#017 Chris Breen | Finding what matters most

Chris Breen, guest · [03:23]So when you say you want to talk and have a conversation about change, my mother was ten when the Second World War started and was immediately shipped off out of London with strangers. Bombing in London, had a friend killed with a bomb, walking, when she was walking next to her, lost her boyfriend, got married at eighteen to a man twenty years older than her who'd been born Cockney working class, had taken elocution lessons to, to change his language, had been in the war in minesweeping, and then started as an office boy in a company in South Africa, and then when they got married, moved to South Africa. And my mother had me at the very next year at nineteen. So I was born into, to very determined parents, full of change in their life, dramatic change. And so that's me coming into the world and in a sense, having a, a reaction to all of their stuff, which was that I was born as an asthmatic. So, so again, sort of struggle to breathe. Lots of struggle to survive. And in fact, the primary school was pulled out of the swimming pool, supposedly dead, having gone in the deep end when I couldn't swim, but fortunately I recovered. Fortunately for some, maybe not for current students. Yeah, so, so that asthma also, I had a talent in running, but I was in an all-boys school, and of course my father, having come from his background, wanted us to go to the best schools, even if we didn't fit in. So I grew up in Cape Town, went to all-boys private schools, could do sport, win the victrola dorm at primary school, then struggled to breathe for a long time, be sick for a long time, jumped to class because I was supposedly Very competent, and then kept back for three years because I was too young. And so a whole mixture of survival and pushing really hard, both my parents, especially my mother. Whatever I did, the next thing was, what's next? How do you do better? A privileged background of confusion and always pushing, always being pushed, and always needing to do better, and always take on new tasks.

Chris Breen, guest · [09:51]So I started, got a job at UCT in about eighty-four, immediately started a master's in teaching mathematics, all new programs. Insisted on going out into the townships to understand what was going on in schools in the townships, and immediately in 1986, all the boycott and the troubles in the schools. I also started an NGO, appointed against my colleagues in the department, fellow lecturers, best advice. I appointed a political activist who was in my B.Ed. class to be, to work for me at the NGO. He was immediately detained, tortured, and so my induction into the political realities in the school happened, and I became very involved in supporting students and teachers in the schools, which pushed me into trying to make a difference in the lecture room. And very quickly I learned that by doing that by rational research, lecturing didn't help at all, because the left-wingers loved what I was saying, viva comrade, viva, and enjoyed the, the theory, what, what I was offering, but the right-wingers just were saying, bloody communist, and that we don't want to listen to him. 1986 was a tumultuous year, both in the, in the political scene in the schools, but also for me, because the very next year I said, I've got to change my teaching methodology. And I'm going to devote myself to finding, researching my own practice, first person, second person research to what is it to teach for transformation? How do I get math teachers to recognize the intelligence of the people in their class, even if that intelligence is very different? Because I think that I found out whether you were left-wing or right-wing, most of the people, most of the teachers, in their student teaching anyway, were fascists in the classroom. What they actually did was not aligned with what they said. And that started a whole long journey in lecturing, in making that, that project that had one person in the townships in my spare time, still being a full-time lecturer, the NGO grew to having a staff of eighteen. I was finding all the funding for it, member of the Radical Maths Education Group. I became a member of that, went to England for a first conference on political dimensions in maths education, and everything became focused on how do you teach differently.

Chris Breen, guest · [12:39]So round about 2000, everything changed again. I, I went to one of these funny throwing the runes, alternative fortune telling, and I w- and I got, say yes to everything. The runes have come down with lots of buffalo energy, say yes to everything, explore everything. And boy, oh boy, did everything happen from there. And I just kept saying yes, and that stayed with me since then. And while, in that same year, while I accepted giving a talk at a Portuguese math teachers conference and doing PhD research seminar in New Zealand, I was awarded the University of Cape Town Distinguished Teacher Award. And I decided to have a party to thank prominent past students for what they'd taught me along the way. And one of the people invited was a guy who'd done, who'd done the teacher's diploma with me, Kurt April, and he is, was then and still is a lecturer at U, at UCT's business school. And he said, what are you doing? And I'd just been to a workshop in England on complexity at work. And he said, but I'm teaching on that. Come and teach my MBA program with me. And I said, only if we can, I can sit in on the whole session. And, and every single session. And I did that, and a week later, someone phoned me and said, Kurt can't teach on our leadership program, and he's recommended you as the best person. And I'd never taught the subject, but of course, I've got to say yes to everything. So I said, sure. And it was through that experience and getting more and more involved in the business school that I started teaching and started, and that's how I came to teach on the EMBA.

Petro du Pisani, host · [14:58]So how did you come up with, with exactly that sort of teaching style?

Chris Breen, guest · [15:02]It's been thirty-five years in the making, so it's got a lot of background, a lot of writing, a lot of researching about it, and I became president of the International Maths Research Group and presented papers and, and gave workshops on it. I think the emerg- the urgency of transformation, then, even more now, means that there's a very small window of opportunity to access people and to get people engaged. And one of the problems is that what I'm trying to access is people's internal worlds and bring about change in that which I think is crucial to change how we are in the world, how we behave in the world. And so in that first session, especially, I've got to level the playing fields very quickly. I've got to Put a framework round that stops people just ad-hocking along, stops the alpha males, whether they're white or of color or male or gen or female. I've got to stop people thinking they can just speak when they want to, take the piss when they want to. yeah, this is serious business, and I've got to somehow assert that authority externally. Once there's control and people are, are cooperating and there aren't discordant voices and people trying to dominate and everybody's voice is equal. Then what I, what I learned very quickly, and, and I've finally found a theory to back it up, but that the only way we learn is from what the theory calls perturbation, being disturbed, having our core selves, our core structures disturbed, so that we do our own thinking. And the, the beautiful thing that it says for the teacher is the teacher's job isn't to pay attention to the outcome. The teacher must spend all their energy disturbing the natural taken-for-granted assumptions, either through what I do or through what I present or workshops or putting people to talk to other people, and that that disturbance then must be, must be Harvested so people have a chance to make their own decisions about what they want to do. So I don't have a model of where I want people to get to, but I have a damn good idea about what I want them to think about, and that's what I do in my associations. Try and create a disturbance for people to think, talk, reconsider, decide whether those taken for granted assumptions are still worthwhile or not.

Chris Breen, guest · [28:04]So I'm laughing because that's exactly what, why David White wrote the book and came up with the talk, which he actually did in Joburg. When it first came out. The, the ideas, he says this balanced life is a load of rubbish. You can't live a balanced life. And so he talks about the three marriages being in constant conversation with each other. And so the idea is that you, that now that you're doing your EMBA, that you contract that there will be for this period, there will be less time spent here. But his point is that, and it, and it's similar to James Hollis's having to listen to your soul, listen to your, in the second half of life, if you don't balance the inner and the outer, you're going to waste your life. And so this marriage to self is listening to the inner self. And it was so funny, I was starting interviewing the people who were coming on a Deloitte program with me, and there was this white guy who said, no, I've got no problem with myself. I, I do mountain biking and I break my record every time and I do this and I do that. And I just said, no, you're punishing your body. That's not marriage to self, that is self-masochism. So, so the marriage to self is the ability to be on your own, in the woods, in nature, looking inwards. It's the ability to feel the grief of the poverty and the hunger that's around at the moment. It's the ability to stop and what Robert Bly calls shudder at what's going on in your life and in what's going on in others. It's standing still and breathing. So I don't know whether you do that. You probably spend a hell of a lot of time doing all sorts of other things, but, you know, it's that time that matters. And that's when, when your partner asks, says, no, you spend a lot of time on your own, that's not necessarily time that's in marriage to self. That's, that's avoidance of self, probably.

Chris Breen, guest · [30:05]I think it's part of an attitude to life. There's, there's a way in which We've become entitled, and that, and that entitlement means that we think life should be good, and that we're failing when we don't get everything going perfectly according to our plans. And I think there's a real, that's not helpful, because then when things go wrong, there's an immediate panic, and there's immediate self-loathing, and there's immediately, I'm not good enough, what did I do wrong, whose fault is it? It's so much wasted time and energy. And I've been drawn again to a very pessimistic woman, Margaret Wheatley, who says the world's in such a bad state, it's in serial decline, and we just must live without hope and without fear. But there's something positive in that, that if we let go of hope, and if we let go of fear, And we just act in every situation according to our true selves, according to our essences, that we're going to be aligned with good to ourselves, to others, and to the world. And so Ruby's poem, The Guest House, is saying that life is not good. Life is full of challenges. Do not feel entitled. Do not waste time when things go wrong. Face up to it. And what can you learn? What happens? What does this give you? What, what are you going to do with it? Yeah. So, so immediately after that call that the family had talking about my mother's death and honoring her, I went with a partner and we went and watched a movie, and when I tried to get up, I couldn't get up. My back had totally seized in my lower back, and I know how it had happened, just in moving something small. Now I can curse and sob, and why me? My mother's just died, and now this, and da-da-da-da-da. But it was like, handle pain, handle death, pay attention to this, and, and use this time to think about your mother, think about where your roots, think about what's happened. Maybe it's time to start thinking about Chris Breen's departure.