Yesterday morning, I received a dark, what I call a “whew” message from a virtual colleague. “Exhausted” and depressed from end-of-the-term testing and grading rituals, he needed a sympathetic ear and shoulder to talk about his litany of semester travails. “It all seems so hopeless and pointless,” he wrote as a summarizing moan because of the large number of low grades he had assigned his students. “Do you ever feel that way?” he asked.

Do I!! What a time for that question to come at me. Lucky for me that it did. I needed it, and didn’t even realize it. Goodness, I told him that I know exactly how he feels. I felt it periodically while I struggled to relinquish control and let the students control the development of the play. I’ve been down and out with a bad bout of it for the last two weeks. I recently have been hitting tall and thick brick wall after brick wall after brick wall: personal walls, business walls, financial walls, and one educational wall. That educational wall, a project with which I am involved with that seems to have impossible deadlines, impossible goals, impossibly meager resources, was the icing on the inedible cake. There have already been more than a few times, at this early stage of the project, and in a few other matters, when I have been fumbling around, have been groping for a handle on something, that I, too, have sighed to myself, to my Susan, and to a few colleagues, “It’s so damn hopeless.”

But, this morning, a lot came together: a chat with an administrative colleague yesterday, listening to an uplifting telephone message from my wife’s e-commerce business, talking with one of her “downliners,” and that e-mail message.

That curse word, “hopeless,” seeing it before my eyes in that blessed message really brought things to home. I, the hopeless hope-oholic, had been saying the same things about many things and letting it ravage me–and not realizing it.

This morning I did a butt-kicking re-inventory of myself. I realized I was feeling self-pity, that my feelings for which I was blaming other people and things were really rooted in my own imperfections, that I was being my own master bricklayer succumbing more to my fears than rising to the challenges.

Yeah, I know how that person feels, and have been feeling that way lately. But, I have found once again that the second I uttered that blasphemy, I cursed myself with self-fulfilling prophesy. I had stuck myself in the shaded valley instead of climbing up the mountainside to the sun-drenched summit. I wanted to hang it up rather than hang on. Unable or unwilling to grapple, I crippled myself. As I thought things were going to the dogs, I started disengaging in dogged pursuit. I succumbed to giving in or giving up instead of giving. I felt like I was fair game instead of being game.

I have noticed that each time I got a touch of that vicious bug, that spirit-infection of hopeless, I felt exhausted and defeated. That soul-sickness drained me, sapped my energy, stiffened my movements and thoughts. Ever notice that there is something dreary, dull, pale, tiresome about this affliction. Looking back, I could feel a flood of dulling endorphins diluting my alerting adrenalin. I felt I was harbored in the confines of a bare, rocky, uninviting cove under an every growing dismally grey, cloudy sky, the mooring chain growing larger, the anchor get heavier and going deeper into the sticky mud. At best, I felt as if I was bouncing to the incessant, little ripples in a sleep-inducing, monotonous rhythm instead of knowing the excitement of riding the waves beneath a bright and warm sun, and feeling the exhilarating wind in my face and tasting the salty sea spray of a vast, unlimited ocean .

This pernicious affliction blurs your vision, kills your appetite, takes the life out of you. It strips you of the belief its possible to do something: you can’t imagine “what if;” you can’t dream “maybe;” you can’t think “it’s possible;” you can’t feel “it will happen;” you can’t wonder “what will this person do.” Gone are the positives, possibilities, inspirations, purposes, potentials, creations, and expectations simply because you can’t expect anything to grow unless you plant a seed.

Talking about seeds, there is in my backyard, at the edge of my heavily shaded patio, an eye-catching white pineapple geranium growing tall and majestic in full bloom. What makes it special is that this plant is only supposed to thrive in full sun. It was the last of many cuttings I had planted last autumn. I had no room for it in the sunny front yard. So, rather than throw it on the compost heap, I just carelessly stuck it in the ground in my back yard with a casual “nothing to lose” and nonchalant “let’s see.” I countered the shade with planting a bunch of potassium bearing rotting banana peels around the cutting and a watering with heavy doses of a nitrogen releasing beer concoction. Lo and behold! It rooted, grew, and flourished. Who would have thought!!

Imagine if then, as I recently had just done with a lot of other things and people, I had allowed what I had thought I can’t do to define what I can do. Realizing that, I will fight back this debilitating disease by fortifying myself daily vitamin supplements of “belief,” “faith,” and “hope.” You see, I much prefer the feeling and fulfilling results of being an energetic “hope-along” rather than a tired “hobble-along” Louis. I don’t have to be positively right, but I do have to be positively positive. That’s the way of being energetic, enabling, self-empowered, versatile. imaginative, and accomplished.

It is a very good lesson to learn and remember. And I am better for having experienced it.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Yesterday two students came up to me on campus. “Hey, Dr. Schmier. We’ve signed up for the upper division class in the Fall.” they said as they introduced themselves. “We going to do another play, aren’t we?”

They caught me by surprise. “We’ll see,” was my feeble answer.

After we chatted, I left them, thinking, “Did I create a monster?”

These two people were referring to what some students on campus call “The Play.” It was something to behold; it was one of my experiments in learning that I tried Spring Semester. Nursing a weird idea, I walked into that first day of Soviet Russia senior history class and said to the thirty or so students, “Want to put on a play about Soviet Russian history?” I nervously explained I was trying to figure out a way how they each could best grasp the spirit of the times, to approach understanding its leaders and people. I made the project sound interesting, inviting, exciting, and almost impossible considering the time constraints under which we would be working. I explained that we would read and talk, read and talk, read and talk until our face were blue, eyes were bloodshot, and tongues were swollen, all the while struggling to put it all together into some kind of a play. I think I was hoping they would turn down the idea.

There were all sorts of questions: “What do you want?” “What do we have to do?” “What if fails how will we be graded?” “What if some of us slack off?” “Do you think we can pull it off?” “How do we do all that we need to do all at once?” After about a week of discussion, they and I gulped, and agreed to jump into both a time and culture warp, and present an original play. And, a week after that, they decided they may as well go all the way and present the play on stage in public!!

It was all them in one way or another. In a short span of only twelve weeks, they did the research; they constantly discussed and reflected on what they had found in newspapers, articles, and books; they wrote, critqued, rewrote, and rewrote again, the play; they directed it, produced it; juggled their academic, work, and personal schedules; struggled to learn their lines, got their cues, and rehearsed it; they contributed to a kitty; they scurried around for all the costumes and props; they bought some costumes and props; they made some costumes and props; they arranged for the lighting and sound; they did the publicitiy. All the time, they talked with each other about Marxism, struggled to understand the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, Breshnev; they fought to get inside the hearts of the peasants and workers; they wrestled with the spirit of the literaries; they grappled with the meanings and impacts of the Revolution, World War II, Cold War. They toured the Kremlin, a commune, a gulag; they traveled through the diverse cultural lands that made up the USSR.

Day after day after day, I sweated through this process, wondering “what hath I wraught?” “Why did I let them decided to go public?” Why this and why that. My feet were constant jelly. My hands were numb. As the weeks passed, I bit off more and more of my lip. I was a bundle of nerves. I shook my head so much people thought I had developed a tic. Many were the times I wanted to jump in and say–maybe scream–“Do it this way,” or “Put this in” or “You can’t leave that out!” Occasionally, in my edginess, I lost sight of the process and focused on the result. It was not easy to button my mouth and clench my fist, and butt out. Many was the times I lost sleep, memorizing the ceiling, sitting by the fish pond, asking myself why I put myself through this anguish and didn’t just lecture, assign research papers, and test–or do tried and tested projects. It was a good thing that I am not a drinking man, but I was tempted to take a nip or two. And, having a strong heart from all my pre-dawn walking was an essential, but there was a palpitation or skipped beat along the way. I exaggerate not!!!!

Finally, opening night. All thirty-two students. Clusters rehearsing scenes, going over lines, adjusting costumes, testing sound, handing out playbills, ushering. One student, a football player with a major role, going from person to person, exhorting, “Game face. Game face. Game face.”

Curtain parted. Before over two hundred people on the University’s main stage in the Arts Building. It was something to behold. Did they ever cook up one delicious creative learning stew!

Now that I think about what was happening in that classroom and on that stage, I am beginning to understand that four ingredients go into making that or any other creative learning stew. The first is the meat: information. The second ingredient is the potatoes and other veggies: flexibility and openness. But, there is more to cooking a palatable stew than just throwing the meat, potatoes and vegatables together in a pot. This recipe calls for the right pinches and dashes of spices to give the stew that tasty zest: an acquaintance with the mysterious, the striking up of a friendship with the unknown, both of which are a beckoning finger to peek in, to sneak a glance around the corner, and to wonder and marvel and question about both the material and themselves. Now you have to cook all that together. And so, you need the fourth element: a weird combination of simmering all those ingredients together with the heat of courage, passion, and foolishness.

“Foolishness?” Very bad word. To me, the students were being anything but silly. They were engaging in a very rational, critical-thinking activity though for many far from the traditional written and verbal way of presentation. While they were working on the project, as I quietly roamed among the triads during class work days, answering questions, explaining issues, and ease-dropping on their conversations before and after class, I saw and heard them exploring, questioning, prodding, thinking, perceiving problems, solving problems, synthesizing. They were struggling to break old intellectual and emotion habits. Their decisions hinged almost always on the act of having to see things yet to be, to see things in a unique way, to glue together apparently unrelated shapes, colors, textures, sounds, movements, occurrences, to answer the question in a novel way, to pose the question in a unique way, to do something in an unexpected manner, and to accept the unexpected result. I saw and heard an anxious reluctance, a hesitant willingness, a newly discovered ability, and a hitherto unknown courage to break through the wall of fear and barrier of criticism that threaten to stop them in their tracks, to take the risk, to break out of the mold, to go against the norm, to put habit aside, to trust, to walk the different path, to open the other door, to go into the novel direction, to use a different medium.

Each them, in their own time and way, took themselves out of their comfort zone, went into new worlds, expanded their world, opened themselves to contradictions and the inexplicable, exposed themselves to the unpredictable and unsystematic and unstructured, rejected the need for the guaranteeing “what do you want,” prepared themselves for failure, exposed themselves, ventured into the unknown, hugged serendipity, accepted accident, rejected the traditional, defied order. And, in doing all of this, started unleasing tremendous potential.

What I was watching was not just an intellectual thing. Having the information is not enough; having the skill is not enough. Information and skill alone do not create the power to choose, to respond, to change. It’s what you do with information and skill, what you are willing to do with them, what you see can be done with them, that really counts. Maybe that’s what Einstein really meant when he said imagination and creativity are more important than information. They’re the blueprint needed before and during construction.

And yet…..but, as Paul Harvey would have said, that is the rest of the story.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

All week I’ve been thinking about a touching message I had received from Ann Brauer Andriacco of St. Dominic School in Cincinnati, Ohio. She told me a very warm story, so warm it made me sweat with joy. It was about how her seventh grade students made a passage using their school work to doing good works. They had studied an art/religion/history unit on icons and artistic portrayals of Jesus, read an essay about being voices instead of echoes, discussed just what qualities the artists were struggling to capture, and decided to make those qualities come alive by going out into the community to perform good works. They brainstormed problems facing them from racism to violence in schools. They formed groups based on their chosen topics and researched the problem, suggested solutions, invited in speakers.

Seventh graders!!.

But they didn’t stop there. Each person became involved in a solution. One group worked preparing breakfast and entertainment for the kids at a Women’s Shelter. Another researched racism and got an article into the local newspaper. Other groups wrote a grant to receive some items they needed. Another collected baby items for Birthright.

Seventh graders!

“They learned,” Ann concluded her message, “that what each of us does can have an effect on the world– even if it is just a little piece of that world.”

From school work to good works. Competence and character.

I guess I was thinking about that warm message, prompted by a discussion on an education list about whether academics have a responsibilty to “teach compassion” in their classes, when I stepped out into this morning’s warm darkness. The security light jumped on as it always does. As I paused to stretch a tight hamstring, I noticed how quickly the moths appeared and how just as quickly the cockroaches scurried to disappear.

As I walked, it seemed that an interesting set of words kept blowing in and out of my mind to the rhythm of my steps as if part of an animated Powerpoint presentation: moths and cockroaches, competence and character, moths and cockroaches, competence and character, moths and cockroaches, competence and character.

We say that to succeed in this new e-millenium people have to be educated. But, just what does “educated” mean, and what does it mean “to succeed?” I think the way most people would answer those questions would be limited to focusing on “competence”: to “getting a good paying job.” That answer has created an educational paradox: educational prosperity in the midst of social recession. That paradox is created by a narrow vocational “get and make” approach to, understanding of, and definition of an education: get that test score; make that grade; get into that school; make that GPA; get that major, make that interview; get that job; make that salary. So, when anyone in academia talks about developing subject competence, we academics gather like moths when a light is turned on. But, when anyone in academia talks about developing character, we usually scatter like cockroaches when the lights are turned on.

We each are an complex web spun with inseparable and intimately emmeshed physical, mental or intellectual, emotional or spiritual, and social strands. But, our educational systems are so one dimensional. We teach to the mind. We are so subject-centered. We are so focused on what we call “thinking” skills. We generally are not emotion-centered and almost totally ignore the heart skills. We are so focused on subject and so out-of-focus on character. We talk loudly about work and don’t even whisper about doing good works.

And yet, none of us emerged from the womb with character anymore than we did with subject competence. We have to learn them both: knowledge **and** how to guide the use of that knowledge. So, why don’t we teach them both, make them both count, throw them both at the students for them to catch? If we are to help a student climb the ladder of success, shouldn’t we, like Ann Bauer Andriacco, also help the student to insure that the ladder is leaning on the right wall? Isn’t the goal of an education to help each person see their own wholeness and that of others, to understand the need to create a guide for the use of the mind, to cultivate a sense of meaning and purpose that powerfully impacts those daily decisions, to learn how to act with integrity in the constant and incessant flow of moments of choice? I think so. It has to be. You can’t really separate what you learn from what you do with what you learn from the meaning and purpose and fulfillment with what you do with your learning. To generate the power of knowledge and competence without generating the guiding power of character and conscience, of overriding direction, meaning, and purpose is very bad education.

Understand I’m not being faddish or bandwagonish. During the last decade I have become a strong advocate and practioner of wholeness or character education long before any bandwagon started rolling and long before any academic designer started cutting cloth for a chic style. It is central to my educational philosophy and at the core of what we do in the classroom with the subject material.

Let’s set things straight and talk of definitions so there is as little misunderstanding as possible. When I talk of **character**, I am not talking about what a lot of people call **values**. I don’t want to create more sterile, intellectualized, compartmentalized, textbookish, and separated “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” courses, programs and curricula about such things as self-restraint, good manners, obedience to the law, reverence for marriage, fidelity, chastity, abstinence, sexual activity, ethics, parental respect, respect for authority, patriotism, religiosity, sobriety, truthfulness, financial independence, work ethic, etc. By **character** I don’t mean a set positions or ideologies on prayer in school, evolution, burning of the flag, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, role of government, individual rights, gun control, and so on. By **character**, I do not mean religious theology, issues of salvation, attendance at houses of worship, holiday observances, and the like. In short, I do not mean a set of beliefs and activities we adults have decided are vital to promoting a lawful, orderly and civil society, as well as living the good life, which students should unquestioningly learn and unthinkingly obey.

By my strict definition, thoses are all **values**, beliefs and action systems. When I say **character**, I am talking about something deeper, alive, and enlivening. I am talking about living, every day principles, the right principles needed to do things the right way at the right time for the right reasons. I am talking about animated inner qualities that know no bounds of time or place or culture: courage, concerns for others, curiosity, integrity, a commitment to personal excellence. I am talking about the breathing guides for those moments of decision. I am talking about: be honest, be compassionate, be trustworthy, be sympathetic, make and keep commitments, build meaningful relationships, be understanding, treat each and every person with respect. I am talking about an vitalizing approach to life, of empowering truth. I am talking about self-awareness, conscience, conviction, courage, free will, and creative imagination. I am talking about the capacity to question, to choose, to act in accordance with your conscience. I am talking about a foundation the laying of which is critical to reaching for your potential, for guiding your choice of a value belief and action system.

Character is what we are; competence is what we do. It’s not a matter of a walling off **either/or**. It’s a matter of an intertwining **and** of Gordian Knot proportions. For the key to the quality of life is based on the extent to which doing is based on principles. And, that does not come from solely a mastery of a subject. We love to compartmentalize and separate, but character and competence aren’t separate and separated departments. They are like the distinct but woven together threads of a spider’s web: touch on strand and all others vibrate. We have to understand, acknowledge, and teach the interconnecting and bridging **and** of the two, for both are critical. But, it’s character, not information or skill, that determines what we do.

I recently told a dear friend, Bruce Saulnier, from what is inside–your character–comes what is outside. What is in your heart becomes your thoughts, deeds. What is inside is the map of the body and mind. That is, how we see ourselves I recently told a dear friend, Bruce Saulnier, from what is inside–your character–comes what is outside. What is in your heart becomes your thoughts, deeds. What is inside is the map of the body and mind. That is, how we see ourselves leads us to see students; how we see students leads us to what we do, and what we do leads us to the results.

In our profession, there is always a lot of talk about motivation, inspiration, making a difference. Competence without character doesn’t motivate, and certainly doesn’t inspire. It’s character, not information or skill or competence that fuels the fire within and ignites the fire in others. In education, the power of inspiration lays in a teacher’s character, not his or her information. Character is like the measles; it’s contagious. Information is not. Get out of the way of an informed teacher fired by character. You don’t have to for only an informed one. An informed teacher, a trained teacher has only potential; only an informed teacher with character can and will act, fight, endure and persevere; only a informed teacher with character can and will touch; only a teacher with character is capable of performing “yukectomies.” It’s no different in any other walk of life.

No. Skill and information alone don’t produce effectiveness, inspiration, and leadership. They desperately need character. In the end, educating the heart is a critical part in educating the person no less than is educating the mind. Wholeness education means to see a student whole in subject competence and in a power conscience. I think the ultimate purpose of an education is not limited to producing a productive worker or a person who has a set of beliefs determined by and imposed by others. Our charge as educators should not be limited to preparing a merely well-informed person. Our students, when they leave campus, must understand clearly the substantative linkage between their character and the complexities of the world about them. Each day has unexpected challenges we and the students don’t and won’t find in the textbook; each day brings new opportunities; each day demands new choices; each day offers excuses for not doing something. Each day is a moment of choice, a moment of decision, all of which are disguised moments of truth. So, don’t we care how they will respond; what choices they will make, how they will use their competence, how they will feel about those choices? I think so. The students, we, must understand the important of having character and using it, that character starts with yourself, extends to family and friends, is magnified in community and the workplace, connects to country, and reaches out to the full reach of the family of humankind.

I’ll say it again and go way out on the limb: to help develop competence without developing a strong guide for the use of that competence is not very good education. It is not even good vocational training. It is to prepare for a drone-like robotic world of making a living in a world without purposeful living. Learning and teaching must start with and continually be woven intimately with character if they are to end with wisdom and community as they should.

Don’t discount character. Character does count!

Make it a good day.

–Louis–