TGIF or TGIM

Well, the days of “wow” are coming quickly upon us. The semester is about to begin. As I was walking on a new route late this morning, thinking about some personal family stuff, I bumped into a long-time colleague going to class whose office is in a building I rarely enter and whom I haven’t seen in quite a while. Her face said it all before a word passed her lips. She looked at me incredulously and asked with surprise written all over her face and voice, “You still here? I thought you had retired and were gone.”

“Nope,” I answered. “Still here.”

“Teaching?”

“Teaching!”

“Why,” she asked looking for my straight-jacket. “Doesn’t this work and these students get you down?

“Down?….Work?…..No!” I asnwered with a joyful smile in my returning inflection, “I know people have been telling me that it doesn’t make financial sense to stay around here, but it makes perfect spiritual sense to me. I love the students. I love what I am doing. Why would I want to give up something that I jump up and go to with a ‘yes’ every day?”

“Spiritual sense? Jump up and to go. Well, it gets me down,” she frowned. “I can’t wait to retire from this work and get out here.”

I smiled a nice smile and started walking again, thinking to myself, “You already have.”

As I continued on my walk, those two words of hers, “down” and “work” started thumping within me.

Let’s take that first downer of a word, “Down.” On those very rare occasions when I feel a disheartening moment approaching, I just get myself back up and get up for and to teaching. The point is I use what I call “point to point” teaching. Those few dispirited moments I see as turning points to invigorate my spirit. I use them to take myself to learning points that go on to become power points of teaching. And now, if ever for even so much as a second I feel self-pity and dejected about any teaching situation, I now will just think of my new found friend, Susan Tipry-Deter. If you ever want to meet an inspiration!!!!

It didn’t take five minutes when I first met Susan at a conference last week in Vancouver for her to show me that I no longer have a right to be down much less stay down. Talk about courage and determination! She has every right to be down. She was an extraordinarily physically active person and a successful model. I’ll just say that she has been fighting a winning war against MS for nearly two decades almost by sheer force of will. The MS may have stopped her active life in its tracks, but not ultimately her active living. She doesn’t know it, but her mere presence teaches anyone who takes but a glance that if you’re knocked down, it doesn’t mean you have to be knocked out. Her muscles may be weak, but her smuscular pirit allows her to walk on. She is still a beauty! She reaffirmed and taught me in conversation after conversation that any set back is a set up, that any wild nightmare can be broken and tamed to be ridden like a dream.

It’s the same with me and teaching. Teaching, which until a decade ago was closer to a nightmarish rut, is now a galloping and driving dream. Why would I want to rein in the dream; why would I want the dream to stop? If it did, that would be a nightmare.

Now for that laborious word, “work.” I think of work as something I have to do. There’s something of a “I wish I could be somewhere else,” stuck-in-a-rut, routine, slogging, sighful, dour, resigned, “oh, well” attached to that word. If you see teaching as work, it then becomes a routine you have to do and do and do and do and go to and go to and go with a heavy trudge and a heavy heart and with no real spirit. In that state of mind, your attitudinal immune system is weakened and you are susceptible to the debilitating infections of “but,” “if only,” “what now,” and “what if.”

Now, with the equivilant of about thirty-five years in the University System I can retire quite comfortably any time I want. So, obviously teaching is not something I have to do and where I have to be. It is, therefore, not work for me. What is it? It’s play! Serious play, to be sure. Nothing routine about it. Certainly enjoyable, meaningful, exciting, rewarding, fulfilling, and overflowing with purpose and vision–if you feel more comfortable with those words.

To me, “play” is something I want to do, that I enjoy doing where I want to be, that I smile inside and outside about. When you enjoy your work, when you have fun at it, it’s not work.

If you see teaching as play, serious play, serious fun, it is something you want to do. Just think of it: if the work of teaching is something you want to do, something you love to do, something you’re happy at doing, someplace where you want to be, then it’s not work. If you say verbally and non-verbally, “I’m happy to be here. I look forward to being here. I feel good,” teaching is surely fun, enjoyment, excitement, reward, fulfillment. Then, your inclination will be to dance and skip rather than trudge and slog; then you’ll exclaim and proclaim rather than complain and blame. That’s how teaching is for me. I don’t separate my teaching as work from my play. Teaching, for me is a merging of work and play. I mean what could I do that combines work and play so firmly and inseparately that it’s not work?

If, however, you don’t love teaching, if you don’t love each and every student, if you don’t truly look forward to it, if you see teaching as work, how can you be happy with it. And if you are truly not happy, how can you be good at it? When you aren’t sharp, it’s dull and you’re dull. And, that just won’t cut it for you or the students. Let’s be honest, as I just told some people, you can’t jump a dead battery with a dead battery. Your engine will turn over and rev, and you’ll turn over other engines, only if you’re charged up.

So, what is it for you: TGIF or TGIM, “Thank God It’s Friday” or “Thank God It’s Monday?”

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

A “Small” Challenge To Myself

Tough walk this morning. Slogging along those sticky ribbons of goo we call asphalt streets that sucked at my feet like tar pits and threatened to pull me under. Oh, for the cool, cool, cool of Dante’s Inferno. Hell has got to feel air conditioned compared to south Georgia these days. It’s brutal down here, people: 4:44 a.m.; 82 degrees; a foggy mist, and I don’t want to think of the humidity and the heat factor. It was nothing more than an open-air inhalant this morning out there.

As I was being blanched in my own sweat, I was thinking about making a resolution for the New Year. No, it wasn’t heat induced delirium. You know the New Year is almost upon us. Of course, for us in academics, we don’t have to wait until December. The old just went out and the new will start up in August. For the past two months, I’ve been engaged in what until two weeks ago I described as an impossible project, attended a teaching retreat, participated in three conferences, given a workshop at one, given a keynote at a second and a plenary at the third. >From all that, combined with reading e-mail messagaes, hearing people talk at those conferences, talking with others, I sense that for far too many the last academic year didn’t exactly end with a round of applause. It came to a close with what I call sighing end-of-the term days of “whews” and “thank goodness.” Relief! We have endured; we have persevered; we have survived!! And, I’m not sure how many will start the new year, draped in celebrating confetti, with expectant toasting, tooting and hooting. Too many will trudge into the new year with a slogging, already beaten “here we go again!”

Our feelings are real, and no one should discount them or disrespect them. At the same time, we shouldn’t ignore them, for they effect both us and others. So I ask how much disappointment is self-inflicted by distorting and exaggerating what students do or don’t do, or should do. We are go quick to blame little things in students and ignore the larger issues in ourselves; we are so quick to proclaim how we suffer because of students. We’re quick to talk about why students aren’t ___________________ (fill in the blank). We blame the students for having surrendered our peace of mind and sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to negative attitudes. So many of us have so filled up our spirits with the clogging silt of disappointed “if onlys” that our spirits are dammed up.

I don’t think the the students or anyone can strip us or give us our sense of fulfillment. Only we can.

I think to many of us don’t hear the warning alarm bells. Sure I get disappointed. I can’t say that I personally like an occasional jolt of frustration when I am teaching. But, I do appreciate it. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, a bit of frustration is good now and then to keep things alive and going. When that happens, it’s a kick in my butt to get out of the clouds, down off the mountain top, back on and stay the course. Disappointment or frustration is a vib. It shakes me and tells me that I’ve gotten a bit detached, that realty is conflicting with and violating my assumptions, my mythologies–or maybe my ideologies. It’s saying, “Hey, your key won’t fit this lock. Stop trying. Why get frustrated and angry because it won’t. Just jingle your keychain and try another.” My frustration jogs me to ask, “What am I missing?” “What do I have to do?” It tells me that I have to attend closely, to see and listen and feel to what is actually happening in the classroom with each of those great people; it turns the spotlight onto the student. And, I can be what I call the “servant teacher.”

Yet, if we are not careful, when we feel that shove we play the exonerating blame game. Blame is an anestetic. It numbs our senses, emotions, and brain. We don’t have to compare and contrast our assumptions about students with the real people and real situation, or look for an emerging need to change. We are looking for a kind of change where there is no difficult “letting go” and challenging “unlearning” and scary venture into the unknown. We go about looking for change without changing, almost looking for changing results without changing what we feel, think, say, and do. Our sighing is the result of unexamined assumptions. And, the more those assumptions go unexamined the more frustrated we get; and the more frustrated we get, the more….. We can get so disoriented, we can dive into a death spiral of “it’s hopeless” despair and burnout without even knowing it until we crash.

You know, we teach who we are; we teach what we feel, think and speak; but we seldom think about why we feel what we feel, think what we think, do what we do, say what we say. We are reluctant to ask those “open, honest questions” of ourselves to ourselves–and struggle for the “open, honest answers.” I think we have to meet the challenges head on, not exaggerate them, not ignore them, not rationalize them away, see them for what they really are. When I do that, I can’t help but hear inspiring sound and see breathtaking sights and have electrifying feelings, and do exciting things.

So, here is my challenge to myself, my new year resolution: for the next semester I will not feel and think and speak any negatives about teaching or students. I will examine my assumptions each day. I will see that roses have thorns and that thorns have roses. And while I want my teaching and students’ learning to be like a prize-winning rose, colorful, fragrant, beautiful, and “perfect,” I will also accept the thorny challenges and scratches, the aches and pains of tending those roses, and learn how to accommodate to them in order to help them grow.

Then, I may find that I can enter–no, dance into–the classroom with greater serenity, faith, hope, and confidence; that my outlook may have become a little brighter; that I might be a tad more excited by and enjoy my own friendship; that I can be that better “servant teacher,” and that I might make myself a bit more into the kind of teacher I will enjoy being in the classroom with.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–