Necessary Whispers

Fear is Inevitable. Courage is a Choice.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — Hannah Arendt

In the summer of 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 assembled outside the village of Józefów in Nazi-occupied Poland. The men who stood in formation were not professional soldiers. Only months earlier, they had been running hardware shops, repairing trucks, keeping business accounts, and returning home to their families each evening. They were fathers and neighbors, men in their thirties and forties who had aged out of frontline service before the war began. Their conscription into a reserve police unit had interrupted ordinary routines, not fulfilled ambitions for combat.

Major Wilhelm Trapp, their commander, stepped before them. Witnesses later described him as unsettled, his face unusually pale. He spoke without military rhetoric or ideological preface. The battalion, he said, would enter Józefów and collect its Jewish residents. They were to remove people from their homes: women, children, the elderly, and the sick. The residents would then be taken to the nearby forest, where the battalion would carry out “necessary measures.”

Only after giving these instructions did Trapp add a final detail that stands out in the historical record. Any man who felt unable to participate could step out of formation without punishment.

The battalion remained still. No one protested or sought clarification. After a moment, a few men stepped out of line, then a few more. In all, out of nearly five hundred, only twelve removed themselves from the formation.

The rest marched toward Józefów.

How should we account for the decision of so many men drawn from familiar routines to stay in formation without protest?

Scholars have focused on this moment because it disrupts familiar explanations for how violence begins. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not composed of ideologues or trained executioners, but of ordinary men whose lives had previously consisted of work, family, and routine. Their choice to remain in formation cannot be explained primarily by coercion or conviction. Most stood still not because they wanted to exact harm, but because they did not want to stand apart, be seen refusing, or face the uncertainty of acting alone. Therefore, the residents of Józefów were not killed by men set apart as specialists in violence, but by neighbors who failed to refuse when refusal was still possible. In this context, participation arose less from intent than from hesitation. The killing did not require their belief, only their compliance.

What happened in Józefów suggests that violence can advance not only through conviction, but through the avoidance of refusal and the desire to remain safely within the group. Harm is sustained when no one interrupts it.

What happened outside Józefów reveals a pattern that extends far beyond wartime and history. Once obedience becomes the easiest way forward, responsibility begins to feel negotiable, something that can be handed off to whoever stands above us or beside us. People rarely wake up intending to harm others; they drift into it when the cost of refusal feels heavier than the cost of compliance.

Decades after the war, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram invited ordinary adults into a small laboratory at Yale University. He told them they were there to help with a study on memory. A mild-mannered man in a gray lab coat instructed them to administer electric shocks to a stranger in the next room if the stranger answered questions incorrectly. The shocks were fake, but the participants did not know that. Immediately following their press of the button, they heard screams, protests, and pounding on the wall. Many feared they were seriously hurting someone. A few protested, a few tried to stop, several shook or wept, but most continued when the man in the lab coat reassured them that the responsibility was his own. Their distress did not prevent their obedience. Being told they were “not the ones in charge” became a relief.

A few years later, another researcher, Philip Zimbardo, converted the basement of Stanford’s psychology building into a mock prison. Volunteers were assigned roles: some became “guards,” others “prisoners.” The assignment came with no training, no ideology, and no instruction to be harsh. The guards were merely told to maintain order.

At first, the volunteers treated their roles loosely. Some joked, others followed the script half-heartedly, unsure how seriously to take the experiment. They carried traces of their everyday lives with them: the habits of students, sons, and roommates. But as the hours passed, their uniforms changed the way they moved. The mirrored sunglasses hid their eyes, and the separation between “guards” and “prisoners” encouraged them to speak with authority. They began to issue commands more sharply. They enforced rules more strictly. What started as playing a role shifted into performance with stakes, and each act of control made the next one easier.

The shift did not arise from hatred or conviction. It unfolded as the guards realized what the role allowed—and chose to use it. No one corrected their tone. No one questioned the rules they invented. Each act of control felt like permission for the next. Within days, they relied on humiliation and psychological pressure, not because they had entered the experiment with cruelty in mind, but because they discovered they could act this way and decided to keep doing it. The situation offered authority without limits, and they stepped into that freedom. Their choices, small at first, accumulated into harm.

Around the same time, a quieter experiment unfolded in a hospital ward. A researcher named Charles Hofling phoned nurses during their shifts, pretending to be a physician giving a prescription. The dosage he ordered violated hospital policy and put the patient at clear risk. The nurses knew this. They hesitated. Yet almost all of them prepared to administer the medication. They were not driven by disregard for the patient or by carelessness. It was the voice on the other end of the phone—authoritative, insistent, claiming responsibility—that tipped the scale. To obey felt safer than to refuse.

The people in these experiments were not sadists or zealots. They were parents, students, nurses, and everyday workers who did not want to cause harm but wanted even less to bear the discomfort of resisting it. They felt anxiety, confusion, even moral distress, yet continued anyway. They were relieved when to believe that the responsibility in their given scenarios did not belong to them. In a forest outside Józefów, this same pattern played out on a scale that cost innocent people their lives.

Cowardice is not the same as fear. Every person feels fear, and it arrives with its own shape, rising from uncertainty, from unanswered questions, from the risks that come with being alive. Fear can warn, protect, or humble us. Cowardice begins only when fear chooses its strategy. It places the cost of one’s actions onto someone else. Instead of carrying the weight of responsibility, it hands that weight to another person and walks away. Cowardice keeps its own reputation polished while letting others absorb its impact. It asks to be understood and excuses itself from being accountable. It allows the consequences of one’s choices to settle on those who cannot escape them.

We often imagine evil as something committed by those who crave it, yet most of the harm in history has been carried out by people who felt uneasy, reluctant, even afraid. The men in Józefów did not wake with murderous desire. They stayed in formation and let someone else decide what their fear would cost. The question Józefów leaves us with is not who among us would choose violence, but who among us would choose the discomfort of refusing it.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This piece was originally posted on my Jill Szoo Wilson Substack.

Poem: Eight Out of Ten

A robin lands on the arm of the garden chair
as if the universe were not built to frighten her.
She tilts her head. The world tilts with it.

No anthem announces her.
No speech.
No medal.
Only the wind, unbuttoned at the collar,
pretending not to notice.

She steps once, twice—
a feathered stride across the iron rung,
making a path of what is there.
The waking yard yawns and watches,
a mini tightrope walker—
eight out of ten from the pine tree branches.

She pecks at a crumb
left over from someone’s careless breakfast—
(is that my blueberry with a bit of bagel?)
it is hardly a feast.
Yet she claims it with the authority
of a creature who never learned to doubt her place.

A distant car door slams.
The robin pauses.
I can see her thinking
the way a tiny body thinks—
all heartbeat and decision.

Then she stays.

This is how courage works:
not with battle cries,
but with the quiet agreement
to remain exactly where fear expected you to flee.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

The Courage to Be Seen Thinking: Speaking Through Fear

By Jill Szoo Wilson

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”— Eleanor Roosevelt

I teach communication courses. Public Speaking is my mainstay. I also teach theatre, but communication has taken the front seat in my heart because I can see—clearly, daily—that the younger generation longs to become confident and competent in their ability to connect with other people. It isn’t a weakness in them, as many older adults like to say. It’s a weakness in us if we don’t equip them now to adapt their unique voices to their audiences.

My generation shared this desire when I was in school, but the landscape has changed since then. We lacked information; this generation is drowning in it. Growing up, our question was “What should I say?” Theirs is closer to “Who will hear me?” They are not unsure of what to speak about as much as they are unsure whether anyone is listening in a world where voices collide, compete, and vanish into the noise.

Yesterday, as this semester wraps up, I asked my class, “Has public speaking gotten easier for you?” I fully expected the usual yes. For a couple of decades, I’ve almost always heard that answer. But this time, about 80 percent said yes, and the other 20 percent said they are more terrified than ever.

I stopped everything and asked them why.

When a student feels afraid, I take it seriously. I feel a brief window of responsibility to help them leave stronger than they arrived, so they do not carry unnecessary fear into the rest of their lives.

One student said, “I felt fine on my first speech. But then I had to miss one, and on the next speech, I felt like I was behind. My chest tightened. I felt like I needed to escape—run out the door—but I knew I couldn’t. So I felt trapped. Feeling trapped, my fear grew and soon it was like I couldn’t see anymore. It’s like my mind escaped the room, but my body had to stay here.”

What a remarkable way to describe panic:
“It’s like my mind escaped the room, but my body had to stay here.”

I won’t unpack the whole conversation we had afterward, but I share this because it highlights how essential it is to equip young people with the communication tools necessary not just to present information, but to remain present within themselves when they feel afraid. Even though these students know each other well by now, even though there’s camaraderie and safety (even in disagreement), they still confessed thoughts like:

Do I sound stupid?
Are they judging me?
What if I fail?
What if I’m not good enough?
Why didn’t I rehearse more? Now it’s too late. I’m going to crash out.
I want to disappear.

So I told them that if they remember anything from this entire semester, please let it be this:

There are always a hundred things happening at once in any moment. That’s life. It’s okay. You can’t control that part.
What you can control is your preparation and your focus—look outward to the audience you’re giving something to, not inward toward fear.
Adapt your message to your audience (using recency, locality, psychology, physiology, and economic factors), and speak from the heart as though you’re giving, not taking.

Fear lasts because communication touches identity. No teacher can remove that for another person; we can only help them learn how to stand in it.

Speaking always involves two kinds of work: thinking and being seen. When a student puts their ideas into words, they’re not only organizing their thoughts; they’re placing those thoughts into a space where others can evaluate them. That movement from inner reasoning to public expression activates the body just as powerfully as the mind. The student feels exposed because, in a very real sense, they are. Communication invites others to witness our thinking, and the body responds as though it must protect what has just been revealed. In this light, courage is not the absence of fear in communication, but the willingness to let one’s thinking be visible while learning to stay present in that exposure.

[C]ourage is not the absence of fear in communication, but the willingness to let one’s thinking be visible while learning to stay present in that exposure.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux demonstrated that the brain processes emotional threat more rapidly than conscious reasoning, producing instinctive reactions before the mind has time to interpret them (The Emotional Brain, 1996). When speaking, that instinct narrows attention and draws awareness inward. The student’s focus moves away from the audience and toward the self: What are they thinking of me saying this? In that moment, communication shifts from sharing ideas to guarding the identity that feels exposed. The body prepares to protect the thinker, even while the thinker is trying to speak.

To teach how to communicate through fear, then, is not simply to teach speaking. It’s to teach attention. Communication is an outward-facing act in which meaning is co-created between speaker and audience. The student is not performing for a passive group but participating in a shared moment of understanding. When fear sends the mind fleeing—“escaping the room while the body stays behind”—the pedagogical work is to help students return to that shared moment. This does not mean suppressing their anxiety, but retraining where they place their awareness. Instead of monitoring their own performance, they learn to notice the listeners they are addressing: how the audience responds, where clarity is needed, and where curiosity sparks. They begin to read the cues that help them stay present, such as facial expressions, body posture or stillness, eye contact, moments of confusion, or quiet signs of interest like leaning forward, nodding, or attentive silence. Attention becomes the bridge that allows the speaker to stay present long enough for communication to take shape.

You may wonder, Isn’t it scarier to notice the people in front of you? I would respond with another question: Isn’t it far more frightening to stand in front of others while constantly critiquing yourself in your own mind? When students shift their attention outward, they no longer face the audience alone. They begin to share the work of understanding with the people who are listening.

Educational theorist Parker Palmer writes that “we fear the live encounter” when speaking because we are culturally conditioned to treat knowledge as a possession to defend rather than a shared activity (The Courage to Teach, 1998). Many students come to communication believing that they must display what they know and protect it from critique. In that mindset, speaking becomes an act of performance: their ideas become something like personal property on a stage, vulnerable to judgment. Fear grows because the task feels like self-presentation rather than shared exploration. The speaker begins working to preserve an image—trying not to be wrong, trying not to be misunderstood—rather than working to illuminate a topic with others. Under this frame, communication is effort spent guarding the self rather than engaging with the subject or the audience.

Instead of treating knowledge as something we defend, we can help students see it as something we share.

A helpful metaphor I offer my students is to treat ideas like campfires. When students speak, they are tending a thought long enough for others to gather around it. The speaker’s work is to make that flame visible and to offer enough clarity for others to see by its light. The heat belongs to the concept, not to the student’s identity. Fear grows when a student imagines they themselves are being scrutinized or judged, as though they must withstand the fire. But when they learn to host others at the fire of an idea, the pressure shifts. They do not perform; they invite. Their task becomes to let the thought burn clearly enough for others to explore what its light reveals.

Hosting others at the fire of an idea becomes an act of generosity. Instead of guarding an idea to protect themselves, students learn to offer it for the sake of shared understanding. In this posture, ideas become contributions rather than possessions to defend. The goal moves toward clarity, shared reasoning, and insight that others can carry beyond the moment of speaking. The speaker intends to give something away: a perspective, a question, or an interpretation that helps others think more carefully.

This change in intention helps reshape the student’s internal experience. The audience is no longer a threat to self-image, but a group of learners who can benefit from the speaker’s effort. Fear loosens not because it vanishes, but because it now serves a different purpose. Anxiety becomes a form of care: a signal that the message matters. Instead of trying to perform without fault, the speaker begins to engage in the work of making ideas accessible to others by choosing clearer examples, inviting shared reasoning, and adjusting pace and language. The focus shifts from How do I look? to What might help them see this?

Such reframing is supported by Kenneth Burke’s foundational view of rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (A Rhetoric of Motives, 1950). Burke’s definition shifts attention away from persuasion as winning agreement and toward communication as building shared understanding. He calls humans “beings that respond to symbols” because we think, interpret, and act through language. Words, therefore, do more than convey information. They invite people into a coordinated way of seeing. In this light, communication becomes cooperative work. As students begin to see their speeches as something they give rather than something by which they are measured, their attention turns toward building that shared understanding. Fear becomes manageable because their purpose becomes relational, and their speech becomes purposeful because it serves a common effort.

Anxiety, then, becomes not an obstacle but a cue that communication matters. It invites awareness rather than avoidance. As Susan Cain observes, “Fear is not a flaw; it’s a sign that something is worth doing” (Quiet, 2012). In a pedagogical context, this insight reveals fear as evidence of engagement, a marker that students are entering meaningful communicative work.

When communication is taught as outward-facing rather than defensive, students learn more than technique. They develop ethical habits of attentiveness, which are central to higher education and essential to public life. In an era marked by rapid exchange, polarized discourse, and performative speech, the capacity to direct attention outward becomes an act of civic responsibility. It equips students not merely to express themselves, but to interpret contexts, consider audiences, and contribute to understanding within complex communities.

Higher education, viewed through this lens, is not simply preparing speakers. It is cultivating citizens capable of relational inquiry. To help students remain present while speaking, to keep their “mind in the room” when fear urges retreat, is to equip them for the intellectual and ethical demands of adult life. They learn to see communication not as self-display but as participation in the shared labor of meaning-making.

This reframing transforms fear from a barrier into a catalyst. Students do not conquer visibility; they inhabit it. They learn to speak with others rather than at them and to stay present in the encounter rather than disappear into self-consciousness. In doing so, they acquire a communicative stance that extends well beyond the classroom, a stance defined not by performance but by presence.

When a student says, “It feels like my mind escaped the room,” communication education becomes a way of helping them return. We can teach them to stay present with others and to participate in meaning-making even when visibility feels risky. The work of public speaking becomes ongoing preparation for shared life: learning to offer ideas with clarity, to attend to others with care, and to keep the mind in the room where understanding can grow. This practice shapes how we show up in the world, cultivating attentiveness, generosity, and a readiness to learn in community with others.

Jill Szoo Wilson is an educator, speaker, and writer who teaches communication and theatre at the college level. Her writing explores the ethical and relational possibilities of speech in public life.

Poem: Love, Or Something Like It

There was a time

When the feeling was high

Like a tide

Rolling up and in

Surfers flying

Sun shining and

Invisible heartbeats

Crooning tunes of

Love

Or something like it.


The edge of desire

Between water and fire

Where burning is natural

Safe and contained

Where extinguishing

Is disregarded like a far-off joke

Laughter and ease

No appeasing

Only releasing

No hand on the trigger.


A season of passion

Final bastion before the mix

Of hearts and hands

Rhythms and bands

Playing songs for two

And candles glowing

Illustrating the knowing

Breaking shadows

Into pieces like crumbs

Along the way.


Shadows slip into

The hourglass—

Goodbye—

Crumbs and sands combine

Lost

And time falling

Sand filling darkness

That cannot be fished

All the way down

Into deepest fathoms of regret.


It is quiet there

Where thoughts dare not

To squirm—

They writhe instead

Slither over, “what the hell”

Wriggle past hatred

Lick the ears of obliterated

Words and

Images all stamped with,

“Doubt.”


There is a way out

But only further down

Past the malice

And through the chalice

Of poison

Red with the blood of

Something once living

Now stiffening

Twitching slowly before

Final death.


A memory of breath

Clouding

First love

Then hatred

Now something

More foreboding—

Indifference

The truest enemy of

That which was

And no longer is.


Indifference is

The air surrounding and

That one time we—

Oh, wait, now I forgot—

It is a stroll in the park

With nothing hiding,

Sitting at a traffic light

Waiting for green

But red is fine, too—

Nothing to forget, nothing to pursue.


There was a time

When hearing your voice

Scattered my focus

Like bees swarming

Drenched in honey

Bringing balance

To the flowers that we gave

And the ones we dropped

Along the way—

A garden full and thriving.


“Hello?”

My God, the timing—

I did not expect

How could I have known

That the ringing of my phone

Would start the race

Like a pistol pointed above,

Toward the space

Where helium-filled expectations

Rest in peace.


I touched my lips

As I do when my heart

Beats

Suddenly

Quickly

Stinging the parts that

Stabilize

When I realize

My hands are the only protection

I have.


“Hello,”

I heard—

Oh,

Hell no—

Hello is not enough

No greeting

Even in the repeating

Could fill the chasm

Between speaking

And hearing.


I wanted to spill

Like a leak in a pipe

Drip into the boards

Between my feet on the floor

Become a puddle

With no response

No chance to offer

More kindling to

Soak

Or to muddle.


I heard his voice

Once more

A bolt of electricity—

I was struck

With a memory

The simplicity of

The time that was high

The surfers, the tide—

A different world

A haunted time.


Then it was quiet

“It” being I

And I being the me

I remembered

I became

After the exit

Of he

And I breathed

Into the phone

Then I hung up—dial tone.


I poured a glass of Merlot

Sat in an unfamiliar glow

Once having waited—

Deeply anticipating his hello—

Now

Denied

Then

Intoxicated with his lies

But no more

And the red warmed my soul.


Once I read

Written on the sky

The opposite of love

Is hate

But you see, my dear,

I fear the stars

Were misinformed—

The opposite of love is

Indifference

I am sure I am right

As muted versions of

You and I

Are blown to dry

And stick

To freshly painted fingernails—

Not painted for you.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Poem: Where Our Eyes Have Met

A single painting in an art museum gathers the gaze of countless viewers, linking people who will never stand there together.

This is a poem about that.

A hundred eyes
have paused at this painting—
or maybe a million—
a crowd distributed across decades,
all standing just where I stand now,
though wearing different shoes.

Some looked quickly,
some leaned in,
some tilted their heads
as if the angle held a secret.
None of them knew
they were becoming part of each other’s story.

The gold frame won’t say
how many people have stood here,
or how long,
or what they were hoping for.
Paintings don’t keep lists.

Still, I wonder
if your eyes
have ever touched this canvas
in the exact place mine do now.
If so, the colors would remember.
They are better archivists than we are.

A single brushstroke
might recognize you—
the way the spotlight sharpened on its surface
when you stepped closer,
the way it softens now
because I have.

We might have shared this moment
without sharing the hour.
Two visitors,
unlikely to meet,
connected by a patch of green
that neither of us layered
yet both of us trust.

It’s possible
the painting knows us both—
you by a trace of perfume,
me by the giggle I released too loudly,
you by the tear you wiped away quickly,
and them by a single loose thread
from their bright red scarf.

All the while,
it stays exactly where it is,
patient as a held page,
letting strangers
complete the same sentence
with different eyes.

What an odd, prismatic intimacy—
to be joined
by something that never speaks,
yet answers
each of us
in turn.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Poem: Snowfall On a Patio Chair

It started with one flake I mistook for a drop,
without asking my permission,
as snow often does.
By morning, the patio chair—
the one with the pale blue cushions I meant to bring in—
had accepted its fate
with the patience of an object that knows
humans forget things.

The snow took its time.
A thin first layer,
then another,
each one more certain than the last.
If the chair felt imposed upon,
it gave no sign.

From the maple,
a squirrel watched the slow takeover,
pressed flat against the trunk
in an embrace that invited romance, or,
at the very least,
warmth.
It twitched its tail once—
a gesture somewhere between
expectation and indifference—
then sighed a tiny puff of breath.

Meanwhile, at the back of the yard,
the pine tree leaned lower than yesterday.
The branches, loaded with fresh snow,
descended far enough
to touch the needles that had fallen weeks ago.
A quiet reunion.
If trees feel anything at such moments,
I imagine it’s something austere:
nostalgia, perhaps,
maybe even joy.

A grand ceremony,
and no one asked me to attend.
Still, I stood at the window,
unsummoned,
as winter arranged its small corrections:
the forgotten tucked in,
the living held close,
the fallen greeted by their own.

A world going on
perfectly well
without my remembering.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Poem: In This Light

All summer the rubber tree misunderstood itself
as a subtropical creature with permanent rights to the patio.
Fall corrected that illusion.
I carried it inside
before the cold could finish the argument.

Now it stands beside the southeast window,
where the morning light arrives like a polite guest—
knocking first,
then slipping across the floorboards
in a thin, honeyed ribbon.

This light was not made for grandeur.
It does not flare, or boast,
or promise anything it cannot keep.
It simply lifts the room an inch or two,
enough that even the rubber tree notices—
its leaves catching the brightness
with the same shy greed
of someone receiving a compliment
they secretly hoped to hear.

I water it slowly,
as if pouring out a small confession.
The soil darkens, swells,
takes what it needs
without apology.

I do not tell the tree
that I admire its stubbornness,
or that something in its resilience
feels tender to me this morning.
Plants are suspicious of sentiment.
They prefer steady hands
and predictable light.

Still, the room shifts—
a quiet choreography
of leaf-shadow and sun-warmth.
And for a moment,
we are both content
to be exactly where the season
has delivered us.

Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

A Fable: The Temple of the Red Crystal

By Jill Szoo Wilson

There was a cavernous room where shadows flickered in the glow and not-glow of a hundred candles. Deep in a forest where the trees had names and whispered among themselves, shedding their leaves sometimes in boredom, sometimes in spite, in the center of an island surrounded by a frigid ocean that looked like clouds and made the whole place seem to float in outer space.

The room belonged to a magician named Heichus, whose hands were arthritic with disappointment, false starts, and spells whose power never left the tips of his fingers.

Year after year, Heichus bent over a heavy wooden table, wiping dust and spider eggs away from the steaming liquids and vials that had become his companions. The dust he swept aside collected at the edges of the wood and fell to the floor on all sides, creating a pile so deep that, if it were snow, it could be shaped into an army of snowmen. Instead, the dust sat dormant yet lively with mites and burrowing mice and spiders hatching from the very eggs he brushed away. His table rose from the drifts like an iceberg from beneath salty seas, its tip the only part he ever really saw.

Among the vials and beakers that bubbled and hissed sat two crystals that glowed with a light almost imperceptible. Against the candlelight, their weak illumination looked like the last pulses of a dying firefly.

Both crystals were clear in their main element, but one shone with a faint blue, the other faint red. These small hues painted themselves across Heichus’ cheeks, thin and uneven, like paint that had already begun to dry. The candles and crystals, and the occasional pop of an ill-conceived mixture, were the only difference between utter forest darkness and sight for Heichus. He kept them on his table as if they were pets that needed his attention to live.

One night, while Heichus was reading from a brittle book of potions, schemes, and chemical riddles, he saw a spark out of the corner of his eye. He turned, and the red crystal began to shine more brightly.

Heichus widened his dark eyes and leaned toward it.

“Could it be?” he asked the stale air.

It had been years since he had seen the warm glow of the red crystal. He carefully moved the powders and liquids out of reach, picked up the crystal, and laid it on a cracked mirror that sat on his table. He set his hands on either side of the glass, lowered his head, narrowed his eyelids, and studied the glowing red stone from every angle. He was like David squinting at Bathsheba, unable to look away.

Heichus had never known the origin of the red crystal, but he had never forgotten its power. As he watched its glow creep into the lines of his face, he remembered himself as a younger man. He peered into the mirror beneath it and saw the beauty of his own youth. The red crystal had the ability to erase the marks of time, pain, and weakness, revealing the vibrancy and strength of any man who stood in its light.

Tears slipped out of Heichus’ narrowed eyes.

“It is,” he whispered to the air.

From aloneness to companionship, he travelled into his own reflection. His mind moved from remembering to feeling to believing the young man in the mirror. He walked around the room holding the red crystal to his face in one hand and the mirror like a fixture in the other. The longer he held the crystal, the brighter it glowed. The brighter it glowed, the clearer and happier and alive the eyes staring back at him.

Heichus danced with his own face. He laughed and coughed with delight. He asked the mirror, “Do you love me?” and the mirror answered with a silent yes as Heichus heard music in his heart. The mice at his feet rolled their black eyes. The spiders sat in rows with their two front legs crossed and watched the human spectacle.

Heichus moved with the speed of a young man. When his bones creaked or his back spasmed, he looked at his face in the mirror, splashed with red, and forgot the pain of his present.

After a night and day and night and day of sleepless frenzy, Heichus began his rituals. He blew out the flames of his candles, covered the powders and liquids, capped the vials and beakers, cleaned his teeth, drank his milk, and sank into the lumps of his old mattress. He placed the red crystal on the nightstand near his bed and propped the mirror behind it. He lay in the dark, seeing and then not seeing the young man staring back at him as sleep pulled at his eyelids. Exhaustion joined hands with inevitability, and Heichus was unconscious to the world.

His snores rose like crows looking for a darkened branch. The stale air was stirred by their wings and by a thin winter draft that found its way across the dust. The red crystal glowed and pulsed. The blue crystal wheezed and sighed its meager attempts.

As the earth turned toward midnight, the trees outside his room began to whisper.

“Years ago, when the red crystal shone with power, Heichus cut many of us down,” said one.

The older trees told the younger ones the story.

“Heichus grew large in his mind and proud in his hands,” they said. “He wanted to build a temple for the red crystal. His hands did the work of a thousand men while his eyes stayed fixed on his face in the mirror. The mirror even cracked under the weight of his gaze. He found his eyes again, one on each side of the crack, and kept chopping. He felled a thousand trees.”

A young tree asked, “Did he finish the temple?”

An old tree with branches bent toward the earth replied, “No. As he began to build the foundation, a great storm gathered over the forest and fell with terrifying fury. Lightning struck the foundation. It struck the bodies of our fallen brothers and sisters. It struck the red and blue crystals and stripped them of their light.”

The young one asked one more question, as young ones often do before sleep.

“Why did he want to build a temple for the red crystal and not the blue?”

“The blue crystal shows Heichus who he truly is,” the old tree said. “The red crystal shows him what he wants to see.”

With that, the old tree drew in a long breath, let it out, and fell quiet.

The forest, the magician, the mice, and the spiders hummed with peace, the way wind hums as it crosses the face of the sea. The world was still. Their memories slept inside their dreams.

Just before the sun lifted its fingers to begin the morning, something rattled on Heichus’ table.

Heichus opened one eyelid, then the other. He looked into the mirror at his bedside and smiled at himself. The red crystal rolled its light across his face like a cat rolling in a sprawl of sunlight. Heichus beamed and groaned and laughed and began speaking poetry to his reflection.

His rhyme was interrupted.

The blue crystal trembled again. This time, its motion took on another kind of life. The light at its center began to glow. At first, it was slow, almost imperceptible. Then its hue gathered strength and lifted into the air, disturbing the stale particles of the room with small touches of blue.

Heichus bellowed a low, wordless shriek. The blue crystal had pulled his gaze away from his face in the mirror, and that filled him with rage.

He leapt from his bed, the red crystal clenched in one hand, the mirror clutched in the other, and ran to the table. He began to mix and stir. His powders and liquids bubbled, hissed, and burst. For years, he had stood at this table for one secret purpose. He wanted to create a potion that would break, smash, or incinerate the blue crystal into a trillion useless pieces he could bury deep beneath the earth.

His hands moved from vial to vial, not carefully but feverishly. His alchemy turned into reckless combinations. His old objective rose inside him again, strong and cold as the temple walls he had once tried to build. He worked and panted. Saliva gathered at the sides of his mouth.

He watched only his hands and the elements on his table. He did not dare lift his eyes to the mirror, did not dare see his face in the light of the blue crystal as it climbed into the air. He knew that if he did, the blue light would strip him of the beauty he clung to in the red.

He felt the arthritis in his hands flare. He felt his lungs fill with the weight of tears and phlegm and regret, all pressing upward into his throat. The stale air began to shine with purple as red and blue stretched outward into wisps and smoke. Heichus closed his eyes and slammed his vials together, causing bursts of fire, both hot and cold, that licked his skin and stole his breath. Pain and relief chased each other through his body. Tears came. Heichus tumbled to the floor.

Through many summers and winters, he had sat and stood and slept in this room, trying to find a way for the red light to swallow him into its reflection. Now he faced his failure and wept into the stale air.

“I am no magician at all,” he said.

The red and blue crystals vibrated. They shook and rolled across the tabletop while Heichus cried on the floor.

“Come what may,” he whispered.

Beams turned into shafts, which turned into streams of colored fire that filled the room, red and blue and then violet. Completely defeated, sobbing, and cut off from his own heart, Heichus reached his hand through the chaos and grabbed for the mirror. His hands shook with fear, confusion, stubbornness, and hatred, yet he fought against his pride and pulled the mirror to his face.

The storm of violet rattled the room, spilled into the forest, and swept across the cloudy ocean. In its center, Heichus forced himself to look.

To see.

His face was marked by both youth and age, both wishes and realities, both dreams and waking. His breath came hard. His joints stung. His veins throbbed with obsession, desire, and a long habit of wanting. His eyes filled, not with blood this time, but with tears that felt heavier than blood. In one still moment, where fantasy and reality met in the air, his voice found a clear, steady line.

“I see,” he said.

With those words, the storm dropped. The wind and sound and fury crashed to the ground, shook the earth, and stopped, the way a tornado finally lifts and leaves behind both destruction and newness. The red and blue crystals gave a last faint puff of light and fell dark.

Heichus stayed where he was, listening to the quiet settle around him.

Outside, the trees felt the stillness return. They did not cheer. They did not mourn. They simply adjusted their branches, as trees do, and continued to grow.

In the years that followed, when the younger trees asked about the strange magician in the stone room, the oldest among them answered like this:

“Heichus loved the light that showed him what he wanted to see more than the light that showed him who he was. That is why he suffered. Hear this and keep it close. A man may chase illusion all his life, but truth will wait longer, and when it comes, no one can face it for him.”

Thinking in Community: Constructivism and the Socratic Tradition in Higher Education

By Jill Szoo Wilson

In contemporary higher education, a surprising harmony emerges between two pedagogical lineages often perceived as distinct: constructivist teaching philosophy and the Socratic Method. One grounds itself in cognitive development and social learning theory; the other traces its heritage to ancient Greece. Yet together, they form one of the most intellectually generative combinations available to the modern classroom. Both treat learning not as passive absorption but as active inquiry. Both assume that students arrive with prior knowledge, internal frameworks, and tacit assumptions that shape how they understand new information. Most importantly, both contend that education is not simply the transfer of content, but the transformation of the learner.

Constructivist thinkers argue that students build knowledge rather than receive it. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, described this process as a dynamic interplay between assimilation and accommodation, a continual restructuring of cognitive architecture as learners encounter new experiences (The Origins of Intelligence in Children). Lev Vygotsky, the Russian social psychologist, extended this idea by emphasizing the social dimensions of learning. His concept of the Zone of Proximal Development proposed that understanding flourishes when learners engage in dialogue with a more capable peer or mentor. John Dewey, the American philosopher of education, echoed this view, asserting that “knowledge is not something which exists apart from experience” (Democracy and Education). Their scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for constructivist pedagogy: students learn by doing, by reflecting, and by negotiating meaning in community.

The Socratic Method shares this commitment to meaning-making through dialogue. Though separated by millennia from contemporary cognitive theory, Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, had already intuited that learning requires active mental engagement. His method—probing questions, conceptual clarification, and disciplined reasoning—invites students to articulate, examine, and ultimately revise their assumptions. Mortimer Adler, the American educational philosopher, writes in The Paideia Proposal that the Socratic classroom is defined by its refusal to reduce ideas to mere facts. Instead, it seeks to refine the mind through inquiry. Similarly, Nel Noddings, the influential scholar of ethics and education, observed that Socratic questioning “challenges students to consider why they believe what they believe” and requires an educator to listen closely, ask precisely, and build questions that reveal the architecture of a student’s thinking (Educating Moral People).

Although constructivism and the Socratic Method arise from different intellectual traditions, their meeting point is the conviction that learning is constructed, not delivered. When paired, they generate a classroom that is both rigorous and learner-centered.

Constructivism in Practice: Learning as a Process of Meaning-Making

Constructivist pedagogy begins with a simple premise: students bring a world with them. Prior experiences, cultural narratives, internalized scripts, emotional histories, and unspoken values become part of the classroom’s cognitive landscape. Jerome Bruner, a central figure in cognitive constructivism, argued that learning occurs when students “go beyond the information given” (The Process of Education). He believed that education should not simply prepare students for future life; it should cultivate their ability to interpret and re-interpret their world.

This orientation toward interpretation requires instructors to move from transmission to facilitation. In a transmission model, the teacher is positioned as the primary source of knowledge who delivers information for students to receive, record, and reproduce. In a facilitative model, the teacher instead designs learning experiences, poses questions, and structures interactions through which students actively construct understanding for themselves. Jerome Bruner, the American cognitive psychologist, argued that learning occurs most powerfully when students are guided to “go beyond the information given,” a process that requires thoughtful scaffolding and inquiry-based engagement (The Process of Education). Stephen Brookfield, a leading scholar in adult learning, similarly contends that facilitation encourages learners to examine their assumptions, engage in reflection, and build insight through structured dialogue (Teaching for Critical Thinking).

These theorists converge on one central claim: meaning is co-constructed. Students learn not only from lectures and readings, but from the interplay of questions, reflections, and interpretive tensions that arise during discussion.

In the college classroom, this creates a pedagogical environment that values nuance over finality. Students learn to test ideas, articulate interpretations, and reconsider or solidify earlier conclusions. The instructor becomes an architect of inquiry, designing learning experiences to provoke reflection rather than prescribing answers. Constructivism thus offers the philosophical soil in which Socratic teaching can take root.

Socratic Questioning: Inquiry as Intellectual Discipline

If constructivism provides the philosophical ground, the Socratic Method supplies the structure. Socratic pedagogy is not spontaneous conversation; it is purposeful inquiry. Christopher Phillips, founder of the modern Socrates Café movement, describes Socratic questioning as “a shared search for understanding” where each question functions as both challenge and invitation (Socrates Café). Allan Bloom characterizes this process as the cultivation of the “examined life,” where intellectual discomfort is not an obstacle but an essential component of learning (The Closing of the American Mind).

At its core, the Socratic Method rests on three types of inquiry:

Clarification questions, which refine imprecise statements.
Assumption questions, which uncover the beliefs beneath a claim.
Implication questions, which reveal the consequences of those beliefs.

Together, they encourage students to build a more precise conceptual vocabulary. This practice strengthens not only critical thinking but also metacognition, the process by which learners examine their own thinking and monitor how understanding develops. By articulating how they know what they know, students begin to understand the architecture of their own reasoning.

Stephen Brookfield notes that Socratic inquiry helps students identify “assumptions that are taken for granted and rarely examined” (Teaching for Critical Thinking). These moments of self-interrogation are often destabilizing, yet profoundly generative. The student shifts from absorbing knowledge to inhabiting it.

Within the college classroom, the Socratic Method functions as both compass and catalyst. It directs students toward deeper understanding and accelerates the cognitive processes described by constructivist theorists. It requires students to participate actively in their own intellectual development.

Where the Traditions Converge: Dialogue as Pedagogical Architecture

Constructivism and the Socratic Method converge in their shared conviction that learning emerges through intentional interaction. Both approaches resist the notion that knowledge is acquired through answers alone; instead, they emphasize the intellectual labor of forming, testing, and refining those answers. Dialogue becomes the medium through which understanding is shaped, not merely communicated.

In a constructivist–Socratic classroom, dialogue serves as an architectural framework that supports and directs cognitive growth. Questions are not interruptions to learning but the mechanisms that move it forward. They guide students from initial uncertainty toward increasingly complex interpretations, prompting them to articulate assumptions, revisit earlier conclusions, and trace the logic of their own thinking. It is in this movement that Vygotsky’s insight becomes visible: learning accelerates in the space between what a student can already do and what becomes possible through carefully guided interaction. The Zone of Proximal Development is not a chart or a formula in this setting. It is the lived moment when a question arrives at just the right level of difficulty, when a peer’s interpretation stretches a student’s own, when the instructor’s prompt nudges thought into a new configuration. As students respond to questions situated just beyond their current mastery, they test hypotheses, negotiate meaning with peers, and begin to inhabit the intellectual habits of inquiry.

Such a classroom is relational, reflective, and rigorously engaged. It honors the individuality of student experience while drawing learners into a shared pursuit of understanding. Within this environment, the instructor becomes a designer of intellectual movement and a structurer of dialogue so that students can recognize themselves as co-authors of their learning. The result is not merely the acquisition of knowledge but the cultivation of an interpretive stance that endures far beyond the course’s boundaries.

Conclusion

As these traditions come together in practice, the college classroom becomes a setting where inquiry deepens and understanding gains structure. Their shared commitment to reflection and the active construction of meaning encourages students to interpret ideas with increasing precision and to recognize the habits of thought that guide interpretation itself. Through this integrated approach, dialogue emerges as a sustained intellectual practice, inviting students into the slow, disciplined work of questioning, analyzing, and revising their thinking.

This work reaches far beyond the mastery of course content. The interpretive habits cultivated in a constructivist and Socratic classroom form the foundation for adult intellectual life. They strengthen the ability to discern patterns, evaluate competing claims, and approach complexity with patience rather than haste. In a culture shaped by constant information and rapid exchange, these habits create a practice of attentiveness. They help students recognize nuance, situate themselves within ongoing conversations, and contribute thoughtfully to the civic, professional, and relational worlds they will inhabit.

Viewed in this light, the purpose of higher education expands beyond the acquisition of knowledge. It becomes an invitation to develop a way of thinking characterized by curiosity, rigor, and a readiness to dwell in questions. When instructors adopt a pedagogy that affirms the social construction of understanding and the disciplined inquiry associated with the Socratic tradition, they help students cultivate a lifelong interpretive stance. This stance, more than any discrete skill or body of information, equips learners to encounter a complex world with insight, discernment, and intellectual courage

Unknowable: An Allegory

“Do you think we are unknowable?” she asked.

Caimon looked down at the dirt around his feet and noticed his shoe was untied. “Not completely, no.”

“Do you mean that we are partly unknowable? But partly knowable, too?”

He could feel his pulse in his temples as he bent down to tie his shoe, “I think we can know someone as much as they are willing to be known.”

She wondered about his answer as she leaned over to tighten the Velcro on the side of her own shoe, “Do you want me to know you?” She whispered the first part of the sentence, but the second part leapt too loudly from her mouth.

“I guess I want everyone to know me. But not really.” He could tell, right away, this wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear.

“Well,” she said, with securely fastened feet, “I think I understand.”

Caimon tried to make a joke, but it fell between his feet, “Maybe you do. But not really.”

As his paltry attempt at humor mixed in with the dirt beneath the hem of his pants, Caimon wanted her to walk away. He didn’t like the weight of her stare, and he didn’t want to feel responsible for her anymore. In a moment of desperation, Caimon turned from her—filled with the conviction that he would never look in her direction again—and he said, “Why do you always need to know? What is wrong with not knowing?”

His footsteps were slow and heavy as he could feel her blue eyes fastened to his back with long, thick ropes tied around his organs. Her eyes pulled at him and tried to stop his movement until, between one exhale and the next breath in, he felt her release. The moment of her imprisonment was the moment of his freedom, and in his freedom, he began to run. Not fast and with nowhere to go, but with the swiftness of a man whose shoes were tied and whose longest mistake grew shorter behind him.

Caimon ran with his secrets. The unknowable parts of himself were rattling around between his right ear and his left. They were sloshing back and forth between his rib cages and percolating up into his throat. The words he would never say, the feelings he could never explain, and the courage he conjured in his dreams but left stuck to the sides of his imagination were loosening with each new footstep. He wondered whether it was dangerous to allow the movement. His secrets felt like gumballs in a gumball machine and he had only ever seen one fall at a time: what would happen if the whole lot was disturbed at once?

He laughed under his breath and panted fog into the cold night air, “If only I had a quarter, I could find some courage to chew on.”

He laughed again, but this time he knew it wasn’t funny.

The words of the girl wrote themselves on the trees surrounding him, and he could hear them on the wings of the wind that fell through the leaves. He watched his shoes as they hit the ground—left, right, left, right—and he began to count the steps. Each step was further away and, somehow, closer, too. Further from her: closer to something new.

It wasn’t any one aspect of the girl Caimon needed to flee, but the anchor her whole had become. She needed Caimon, and Caimon didn’t want to be needed. She expected things from him, and he wasn’t sure he had what she was waiting to discover. He didn’t want to disappoint her, to lose her, or find her, and the girl only wanted to be found. Theirs was a connection of two negative magnets, one wanting to change her charge. She wanted to change the nature of herself so she could be pulled into Caimon and he into her, almost as though the choice no longer belonged to them.

“Unknowable,” he read as the words wrote themselves in the reflection of a lake up ahead. Caimon stopped running and never looked back, but sat on the edge of the water.

The air was so cold by then that his breath felt like crystals grabbing the edges of his lips as it was blown from his body. The forest was silent and still: the kind of stillness that lowers itself like a parachute over nature when the moon is moments away from switching places with the sun.

Caimon, tired and cold, reached into the pocket of his coat to find his book of matches. Once he was certain the matches were there, he looked near his feet for pieces of fallen wood. One by one, Caimon reached into the dirt for the wood, methodically like he was looking for pieces of a puzzle that had fallen to the floor. Once he had gathered enough wood to build a fire, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two things: the matches he knew were there and an envelope she had given him earlier, long before he tied his shoe.

Caimon crumpled the envelope—still filled with her letter—in his left hand and placed it on top of the wood. With a match in his right hand, Caimon struck the side of the matchbook and watched the flame immediately appear.

“Quickly,” Caimon thought. “It is quickly that a match is filled with fire.” Just as the flame crept dangerously close toward his fingers, Caimon leaned over and watched as the flame stretched itself from the match to the letter, like a bridge between two lovers. Or two strangers. Once the letter was lit, Caimon stood.

He closed his eyes and felt the heat of the letter begin to grow as it linked arms with the pieces of wood he had gathered from the forest floor. Soon, the fire began to melt the breath that gently rolled from between Caimon’s lips. He lightly bent his fingers into fists, his fingertips touching the inside of his own palm. He felt the skin on his hands and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before how rough that skin had become.

He could see on the inside of his eyelids the orange and red of the fire he had built: the fire made with his rough hands and matches and her letter. He didn’t want to look at it just yet but, instead, he wanted to feel it dance before him like a lover unencumbered by self-consciousness or pride. Caimon drank in the light and let the colors of the illumination paint a masterpiece inside his mind.

Enraptured by the freedom of the flames and the heat of the fire against his shoes and legs and face, Caimon leaned back his head and sighed a message that flew into the sky, “There is nothing wrong with not knowing.”

And without seeing the sun begin to rise, Caimon knew the day was new.

Necessary Whispers

Poem: Eight Out of Ten

The Courage to Be Seen Thinking: Speaking Through Fear

Further Reading

Poem: Love, Or Something Like It

Poem: Where Our Eyes Have Met

Poem: Snowfall On a Patio Chair

Poem: In This Light

A Fable: The Temple of the Red Crystal

Thinking in Community: Constructivism and the Socratic Tradition in Higher Education

Further Reading

Unknowable: An Allegory