niffyjiffy

The Oxford English Dictionary does not deign to define the term “wordcel” as “a person who has replaced worldly knowledge with a crippling dependence on their verbal reasoning.” Nor does it define his adversary, the “shape-rotator,” an idealised being whose thinking is neatly contained within the realm of Platonic forms. Any internet-poisoned individual could glance at these terms, and from the suffix “-cel” immediately recognise the smug character which defined these terms and began labelling friends, posters, and thinkers. Pop psychology will never go out of fashion, and this dichotomy being both pop and psychology, it is now recognisable to millions of internet users.

The lot of wordcels and shape-rotators is much more than a topic of brief intrigue in my friend group. Having been subjected to a middle-class upbringing, we were informed with dangerous regularity of the strengths and limitations of our individual brain chemistry. Parents, counsellors, and psychiatrists would read the writing on the wall and augur which careers would suit us best, which hobbies we would excel at, and what kinds of lives we could lead. Once these new terms were introduced to us, we began implementing them immediately in conversation, as though they appeared in a word-a-day calendar. Instead of saying “my working memory is a real problem if I’m going to improve at poker,” one could simply say “I’m such a fucking wordcel.”

I wish I could say it ended there. Over the past few years I have worked in education. While it is prudent to pretend that a teacher is simply carrying out a duty—this is certainly the philosophy with which I write term reports and discuss students with my boss—teaching is a deeply expressive endeavour, and these unpresentable brain-worms have had a major impact on the way I understand my profession. Take for instance the fast talker, a student who possesses excellent mental math skills and precocious problem-solving intuition but who thinks too quickly to speak or write clearly. While their thinking capabilities are a great asset in theoretical mathematics and science classes, they are persistently hindered by their sloppy nomenclature, their proclivity for simple mistakes, and their difficulties presenting knowledge. Isn’t it obvious that this person is a shape-rotator, struggling to adapt their Platonic machinery to a world of wordcels? The epithet is irresistible.

Consider alternatively the hard-working bookworm. These students are verbally mature beyond their years, often able to talk charismatically to their elders and extract the kind of information that teachers ordinarily keep quiet about. Even their math work spreads out evenly across the page, with perfect handwriting and clear progression. Yet they rarely succeed in making the connection between the two mediums: turning a conceptual problem into an algebra problem. Taking the liberty of reflecting on a real case, I remember a conversation (naturally in which I defined “wordcel” and “shape-rotator” without naming either term) in which a student told me she had “dyscalculia,” an inability to draw abstract connections between mathematical symbols. She claimed to dream completely in audio, like some sort of Jedi. I needn’t say which of the two definitions she identified with.

This distinction is not new to academics—nothing could be further from the truth! Perhaps the most compelling polemic is the Ernst Rutherford quote: “All science is physics or stamp-collecting.” The snobbery here is bawdily funny; not even “soft sciences” are safe from this partition into real ideas and frivolous literature. Indeed, physics is a beautiful playground for the shape-rotator. I think back to a physics class in college, in which a whole auditorium chuckled at me for failing to understand that an infinite length of wire is identical in voltage to an infinitely wide loop of wire. Yet the wordcels have had the last laugh, as quantum physics has proven too disgusting to reason with abstractly. Einstein spent years in denial of this innovation, declaring that “God does not play dice.” Even famously brilliant physicists are forced to blindly trust in the languages of rote algebra and erudite thought-experiment, abandoning the beautiful images which characterise the physics of centuries prior. Feynman once exclaimed that “if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t.”

Indeed, outside of the paradigm of fatalistic IQ-judging that motivates these terms, no academic discipline is quite so simple. These days I treat my investment in wordcels and shape-rotators as a foray into Learning Styles[1], a concept which classifies each student under a particular medium from a choice of Visual, Auditory, Written, and Kinesthetic. Identifying shape-rotators as primary Kinesthetes and allotting the remaining three domains to wordcels, this creates natural bridges using each student’s secondary style. I encourage my frenetically abstract thinkers to “think with their pencil,” or to verbally explain concepts to me as though I were an idiot (as in the classic Rubber Duck test.) Likewise, proficient note-taking and well-structured conversations do wonders to help verbally gifted students break down complex networks of concepts (I am quite sure that this is what Rutherford considers stamp-collecting.)

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to ponder where the celebrated Whitman poem, “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer” fits into all this. I am simply unable to decide—perhaps words are beautiful too.

Footnote

[1] I had a conversation with an editor about learning styles—in recent times they have fallen under considerable scrutiny. The “meshing hypothesis,” which states that students learn best when taught in a way that reflects their learning style, consistently fails to be verified by studies. I do believe that the spirit in which I have used the concept here avoids this problem.