I’ve been thinking a lot recently. And that has been changing me. It’s the same for everyone–an amazing ongoing transformation, an alteration of thought patterns and perceptions as we go about our daily lives and our brains try in their own quirky ways to make sense of things.

I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s a wonderful  book that reminds me a little of In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel in that it is written by a giant nearing the end of his career. There is wisdom and balance and a lifetime of knowledge in it. I previously posted on a TED talk he gave about a year before Thinking, Fast and Slow was first published on the experiencing self and the remembering self. But something jumped out at me from the book the other day–the idea of how the brain makes things seem normal, even things that are very unusual. In the book he tells a story that reminded me of one of my own experiences. I was travelling around Europe, a 20-year-old kid on break from uni, with a Let’s Go guide. I moved along a fairly worn path at one point: Venice-Florence-Rome-Naples-Pompei-Corfu-Athens-Istanbul. I met a guy–I don’t remember his name so I’ll call him Guy X–in Rome, at a youth hostel we were staying at. He told me how he kept on meeting the same people as he traveled through Europe. His story sort of freaked me out. It was full of weird coincidences with different people in different parts of his trip. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was to become another paragraph in a story I’m pretty sure he’s been telling ever since. You see,  I later met him again at the youth hostel in Naples. Nothing strange there. The Let’s Go guide only listed 5 or 6 accommodation options for a city. But a few weeks later, I was sitting in a cafe in Athens, and there he was at the next table. And a week or so later, I took a ferry up the Bosphorus toward the Black Sea. And there he was, sitting in the seat beside me as we chugged past the Rumelihisari Castle. Mr. Kahneman, in describing a somewhat similar experience, notes that although it was unusual to meet Guy X a second (then a third, then a fourth time), it is even weirder to think about how normal it became to do so. When I met him on the ferry in Turkey, I was not in the least bit surprised. Guy X had become The Guy I Meet Unexpectedly. Indeed had I met someone else on that ferry that I had previously met once in my travels, it would have felt infinitely more surprising. Because that’s what brains do–they adjust to new events and make them seem normal.

And this got me thinking about culture again. Not culture in some quasi-national sense. And not culture in some don’t-stick-your-chopsticks-in-your-rice kind of nuggets of behavior. But culture in the sense of what we find acceptable; what we choose to include and what we choose to embrace, and what we decide we don’t need. That is to say, what we think is normal at any given time. Culture is the water we fish swim in. We notice changes, pause for a moment to let it register, and then swim on. The changes just become part of the environment if they are not life-threatening or similarly significant. But to go back and see what was normal before can be very shocking. A  kind of a Holy-cow!-Were-we-really-like-that? feeling arises because the new normal has become, well, so very normal. Watching the wonderful  drama series Mad Men makes this clear. In the early episodes, it is shocking to find people smoking in office meetings, or in offices at all for that matter. Men smoke, women smoke (even a pregnant woman!), and men drink in the office (“Should we drink before or after the meeting–or both?” one character asks). It was shocking for me to see this, and yet I when I thought about it, I do remember my father smoking in the car with the four of us kids in the back, unbuckled and inhaling almost as much as my dad. I remember my parents putting out cigarettes at parties the way my wife and I put out plates of olives. I remember smoke rising here and there at cinemas, the light of the projector catching it, or people smoking on airplanes. And I remember people doing almost everything with a cigarette in their hand or lips. You just don’t see that anymore. And we’ve all gotten very used to not seeing it anymore.

At my job, I often think of teaching as a collection of cultural activities. What is normal in the world of teaching is highly relative, but there are general trends and practices that are part of the ebb and flow of English teaching culture. And Japan has a lot of peculiarities when it comes to teaching culture. The widespread acceptance of of communicative language teaching, coupled with an almost equally widespread lack of implementation of its methodology, is one of the most glaringly peculiar, for example. I am always suspicious of teachers who make the claim that what they do in class is the “way Japanese teachers teach.” That’s because I have seen that change, and I know it will change again in the future, even if I am not happy about the speed (or tack) of that change. I once watched a teacher teach two back-to-back English lessons, one an English I lesson and the other an Oral English lesson. For the first, the teacher spoke almost completely in Japanese, and focused on explaining the words and grammar of the text. In the second, the same teacher spoke almost completely in English and led the students through a mostly communicative lesson. This seemed perfectly normal to the teacher in charge; yet it seemed very strange to me. At some point, this teacher will likely gravitate to one type of teaching–a type which is both effective and matches the needs of her learners and her own personality and style–and forget that she ever thought it was necessary to use two completely different approaches in two different classes. It’ll probably be proceeded by a change in the curriculum that acknowledged that a four-skills course like English I and a listening and speaking course like Oral Communication should be such separate critters. And then it will seem as natural and normal as anything ever was.

That’s how the new normal will feel, I’m sure. But getting there is still going to take some time.