By Tobin BarnesEvery once in a while, when the moon is in its proper phase, the stars have aligned, and “the world is spinning in greased grooves,” a teacher’s students fully understand the content of the day’s class.
Like I tell the kids, it makes a teacher’s heart go pitter-pat. (They roll their eyes.)
It happened to me just the other day in my Advanced Placement Language class, and those kids are pretty sharp. I’m always learning something. Sometimes, they do too.
We were covering this short, non-fiction piece called “Four Kinds of Chance” by James H. Austin in our Riverside Reader. At first you’d think chance is chance, but according to Austin, it’s not that simple.
For example, he says Chance I is just pure dumb luck. We’ve all been there. Something good happens to us, and we didn’t do anything to deserve it. You step out into the parking lot and there’s a $20 bill.
On the other hand, Chance II happens the more you try. As Austin says, “Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you least expect it.” In other words, spend a lot of time in the parking lot.
This isn’t passive dumb luck like just going about your business. You’ve got to be active, you’ve got to “stir the pot.” The more you try to find good things, the more likely you’ll find them.
But neither Chance I nor II takes any special ability.
Austin says that in Chance III, “We see blind luck, but in camouflage. Chance presents the clue, the opportunity exists, but it would be missed except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance.”
Austin points to Louis Pasteur’s famous quote: “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” Austin’s prime example is when Alexander Fleming noticed that a mold had fallen into his culture dish, and the staphylococcal colonies near it failed to grow.
Most of us would have thought, “Huh?” or even more likely, “Doh!” Fleming instead thought, “Hey, penicillin!” or at least, eventually he did.
So here’s the lineup according to Austin: Chance I (accident), Chance II (general exploratory behavior), and Chance III (sagacity).
Some can take advantage of Chance III, some can’t.
A girl in my class, Katie, raised her hand at this point and said she had an example of Chance III. Just the kind of initiative a teacher is looking for.
She said she liked to shop at T.J. Maxx. (Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.) Yeah, she continued, you can get really good deals there. But you’ve got to be wise enough to appreciate them. (Okay, this was making sense now.) Like there was this Michael Kors handbag there, she said, and it was $200 dollars off the original price.
Yeah, bingo!
There’s Chance III: A lot of people would have missed that great bargain, myself included (Who’s Michael Kors?), but not her—she has the “prepared mind” Louis Pasteur was talking about.
And Chance IV?
Austin calls it Altamirage because it’s like what happened at the Spanish cave of Altamira. A dog had originally found this cave randomly hunting for game. Some years later, an amateur archaeologist, Don Marcelino de Sautuola, was exploring it. His daughter, Maria, had asked to go along.
Unlike Don Marcelino, who studied the floor of the cave where archaeological artifacts are usually found, his daughter open-mindedly looked up and all around. On the ceiling she found “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory.”
So through the dog and his hobby and his daughter, Don Marcelino had stumbled upon some of man’s first pictorial expressions. And to further emphasize the complexity of Chance IV, Austin says, “In quest of science, he happened upon Art.”
I’m not sure we ever get to Altamirage in class, but once in a while we get three quarters of the way there.
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