Toen ik vanmorgen de Volkskrant las, moest ik denken aan de roman Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) van Robert M. Pirsig. Daarin staat deze passage (ik heb de woorden waar het om gaat even vet gemaakt):
He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn’t a single complaint about “nothing to say.”
In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour’s writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, “Do you have to write about both sides?” Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested
Bert Natter 