I’ll just say that every time I finish reading the about 170 weekly student journals, I think of one of my favorite Zen stories. And reading a host of e-mail responses and getting involved in a few off-list conversations with some e-colleagues, that story is even more vivid this morning. Both student journals and faculty comments were replete with explicit and implicit yearns for an Eden before the expulsion, with prayers of “if only” and wishes upon a star of “I wish” for all problems to go away.

One of my favorite Zen stories:

A priest was in charge of the garden within a famous Zen temple. He had been given the job because he loved the flowers, shrubs, and trees. Next to the temple there was another, smaller temple where there lived a very old Zen master. One day, when the priest was expecting some special guests, he took extra care in tending to the garden. He pulled the weeds, trimmed the shrubs, combed the moss, and spent a long time meticulously raking up and carefully arranging all the dry autumn leaves. As he worked, the old master watched him with interest from across the wall that separated the temples.

When he had finished, the priest stood back to admire his work and whispered to himself, “Beautiful. Perfect.”

“Isn’t it beautiful,” he called out to the old master.

“Yes,” replied the old man, “but there is something missing. Help me over this wall and I’ll put it right for you.”

After hesitating, the priest lifted the old fellow over and set him down. Slowly, the master walked to the tree near the center of the garden, grabbed it by the trunk, and shook it. Leaves showered down all over the garden.

“What are you doing?” screamed the priest.

“There,” said the old man, “it is now as it should be.”

The moral of the story is simply that we should be real and accept the truth that there is no ideal. There is no ideal student and no ideal classroom situation–and no ideal professor. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am idealistic and I think ideals are important. They have a role to play. They should motivate us to reach out and up. Yes. They should point us in the right direction. Yes. Uplift us. Yes. Make us lighthearted. Yes. Offer purpose. Yes. Create a sense of mission. Yes. They are a tool of inspiration. Yes. They are a measurement by which we gauge our lives. Yes. They are all these things. They are not realities in themselves. And, an overdose of ideals is, if we assume the ideal student or the ideal professor or the ideal classroom is a reality, harmful to our health. Ben Franklin warned that when circumstances and people don’t fit our ideal, if we’re not careful, the ideals become our difficulties and afflictions. How true. When we are plagued with either or both what I’ll call “the perfect student syndrome” or “the perfect professor” syndrome, we lose our balance, our sense of the real; and we hallucinate, painfully mumbling a mournful dirge of “if only” and “I wish.” It is when we forget what ole Ben said that we get frustrated, because we are looking for something that cannot be found, searching for someone who doesn’t exist, striving to create something we cannot fashion, thinking we are someone who is not, and fashioning becoming someone we cannot be.

So, let’s be real about students and ourselves. We academics can’t be the perfect human beings because we are human beings. We can’t expect students to be perfect humans because they, too, are human beings. We can’t expect any class composed of human beings to go perfectly as we want because that class is composed of human beings. We have to get unstuck from the ideal image of ourselves and of students. We have to stop polishing our halos and promoting our saintliness by tarnishing the humanity of students. We have to stop assuming what we think about ourselves and students is the absolute truth about us and them. We have to stop retreating from life and advance into it. We have to stop wishing upon a star who we want ourselves and them to be, and accept who we and they are. We have to acknowledge our own human needs, our own pains, our own fears, our own darkness which we allow to halt, confine, constrain, divert us. And when we don’t, we and they pay a high price. We bury ourselves into a blinding and deafing and desensitizing fictional prose, and we cannot connect.

You know, a few weeks ago I had what my darling Susan fearfully called a “serious cancer scare.” I mean I had my annual check-up on a Wednesday, unexpectedly got a call from my doctor on Thursday that he was sending me to a Urologist, heard from the urologist on Friday, saw him on Monday to be examined and have some tests done–and then waited around for a couple of weeks waiting the results to verify the urologist’s diagnosis. I struggled to console her, and comfort her, and allay her fears, and put my best foot forward. Hell, I struggled to do the same things with myself. I struggled to put the prospects of having cancer out of my mind. I suppose I could say that I succeeded. I could say that, but don’t believe that for a second. You don’t think that the rapidity of those events, the fact I didn’t have to wait months to get an appointment didn’t put my hair on end? You think I didn’t bring it into the classroom with me? In a pig’s eye! It was lurking all about me like an enveloping, and sometimes opaque, cloud. Every now and then I thought I saw the speck of a vulture circling in that cloud. My ideal of not worrying until I knew there was something to be concerned about didn’t quite perfectly work. Sure, I tried to paper over it, pretend it wasn’t so, not deal with it. And yet, it caught up with me every moment because by the very fact I was fighting to put it out of my mind, I was consciously putting it in the forefront of my mind. I couldn’t run away from myself. I couldn’t escape myself. It was going wherever I was because I was going wherever I was.

None of us is free of life’s problems and challenges and distractions and shatterings any more than are students. We each live in what Carl Jung called “our shadow.” We all have periods of fear, moments of cynicism and/or skepticism, times of confusion, instances of depression, resignation, distractions, troubled relationships, worries, discouragements, despairs, compromises, annoyances, angers, disappointments, abuses, senses of rejection, stresses, arrogances, uncertainties, insecurities, and impatience. Students and us are dealing with financial problems, death, injury, marital problems, parental problems, time conflict, alcohol and drug problems, legal problems, single parenthood, lousy job situations, pregnancy, divorces, painful divorces, physical illness, troubled children, troubling children, troubling room mates, lost love, new love, etc, etc, etc. Students carry that “stuff” with them and it impacts on their focus, attitude, and performance. We carry that “stuff” with us whether we want to or not, whether we acknowledge that or not, whether we’re conscious of that or not. And it impacts on our concentration, attitude, and performance.

And yet, so many of us are in denial, fight so hard, spend so much time, expend so much energy struggling to be that super-human paragon of strength and virtue we are not and cannot be. It is to no avail. It still preys on us however we pray it won’t. As a recent book by Jon Kabat-Zinn is titled, wherever you go there you are. And, we academics waste so much time and energy fighting to deny that simple truth of our humanity. So many of us think we can be into our intellect and subject and our of ourselves. Celebrity, resume, title, degrees, wealth of knowledge, position are not protective immunization shots against being an imperfect human being. In fact, they may make the light dimmer and darken the darkness.

If, as the Persians said, fate throws a knife at us, will we catch it by the blade or the handle? If we utilize the ideal and the real properly, if we reach for one and accept the other, they will embolden our courage, strengthen our resolve, brace our determination, maintain our perseverance, give us more patience, deepen our understanding, sharpen our senses, alter our perceptions and preconceptions, give us faith and love, and provide us more insight and wisdom. If we use them the wrong way, we’ll feel discouraged, frustrated, depressed, annoyed, angered; and we’ll accuse and blame.

Circumstances, us and them are always different from what they might or should be. The question is, then, “Now what?” How are we going to handle it?

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Here I was walking along in the marshy darkness. The temperature was twice that of Pennsylvania ten days ago. There were no mosquitos in pharonic headress flying about. So, I wasn’t worried about West Nile. I was thinking about a conversation I had this past week with a colleague on my campus. In the course of our chit-chat, I mentioned that I had just returned from giving a workshop on exciting the classroom at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. Some of the rest of our chatting went something like this.

“What do you do to turn on the students?”

“It’s not so much what I do as who I am. I love each of them and believe in each of them, and struggle to help each of them to love and believe in themselves.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

“No, seriously. I’m curious. The students are always talking about how exciting your classes are,” he asked in something of an air of disbelief. “The students in my classes are bored. I’m not sure I know why.”

“Who’s responsible for that?” I asked as I looked directly at him.

He look back with an increduous gaze. “You saying we are responsible for the students being bored or excited?”

“Yes. We’re the authority figures. We’re in charge. We’re responsibile for the climate in there. We can’t get students to jump up and down with a yawn. We can’t get them to ‘rah rah’ with a ‘bah.’ You won’t conjure up a smile with a sneer.”

“Well, then, from what I hear you apparently don’t yawn or sneer. What’s your trick? I’d like to know.”

“No tricks. I just told you. I love them and believe in them. If you want the students to be excited, be excited about each student. Don’t be excited just about the subject. Win their hearts if you want their minds. Love them, each and every one of them. Believe in them, have faith in them, have hope for them, notice them–unconditionally.”

When he asked me to describe what I do, I gave him a thumbnail sketch of my classes.

“Remember, it’s not one thing it do. It’s a total package not just of techniques, but of attitude that creates a mood of trust and respect.” I explained.

I told him I have the students from one semester write confidential letters about me and the class to students in the following semester that I hand out first day of class. I told him that on that first day, I meet each student at the door with a welcoming handshake and we all walk around the class shaking hands and introducing ourselves. I described the classroom community building exercises and the exercises I use to lay down the four working themes of the class. I talked of the daily supporting and encouraging “words for the day” I or other students put on the blackboard and how we discuss them for a few minutes. I have them journal daily and read them every week so I can get to know them a bit more and have an inkling how life is getting in their way. I explained why I and each student write what good happened that day on the blackboard at the beginning of each class. There’s the small but essential small talk, the looking, the joking, the listening, the noticing, the laughing, the smiling, the encouraging, the supporting, the constant emphasis on the positive.

“The other day I heard a student in the back of the room whisper that the day a project was due was her 21st birthday. To everyone’s surprise, I brought in four dozen birthday doughnuts and we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. The small stuff isn’t small.”

And, then, I described some the hands-on, get-into-the-material projects and how I no longer lecture or give tests and exams in my attempt to help students learn to become life-long learners and unlearn being merely short-range grade getters. Telling him that I’m always experimenting, I described how I just tried something new. I had asked these students who had been in class only three weeks to write a confidential letter about their reactions to what we were doing in class to the professors attending that workshop.

“Oh, I could never do any of that,” he exclaimed raising his hands like a red light to stop my advance.

“I think you’d surprise yourself,” I softly explained. “I know over the years I surprised myself. So would you.”

My colleague didn’t hear me–or didn’t want to hear me. As I offered him encouragement, support, and help, he sadly peppered me with a string of defensive explanations. “Do you know what the others in the department would have to say?” “I would love to but I really couldn’t.” “What if I try some of it and it doesn’t work?” “It’s just not me.” “I’m not comfortable doing that.” “What good would it do?” And he concluded with a resigned, “You know, I’m almost sorry I asked.”

“You’re sounding like a student,” I finally retorted with a soft voice, a friendly chuckle, and an understanding smile. “What would you tell a student if he or she said any of that to you when you gave out an assignment?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s different!” was his ready come back.

“Is it? Why?” I asked. “I don’t think we professors with our degrees and resumes are all that different from the students as we pretend or suppose we are. If you say that of yourself, how can you ask students to think and to feel and to say and to do otherwise? That ‘do as I say, not as I do’ never works.”

We talked on for a while.

This morning I was thinking that my friend and colleague also sounded just like Moses, not the advertised Cecil B. Demille bearded, gray streaked, dominating figure of Charleston Heston standing on an outcropping of rock hands aloft, dark clouds swirling above him, parting the Red Sea. He could sound that way. I’ve known him a long time. He has it in him. Instead, his words and body language and facial expressions were that of the cringing, disbelieving Moses of the burning bush.

The curious thing about Moses, he wasn’t the same person when he was groveling before the burning bush as he was later at the Red Sea. Well, actually he was. It was his perception of and belief in himself that was to change. And, I sometimes wonder if we all focus more than just a bit on the Moses before the burning bush in us than on the potential Moses at the Red Sea in us.

Now Moses went up the mountain with a curiosity. I don’t think he initially expected and liked what he found. Kneeling shoeless before the burning bush he quickly melted into a mass of tenseness, self-denigration, and fear as he heard what God said He had in store for him. God had selected him to “go down to Egypt’s land and tell ole Pharoh to let My people go,” and Moses fought God tooth and nail. “Who am I that I should….” “No one is going to listen to me.” “What influence can I have?” “I’m just a nobody.” “Why can’t someone else do it.” “I’m not a good speaker.” Moses wanted back-up and clout. “Who am I going to say sent me?” He wanted assurances and guarantees: “You gonna be there, too?” No wonder God got upset.

Moses wasn’t as yet sufficiently wise to avoid or cast off all those thoughts that weakened him. By asking negative questions, he evoked weakening images of himself. His problem was that he didn’t have a sense of awe and wonder about himself. The self-effacing Moses at first couldn’t bring himself to re-imagine himself so he could see what God saw in him. Like my colleague, he didn’t–or couldn’t–see the potential in himself. That omission shaped his thinking, his feelings, his words, and his actions. And so, he didn’t–or couldn’t–reach for and bring out the potential in himself. He couldn’t see the positive possibilities and so couldn’t see that the best of those possibilities could happen for him. He was getting what he saw, the negatives: problems, obstacles and limitations. He did not see the positives: limitless possibilities and opportunities. His doubt, though nothing but a few self-generated thoughts, was a restricting chain he created and to which he gave the strength of steel. As his conversation with God continued, his doubt grew stronger and more resistant, and so did the size and weight of those chains. God was asking Moses to believe about himself differently and to see himself differently and do different things. God was saying to Moses, “Hey, guy, if you want to motivate and inspire, if you want to energize and mobilize, if you want to lead, you have to focus on your capacities and possibilities of what I’m saying and not on your negatives of what you’re saying, and say to yourself what I am saying to you–and take a chance to believe it.” And, the disbelieving Moses resisted every inch of the way. He reminds me of something Peter Senge wrote somewhere in THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE. Moses was so focused on throwing problems in his way, he was so distracted by doubt, fear and anxiety, that until he let go he couldn’t see what he was really made of. Moses couldn’t believe that he could possibly have possibilities within him and that he had potentials he never thought possible.

I guess I’m sounding like a preacher. Oh, well, it’s Sunday. Actually, I am being autobiographic, for I was at the burning bush until eleven years ago. Nevertheless, like Moses, like my colleague, once like me, so many of us–faculty and student alike–find every reason, rationale, or explanation to diminish and weaken ourselves with that Mosaic liturgy. We are so disinclined to focus on the exciting, productive, positive possibilities of what might be. Degrees and resumes not withstanding, so many of us are so constrained by our constrained perception of our value and strength, ability and talent, vision and imagination, creativity and activities, possibility and potential. So many of us so often focus on the shadowy valley where we are confused, depressed, intimidated, angry, hesitant, resistant, paralyzed rather than on the majestic, sunlit peaks where we are most effective, affective, connected, and, above all, most alive. And, we are hard pressed to boldly dream and act, and see what we might be like if we did. Like my colleague, as I did for so many years, so many of us cannot untie those “nots” in our “cannots” and kick ourselves in our “can.” We don’t have Kierkegaard’s “passionate eye” for our potential. We will curse ourselves with all kinds of rationales, excuses and reasons and counter-analogies why everyone else should change while we remain unchanged and don’t have to change our attitudes and actions.

The Mosaic lesson for each of us is that a lot of us are still cringing in front of the burning bush looking dismally at problems and have yet to look for the possibility and probability that each of us can be that indomitable person standing at the edge of the Red Sea we are capable of becoming. I assure you, with a lot of sweat, day after day after day, rather than depressingly be stopped by “accepting reality,” we can choose to see a “reality” created by what we choose to believe, to see, to think, to feel, to listen, to act out and act upon. We have the capacity to create the kind of real future we desire. All Moses did–and it was some kind of an “all”–was to see his inner landscape with new eyes, ears, and heart.

Am I being pollyanic? I don’t think so! Sure, I know many academics who would literally astound themselves if they could find the way to turn themselves into a pushing tailwind instead of battling their slowing headwinds, if they could metamorphose their ugly negatives into beautiful positives. At the same time, I can say without hesitation that I have never met one person–not one person–who did not have the ability to be a Moses at the Red Sea. And, as I stand in testimony, it’s more a matter of inclination than circumstances. If each of us want to be open to that potential, feels a passionate need to be open to that, are willing to struggle day after day to find our way to be open to that, we can open ourselves to be open to that potential, believe in that, have a hope for that, see that, tap that, and direct that. We don’t have to go down into Egypt’s land and let the people go; we just have to go down inside our own land and let ourselves go. We can convert the curse into a blessing and make the impossible possible, and the potential actual; we each can part our own sea. Then, at the same time, we can help and support and encourage students make their own arduous, but exciting, journey from their burning bush to their own Red Sea.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Here I am at a B & B in Clarion, Pennsylvania. It’s 3:30 a.m., Saturday. I think it’s the 14th. Not sure. Can’t sleep. Mind is racing. Too blasted cold to walk. 39 degrees!! No coffee in the room. Yuk!! Getting ready to wind up my workshop on teaching at the university this morning. Sitting down to share later:

I think I’m going to tie everything up with some exercises that focus on the same two words with which I began: “why” and “see.” Why a “why?” Because without a conscious and reflective and authentic “why” for what you’re doing, without a dream, without a vision, you are uncommitted, aimless, adrift, lethargic. Why a “see?” Because the problem with so much of education is not fad, gadget, gimmick, technology, or methodology. The problem is seeing. It’s a problem of seeing who is inside and who is out there. And, the solution lies within each of us, now, today, each day.

You know that old saying, “seeing is believing.” I think whoever first coined that phrased got it wrong. At least, I’d like to change it around. I think it should read: “believing is seeing.” For me, that’s more accurate because wherever I go, my belief is there. Because over the past decade, I have discovered that as I believe, so it will be. I discovered that if I was to change what I was doing, I had to change who I was; and if I was to change who I was, I had to change what I believed. And, I discovered that as I changed what I believed, I began to see differently; and as I began to see differently, it came full circle. I changed what I was doing. Because over the past decade I have found that as I believed that there are a host of sacred persons in the classroom waiting to be discovered, I sought out that sacredness and saw it. I slowed down, overlooked less, looked and heard more, saw and listened more. I worked, worked hard, still do, to discard the habit of inattentiveness.

Believe and you will have the courage to ask the vital question, “who are you?” You ask not to get the answer as much as to make you first mindful of your own feelings and thoughts. The question means how and why am I going to establish a relationship with both this person. It also asks whether I am willing to acknowledge and have a relationship with this person. And, you will be in quest for the authentic and not settle for superficial gloss. You will be a constant question mark, moving in wonder and awe of each student from question to question. To believe is to really look for and really see a student rather than be captured by judgemental images about him or her, and to see a bit more accurately what and who is really there. Believe and you will struggle to miss nothing and notice everything that is pulsating beneath the surface.

To believe is to see each student’s individuality, each’s identity, each’s uniqueness, and to see how deeply you must value these differences. And as I came to believe over the past decade, I discovered that the ruins became beautiful, the unimaginative imaginative, the soulless soulful, the mindless mindful, the numb feeling, the powerless powerful. As I began to understand that “the secret” lay within, as I began to believe my imagination fired up, and as my imagination fired up, my heart and soul and body followed. It meant letting a wonder and awareness of each student percolate and bubble to the surface and seep into my thoughts, feelings, and actions. I believe that if you believe in that sacredness of the individual, you will see things and people who weren’t there before, doors will open that were closed before, and “unseen hands” will appear to guide you.

So, each day I pack and re-pack by bags for the journey. I practice. I practice unlearning, learning, relearning. I practice breaking old, sleeply habits and making new, awakened habits. I practice not as a rehersal of something to do, but someone to be. I practice awakefulness. Each day, I travel my own yet undiscovered inner geography. Each day, I practice the art of intention and curiosity. Each day, I practice imagining and re-imagining. Each day I practice, if I remember my Jon Kabat-Zinn, a “mindfulness.” Each day I practice paying attention and not falling into the abyss of the sleeping, stuck, straitjacketing automatic and unconsciousness. Each day I practice an open openness and not falling prey to my own closed likes and dislikes, opinions, biases, expectations. Each day, in the spirit of Emerson and Thoreau, I practice awareness and discernment of the present moment. Each day I practice heartfulness. Each day I practice being strong enough to be weak. Each day I practice not to cling.

Each day I renew myself with the belief I can be that person each student needs to help him or her to help him- or herself become the person he or she is capable of becoming. And each day, each person, then becomes my teacher to believe and to see the richness of each person, the richness of each day, and the richness of each moment.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

“Hey Doc,” Rachel asked in her brief message, “I’ve got a question for you. How can I can I get my students excited and experience that “‘joy of learning’?”

“Hey Rachel,” I answered in my brief reply, “I’ve got an answer for you. Make sure they don’t think they’re in a funeral parlor.”

Make it a good day.

–Louis–