Let’s Get Loud — Vogelsang, Germany | February 1997
“Epiphany at the Ordensburg Vogelsang”
“Imagine you’re standing around, waiting in a supermarket checkout line,” the voice of the warrant officer thunders through the room. It’s quite amazing, with this seemingly irrelevant opening, he manages to instantly quiet down and get the attention of the 50 NCOs and officers who are packed into the cramped room. A few moments ago, hardly anybody paid any attention to the balding warrant officer as he reshuffled his papers in a corner of the room and now he’s got our full attention: where is this going?
“You’re waiting in a checkout line, minding your own business, and suddenly… out of nowhere… a dirty canvas bag is drawn over your head… What do you do? What is your first impulse?”
We’re at the training session “Hostage” which is part of our preparation programme for the upcoming deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The warrant officer continues his story about what to do when taken hostage behind enemy lines. Telling us more stories and continually asking questions, he effectively manages to keep his place in the centre of our attention. I’m mesmerised by the effect of his technique. The way he runs his session completely contradicts everything I’ve been taught during my nine-month NCO-Instructor training, and that’s fine with me.
I never liked the way I’m supposed to conduct my classes: starting with five minutes of irrelevant chitchat, wasting valuable time outlining all the learning objectives and outcomes of the lesson in full detail, telling students the stuff they’d already know and then ask the same boring concept-check questions after every main point made —a guaranteed formula for disengagement. To make things worse, I should use an overhead projector and artificially try to cover up the lines on a slide, even though everyone would have already seen the whole thing. It is pathetic. No, the way this session is run makes much more sense to me.
During my time at the Royal Military School I had no choice though. I had to write out in full detail everything I intended to do in class. Then, as I taught my lessons, three instructors would sit in the back of the room ticking boxes on long check lists, making sure I wasn’t trying to be creative. Their feedback was always the same, the lesson had been well constructed and delivered, but I had missed instruction steps 4, 23, 28 and 34. It had been a good lesson, but not all the boxes had been ticked: “need for improvement.” Really!?
Once placed at my operational unit, I didn’t yet have the confidence to deviate from what I had been taught, so for the first couple of months I bored my soldiers to death with my lessons. Over time though, my confidence grew and, albeit behind closed doors, I adjusted the way I taught. Rather than listing objectives and outcomes and lecture, I got right into the material, continuously asked questions and tried to turn theory into practice. My logic was that if they engaged with the material, my soldiers would work out the objectives and outcomes by themselves. The result was as expected. Instead of being blasé, the soldiers enthusiastically jumped on board. Trapped in the conservative army atmosphere, however, I kept my teaching style a secret. On paper I did everything to have the boxes ticked.
But now, here at the former NSDAP Educational Centre for Future Leaders, Ordensburg Vogelsang, a senior warrant officer just validated my ideas. He didn’t bore us with objectives and outcomes at the start of his session, he’s been telling us stories and asking questions, letting us discover his goals; it’s exactly how I think it should be done!
That’s it, I’m not going to pretend to teach my lessons the conventional way anymore. I’m going to do it the way I think it should be done, let the boring conservatives prove me wrong!
A class on creative thinking skills given to students of the University of New South Wales’ Foundation Year programme at Vientiane College in Laos, August 2014.\
P.S. For the almost 20 years that have passed since this moment of epiphany, I have done exactly that. First as I continued as an instructor in the Royal Netherlands Army and later as a teacher in Southeast Asia. I tell stories, ask questions and force people to think. Then, last year, there was another moment of validation.
At the end of a term, we do a short evaluation survey of the course. One of my questions is, “What was your Wow! moment of the term?” As we discussed the students’ answers to this question, one of them hesitatingly spoke up: “To be honest,” she said, “ the wow moment for me was you.”
“In what way?” I asked, taken aback a bit by her comment.
“Well, everything you say is so different. You say all these things nobody else says, yóu are so different. You make me think about everything all the time, even when we’re not in class. Nothing looks like the way it used to anymore.”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?” I asked.
“Uhm, a good thing I think,” she said with a smile, “I like different.”
Score!! I do what I do because I think it’s the way things should be done. I had this validated 20 years ago by a Dutch warrant officer 20 years my senior, and now I’ve been given the greatest possible compliment I can imagine (It doesn’t matter if she actually meant it that way or not.) by a bright young Lao student who’s at least 20 years younger than me; it’s just right!
Jennifer Lopez – Let’s Get Loud on On the 6 [CD]. New York (NY), USA: Columbia Records. (1999)
This autobiographical sketch comes from my bundle In the Moment: A Disjointed Audiobiography which is available at Amazon.com. (USD 9.50 for a paperback or USD 4.50 for the Kindle version)
