of girls who were perhaps kinder than the poem deserved, but it was not haiku in the deeper sense. It was romance wearing a syllable count, a young male trying to manufacture feeling from the outside using the available props of moonlight, hair, waiting and love. It was not dishonest exactly, because I was not sophisticated enough for dishonesty in that field, but it was a performance of feeling by someone who barely knew what feeling was allowed to be.

That is where the lesson became uncomfortable, because Jones was showing me, without making a lecture of it, that correctness could be a hiding place. You could satisfy the visible terms of the question and still miss the point, count the syllables and fail to hear the silence between them, put love in the last line and still not have touched love at all. For a boy raised on rote learning, that was a dangerous discovery, because rote learning gave you a ladder while this new method kept removing rungs and asking whether you understood why ladders existed in the first place. I wanted the safety of the answer, but Jones kept pointing towards the meaning behind it, and that meant precision had to serve something larger than itself.

It was one of the first times I can remember feeling that a teacher was not simply marking what I had done, but pressing on how I had thought. A wrong answer can be corrected, but a misunderstood answer asks you to rearrange the machinery inside yourself, because the fault is not in the spelling, the counting or the neatness, but in the way you have received the question. That was the beginning of some moulding, whether I recognised it or not, because Jones was teaching the difference between compliance and understanding. He was teaching that the visible task and the real task are not always the same thing, and that a mind can be quick, accurate and still not deep enough in the right place.

I did not thank him for that, and I doubt I even accepted it at the time. I probably sat there feeling vaguely robbed, because the girls had liked it, the syllables had lined up and surely that should have been enough for one school day. But something lodged, with irritation arriving first as it often does and the lesson following later with the patience of something true. Years later, I would see the same pattern everywhere, with clients answering the question they thought had been asked, boards satisfying the form and missing the substance, and people complying with the visible rule while walking straight past the reason the rule existed.

That is a difficult thing to say in any room, because nobody likes being told they have met the requirement without understanding the purpose. It sounds superior if said badly, and sometimes even if said carefully, which is one of the harder social facts a quick mind has to learn. Yet that was one of the first lessons Richard Jones gave me in the dull roar of that classroom, because the answer could be precise and still incomplete, and the thought could be accurate and still miss the point. The mind could win the counting and lose the poem, which was not a lesson I would have chosen, but it was one I carried.

I doubt I admitted much at the time, because I would have hidden behind the answer, the terminology, the neat explanation and the safer machinery of analysis. Something of it got through despite me, and Jones made me see that English was not the soft subject people sometimes pretended it was. It was not decoration placed around the serious business of life, but one of the ways life revealed itself without having to stand up and confess. People said things badly, beautifully, falsely, carefully, clumsily and with far more truth than they intended, and the person who knew how to listen could hear the pressure underneath.

That became relevant in ways I could not possibly have imagined then. Later, in business and accounting, people would bring me their own dull roar disguised as numbers, and they would tell one story while the figures told another. They would explain decisions in language so carefully arranged that the missing truth became the loudest part of the sentence, and the bank statements would sit there coughing politely in the corner. Richard Jones, irritating as he could be, had begun teaching me how to hear that, because he was teaching us to distrust the surface, notice pattern, hear repetition and ask what had been softened, omitted, disguised or over-explained.

That is where he began to lose me and teach me at the same time. He lost the part of me that wanted the room to behave itself before the work began, because that part of me still believed silence was the necessary condition of intelligence. He taught the part of me that had not yet been given permission to understand that thinking was not merely the private machinery behind an answer, but could itself become the work. At first I did not find that liberating, because it was like being told the answer was no longer the destination, but only the first paddock gate on a road that kept turning back on itself.

That is a dangerous thing to do to a child with a restless mind, because facts can be stacked neatly but thoughts have a habit of opening trapdoors. Ask that child to think, and he may start seeing the assumption underneath the question, the weakness in the argument, the missing piece, the angle no one mentioned because mentioning it would slow the lesson down and irritate everyone who only wanted to get to lunch. I did not yet have language for all that, but I knew the room felt different and no longer moved in straight lines. The actual dull roar of boys being boys seemed to match the noise being introduced into my head, where answers were no longer sitting obediently in rows but beginning to argue with one another.

There is a peculiar discomfort in being moved from memory into thought. Memory lets you feel clean, because you can prove yourself by retrieval, be quick, accurate and rewarded, which is a very pleasing combination for a child who wants evidence that he has a place in the room. Thought is messier, because it can make you slower not because you know less, but because you can see more than one path and are foolish enough to stand there considering which one might be true. Richard Jones, whether deliberately or simply by being Richard Jones, introduced that discomfort, and he asked us to listen, read and return with something defensible rather than merely familiar.

That word, defensible, would later become one of the central words of my professional life, although I did not know it then. In accounting, tax and business advice, it is rarely enough to have a feeling, even when the feeling is right and the file has begun to smell faintly of trouble. You need the law, the numbers, the file note, the sequence, the reason, the explanation and the capacity to sit across from another human being while they pretend not to understand what you are making painfully clear. Jones was not teaching me tax law, obviously, which would have cleared the room even more effectively than most English lessons, but he was teaching the habit of building a thought that could stand up when pushed.

That should have suited me perfectly, and in time it probably did, but at the beginning it felt like a disturbance. The boy who had been rewarded for getting things right now had to deal with the inconvenience of there being more than one way to be right, and several ways to be wrong while sounding quite confident. That is not a small emotional shift, because it is one thing to compete in a system built on certainty and another thing to survive in a room where certainty has to explain itself. The dull roar, then, was not only noise, but the sound of the wider world entering the classroom before I was ready for it.

Life, it turns out, does not run like a primary school report. It does not hand you neat categories and ask you to fill them with perfect marks, and it does not quieten itself just because you have arranged a good thought in your head. It talks over you, interrupts you, laughs at the wrong time, misunderstands the instruction and then complains about the outcome. That may be why I reacted so strongly to Jones’ apparent lack of control, because it offended something in me that needed the room to make sense before I could risk myself inside it.

I suspect now that Jones understood something I did not. Absolute silence can be useful, but it is not the same as engagement, and a quiet room may simply be a room waiting for its chance to escape. A noisy room may contain energy, resistance, laziness, mischief and the occasional spark of attention, and the teacher’s job is not always to eliminate the noise but to find a path through it. That is a more difficult form of teaching than standing at the front and demanding obedience, and it is also more difficult to recognise when you are thirteen or fourteen and convinced that the universe would improve if everyone else would just settle down and follow the program.

There is a dry little cruelty in the fact that I spent so much of my life wanting rooms to be tidier than they were. Classrooms, offices, client meetings, boardrooms, committees, families, clubs and the rooms inside my own head all had a habit of refusing to arrange themselves in a manner that suited me. I would walk in with the thought already several steps down the track, only to find everyone else still arguing about where the track began, whether there was a track, or whether the wall directly ahead was actually an exciting opportunity. That is where the head and the brick wall come in, because I have often seen the wall early, or believed I did, which is almost as dangerous socially as being right.

I would point out the wall thinking I was helping, only to discover that many rooms do not want the wall mentioned until after impact. They prefer optimism, delay, politeness, consensus or the comforting belief that if the wall is not named, it may yet develop the manners to move. Richard Jones’ classroom was one of the first places where I began to understand, dimly, that seeing something was not enough, because you had to say it in a way the room could bear. You had to justify it, shape it, slow it down and build it carefully enough that it might survive the noise, and even then there was no guarantee anyone would thank you for the effort.

The temptation, of course, was to retreat into the simpler version of intelligence. Know the fact, give the answer, take the mark and go home, because that version was much cleaner and gave a boy the feeling of competence without the mess of persuasion. But Jones’ way made facts answerable to meaning, and once that door opened it did not close easily. I do not want to make him sound saintly, because that would be both untrue and unfairly boring, and he could irritate me in the way theatrical adults often irritate boys who think life should be more practical than performed.

His self-regard could fill the room before the roll was marked, and there was theatre in him I was not always generous enough to understand. A boy can be very sharp in his judgements while knowing almost nothing about the human being he is judging, and I was no exception to that. Still, irritation can be a form of attention, and I watched him, listened more than I admitted, recoiled from the lack of control and then unwillingly absorbed the deeper control underneath it. He did not need every second of the room to be silent to be working on us, because he only needed enough of the room to be listening when the thought mattered.

That is a different kind of authority, and it does not always look like authority to a child who has learned to equate control with silence. It can look casual, vain, even careless, but it can also invite a mind to do something more difficult than obey. I wonder now whether that was the real offence, because perhaps Richard Jones did not offend me because he failed to control the room, but because he made the room harder to master. I could master repetition, neatness and the small ceremonies of school success, but thinking in a room full of other people meant dealing with interruption, interpretation, disagreement, personality and the dreadful possibility that someone else might have a point.

That last part is not always easy for a fast mind. The mind moves, sees a pattern, jumps ahead and then grows impatient when the room has not caught up, but sometimes the room has not caught up because the mind has skipped a step. Sometimes the room is not stupid, but unconvinced, frightened, bored or protecting itself from being made to feel smaller. Sometimes the explanation has failed even when the thought is sound, which is a harder lesson for a quick mind than any number of spelling lists.

Jones did not explain all of that to me, and I doubt he would have put it that way. He simply taught English in a manner that made the answer less important than the thinking behind it, and he asked us to make a case, notice language, justify opinion and understand that meaning was not a dead object waiting to be picked up. He asked more of us than a memorised answer, and that was both a gift and a nuisance. There were boys in that room who could survive the dull roar better than I could, because they had the easy noise, the social rhythm and the capacity to push and be pushed without taking every disturbance as a threat to civilisation.

I often tried to earn belonging by being useful, correct, capable or quick, and that is not the same thing. Usefulness can get you admitted to a room, but it does not always let you rest there, and correctness can win a mark while still putting a small distance between you and everyone who would rather not be reminded that a mark was there to be won. In Jones’ classroom, the old bargain began to fray, because the room did not reward me simply for having the answer. It wanted me to expose the machinery, slow down and show my working, which is a phrase from mathematics but applies just as well to life.

Of course, I have spent a lifetime doing some version of arriving too quickly and then looking wounded when the room fails to applaud, which may prove that education is not the same as correction. I learned the lesson intellectually long before I learned it emotionally, and even now there are moments when my mind arrives several steps ahead while my mouth, that traitorous little instrument, opens before diplomacy has had time to put on its shoes. Then the room stiffens, the wall comes closer and I find myself once again bouncing my head against the bricks in the name of assistance. That is not always noble, and it is not always the room’s fault, which is an admission worth making before the story turns itself into a sermon.

The dull roar never really went away, because it simply changed rooms. It followed me from school into work, from work into business, from business into clients’ lives, and from there into the strange unsettled territory near retirement where the noise becomes internal as much as external. In a classroom, the dull roar was boys talking over a lesson, but in adult life it became competing expectations, half-truths, anxieties, excuses, deadlines, pride, denial and the low background hum of people wanting clarity without wanting the disturbance that clarity can bring. It is remarkable how many adults ask for advice when what they really want is a better arranged version of the answer they already prefer.

That is where dumbing it down became more than a social trick. It became a way of surviving the roar, because you learn to reduce the thought before the room hears it, soften the edge, remove the branches, hide the scaffolding and present the smallest version of the truth that might still do the job. You do this not because the full thought is always brilliant, because it is not, but because the full thought is often too much for the moment in which it arrives. There is a private humiliation in that, not dramatic enough to complain about and too easily mistaken for arrogance if described badly, but real enough in the quick edit, the swallowed explanation, the warning reduced to a suggestion and the frustration hidden behind a joke.

I can trace some of that back to rooms like Richard Jones’ classroom, although not because he caused it. If anything, he gave me a tool, because he showed me that thinking needed more than speed, and that it needed structure, evidence, patience and presentation. It needed a shape the room could follow, even if the room was muttering, fidgeting and trying to turn itself into a dull roar. That was the emotional challenge of the shift from rote to thinking, because rote learning had allowed me to be good without being exposed, while thinking asked me not only whether I knew something but how I saw it, why I saw it and whether I could defend the path between evidence and conclusion.

Perhaps that is why school began to feel less like a ladder and more like a room full of weather. Illness, late arrival, hierarchy, sport, noise, teachers with theatrical confidence, boys with their own pecking orders, the odd kindness, the casual cruelty, the approved doorways into belonging and the unapproved ways of standing out all worked on me at once. Richard Jones did not create that weather, but he taught in the middle of it, and his dull roar gave part of it a name. Looking back, I can see that a classroom kept in perfect silence may have suited the anxious part of me, but it would not have prepared me for much.

The wider world was never going to sit quietly while I arranged my thoughts. It was going to interrupt, misunderstand, challenge, ignore and occasionally prove me wrong, and if I wanted to think in that world I had to learn to think through noise. That does not mean I enjoyed it, because there is a difference between being formed by something and being grateful for every minute of it. I was not walking out of Richard Jones’ lessons glowing with intellectual awakening, ready to thank him for unsettling the tidy shelves in my head, and I was more likely irritated, watchful, slightly affronted and privately trying to work out why the old methods no longer seemed sufficient.

Yet something changed, even if the change arrived without ceremony. The answer was no longer enough, the mark was no longer the whole story, and the room was no longer merely a container for instruction but a living test of whether thought could survive contact with personality, noise and resistance. Richard Jones, with his E Type Jaguar past, his Jeep Wagon practicality, his high opinion of himself and his maddening acceptance of the dull roar, became one of the teachers I had to grow into understanding. At the time I saw the lack of control, but later I saw the invitation beneath it, because he was asking us to do something far more difficult than behave.

That is where the chapter of my life began to turn, although I did not know it then and would probably have objected to the inconvenience if someone had pointed it out. I had come from a system where learning meant receiving the facts, holding them neatly and returning them on demand, while in Jones’ room learning became argument, interpretation, evidence and refinement. It became the beginning of a longer struggle, not only to know things, but to explain them without losing the room. The dull roar stayed with me because it was the sound of order giving way to thought, and thought discovering that it would have to make its case in rooms that were never going to be silent for long.