Well, the day after Memorial Day, yesterday, unexpectedly turned out to be memorable. When I wasn’t looking, I found another another word to send to Kenny: righteousnes. It’s a word you don’t hear in the intellectual halls of ivied academia. Nevertheless, it fits.

It all started yesterday morning as I was working in my front yard, feeding the grass with a nourishing and natural liquid concoction of cheap–very cheap–beer, ammonia, and sugar. A car stopped. The driver’s door opened. My garden is beginning to feel like that fountain at the University! To my surprise, out jumped Karl (not his real name). It was four years ago that he was in one of my first year history survey classes. Many was the wall he drove me up. Fought me tooth and nail. Could never get through to him to believe–so I thought at the time.

“Hey, Dr. Schmier. Haven’t seen you in a long while. Guess what? I graduated?

“Congratulations! “Knew you could do it, but I wasn’t sure you would.”

He came over. I stopped intoxicating the grass. We sat down and small talked. Parts of our conversation went something like this. It’s very close to verbatim.

“Now what’s in store for you?”

He didn’t answer my question at first. It was as if he was building up the suspense before he hit me with a broadside.

“Hold on to your draws. I’m going to be an elementary school teacher!”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope. It’s true.”

“Damn, that’s nice to hear.”

“Surprised?”

“Yep. No, not really. Are you?”

“Kinda. Would have been when I was in your class. Not now, really. No, still am. It’s all your fault. Remember how I used to write all that dark stuff in my journal about myself being warty and pimply because of all that shit I went through? …..I want you to know that even though I wasn’t very nice to you, you helped me start getting pass all that I believed about me being ugly. So, yeah, I’m kinda surprised. I didn’t think I had it in me, but something you said really got to me and got me going. Bet you don’t remember what you said.”

“That you were beautiful inside and you had the cure to your warts and pimples if you kept asking yourself the same four hard questions I had asked myself after my epiphany to get rid of my….?”

“You remember! You called it the ‘acne on your soul.’ That started me going. I was just too angry inside at you at the D in the course to tell you. That grade and what you said really ate at me that summer. So–and I never told anyone until today. Now, I want to tell the world–the next semester, I started to see that if I could breakthrough that ugly crust and find what you said you saw. Don’t know why. Maybe, I was just tired of being nothing and figured I had nothing to lose to see if I was something like you said I was. So, I started hoping that I might have it in me and asking me those questions. Yeah, you got me to start looking.”

“Asking the questions was hard?”

“Hell, no. It was coming up with the answers that was tough.”

“Just the answers?”

“The honest answers.”

“Just the honest answers?”

“Well, it was really tough honestly acting on those honest answers. It was like I found a real spiritual ‘clearsil’ that started cleaning up that acne on my soul. Then, I found that beautiful something, sort of got what you would say was a clear spiritual complexion. You know, I never knew how heavy all that baggage that I was carrying was until I started to stop carrying it. Thanks.”

“What you just said was nice, real nice. Better than I could. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You made my day. Remember, though, before you thank me, it was you who did the looking. You asked yourself all the hard questions of yourself. You got to the tough answers. You did all the breakthroughing. You made it happen. All I did was ask you to have both the belief in yourself and the guts to search. You took the chance. You took on change. You opened and squeezed your own tube of spiritual ‘clearsil’ and kept applying it. So, thank yourself first. Remember what you just said, help your students to start opening and applying their own tubes, and you’ll be a fine teacher. No, you’ll be a great teacher.”

We talked some more, and then he asked, “So, tell me. Help me some more. What’s the most important thing you can tell me that I need to be a teacher?”

“You just said it yourself.”

“What did I say?”

Suddenly that word rolled off my tongue as if it was sucked out by an unseen vacuum. I don’t know why. I never thought about it before.

“Righteousness. You have to become a righteous teacher. Unless you struggle to become a righteous teacher, you’ll always be trying to start a fire inside someone–and yourself–with a wet match.”

“I said that? I didn’t say anything about I gotta go to church to be a good teacher.”

“No, you didn’t. Wouldn’t hurt you though. No, the righteousness I am thinking about means to go beyond yourself, to do good, to make a difference, to make the world a better place. Being a righteous teacher to me means the most important thing I can do as a teacher is to teach for a purpose more important than myself. It will give you one great benefit like it gave me.”

“What’s that?”

“Struggling to become a righteous teacher will help you overcome your greatest weakness as it helped me overcome mine.”

“And what’s that?”

“A lack of faith in yourself. It’s that ugly ‘it’s not me” and ‘oh, I can’t do that’ and ‘what will others say’ and “I’m warty and pimply’ stuff. In the ole days, until about eleven years ago, it was so easy to let myself be pessimistic and easily distracted and side-tracked and way-laid by all that negative stuff. It’s like everything else. Reality isn’t what happens; it’s what you perceive happens; it’s the meaning you give to what happens. You get what you want to see. Whatever you truly believe, you’ll be determined to make it so. When you decide that something is truly true for you, you’ll do everything in your power to make it come true. If you are a righteous teacher, you will believe that you have the ability to truly make a positive difference in the world, you’ll go out to make a difference. Finding and following a positive purpose, I found wasn’t easy. It took work and focusing. Still does. A lot of it can be unexciting. But, the results will be exciting as nothing else can, and your eyes will open to see what you otherwise would have missed. You’ve discovered that.”

“It’s that ‘if you want to do it, it can be done; and if it can be done, you’ll do whatever it takes to do it’ stuff you always told us–and especially me–in class.”

“You’ve got it. When you believe in something, you’ll have a sense of justice in your beliefs and will try to make decisions which are morally right. Being a righteous teacher has nothing to do with words and appearances. It’s all about doing with an earnestness, committment, and authenticity.

And we talked some more. Then, he asked, “So, what’s your purpose?”

“What I said. You! To be righteous. Wherever I am, I want to be that person who helps another person help him- or herself become whomever and whatever he or she is capable of becoming. I want to make a difference in somebody’s life. I want to make a difference in this world. As a teacher, I ask what is it to be a human being. How does what I do help move me and others into a place where we all become more beautiful as human beings? That’s the teaching I really want to do and try to do. If you treat people as if they were what they ought to be, beautiful, if you are a beautiful person and make the world around you beautiful, you’ll have a better chance of helping them help themselves to become what they are capable of being. Like you. You know, a lot of teachers have ability. They have information and know methods. The great teachers have more. They’re optimistic searchers. They have the desire to search for and have the ability to recognize the hidden ability in others and help them see it as well. That search motivates me, drives me, pushes me, pulls me, inspires me. Read your Matthew. Thirst and hunger after righteousness when you’re in the classroom, and you’ll have times when you’ll fly so high that you’ll think you can’t or won’t get any higher.”

We talked some more about stuff. Then, after a while we got up. We hugged. He left and I went back to giving the thirsty grass a nourishing libation. I had a warm, inebriating glow inside myself. I knew what Matthew meant. Yeah, “righteousness” is a very good word.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

I was working in my front yard yesterday, whiffing away the gnats, winching at the stinging drops of sweat flowing into my eyes, cursing those featherless south Georgia eagles we call mosquitoes. A car stopped. The driver’s window lowered. My neighbor from around the corner leaned out her head out. I stopped and turned towards her.

“Your garden is so beautiful. I do wish all my plants were blooming like yours.”

After a brief chat, she drove off. I thought for a moment and looked around my garden. Her definition of beauty was narrow and shallow. It’s like judging a person we call a student merely by a grade. Or, judging a person only by a title or position or bank account.

There was a lot of beauty she hadn’t noticed and had missed. There were a lot of plants which had already bloomed, a lot of plants budding, a lot of plants which have yet to bud, there were a lot of hidden plants that were mere seedlings, and there were some that lay secretly beneath the surface in the potential of planted seeds.

My neighbor saw beauty only in a blossom. For her my plants’ beauty was a snapshot of the past, an image in the preset, or something yet to be. Was the plants’ beauty to be understood simply as a matter of having blossomed, blossoming, and yet to blossom? Or, was their beauty always present, and merely in the process of changing form.

After all, what is the bloom without the attached stem and leaves. What are the stem and leaves without the attached roots? What is the plant without the seedling, and the seedling without the seed? What is the seed without the soil?

It seems to me that the beauty of a flower does not merely lie in the bloom anymore than the beauty of a play lies in a catch phrase or a line or a scene anymore than the beauty of a painting lies in a stroke or a particular color or a single image anymore than the beauty of a person lies in a reputation or degree or position or profession or nationality or religion or whatever anymore than the beauty of a student lies in a grade or bestowed honor or GPA.

If beauty, whatever it is, exists in the eyes of the beholder, then the full and true beauty of a garden, or of a plant, or of a poem, or of a painting, or of a person, or of a student lies in seeing all of it, in seeing its complex totality, in seeing it from “all sides,” in seeing its giving and receiving contribution, in seeing the life-giving and sustaining processes of life, in seeing growth and change and development, in seeing its intimate wholeness–both seen and unseen, physical and spiritual, actual and potential, snapshot and process, singularly and in community or in a body of work or in a garden.

If we don’t, there is a lot of beautiful and meaningful stuff we’ll miss.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

There was a calming, but stirring, message in my mailbox this stormy morning. It was sent by a former student from whom I haven’t heard in a few years. It brought back a flood of memories. It gave me pause. It tightened my chest. It slowed my breathing. It brought tears to my eyes. I must have read that message three or four times. I cannot share either it or the story behind it. I’ll just say it is for me a poignant and jolting and reinforcing reminder that before anyone throws him/herself prostrate before the idol of Assessment understand one thing: a lot, an awful lot, in education that counts cannot be counted.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

If I am not careful, every day I work in the garden–and I work there everyday–can seem so ordinary that I don’t care. I pull a puff of invading grass, dead-head the spent roses and coreopses before seed pods develop, prune the Texas poppies, stake a leaning a gladilus stalk, cut the deflowered amaryllis stalks, pick the spent daylilly flower, transplant a galardia or echinecea seedling, nurture a Wandering Jew cutting, spread around the coffee grounds (natural slow-acting nitrogen-producing fertilizer), turn the compose heap, soak the chewing tobacco (nicotine is a natural insect repellant), trim, thin, shape, snip, and on and on it goes. Yep, it all can seem so ordinary, monotonous, routine if I am careless enough not to be careful not to care. There is, however, nothing tiresome about the picky stuff. There is nothing ordinary about when I ordinarily move about the garden. Every moment is one of those “it needs to be done” important choice. Every moment is one of those “don’t give me any excuses” moment. Every moment is one of those “it serves a purpose” moment. Every moment is one of those “don’t take the easy way out” moment. Every moment is a “pay attention and see and listen to the details” moment. Every moment is a “do a little bit more and better than you did yesterday” moment. Every moment is an “opportunity of a lifetime” moment. Every moment is a “dig in and make it happen” moment. Every moment is one of those “it makes a difference” moment. Every moment is one of those “laying the groundwork” moment. Every moment is a “put in the effort to make it happen moment.” Gardening is not composed of putting off “someday” moments.

A moment is not a very long time. Yet everything that I have ever been accomplished in my garden, has been done in a string of moments in a string of days, one after the other. The nature of the garden is that I can’t do it all at once. The nature of gardening is to be both in every moment and beyond it. And so, every “little bit” day counts. Little is huge, and small is a lot. Every day is extraordinary. Every day is important. Every day is a consequence. Every day is a cause. Every day is an action. Every day is a result. Every day is powerful. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the connection. Nevertheless, it’s there. It’s inevitability is there. Without this linkage there are no possibilities, no dreams, no opportunities, no choices, no accomplishment. That makes everyday important and great. That makes sure every day is a critical link. That makes sure no day is routine or monotonous. That makes sure every day is large and impressive. And that makes sure I am enthusiastic everyday about each day.

Every day in my garden is made of small, barely noticeable, but essential accomplishments. If I am successful in my gardening, it is the result of consistently assembling one successful, positively directed, focused moment after another. A beautiful garden is not a vague and distant concept. It is a clear and specific everyday affair. Without daily little things, there’s nothing to add up to make the big things. So, there are no little things. It is nothing more than small successes which have been sustained over a long enough period. It is created in the small moments, which one by one add up to big results.

Premier and fast are not synonyms. There are not in cooking; they are not in gardening; they are not in teaching. Like my garden, teaching is an everyday affair. You can’t be hooked on fast effort. There is no deep, dark, hidden secret to success teaching any more or less than there is to successful gardening. It’s clear and easy to see. Success comes from doing what needs to be done, not what you want to do; success comes from doing when it needs to be done, not when it is convenient to you. If I want to be a good gardener or a good teaching, doing the least or just enough is not enough. There’s no short cut no matter what some self-proclaimed, motivational guru may say or write. A blooming garden isn’t the result of platitudes and good intentions. It comes from days and moments lived with the sincere and committed effort to just keep digging and making it happen.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

I received a message this morning from an e-friend who said that he would love to plant a flower garden, but (there’s that barricading word) it takes so much of his time and he didn’t like to sweat in the high temperatures or be bothered by “pesky critters.” I told him nicely a take-off on something that I think I had read somewhere in Samuel Johnson. I have come to see over the years that contrary to a host of infomercials there is no magic garden tool or planting technique or gardening book. We don’t understand ourselves, our basic nature, if we think we can have a blooming garden with a wilting attitude. What we can read and hear and buy and do, but unless we change our disposition, unless we water our drought-ridden attitude, little will flourish. Even a disease resistant plant wont have much of future in my garden unless I have a dis-ease resisant attitude. I told my friend that I have found that if I think gardening is laborious, if I think gardening is a delight, if I think gardening is hellish, if I think gardening is heavenly, I’m right and I will make it so and it will be so.

It’s a good lesson from my garden for teaching.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

I was walking through my garden, looking for a blooming rose or two to snip and then slip quietly on my sleeping angel’s pillow this Mother’s Day morning. The sun was just on the horizon and my eye caught an isolated dandelion in full playful and magnificent geodesic bloom carefully peeking out from under a glorious Peace Rose bush. As stooped down on my haunches to admire the unique beauty of each, a thought struck me. Being an avid gardener, I am willing to see so much more; and when I do see more, I am willing to see so much less. And, like gardening, I think that there are only two ways to teach. One, is to love every student as a unique and miraculous being. The other way is not to.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

A curse on a revengeful Montezuma and salmonella!! I had been lethargic, sleepy, achy, tight, uncomfortable, unfocused, out-of-sorts, drained of energy, lifeless because of a nibble on something unedible this past weekend. I was just under the proverbial weather. “Under the weather,” isn’t that an interesting idiom. It tells us that the weather effects how we think, move, and feel. Talking about the weather, it is hot and dry, hazy and smoky down here. The mosquitoes are wearing gas masks. The Okeefenokee Swamp is afire and its casting its irritating pall over the whole area. My eyes burn. I feel like I’m perpetually inhaling a cigarette. It, too, is effecting how I think and move and feel.

And, according to Mark Twain, I can do all the talking I want about the weather, but I can’t do anything about it. Well, you know, Mark Twain didn’t get it all right. You can do something about the weather–in the classroom and on campus. That’s why the next word I am going to give Kenny for my DICTIONARY OF GOOD TEACHING is “Weather.”

Why? Because, as I say again and again and again, in the spirit of Emerson, the fundamental purpose of a teacher is to help a person help him/herself become the person he or she is capable of becoming; because, as I have said earlier, I strongly feel that the prime purpose of a teacher, the all important MUST, is to prime good feeling in each student. And, to do that is to do something about the weather–in the classroom. Now, before anyone starts on me again with the touchy-feely or new age or similar whatevers accusations, hear me out.

I received read this end-of-semester evaluation from a student:

….You know, this class was a lot of hard work even
though there were no tests. I guess you made the
projects seem like they weren’t a struggle. It was
almost that you tricked us into wanting us to do it.
It seemed at times so natural and easy that it was
hard not to believe we could do those crazy things.
It really makes a difference that the weather in the
classroom was springy everyday in the class. I know
that I always looked forward to coming to class. A
lot of us did, strange as that sounds. It was never
a dark and stormy and threatening place. We felt
better and safer and fuller (sic) of energy….

That phrase, “weather in the classroom,” reminded me of a conversation I had with several students as we small talked about the weather before class began. It was a cloudy and “cool” mid-70’s side morning. The small talk went something like this:

“I like this weather,” he said. “I don’t like it when it’s real hot and muggy.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s hard to be full of energy. It all gets to me real quick and I tire real fast. It’s just not enjoyable and I can’t do things as well. I can’t focus as well. I just don’t feel good. I lose my spring. I get lazy.”

“You like the cold?”

“Not too cold. I get stiff quickly and slow down, too. I like it in between.

And finally, in a masterful interplay of actors and real people on a recent episode of WEST WING, in one scene, David Gergens said, talking of the President’s role, that our best Presidents have a sense of how much better we can be than we are. The best Presidents create a climate that instills a sense of potential, the possibilites to make us dreamers of dreams and help us produce great action. That is also true of best Presidents on our campuses, of our best Vice Presidents, of our best Provosts, of our best Deans, of our best department heads, and of our best teachers.

Through the ages, people have been affected by the change of seasons. Winter’s darkness and wintery white commonly brings a bad case of the blues for many. In spring, the fields are alive with the sound of music, and people are inoculated with large doses of a sense of life. The heavy summer heat and humidity is a prescription for lethargy. I don’t think it’s much different in the classroom. The weather of the classroom has real consequence for learning. When there is sun deprivation in the classroom, the “downers” prevail. When there is an icy chill in the air, students tend to freeze up. When the room is full of storm and lightening, students cringe in fear. When it is “springy,” the room is inviting and students tend to dance to their delight.

Weather–a slick word for “mood”–has an enormous impact on those in the classroom. It sets the pace. It is catchy. It can inspire, anger, arouse, alert, bore, impassion, bore, enthuse, dampen, threaten, encourage, slow, hasten, dull, sharpen, enliven, build, destroy, raise, lower, soar, ground, frustrate, gratify, sadden, cheer. It grinds down or lubricates. When students feel upbeat, they focus on the upside of things positively. The upbeat will more likely go the extra mile. When they feel down, they tend to focus on the downside. The downbeat will more likely trudge along and feel beaten up after a few feet. Negative vibes are distracting and disrupting and dissonant. Positive vibes are focusing, settling, and resonant, How a student feels is more often than not a mirror of the teacher. In this sense, teachers who, like Typhoid Mary, spread bad moods are bad for learning. Teachers who pass along good moods help learning. The mood is either grit or oil.

Now, I am not so naive that I think the weather in the classroom is the only determinate or to think that every student responds to the atmosphere of the classroom identically. There are complex personal climate patterns outside the classroom and inside each of us. I have learned that the classroom weather does, however, significantly effect how people feel and perform.

You can say that students are responsible for their own learning. Fine. Like it or not, students take their cues from us just as we take our cues from our colleagues, department heads, deans, VPs, and Presidents. They listen more carefully to what and how we say things; they watch us more carefully for what we say with our body movements. The teacher’s way of seeing things has special weight that makes sense of an assignment and that gives direction in a situation. What teachers praise or not praise, criticize constructively or destructively, support or ignore, encourage or discourage, clarify or confuse, teacher sets the standard and creates the mood. That doesn’t strip us of our responsibilities as climate makers. We can be Irving Berlins: when blue skies are smiling at you, the blue days are gone; when the sun is shining so bright, things seems to go so right. Or, we can be Hoagie Carmichaels: when there’s no sun up there, gloom and misery everywhere, stormy weather.

The weather of a classroom will largely determine whether anything else will work. It’s sad to ignore the suffering effects of what I call academic SAD (Smile Affective Disorder) and not treat students with educational heliotherapy

Make it a good day.

–Louis–