"Did you eat your sheep intestines for breakfast?" Amy Hoffmaster

   "Did you eat your sheep intestines for breakfast?"

   Robbie asked me this question five times a day each day I saw him. I say asked, but it was more like a demand. I grew tired of missing the point. I chortled and changed the subject while some of the other kids in the group stared at him, bewildered. I felt like he was alienating himself and I should do something to help. Robbie was a member of a group of middle school kids I taught tidal ecology at the Summer Field Studies Program. No one was mean to him, but they weren't trying to get close to him either. Some of the kids would toss the question right back at him, imitating his frantic tone of voice and captivation, as if the question were a punch line to a joke. I wanted to protect him. I was determined to teach him about his relationship to the environment, but this seemed out of reach. Tirelessly, each day he would ask this question and laugh.

   Robbie expressed himself most comfortably through movements and exaggerated funny faces. The list of his medications took up more room than the camp application form allowed. He was dropped off each morning in various states of readiness; I didn't dare predict what he had on his proverbial plate. When Robbie spoke to other kids they listened, but didn't understand what he meant; they didn't know how to respond. They were polite, often gave a shrug or a yes or no, not sure what they were committing themselves to. As a result of Robbie's disinterest in the other kids' responses, it was nearly impossible for him to maintain a conversation with them; discussions were one-sided and abrupt. His reluctance to form friendships in the group and his difficulty communicating made it difficult for me to connect with him as teacher and a learner.

   Once I got over the initial shock, I wondered about the impetus for his question. What was so special about sheep's intestines? I should have asked Robbie this exact question. By the middle of the two-week session, we all knew that Robbie had a passion for parasites - especially ones that inhabited intestines. He was fascinated by the microscopic interactions that aided in digestion. He was interested in tiny creatures in general and cared little for anything else.

   I started to learn about Robbie when I spontaneously responded to his sheep intestines question. "Yes, I ate them with a glob of ketchup and a pickle on the side," I snapped with a half-grin. He looked stunned for a moment and then he nodded, giggling quietly.

   Another question Robbie asked incessantly, "What would you do if you woke up to 50,000 fleas staring you in the eye?" was equally mystifying to me. The question crawled inside me. I thought about it when I brushed my teeth. I thought of it in a groggy half-sleep and made myself laugh out loud, imagining waking in the morning to 50,000 fleas resting on my chest. I imagined these 50,000 fleas as an elaborate three-ring circus, instead of thinking of his malicious parasitic fleas ready to pounce. In this imaginative scenario I began to entertain Robbie's observation.

   He expected me to be imaginative. He asked the questions again each morning, as if I would have 24 hours to give it some real thought. I realized I could engage in the questions he was asking. I could authentically show that I valued his curiosity by actually being interested. I answered, "I would run." He threw his head back and cackled. The screeching laugh bounced off me, reverberating, and I couldn't help but laugh too. He laughed harder than I thought possible, a laugh that few would identify with a young boy. He gasped for breath and started another round. It was infectious. After I replied absurdly to his questions, Robbie interacted with me more fully. He paid a little bit more attention to what was going on in the group. He took a step closer.

   At the time, I expected Robbie to conclude that the physical and biological patterns we found in the places we explored implied connected meaning. There were quantifiable changes in the tides, zones of animal life, and measurements of macroscopic organisms. In the field we measured these differences and discussed what our findings meant. I assumed that each of the students would find the differences meaningful and predictable patterns in nature. I anticipated that they would value the same meanings as I did. As far as I was concerned, Robbie could have created his own story about what the patterns meant. But he simply didn't. Most exasperatingly, he didn't care about the tide pools unless they were concretely connected to parasites. It was hard to get Robbie to discuss anything but parasites. He was uncomfortable talking about ideas that he didn't already understand. His discomfort was tangible: he turned away from the group, spoke inaudibly, and avoided eye contact. It was difficult for him to mentally and emotionally move away from his own ideas because the uncertainty that this movement involved was not easy for him to confront. I tried to ask questions that connected the phenomena we observed in the intertidal to microscopic interactions, but I never helped him make the connection.

   In every way, this challenged my concept of curiosity. I had never witnessed such a focused sense of wonder that was unreceptive to peripheral ideas. The part that surprised me was that Robbie couldn't be convinced that parasites related to other living things; he thought of them as isolated objects. He was so reluctant to entertain ideas about new processes because he didn't see any connection between them and what he knew he was interested in. It was my task to show him that tidal life was in fact related to parasites.

   After Robbie's heartening but unanticipated response to my silly retort about the sheep intestines, I realized his question was telling me more than I was hearing. His distractibility told me, first, that he didn't care about urchins, periwinkles or barnacles, only parasites. If I wanted him to learn I should help him learn about microbes. Second, it told me that the group activities we did were meaningless or even disdainful to him. He refused to hold hands, rub shoulders, close his eyes, or trust anyone else's faculties over his own. His question was almost like a test of my character or potential. He wondered if I could laugh about the absurd idea of eating sheep's intestines with him and if I also thought that intestinal fauna were intriguing.

   Looking back, I see that instead of the questions that I asked him about the patterns he observed in the intertidal, I should have asked him about patterns that can't be observed by the naked eye. He noticed patterns at this level. For example, he wondered whether all animals were susceptible to parasites, because he noticed that many animals have intestines. His questions about parasites were senseless to me on their own, but meaningful when considered in the context of our group and the ideas we were discussing. When I finally attempted to ask him questions that were more congruous to his interest, such as ones about evidence of parasitism in the intertidal and deep ocean communities, Robbie recognized that I was trying to meet him halfway. I was willing to move away from what I thought was interesting and important toward what he was curious about.

   Robbie made me think about why we all ask questions. One of the most valuable reasons is to make a connection with another person within the space of an idea. Asking a question accomplishes in a sweeping motion something that takes courage. Questions offer space for two people to share thoughts and, most importantly, curiosity. A question is an invitation into an internal process of making meaning in the world. Often, like in Robbie's case, the language we have available to make this invitation is rudimentary and incapable of expressing the complexity of our thoughts. There are patterns in these interactions. There are expectations and unwritten rules as to what is acceptable.

   Robbie didn't abide by the same rules of conversation that most of us understood; he had his own. He defined his own system of when to ask questions and what their topic should be. This system was governed by his piercing curiosity and his single-minded quest for facts about parasites. He didn't think that it was rude to interrupt a conversation or shout louder than the hum of the group if he had a question about parasites. Uninhibitedly and straight-faced, he would ignore a question I asked him and bounce back with a serious or silly question about a microscopic organism.

   We use questions to create meaningful relationships, not only between the ideas within the questions but also personally, between the people we ask and ourselves. At the time I was too absorbed in the complexity of all the interactions happening in the group, but from the vantage point of months later I can describe the way I understand the context of Robbie's questions.

   Soon after I met Robbie I began to see the pattern that related the kinds of questions he asked me. I was motivated by my own curiosity and desire to connect with him. I used him to learn about "thinking." I felt like a parasite; I was fueled by his ideas, inspiration, and creativity as a muse for my own thinking. By challenging my very basic ideas about teaching, Robbie taught me the value of an individual's curiosity. Most importantly, I thought deeply about the way his curiosity and my preconceptions defined the boundaries of our conversations. As I explored the edges of our conversations - where they started and ended, I began to see patterns between the kinds of questions he asked, when he asked them, and how they related to our interactions and the physical environment we were in. Robbie asked uncommon questions, usually about parasites and other microscopic organisms or digestion. He asked the most questions when the group was involved in an activity about which he wasn't enthusiastic. I saw patterns that connected his questions to a more meaningful way to interact with him.

   In "The Patterns Which Connect," Bateson(1) describes three orders of connections: first, the relationship within objects. There is a second order connection that describes the relationship between two objects. Third, there are "meta-patterns," those that relate the contexts of the objects to each other. Bateson illustrates his levels of patterns with phylogenic homology, or similarities in the limbs of humans and horses, compared to lobsters and crabs. He continues to explain that the crab's anatomy contains patterns within the individual itself; this is the first order of pattern. When you compare the crab and the lobster there are similarities, or phylogenic homologies between the parts of the legs and claws. Each of the organisms has segmented legs and similarly shaped claws. These comparisons are second order patterns. The third order pattern, or meta-pattern, is more abstract. You can compare the relationship of the lobster and the crab to the relationship of the human and horse. That is, relating the patterns to each other. Bateson considers the appreciation of the "meta-pattern that connects" an aesthetic.

   I map Bateson's theory of "the pattern which connects" on to my understanding of the human ecology of questions. There is meaning at each of the three levels. There are patterns within the ideas of a question, there are patterns between the questions, but there are also patterns that describe the patterns between questions. This third order pattern creates what I would like to call the question space. Robbie and I understood each other's thoughts when we engaged in the space that was created by the patterns of relationships between our questions.

   Months after my time with Robbie, as I read Bateson's article again, his theory of meta-patterns helped me make sense of Robbie's questions. I realized that although the meta-pattern was there, and it gave meaning to the individual questions themselves, it took months removed from the situation to wrap my head around it. When I was working with Robbie, it was so difficult for me to know how to reach him because at each of the three levels of patterns, there was complexity and uncertainty. When I thought about the first order patterns in Robbie's questions, there were similarities in the language he used to form his questions, but often it was difficult for him to clearly communicate them to me, and he didn't seem compassionate when I didn't understand what he meant. The serious tone and straightforward construction of his questions gave them their shock value. These grammatical characteristics made his questions exceptional and tied them closely to his singular thoughts.

   There was a second order pattern between the questions he asked. They were usually about parasites. The relationships between the questions were mainly in their content. Another distinguishing element was what his questions were not about. He didn't ask about what his peers were doing, or what the group was focused on. His questions were related in that they were focused on his passion for parasites.

   The third order pattern surprised me. He usually asked questions about parasites when the group was involved in an activity that was not readily related to parasites. The relationship between the pattern of his questions and the group's patterns was revealing. I realized my frustration in reaching him was rooted in the fact that I was trying to connect with him using group activities, and he wasn't curious about or engaged in the activities.

   This analysis might seem simple, or even obvious to the reader, but in fact it was an entirely new understanding for me. I had previously thought of "disengagement" as a behavioral problem or a mental exhaustion. Subsequently, I understood it as a genuine inability to be attracted to an idea, even if the desire is there. Robbie might have wanted to explore and describe the tidal ecology in some sense, but couldn't get curious because it wasn't about parasites. I realized that curiosity doesn't just happen, that children aren't "naturally full of wonder" but that it is a task on their part just like any other mental activity that isn't always easy to fuel or sustain. Prior to this, I had taken curiosity for granted.

   Meeting an idea with curiosity means that we put the idea in a space where it can be explored and played with. This space is created by the meta-patterns of ideas. A teacher and a student playing with an idea that rests in this place is a prerequisite to real learning.

   Robbie helped me to see that there are ways of understanding the world that are not predictable or logical from my perspective. There are many ways to know. He appreciated different patterns of nature than most of the group did. As I progressively appreciated the patterns within his questions, the patterns between his questions, and the patterns in the context of his questions, I understood his perspective more fully.

   We are more than the sum of what we know. There are differences in the ways we think and how we make sense of the things we experience. We are how we talk about our thoughts and how we ask questions. Curiosity takes hold when we search outside ourselves for connection and meaning. When we search, we try to find the patterns that connect us to the world around us and give us meaning in this greater context. When we fail to communicate the meaning we find and the things we know, we realize how difficult it is to find the question space.

   Studying Human Ecology has encouraged me not only to ask thoughtful questions, but also to receive other people's questions with genuine curiosity. I have learned that ideas only exist within context, and that this context can help us understand the patterns of ideas. They do not exist as isolated objects; they are in constant relationship with each other and their contexts are in relationship with each other. In reflecting on my interactions with Robbie, I learned to value patterns of curiosity. As I reflected on Bateson's description of meta-patterns, I realized that his explanation gave meaning and form to the jumble of confusing and contradictory ideas I had about my interactions with Robbie. I knew that curiosity existed somewhere, but with Bateson's theory I saw that curiosity was located in the meta-patterns between questions when Robbie and I met halfway, in the context between our ideas, or the question space.

   Robbie's questions were simple, really, because any consideration at all would suffice. _____________________________________________________________________________
1 Bateson, G. (1978) The Pattern Which Connects. Coevolution Quarterly. Summer. Pp 5-15.