Four Little Big Words: An Update

I saw “Angela” in class yesterday. She came up to me with a different look on her face. Gone was the faceless gaze. I asked her if the petition of names had been accepted. She told me it had. She then went on, “I’ve been thinking real hard all weekend. You know, Dr. Schmier, you made me realize that I didn’t think I had it in me. So I didn’t look for it. I think I have some exploring to do.”

The miracle is even bigger than I dreamed.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Four Little Big Words

You might want to call it a “nothing to speak of” incident. A student I’ll call Angela didn’t think so. To me it was nothing less than miraculous. It happened Friday. The students in each community had presented their portfolio covers and were finishing up their biographical interviews. In the midst of the hopping cacaphony, one young lady “secretly” motioned to me. I wove through the scattered chairs and over a few reclining bodies. I knelt down on my knees. Not wanting others to hear her, she whispered to me, “Dr. Schmier, I want to run for the Student Government. The deadline has passed and they’re giving me a special exception. I need fifty names on a petition today to support me and I thought I could get the others in the class to sign it.” I smiled, looked in her eyes, but I didn’t say anything.

She went on, almost quivering. “Do you think the others here would help me? Would you ask them for me?”

“Don’t you think you should ask them,” I softly answered.

“Yes, but I couldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“I’m nervous standing in front of people I don’t know very well.”

“Aren’t you going to do that when you campaign and after youget elected.”

“Well….Yes…..”

“Haven’t you’ve already done it when you stood up, introduced yourself, and showed your object, and just presented your portfolio cover with your community?”

“Will you get their attention?”

“Why don’t you do that.”

“I can’t. I’m so nervous.”

“That’s okay,” with a tone of sympathetic understanding. “It’s all right to be nervous. I’m nervous every time I come into class.”

“You are?”

“Sure, I don’t know what’s going to happen or if I’m going to screw up. I just don’t let it control me.”

“How do you do that?”

“I have faith in myself. You heard me apologize for messing up on Monday. Have faith in yourself and in them. You might be surprised.”

As I got up, I smiled with a confidence in her, and walked away. I went off to sit in a chair in the room’s alcove hoping she could muster her courage. Then, after a few minutes of looking around and getting prodding encouragement from her community members, she slowly –agonizingly–got up, hesitantly wove her way to the front of the class, lifted her hand to get the attention of the other students. The classroom went unnaturally quiet. All eyes turned to her. She nervously explained about the petition, and asked them for their support.

A broad smile appeared on her face as she heard an instant chorus of “neat,” “sure,” “where is it,” “hand it here.” She got her fifty signatures.

At the end of the class period, she came over to me proudly holding the filled petition. “I was nervous. Thanks for having faith in me that I could do it and making me do it. It was a good lesson.”

“Who had faith in you?”

“…Me.”

“Don’t forget that. Thank yourself. You did it. You taught yourself. Have more faith in yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Then, it’s a great day. You learned something. You took a step today”

“I’m going to think about what I did.”

“Also think about what it says about you that you did it. Now, take another step. Take one step each day and you’ll surprise yourself. Make it a good weekend, and don’t drink and drive.”

“It already is.”

She smiled and went off. A small event that won’t make recorded history. It may not even stick in her memory. It will stick in her soul. I still think it was a great miracle.

So, thinking about that little/big event, I want to talk about four little/big words that I told a gathering of inspirational Christie McAuliffe Scholars in D.C. last month should permeate every fiber of our teaching and learning: faith, hope, love, and miracle.

Faith, hope, love! Inspirational words. Powerful feelings. Meaningful experiences. Uncomfortable words, embarassing words, for most academics. Rarely included in their vocabulary. Less seldom spoken. They punctuate my conversations with students. I, more often than not, write at least one of them on the board as part of my “Words For The Day.” They are inscribed in all my syllabi. They are the guides for all I feel, think, and do. They are what I call “heart words.” I take each of them to heart. They are the movers, the doers, the sensors, the adjustors, the touchers, the connectors, the transformers. They are more than words or ideas offering a verbal or conceptual formula. They are experiences; they are a personal and professional meaning; they are a vivid sense of life and teaching; they deepen what my teaching–and my life–is all about, and is always becoming. They fill in the holes and tie up the loose ends. They are for me threads of meaning that when woven together make a thick, textured and meaningful professional and personal tapestry. They are at the heart of everything I struggle to be and become, and consequently what I do as I struggle to make a heart to heart connection with student.

You see, I have come to see it is far more the size of a teacher’s heart than the size of his or her bank of knowledge or the size of his or her resume or the size of the class that leads to successful teaching. As my friend, John Lawry at Marymount College, reminded me, and as I experience day after day, students really learn what the teacher is doing inwardly and spiritually. Why? Because we teach with our words, tones, movements who we are. And as John once again reminded me, we are all spiritual guides, and everything we say or write are confessions of faith whether we like it or not, want to be or not, know it or not. We teachers are, as Maslow said, theraputic or pathological agents. We teach faith or fear, hope or despair, love or hate, strength or weakness, courage or submission, joy or sorrow, excitement or boredom, life or death. It’s always our choice. Over the past decade I increasingly choose faith, hope, and love.

It’s faith that merges the spirit person with the flesh person; hope adds the angel person to the human person; love adds the heart person to the mind person. When you add up spirit, flesh, angel, human, heart, and mind, they total the whole person.

Faith is a “can do” word. I weave my faith in each and every student into each and every fiber of my teaching being to assist each student like Anglela to awaken his or her own faith in themselves. No successful teacher lets faith take a holiday. It’s faith that lets each of us dream dreams while we’re wide awake. It lets me look for and see the invisible, listen for and hear the inaudible, reach out and touch the intangible, and do the impossible. It lets me see beyond the subject and grade into the person. Faith is an opening attitude, an arch enemy of closed-minded pre-judgement. As long as my faith is kicking in, it’s kicking “can’t” out; and its kicking open doors “can’t” closes. Whenever I utter a barricading “but,” it’s faith that kicks me in my butt.

When faith is around, hope, thrives. Hope is that vibrant “could be” word, that “this isn’t it” attitude, that “there are moments yet to be”feeling. It doesn’t say things will happen, only that they can happen. Hope is an “it’s possible” attitude. And, if something is possible, doesn’t it make sense to explore every way to convert the “could be” into an “is,” that “maybe” into reality. Hope, then, is a “hey, get with it” attitude. It’s a “keep going,” “you can do it,” “don’t give up,” “don’t walk away,” “don’t despair” comittment.

When hope thrives, love, appears. Now love is that simple, magnificant, supporting, encouraging “aaaaaaaah” word. It is my first principle of teaching. It is a truth of teaching. It says “you are somebody, you are worth it, I see you, and I care.”

And, when love is present, miracles….do….happen!

Faith stimulates.

Hope sustains.

Love sanctifies.

Miracles form and transform.

That’s what teaching and education is really all about. That’s why Goethe said that the teachers who had the greatest impact on him were the ones who were into his heart and not their heads, the ones who loved him the most and not the ones who knew the most. That’s why Kahlil Gibran speaks of the teacher in THE PROPHET as the person who “gives not of his wisdom, but of his faith and lovingness.”

I have discovered during the last nine years that successful teaching doesn’t mean achieving tenure; it doesn’t mean getting that grant; it isn’t reflected in the size of a paycheck or a promotion to that administration position. You won’t find it in the publication of that article or book. It’s not to be found in a resume. You won’t hear it in classroom eloquence. It doesn’t shine in professional brilliance. It’s not to be uncovered by covering the material or having a proper distribution of grades. It isn’t scored in the scores on a standardized test.

Want to be a successful teacher? Make a difference! Take those four little/big words to heart. Smile on each student. Teach faith, hope, love to their hearts and heads with joyful faith, hope, and love. Believe in miracles. Look for them. Stir up each student’s faith and hope and love in him- and herself so they can smile on themselves. Make a difference! Make for miracles!! Alter the course of a life!!!

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

My Most Powerful Teaching Tool

Weather report: 5:00 a.m; 82 degrees; heat factor 93 degreStatus: RO X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 13908

es. The National Weather Center has just issued a warning. The heat is melting the snow caps on fire ant hills and that is posing a threat of flash flooding throughout low lying South Georgia. Stay indoors. There is a state-wide noise alert. The excessive howling of the dogs of August may cause damage to ear drums of the very young and short out hearng aids of the elderly.

During my pre-dawn walk, much of what my eyes see is Augustish. Stinging globules of salty water pouring off my foreheand, flooding down the bridge of my nose, swirling around the protective eaves of my eyelashes, and flooding into my eyes. Everything is distorted and blurred as if I was opening my eyes underwater.

And yet, with every squshy step, I was slowly seeing clearly the answer to a student’s question through my heart’s eyes.

It was last Friday during the “what do you want to know about me” community building exercise. It’s a time when I sit among the students and answer without hesitation any and all questions of whatever nature they may have about me. Towards the end of the class period, a student, a first year education major, hit with a biggie. He wanted to know what I thought was my most important classroom method. Silence. I was thinking of a response when time ran out. The “clockmaster” joyously exercised her authority and yelled an end-of-class, “Time.” Rescued. I had the weekend to come up with an answer.

Over the last few days, that answer formed in my heart and head. This morning it evolved into words.

I will tell the students that the dominant implement in my teaching toolbox is my attitude. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, what goes on in the classroom is ten percent people and situations and ninety percent my attitude in responding to those people and events.

And what is my attitude? Fundamentally, I don’t make students my excuse; I make them my reason. I feel it is a privilege to walk among them rather than feeling it is their privilege to sit humbly before me.

And from that refreshing and nourishing springwell naturally flows everything I feel, think, hear, see, say, and do.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Ten Stickies

No walking this morning. My day off. Like mad dogs and Englishmen, I went out yesterday into the pre-dawn darkness. Everything is heavy with super-heated water. Can’t tell the difference between the humidity and afternoon torrents. A touch of ringworm on my left knee is a reminder that the fungi and algae are soaking it all in while the rest of us creatures are walking around soaked. I mean, I sure didn’t need any water bottle to quench a thirst along the route. All I had to do was swallow the air as I waded along my new route in water-filled shoes on the spongy and quishy asphalt.

While I was praying for the invention of a miniaturized intravenous I could wear like a wristwatch and hoping my skin wouldn’t mildew, I was thinking about some revised guidelines I needed to apply to what I have been calling for a long time my classroom’s “Rules of the Road.”

It’s slightly less than two weeks before classes begin, and I feel myself getting into that meditative, excited, and anticpating mood as I prepare myself.

I came up with ten “stickies.” I struggled to jot them down. Modern-day pens don’t do well wading through the flood of water coming off me. Oh, for an old Waterman! Anyway, following the dictates of Deuteronomy 11:18-21, they are now tapped to my office door. Thought I’d share them with you:

1. Too many classroom rules get in the way of good teaching and good learning

2. Opitmal teaching is not blissful teaching. It is adjustable, flexible, and dynamic teaching. The good teacher has to be a master at impromtu, at making split-second decisions, at quick-thinking.

3. I can’t just go into a class; I’ve got to get into it.

4. Teaching is something you do with students, not something you do to them.

5. It’s the heart of the teacher that makes teaching a dear and precious gift.

6. What knowledge do you have that is greater and more powerful and more effective than caring, kindness, and love?

7. A class day is wasted if you haven’t smiled and laughed with each student

8. Students can hold us spellbound if we open ourselves to their promise

9. Consistent teaching does not mean always doing it the same way. Many is the time the consistency means remembering to forget.

10. If you want to be free and happy in teaching, you have to sacrifice routine and boredom.

Now, if I can follow these guidelines to pull off all my “Rules of the Road,” I have a great chance that each day will surely be like tingling, anticipating count down time; each day will be getting ready for the game; each day will be an adventurous entering of the unknown; each day will be full of wonderment and astonishment; each day will be different and challenging; each day will be an opportunity to step out to be different and accept the challenge; each day will be a miracle in the making; each day I will choose to believe, have faith, and have hope; each day I will go to and leave those great people in the classroom on light, poetic feet to whatever tune is playing in my boombox.

If I can follow them, then each day will be special, a first “new” day and I will be “new.” If that is the case, then there will be no resigned “thank goodness it’s over ‘whew'” day. Instead, each day will be rewarding, fulfilling, and meaningful. All this will be true of the first day, the last day, and all the days between.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–