My Own Ignorance

Fog. Chill in the air. Faint moonglow. Drops of condensed mist falling from barren tree branches like rain. Quiet.

While walking in this envelope of dark and silent solitude, I was thinking about Yemenja and how sharing my story of her impact on me prompted others to share equally magnificant and beautiful stories of students who influenced them. But, I was also thinking about some interesting discussions going on about students walking out of class in the middle of a lecture, talking to each other while the professor talked, just not paying attention to the teacher while she/he waxed brilliantly, selling and buying lecture notes rather than going to class. The connecting thread of all these discussions was to heap total blame on and point the sole finger at the student for not being dedicated to and responsible for his or her own education. But, I wonder, as I told a colleague during a cordial exchange, maybe we should own up and share both the responsibility and blame. So many times we patronize the student by saying, “I don’t blame them for doing so and so” as if the students are smart enough to know an academic sink hole of questionable value when they see it. But, then, without missing a heartbeat, as if the truth and meaning of that acknowledgement is too uncomfortable to confront and bare, we proceed to blame them for everything amiss. Well, if the students are bored, maybe it is we who are boring. Our excitement for the subject doesn’t necessarily automatically translate into an exciting learning climate or experience. If the students don’t feel cared about or missed , maybe it is we who don’t care for or about them and are missing the point. If the students in their wisdom find it purposeless to go to class to hear a rehashing of the textbook or to play glassy-eyed and take lecture notes they can secure elsewhere, maybe we ought to reflect on the purpose and meaning of class time. Maybe if the students don’t talk to us, it is because we don’t sincerely and respectly listen to their voice. If some students walk out of a classroom, maybe it is because some of us haven’t really walked in. If we are not there in spirit to interact and don’t really interact, maybe we have to change our act. If class attendance, note-taking, dress-codes, lectures, grading, our voices have become the heart of our perception of learning, maybe we’ve become heartless. Maybe if the students has become faceless, we have to face up to the truth, heed them, and look ourselves in the face.

To thinking about Yemenja, the stories her story prompted, these discussions, I thought of something else. I just wrote to my good friend, my fellow-traveler, Peter Frederick at Wabash College. He asked me a while back for my reaction to Jonathan Bach’s statement that we teach what we must learn. I delayed my answer because I didin’t know how to answer. I am afraid my response yesterday was both cryptic and incomplete. Now that I think about all this that has been going on–and especially from my own experiences–this is what I should have told him. I am convinced that in those students and colleagues to whom I did not and/or do not and/or will not listen, whom I did not and/or do not and/or will not see, to whom I did not and/or do not and/or will not accord respect, from whom I did not and/or do not and/or will not learn, I have found my own deafness, blindness, ignorance, disrespect, and a need to learn.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Yemenja

On the dark, panelled wall in my office, above my computer desk, floats an elongated, 15 X 3 inch, bleached, pine, hand- carved primitive African “kuumba” mask. It has been there since I found it one August, 1994, morning leaning against my office door. It had been wrapped simply in a cut-up grocery store paper shopping bag loosely tied with kite string. Hand written on it was an equally simple note: “For giving me a voice, opening my eyes, and for your ‘Kuumba’. As-salaam alaikyum. Yemenja”

Yemenja is a non-traditional African-American who was in my first year history class the previous spring quarter. She is not a sculptress by hobby or an art major. She must have spent the entire summer tediously and lovingly hand-carving that mask. I was deeply touched by this unexpected gesture. I quickly and tenderly hung it on the wall where I would see it every day. It has become my most treasured of those sacred objects of my teaching I have scattered around my office that both comfort me and annoy me. Its slanted, deep, dark eye-cuts seem to stare down at me in silent vigil. Like a sentinel, it watches over me to protect me against the assaults of the dark hordes of arrogance and amnesia. There’s an eeriness about it. It always seems to float above my computer desk unattached to the dark panelled wall. At times, I can almost hear whispered warnings that I not get so taken with myself that I stop remembering why I do what I do. Once or twice, I’ve felt an inner sensation as if it was peering into my soul to see if I have stopped asking who I am and what I do and what I should struggle to become and should strive to do. It is the first thing I look at when I enter my office. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t feel its presence hovering above me as I mediate before going to class. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t look back at it as assurance and to assure it as I leave my office for class. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t see some different meaning in it.

For the last two weeks, particularly strong images of that totem have been hovering about me: in class, on all of my walks. Even 300 miles away throughout on-goings of an exciting and invigorating three day conference on teaching in South Carolina it made its mysterious presence felt. It was, at times, eerie. I saw its blurry reflection in the window of the hotel’s health room as I struggled to get my mind off the boredom of walking on the treadmill. It seemed to envelop me as I presented my workshop at the conference. My heart’s eye caught a glimpse of a faint incorporeal apparition every now and then as I offered a group of graduate students in the University of South Carolina’s School of Education called what their professor kindly called an impromptu evening master teacher seminar.

I didn’t really know why something so simple had such a strong hold on me. This late February foggy morning, sweating along the pre-dawn streets in a tropical low 70s and humidity in high 80s, after witnessing and experiencing almost two weeks of volatile gut- wrenching, soul-searching, at times brutally honest and personal discussions, arguments, reflections, exchanges and confrontations, I think I began to understand. To explain, I have to back up.

Before I met Yemenja in person, I was introduced to her by rumor, innuendo, and warning. A colleague from my department approached me a day or two before classes had begun. I vividly remember him saying, “I hear that Yemenja woman is in your class. You better watch out and keep an eye on her. She’s one of them Black Muslims and you know what they’re like. You’re going to have your hands full keeping her under control and in line.” Other colleagues from other departments similarly approached me. I’m not sure they were expressing concern for my well-being because I was Jewish, or reacting to their own experiences or bias, or gloating that she was going to put me to the test. Anyway, uncomplimentary words and phrases and tones easily fell from their lips: pushy, rude, troublemaker, feminist, pain in the ass, loud-mouth, radical, black activist, inconsiderate, controller, disrespectful, bitchy, argumentative, dominating.

Outwardly, I non-shalantly shrugged off their warning with a confident “great. I’m looking forward to having her in my class”, but inwardly I nervously signed a not so confident “oh, my god.” For the next day or two, I fought all kinds of crazy images and anxieties.

I didn’t have long to find out. It was true that Yemenja had a commanding presence about her. In dress, speech, and demeanor, she couldn’t be missed and wouldn’t be ignored. It never occurred to her to censor herself because I might have thought ill of her, or that the other students might not agree with her or feel uncomfortable with both her views and demeanor. She never let a fear of going against the grain, swimming against the current, or of being unpopular stop her.

Whether we were talking about the Spanish attitude and treatment of natuves upon their arrival in the New World or the establishment of slavery or the religious Great Awakening or the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution or the early 19th century American reform movement or the struggle in ante-bellum United States or the rise of American capitalism or the Populist movement or ….., she led the charge and unintentionally saw to it that the class was not a model of decorum, that its dynamics were anything but conventional business as usual, and that order was never the order of the day. She challenged assumptions and values, warded off dissent; she criticised gender bias, confronted racial prejudice, grappled with religious hypocrisy, denounced class division and oppression, argued about the legitimacy of capitalist economic exploitation, talked about student submissiveness.

It was a quarter that was uplifting, exciting, and adventurous. But, it was also tense, uneasy, uncomfortable, and threatening quarter. It was physically and emotional exhausting. The stock of mylanta, tylenol, excerdrin–and Beringer–went through the roof. I can’t remember one class that I didn’t enter or leave relaxed. Sticky palms, nervous stomach, and sweaty shirts were common. Seldom did a class progress as quickly, safely, according to MY agenda, and smoothly as in a class that was either controlled or homogenous. There were moments of panic when I thought things would get out of hand.

I have to admit there was many a day I wished I could put the condom back on the classroom and practice “safe teaching.” At times, I wished I could sleepwalk to valuing the presence of each and every student, or that teaching in different ways would be like cozying cozy up to a warm, comfortable fire, or that thinking in different ways about education and students and me would be like the delight of eating a scrumptious double banana split.

But, I bit my lip and said a silent prayer to myself and acknowledged that none of this teaching and learning came cheap or easy. There were claw marks all over my identity, scratches and bruises marred my mind-set, choke marks colored my soul where I had fought futility, thankfully, to cling to my old ways. I was preaching new ideas and was embracing new ways of thinking and teaching, but Yemenja made me see that I still had a long way to go because I still wanted to cling to too many comforting and safe old ways of practicing my teaching. Yet, I discovered I had a fierce will to struggle to let my practicing reflect by beliefs, to break the still too narrow boundaries that encapsuled the way the classroom functioned. I had to accept the simple, but difficult truth that if the classroom is really a free market place of ideas, I had to struggle to let it be free; that if I wanted students to develop their own voice, I would have to let them voice and hear their own voice. And, as I struggled to respect and accept the challenge of this new way to experience, I saw that as other students saw I was willing not only to let Yemenja voice, but respectfully hear her voice, they began being their own voice. And, she began to hear their voices–and my voice–dialogue appeared and mutally respectful understanding developed.

Now, almost two years later, I wonder who the real student was in the class. It has taken me this long to consciously realize what I had learned, had started learning, from that class and from Yemenja. My soul knew it, but my mind just figured it out. My heart’s eye saw it, but my mind’s eye just took off it blinding patch: I began to learn that maybe the material I most want students to know at any one time isn’t necessarily what learning is all about; I started learning different ways of knowing and of saying and of understanding; I saw I had to learn to devise a flexible grading system, keeping standards high, valuing excellence while abandoning absolute and fixed criteria; I began to see that mine wasn’t the only important voice to listen to; I continued the struggle to learn to become an involved observer, worker, particpant rather than a distant and detached reader reciting in front of the classroom; I started learning to allow the students, and myself, to talk about personal experience, sharing personal memories and narratives while linking them with academic knowledge–and began to see more clearly how it enhanced their capacity to know, to understand, and to want to learn; I began to learn ways that transformed consciousness and created a climate of free expression; I started learn to question more both the site and perspective from which I teach and the students learn; I began to see more clearly that my voice must always be changing and evolving as I recognize and acknowledge the uniqueness of each student and of his/her change and evolution; I learned more how to teach so the students would learn how to listen seriously to themselves and to one another, to talk with each other rather than at each other, and to learn that more than the professor has something important to say; I began to see with greater sharpness how the classroom is a place where even the student, then, can have authority in the learning process.

That class proved to be critical in my growth, and Yemenja was an important person in my learning. I didn’t realize how important until just now. She had helped me travel farther down those difficult personal and professional roads I had started walking a eighteen mongths earlier and gave me both insight and confidence to continue walking them since.

Now I know why that mask is such a strong totem for me. Coming to think about it. Maybe, it should have been I who should have spent many of those summer hours tediously making a carving for Yemenja.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

“Wholeness”

I came in this morning from my walk feeling very blue even though I walked only half my five mile route. My walking grubbies are Carolina blue, my gloved hands were blue, my covered ears were blue, my nose was blue, the stuff that hung from my tearing eyes and dripping nose was blue ice, and I think, in spite of my insulated long johns, the rest of me is azure. I am so frozen that I’m afraid to sit down in front of the computer thinking I am going to fall apart. I know if I smile my face will shatter, and my my fingers will break off the instant I try to bend them or hit a key. Folks, it’s 13 degrees with a wind chill factor of -4 degress out there!! In south Georgia!! What’s going on here? It was 81 degrees only two days ago!!

I don’t know why I went walking this morning. The fact that I did just proves that because I have a Ph.D. doesn’t mean I’m smart. The only smart thing I did was to come in after only two miles. Anyway, while I was shivering on the streets try as I did to the contrary I couldn’t help but still think about the relationship of research and teaching. As I darted around the clouds of ice formed by my huffing breath as it quick froze, something got into my tearing right eye. I think it was a sharp, long icicle that was hanging from my eyebrow. For a few seconds, I had to walk with that eye closed. Suddenly, I found myself walking off-balance with a loss of perspective. After I cleared my eye, I tried something. I walked with the other eye closed. Again, I was thrown off-balance and lost perspective, this time in the other direction. For a few blocks, I took my mind off the research/teaching issue and experiemented with walking with each of my eyes closed, with both eyes closed, and with both eyes opened. I must have been a sight: bundled up, swaying and staggering this way and then that as if I was WUI (walking under the influence). But, I began to think of another of something that I had once discussed with a good e-mail friend of mine might be somehow connected with this research/teaching issue, something spiritual or emotional.

I began to wonder how many of us walk into the class room without both our eyes open as if we were a pirate with a patch over one eye, the heart’s eye. We rely so heavily on the mind’s eye to form our image of ourselves and the students, as well as our way of knowing and evaluating. Using only that uncovered mind’s eye I wonder if we lose perspective, deflate three-dimensional people and see only flat, poster-like physical shapes and measurable physical movement of arms and legs and lips in the form of tests, papers, experiements, discussion, question-asking, and question-answering. The images of the mind’s eye are cold quantifiable fact and reason that seems safely and comfortably predictable and therefore gradable. It’s a mechanical world of color, weight, taste, length, smell, height, shape, action and reaction, texture, and performance. Using only this eye, we approach the world as something to be compiled, piled, weighed, dissected and measured, manipulated and controlled.

I wonder if that information is neutral, passionless, purposeless as many of us suppose. Over the past few years, I have come with some difficulty to see that we on both sides of the podium are beings not only of cold intellect but of warm passion, not only of dimensioned physical shape but of non-dimenstional emotion. I have come to understand that the course we chart in a class for the use of the intellect’s discoveries emmantes from the inner emotions, attitudes, beliefs out of sight of the mind’s eye. And so, the mind’s eye does not present a full picture of reality because that eye is blind to that part of the larger spectrum that the patched eye, the heart’s can see. The eye of the heart sees a warm non-material, immeasureable–or difficult to measure– world of feeling, an unpredictable and less controllable world of emotion, a transforming world of connectedness, an energizing world of attitude.

As I came to realize that I had to discard the patch, I began to realize that if we are emotinally shut down, how could I or the students be excited about ideas much less about themselves. As I began to open both my eyes, I began to acquire a balanced “whAole sight” and practice “wholeness education”, and could see clearer with both eyes a vision that encompasses the full dimension of the mind and the heart, and see the interconnectedness of emotion and intellect, spirit and reason within individuals and the learning process of education. I began to see that “wholeness” doesn’t just mean pleausre and joy, but awareness, alertness and sensitivity as well. I discovered that as I began to open both my eyes my teaching and learning was deeply affected. I began to embrace change–not fearlessly and easily I assure you–to become engaged, to have what can only be described as a liberating revolution of values that has yet to end. The flattened inanimate images in the classroom began to pulsate with life, the muted images began to acquire a voice. I began to take engage them, to respect each of their uniqueness. I began to take a greater and greater interest in each of the students, in knowing them and of them, in caring about and loving them, in understanding the impact of their experiences, in hearing each of their voices, in sense each of their fears and pains and joys, in recognizing each of their presence, in genuinely valuing each of them, recognizing that each of them contributes, acknowledging that each of them is a resource, and empowering them.

It wasn’t and still isn’t easy, but you know what, I began to engage myself, to hear my voice, to impower myself, to pulsate, to respect and understand the impact of my experiences, to break my boundaries and play it less safe, to dominate and control less, to relinquish star status, and to live more freely, honestly, deeply and fully. And, the classroom became a very special, real, and exciting place.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Teaching and Research

I went out late today. It’s Saturday and I am allowed. I was prepared for a hard walk. For the last two weeks, I’ve been racked with a bad head cold that has kept me off the streets. Today’s depressing overcast, misty drizzle, and penetrating chill in the air that were heralding the cold hurtling towards us at breakneck speed from the north didn’t help my reluctant attitude. Nevertheless, I had to get out.

I found the wet streets spattered with psychedelic patterns of damp sand created by last night’s rain. Every grinding step reminded me of Bill Robinson or Bojangles doing one of their graceful soft shoe sand dances. It wasn’t long, however, out from the scraping, gnashing, steady 2/4 cadence of each step came whispers: “I am a professor”….”teaching”….”research”….”I am a professor”…. “teaching”….”research”….”I am a professor”….

I had thought I could go out and get away for a few minutes from an discussion that’s raging and of which I am in the middle on a list that had been triggered by reactions to the Random Thought, “Being A Teacher.” It started out centering on whether teaching centered on engaging people or transmitting subject matter. It then moved on to the issue of whether the skills needed for research and scholarship are the same skills needed for teaching, whether being a good scholar automatically translates into being a good teacher. The discussion quickly degenerated–or transformed–in one of research versus teaching, professor versus teacher. I was beginning to feel like I had taken on the world saved only by the ghost of Don Quixote comfortingly draping his arm around my shoulders.

One statement got to me. The person asked wasn’t it true that those in higher education were professors, not than teachers. I asked him to define his terms. His answer seemed so haughty, so arrogant, so denigrating of so many of those good, dedicated people struggling against so many odds in the trenches of k-12. I don’t think he meant it that way, but that’s how it came out. I just had to get some fresh air thinking I could block out this discussion. It was wrong. That statement kept popping into my mind. I saved it:

I consider a professor to be someone who goes beyond
teaching by also professing what he/she has learned to be
true in one’s scholarly endeavors, while also providing
students with the tools to be able to either accept or
reject such affirmations. Inherent in this notion is the
need for critical inquiry into one’s own field via
research endeavors. Teachers convey information about
various topics to their students so that they have
certain skills and knowledge base.

Ultimately, I feel that individuals who instill a sense
of wonder in their students to investigate and explore
and push the boundaries of our understanding as well as
provide them with the tools to do so have gone beyond
teaching and have become professors.

Coincidentally, yesterday I had a conversation with some colleagues at a TGIF coffee clutch that paralleled the internet debate I was embroiled in. The gist of some of our conversation went like this after one of the people at the table complained that the University had run out of money to fund his trip to a conference when he was scheduled to present a paper. Don’t hold to remembering word for word:
“We’re a university now and we still can’t get enough money to do good research or go to conferences,” my colleague complained.

Taking a devil’s advocate position, I asked in reply, “Why do you want to do research?”

“Why? That’s a dumb question.”

“Humor me.”

“Well, it keeps me abreast in my field.”

“Your entire field?”

“You can’t be a good professor unless you do research and publish. If you’re an accomplished scholar you’re a good teacher.”

“Can’t we just read journals and books? We can be just as informed by being consumers of research rather than producers. Besides, synthesizing that material requires the same skills of research.” ………..

“It keeps my mind alive.”

“What about your classes?”

“It the same old thing, day after day. Don’t you get bored after a while teaching the same ole class?”

“Honestly? I have never been more alive or felt meaningful since I made the transformation from a researching professor to a teacher and became more concerned teaching each student rather than transmitting information. Every class is an unknown. Every student is different. Everyone is a new adventure. Every class is a new challenge.” …..

“I don’t care what they say. Research and publication is the only thing around here they really appreciate.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Everyone! Us. You. Me. The administration.”

“Now, that one I can’t totally argue against. What about the students?”

“What about them?”

“You’re a teacher.”

“This isn’t public school. I am a professor!”

He uttered that statement with an emphatic tone that was almost a plea, like it was a protective incantation screamed from the top of the high and thick walled redoubt of the ivory tower hopefully and nervously trying to dissuade the enemy from launching an assault.

As all this was popping in and out of my mind, too much for one message. But, my impish spirit started doing the devil’s work, and before I knew it a clear image suddenly appeared before me. It was a cartoon. Oh, to be Herblock, Malden, or Watterman. But, I can’t draw a straight line. You’ll just have to picture this: an ivory tower stands tall in the distant background, surrounded by glistening libary archive, laboratory. In the foreground is an image of a person, clothed shabbily in dirtied and torn academic robes bedecked with tarnished medals. His mortarboard is about to fall off. A long scholarly resume drapes his neck. Huge globs of sweat jump off his bent brow as he struggles under the weight he carries on his back. His face is misshapened by physical strain. His back is bent over. His knees are buckling. He is desperately clutching over his shoulder a huge, overstuffed, heavy, burlap sack labelled “Teaching Load.” It is filled with small images of a variety of people who are desparately begging, “Teach me.” The road, which leads back to the ivory tower, he had walked is strewn with people who have fallen unnoticed out of the sack. Lining the road like a gauntlet are leering, angry, unsympathetic people labelled students, administrators, parents, legislators, businessmen, John Q. Public snapping their whips labelled “student teaching evaluations,” swinging their bats labelled “peer teaching evaluation”, “teaching portfolios”, putting on their hands brass knuckles labelled “teaching effectiveness”, holding lynching ropes labelled “accountability.” Fatigued, his eyes wide-opened, he is barely able to look up with a pathetic and confused look, and whispers in pleading disbelief words that appear at the bottom of the cartoon: “But, I’m a Professor. I belong back there.” More later.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Academia’s Disease

As a result of being embroiled in a heated discussion on some lists that unexpectedly erupted around my last Random Thought, it occured to me that there has been a plague raging somewhat unchecked throughout my and other campuses of higher education–and throughout other levels of education as well–to which regrettably all too few professors and teachers are immune and to which I had once succumb until I was started on the road to recovery by a never-ending painful treatment of honest self-reflection and self-actualization. And, I am not talking about this season’s flu bug. It is a disease whose symptoms are: a “dis-ease” with accepting the truth that with all our degrees and resumes put on our pants and panty-hose one legs at a time just like everyone else; a “dis-ease” of accepting the truth that we are subjective whole human beings with complex lives and experiences; a “dis-ease” of facing the fact that we who profess from the dazzling heights of Mount Podium are no more or less empirical, analytical, and objective than anyone other human being; a “dis-ease” with realizing that nothing we do is value neutral; a “dis-ease” to realize and acknowledge that there is an intimate and inseparable connection between our life practices, value systems, habits of being, sets of beliefs, outlooks on life, ways of looking at things and people, visions of ourselves, perceptions of students, and our performance as academics; a “dis-ease” of realizing that no one can separate the person from the professional; a “dis-ease” with acknowledging our personal experiences and the revelvancy of these experineces to our teaching, that we have memories, families, religions, feelings, and culture; a “dis-ease” that we it is a “dis-ease” with understanding that we bring all this onto the campus, into meetings, discussions and the classroom rather than being focused objective seekers of compartmentalized bits of information; and finally, a “dis-ease” with talking about ourselves, our identity, and our self-actualization rather than about our subject or the students.

The truth is that we must practice being the teacher first to ourselves before we can be teachers to others, for we have to have our own well-being and achieve our own empowerment if we are to teach in a manner that helps and empowers students.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–