The Juggling Experience - Some Lessons to Take Away With You

Using juggling as a metaphor for life. In juggling it looks like there are many things happening at once, but you found out in your practice that there is really only one thing that you are doing at any one time. It is an illusion, because there are many things happening at the same time, but the juggler is actually only doing one thing at a time. It is really a matter of scheduling and emphasis. Each ball (or scarf) arrives on a set schedule, and then you need to know how much emphasis to give to that object to make it perform appropriately. Then the next time you need to pay any attention to it is when it comes by on the schedule that you have set. Eventually you realize that you are in control and can change the schedule. You have to know what you are doing through repetition so that you do exactly enough to keep the pattern moving smoothly, no more, no less. Then you can juggle indefinitely without stopping or dropping.

In your job you practice doing things well and because you have done them well in the past you have confidence that you can do them well in the future. That's how you keep your job moving smoothly, by tackling one thing at a time, putting it on track with just the right amount of energy, and moving on without a break to the next task. If you are a supervisor, you can keep a dozen people and tasks moving by setting them in motion, and paying attention to their progress on a set schedule. When you are in the middle of your routine (or the middle of your work day) there is no time for hurry or for worry. We all try to keep many balls in the air and the secret to doing it well and keeping the balls from crashing down around you is to pay just the right amount of attention to each ball (or to each problem). You can't dwell on an erratic throw (or on a past mistake), or you will simply freeze and be unable to continue, nor can you think of the next throw (or the next problem) until it is in your hand (or on your desk). So living and working in the moment is important to be efficient and to reduce stress. We all need to learn to be precise, but we also need to learn to respond appropriately to mistakes. Remember, "a drop is a sign of progress!" Confidence is gained through making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

Using juggling as a metaphor for learning

When you learn anything it is by successive approximations. A brain surgeon starts with pretty crude cuts in comparative anatomy class at the age of 18 in pre-med school, usually on a dogfish or a cat. Then she "practices" medicine for ten years or more before she is permitted to make her first cut on a living person in her surgical residency at the age of 28. In the martial arts they say "Beginners make big circles, Masters make small circles." When you learn a physical skill you must first practice in your left, or verbal, brain; then you actually perform on the right side of the brain, the brain of "flow." The transition of the skill is often sensed by the learner as an "Ah-Ha moment," sometimes described as "A light bulb going on." We went through an exercise where we each saw that light go on for ourselves, and we noticed that moment and celebrated it. For some people this was the first time they had noticed the "Ah-Ha Phenomenon," or "Eureka moment," since grade school.

You can notice this phenomenon in your job as well, but you need to be aware of it first. Notice your growth and development in taking care of any situation, and celebrate the moment when you know for sure that for that situation you have made the transition from "Beginner Mind" to "Master Mind." You will find that this phenomenon is transferable and that the learning is cumulative. The first juggling trick you learned, the cascade, may have taken 40 minutes; but the next trick may take only 20 minutes. Eventually you can learn new tricks in only ten minutes, then five, cutting the learning time by half again and again. This process of learning how to learn takes place because you have gained confidence and you have learned how to break things down and go step by step, aware of every movement and noticing every nuance of the process. We practiced "relaxed alertness," which helped prepare the field for planting. We pointed out the relationship between risk and reward, and you took small, cumulative risks and saw rewards at every step both through the learning you could see and the reinforcement from your partner, who became your "enthusiastic mentor."

How to keep learning and training fresh.

Novelty is an important component of learning and in order to keep it fresh and new it is vital to keep taking risks. Once you are afraid to fail you will stop trying to succeed. In juggling this means being aware that you learn "drop by drop," and being confident in both yourself and the process of learning. There are at least eight different learning styles. Howard Gardner calls them eight "intelligences;" and one challenge you face is to adapt your material to a number of these modalities. I used them all in teaching juggling and your challenge is to imagine how to teach your next lesson incorporating all of the following styles:

Musical - Have your students write or learn a song so that the lyrics encapsulate the learning. (We explored this by using some of the 38 instructional songs I wrote that I use to teach juggling.)

Spatial - Have your students visualize the outcome before they start. (We did this throughout the juggling lesson, and found that practicing with invisible props helped make tossing and catching with the real things easier.)

Kinesthetic - Have your students move through or act out the learning. (This is automatic in juggling.)

Interpersonal - Work in teams and give one another structured feedback. (We worked in teams to learn juggling and congratulated one another to celebrate each achievement. It is through teaching, coaching and mentoring others that our best learning takes place.)

Intrapersonal - Leave time for reflection both before and after learning. (We gave every student several moments to reflect on what they would be learning and let them reflect on what they had learned.)

Mathematical - Create specific goals, "paradigms for promotion," and "equations for success." (In our juggling class we did this by knowing the steps needed to succeed by quantifying our achievements, and by counting ourselves forward step by step.)

Naturalist - This is the natural tendency toward order and classification, and is an intelligence recently added by Gardner. (We used a taxonomy of learning that orders the process and used a classification system for achievement that sets up a natural hierarchy of learning.)

Verbal - Usually this is the first method we think of when we think of teaching, including what students hear and what they read in your handouts and your powerpoints. (In our juggling class we used linking tools, memory pegs, mnemonic devices and verbal cues to reinforce learning and to help with information retrieval, but it would not have been possible to learn to juggle with only the verbal intelligence.)

By making the process for learning to juggle into a musical, spatial, verbal, mathematical, kinesthetic, intra and interpersonal "accelerated learning" game that you can only win and never lose, we made a strong statement for the power of multiple intelligences and cooperative learning, possibly the most important "discoveries" in education in the last half of the Twentieth Century.

Tools We Used - The instructional materials we used are difficult to find in stores. The musical instructions are from the audio tape, JUGGLETIME ($6.95) and the video of the same name ($16.95). The next video in the series is JUGGLING STAR ($16.95). Both video tapes have Parents Choice awards, and between them they share over a dozen national educational awards. The scarves ($5/set of 3) and JuggleBeanBalls ($12.95/set of 3) have been tested in thousands of schools world-wide. The book is Juggling From Start to Star by Dave, Dorothy and Ben Finnigan. All materials can be ordered from the presenter.