Please don't elaborate

When I started learning computer science, I was lucky to have a roommate who was very skilled in the subject. I quickly learned, however, that my roommate would simply not respond to questions of the form “How do I do this?” As frustrating as it was for me when I just wanted an answer, he refused to tell me what I had to do and instead demanded that I think about it and ask him a better question like “What exactly does this specific thing mean?” or “Here’s how I think this works — does that make sense?” I would always eventually get to the answer and thank him, but it wasn’t until recently that I thought seriously about the way he approached teaching me — by letting me engage with the concepts myself — and how it was something that is, in my estimation, greatly lacking here at Princeton.

I came to realize it when watching a YouTube video called “Jacques Derrida on American Attitude” (although how I ended up in such a high-brow corner of YouTube, I’m not quite sure). A reporter asked Derrida — who completed most of his education in France — why he once characterized her as “American” for giving him a topic and asking him to speak about it. Derrida’s answer was that when he came to America to teach, he noticed that students and professors would interact in this way: They’d ask each other “to please elaborate” about a given topic instead of engaging with the topic themselves as part of their question.

The problem with the “please elaborate” mentality stems from a lack of understanding of the social process of teaching and learning. A student will ask a professor to say something about a given topic such as Marxism or machine learning as if people have entire discourses in their back pockets. As if what a person knows is nothing more than a hard drive of information in his or her brain that you can access with the proper function call. This works fine for questions that are mere facts, like “When was such-and-such written?” or “How efficient is such-and-such algorithm?”, but is useless for more complex questions about concepts and their structure. Such knowledge isn’t accessed by simply sending a request to the bank of information, but rather in a collaborative effort with the asker.

When I ask for someone to elaborate on a point, I’ve taken myself out of the equation. I’m not responsible for figuring things out or applying my thoughts to the situation; I merely demand that the person I’m talking to give me what I need. Other people know things, and when they tell me something, I too will know it. The problem here is not only that it’s practically difficult for a professor to simply regurgitate information without a context, but also that this implies that the student is a tabula rasa who has nothing to contribute, whereas the synthesis of what we already know with new information is what learning is all about.

One might think there is a divide here between the kind of knowledge being taught. For example, one could argue that philosophy has, for over two millennia, been a dialogical pursuit requiring two active participants in a conservation. Some think that the hard sciences are somehow different in that there are a lot of facts that have to be learned that can be elicited with a simple “please explain this.”

In my experience, though, there is no reason to think that the demand of being an active participant in your learning is no less present in disciplines that appear on the surface to be more fact-based. This is because it’s never really about facts, even in fields that are based on a lot of them. If my roommate had simply told me the answer to my computer science question, I would know another fact, but I wouldn’t get what was really going on. It was only when he helped me struggle through the problem on my own that I came to understand more fundamentally how the system worked and was thus able to add in the facts on my own. And in this case, if time is what pressures a person to demand an elaboration instead of struggling through something, you end up saving more time. Instead of spending time learning facts, you can in some sense derive them from your deeper conceptual knowledge.

Now, when I’m having a conversation about a topic of import with my friends and I don’t understand something, I stop myself from simply saying “elaborate on that,” and instead try to frame questions that indicate that I am engaging with the idea partially but haven’t quite grasped it. If you want to know more about something, don’t ask someone to elaborate on it or just give you the answer. Bring yourself up to their level, give it all you’ve got intellectually and see what you can learn from there.

Luke Massa is a philosophy major from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.