A QUICKIE ON TEACHING IS A “BED OF ROSES”

Well, I hope you all in the States had as a delightful Thanksgiving as Susan and I had. We had gone “over the river than through the woods to grand-daughter’s house” for a delightful and delicious Thanksgiving with my youngest son and his family in Nashville. For me, it was a particularly special time that eight weeks ago I thought I may never see again. But, see it again I did. As I hugged my son and daughter-in-law with a tear in my eye, as I held my grand-daughter with more than one tear, I knew once again that “ah” feeling that there are only two great and vital things: to live to see the great day that dawns and to live to see my world filled by the light of my family’s faces. It was a dramatic contrast to the two days before our departure. Those were two “ugh” days for Susan. She had come down with a bad, grumpy inducing head cold. Her irritability had increased when at the same time the inconsiderate heating and air conditioning system unexpectedly had to be replaced. Her crankiness went off the charts when the gas was turned off most of the very day she had scheduled to bake her renowned cheese cake for Thanksgiving dinner. She was not a happy camper.

To make her “grrrrrrr” mood less “grrrrrr-some,” Tuesday morning I secretly went out into the backyard. In the dim light of the gray dawn, assisted by a flashlight, I harvested some beauties from my rose garden with which to surprise her. As I carefully snipped here and there to gather a smile-inducing aromatic and elegantly colorful bouquet, I suddenly thought of how much my “bed of roses” has in common with teaching.

You do know that teaching is “a bed of roses,” don’t you? Well, it is. Of course, if you know anything about gardening, I’m turning the cliché “a bed of roses” on its roots to mean anything but trouble-free, easy, simple, effortless, and perfect. If you know anything about roses, they are high, very high, maintenance plants. And, they have thorns that prick, scratch, and draw blood. To make roses into an alluring “bed of roses” is complicated, challenging, time consuming, and occasionally bloody. That’s why they’re sometimes known as the “temperamental divas of the plant world.”

If you want to smell the sweet fragrances of roses and if you want to be dazzled by their beauty, you can’t take them for granted; and, you can’t just plop them in the ground and leave them alone to themselves. It’s just like being a true teacher. It takes a discipline of your spirit, your heart, and your soul. It requires a feeling of effortlessness in your efforts. It requires constant attention, engagement and involvement. It requires at times inconvenience and discomfort, at sometimes pain. Sometimes, if you want your heart to soar, to dive deeply into the miracle of life in the rose bed your arms and hands have to be cut by the thorns. That is, you’ve got to be prepared to work at it, you’ve got to want to work at it, and that work has to be a labor of love. It has to be a labor that feels like boundless joy and adventure. There can’t be anything laborious about all the time and effort it takes to deal with black spot, powdery mildew, canker, rust, and scale; to fight off aphids, slugs, thirips, caterpillars, midge, Japanese beetles, leafcutter bees, and spider mites; to dead head, prune, water, and feed. And, you have to do all that day after day after day, for each day is a new day when something new has to be done. Need I go on?

Now, I’ve helplessly watched some roses whither from whatever. But, you’ve got to be tough enough to win. You’ve got to be tough enough to take some adversity, make mistakes, and keep on without considering the possibility of losing. Trust me, you can allow all this challenging hassle to stop you in your tracks or to urge you on; you can allow it either to blemish your heart or to uplift your spirits; you can allow it to tire you or invigorate you; you can allow it to tarnish you with snarls or you can allow it to burnish you with smiles.

If you can meld the sublime with the mundane, if you can introduce melodic poetry into the bland prose, if you can ignite your heart with a burning ecstasy of faith, hope, and love, it will open the buds of your roses into magnificent blooms. No, you’ve got to tend intensely to these romantic rascals, just as with students, with all of your senses on alert each day as well as with the most careful and loving attention each requires and deserves. It’s that unconditional love, that unswerving faith, and that undying hope, that constant gritting it out, that are in the very essence of both gardening and teaching. They are that mysterious stirring in us that spur us on. They are the power that gives us the resolve to believe in each student while acknowledging her or his imperfections. They are the reservoirs of purpose and meaning from which we draw our strength, commitment, perseverance, and endurance. They are the magical triggers that set off the explosion of life

So, too, the classroom is a peerless, pleasurable, beautiful, aromatic, and dazzling bed of roses. But, you can’t only use your eyes and ears. Your eyes see only light; your ears hear only sound. It’s your listening heart perceives meaning and purpose. So, if you constantly tend to each student with all your senses, as well as with your heart and soul, if you let yourself be stirred by human emotion as well as by human intellect, , if you give to each of them with your empathy, you have a better chance of helping each student to awaken her or his too often dormant capacities, to move toward a wholeness that melds emotion and intellect and values, to see the light of her or his own being, and make her or his educational experience a journey of transformation.

The great truth of all this is that by loving each student unconditionally, by seeing in each student a shrine to creation, by lifting each student, you will rise and honor your own real self. Yeah, teaching is a “bed of roses.”

.

Make it a good day.

      –Louis–

A QUICKIE ON EDUCATIONAL LOVELESSNESS

            Slowly and patiently recovering from my cerebral hemorrahage, with Susan hovering over me like the loving mother hen she is, until I get back into physical shape and recover my energy, I have little else to do other than think.  I have to admit that as a sign of my healing, I’m biting at the bit to get back into class Spring Semester.  As part of my process to psyche myself up for my return in January, a few days ago I watched PBS’ “Declining By Degrees” for the umpteenth time.  By chance, watching it coincided with two other events.  The first was reading an inspiring response by a teacher to one of my Random Thoughts on caring.  He wrote, “Most of them [students who he is mentoring] want to fail; it’s easier. Although deep down, they want to feel what its like to have success,  Its just that they have been failing so long and have been told so many times that they are failures they have given up.  I believe it’s my job to convince them they have something positive to contribute, to share, to present.  They can learn if they get confidence.  If they are hidden in the shadows forever they will always fail.”  The second, and most important of all three happenings, I’ll just have to say is that Susan and I dropped everything to help a student who came to us in dire need.   

            This confluence reminded me of what I don’t see in all too many classrooms:  unconditional love!   By that, I don’t mean love of and dedication to an academic’s discipline.  I’m talking about teaching as a labor of love.  I mean an intense love of and dedication to those human beings in the classroom.  I mean loving to be in that classroom, loving the challenge of dealing with the challenge each student poses, loving all the time it takes to reach out to a student, loving the continual exertion of energy is takes to touch a student, loving the great effort it takes to make a difference.  I mean loving to freely give of yourself, loving to be authentic, and, above all, loving the moment you’re living in.  I can guarantee that if you have all this love, all this unconditional love, you’ll fill yourself with a moving and exhilarating purpose, meaning, accomplishment, and fulfillment; you’ll infuse and inspire yourself with deep sincerity and integrity; you’ll discover riches in places few other academics even think of looking or dare to look; you’ll find that the sky’s the limit when it comes to possibilities; and, most important, each day will be a new adventure filled with grand discoveries.   

            Let me put it this way.  Following the call of Thoreau, my educational philosophy is simple.  It’s unconditional faith in, hope for, love of, kindness to, caring about, and empathy for each and every student as a sacred and invaluable human being.  No exceptions.  From them spring my attitudes of and behavior towards each student.  When we unconditionally treat each student as a shrine to creation, we respect each of them; when we respect each student, we appreciate each of them; when we appreciate each of them, we accept each student; when we accept each student, we welcome and embrace each of them; when we welcome and embrace each of them, we have faith in and hope for each of them; when we have faith in and hope for each of them, we think the best of them and for them; when we think the best of them and for them, we care about each of them; when we care about each of them; we act caringly; when we act caringly, we are empathetic and loving; when we are empathetic and loving, we are excited about their potential achievement; when we are excited about their potential achievement, we do whatever it takes to support and encourage each of them.  And, when we do all that, we just might offer each student the best chance to transform her- or himself 

Make it a good day. 

      –Louis–

A FINAL WORD, FOR NOW, ON “I CARE ABOUT STUDENTS”

     It was nice this balmy, cool morning. It was the first time I’ve gone out before the sun came up. True, it was only a three mile fast stroll, but it was a beginning. In that darkness, there was a light of calm. In that quiet, I was thinking about a short message I had received yesterday. It was from a student. “I heard you were real sick and almost died. I just want to tell me that you’re okay. Still clean.” You don’t know what that means, but I do. And, she got me to thinking once again about how critical caring is to teaching and learning.

     Will Rogers once said that he never met a person he didn’t like. I wonder how many of us would really say that about each and every student. For me, there is not one student who is valueless and who is not worth nurturing! I’ll repeat that. There is not one student, not one, who is valueless and who is not worth nurturing. There is not one student whose future is meaningless. I’ll repeat that, too. There is not one student, not one, whose future is meaningless.

      We all want to believe we are caring people, but while we are loudly proclaiming with our lips “I care about students,” do we have an unconditional–unconditional–caring for each student even more fully in our hearts? Do we really feel a calling to care? Do we live that calling authentically? Do we get up each morning choosing to feel caring? Do we go out of our way to compliment, to offer encouragement, provide emotional support, and boost self-esteem? Do we make that critical one more effort to make that all important one more attempt?

      Should we wonder about that? Think we academics, with all those letters before and after our names, with all those scholarly resumes, with all that reputation, are immune to such feelings? Think again. Watch PBS’ “Failing By Degrees.” I’ve been in this collegiate profession on either side of the podium since I was eighteen. Fifty-nine years!! I know we’re not above fearfully worrying about what others think of us. Do you think we don’t welcome the feeling that we are noticed, loved, and appreciated? Do you think our faces don’t light up at such special moments? When we academics don’t feel appreciated, when we don’t feel recognized, when we don’t hear compliments, when we feel we’re the target of bias or prejudice, when we’re fearful about our work, we often without realizing it begin to act the same way as the students. Our enthusiasm wanes; our energy is sapped; our attention is shortened and diverted. Then, the pernicious excuses appear: “I’m too tired,” “I don’t have the time,” “I’m too busy,” “It’s not my job.” It creates a self-defeating and vicious cycle of “Why should I go out of my way to say and do nice things for others when no one does it for me and there’s nothing in it for me.”

      By a “calling to care” I don’t mean turning your collar around. I mean being driven by a vision, being fired by a purpose, and being fueled by a meaning, all of which power a persevering conviction and enduring commitment This near-fatal cerebral hemorrhage has gotten me to wonder if the most caring people are those who have faced their mortality, known fear and suffering, known struggle, known loss, have gone deep into themselves to a place so quiet they could hear the ripples of their blood circulating, called on the power of their spirit, found their way beyond the point of moaning and groaning “why me,” and have come out of the darkness. These persons have an appreciation and a sensitivity to life that fills them with awareness, otherness, compassion, empathy, kindness, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Just as I’m not sure you can truly appreciate Spring without having experienced winter, I’m not sure that caring people just happen or that caring can be truly taught in some academic setting of a “Caring 101” class.

      Yet, as I’ve said over and over, and from experience as a recent ICU patient, there is greater power in caring than there is in titles, credentials, recognitions, status, authority, knowledge, tests, and grades. Authentic caring is a matter of engaging, of downright “neighborliness,” of genuine presence, of being responsive to a student, of reaching out to and touching a student, of being empathetic and compassionate, of being trustful, of being honest, of being kind and good. Caring is an unselective and unconditional nourishment of inclusive belief, hope, faith, and love. When students feel a teacher doesn’t notice them, doesn’t care about them, is there to weed them out, the joy of learning is drained out of them; confidence is replaced by anxiety and fear; and they really won’t be as inspired to learn from that person. Students will be happier, less fearful, more relaxed, more eager in the classroom, and achieve more when you care and when they know it.

     What darkens or lightens our teaching is the way we decide to live our teaching. Above my computer at home hangs a word: “Choose.” It’s all a matter of choice, not chance. Suppose we consciously choose to awaken each morning with our heart saying, “I must give, I must not demand.” Suppose we deliberately choose to live each moment of each day with the purpose of caring enough to make a difference. Suppose we intentionally choose to get up each morning asking ourselves what we can do to help someone. What we would do, then, would not be a random accident. What we would do, then, would be the result of a vision and of a purpose. What we would do, then, would be the result of specific caring feelings, thoughts, and actions. If we create a truly caring aura around us, if we reach down into that caring and connect with it, everything we would do would have a real basis in purpose and meaning. It takes very little to notice, to offer words, to be kind, to nurture that help others feel how much we care about them. I have learned that these actions can have an impact throughout a person’s life. We must minimize the sense of alienation, prejudice, and ongoing anger that pervades the lives of far too many people and replace these negative feelings with emotions and behaviors that are filled with compassion and caring. If we can muster the moral courage to keep an open heart, we enlarge both our heart and the hearts of others; and, then, we add meaning to our own lives while offering that precious gift to others.

Louis

THE QUESTION

     I know. This Random Thought is so quick upon the one I sent out Saturday. But, it suddenly appeared yesterday and is pent up inside me, and I’ll burst if I don’t get it out and share it. So, please, be collegial and understanding, and bear with me because I think it is that important.

     Do you know how many of us commit sacrilegious acts? By that I mean far, far too many of us, as my friend, Bri Johnson, wrote to me, don’t love our fates; we devalue our challenges; we don’t allow ourselves, as Nietzsche famously said, to become stronger by that which does not destroy us. Bri and Nietzsche were saying that life in all of its aspects just doesn’t always go the way we want, and there isn’t anything we can do about that. Yet, to wish for a life free of challenges is to wish for a life in which it would be impossible to find any kind of real fulfillment. It’s our responses to and handling of those challenges, large and small, that we can find valuable and magnificent opportunities to see into, to learn, to develop, to grow, and to accomplish.

     I told a dear e-friend, that a serious, life-threatening illness, like any personal or professional challenge or adversity, becomes sacred when we decide to let it educate us, when we decide to let it alter us from the inside out, when we decide to let it tell us to live life to its fullness, when we decide to let it provide experiences and knowledge and emotions that we could not possibly acquire in any other way, when we let it guide us onto a meaningful and purposeful course, and when we decide to apply all that learning to our personal and professional lives. What makes any challenge, disappointment, or adversity a sacrilegious or sacred event, tumultuous or peaceful, is a matter of our attitude towards it. So often, too often, we let ourselves be distracted, diminished, slowed, or stopped by a piling up of negative and dismayed “why me” or forlorn “I wish” anger, anxiety, frustration, and/or resentment. That heap hides the potential peace hidden underneath and the possibility of bringing it to the surface. Such it was with my near-death cerebral hemorrhage. I have virtually no memory of that week in ICU, but Susan tells me that on that first day there, I told her that if I come through this, whatever the physical or mental consequences, we will not live in fear and anger, that we have to be at peace with what had happened and not live anxiously with what might happen. You see, until I had the CTA scan and we spoke with the neurosurgeon last Thursday, we knew that I had come through the experience unaffected, but we did not truly know if the prognosis was that I was going to be a walking time bomb and some day something would pop without warning, and my lights would dim or permanently go out. But, let me tell you something, during those seven weeks between the time of my hemorrhage and the time when the surgeon told us that there was no aneurism in my brain and a hemorrhage would not happen again, that peaceful acceptance and the willingness to learn from it, opened the door to everything. Let me tell you another thing. There’s a power to inner peace. In a quiet, calm, relaxing, and healing repose, I could connect with what is truly meaningful and valuable in both my personal and professional life. Coming from an experience with a freeing perspective of peaceful acceptance rather than from a negative and up-tight perspective of fearful and anxious tumult, whether we’re talking about a life-threatening cerebral hemorrhage or a challenging student or a quest for tenure or promotion or applying for a position or securing a publication or pressure from colleagues or administrators, or anything and anyone else, you have a truer sense of authenticity, a greater trust and deeper confidence in yourself and others, a sharper clarity to your thinking and feeling and doing, a greater depth to your understanding, a more sensitive empathy for others, and a greater desire to live your vision.

     I realize more intensely than ever before that if I want better students, I have to become a better person. So, I’ve been asking the ultimate question of myself: what can I both as a person and teacher do better for the betterment of someone else? By that, I don’t’ mean merely stuffing someone with information; I don’t mean only developing someone’s so-called critical thinking skills; I don’t mean only honing someone’s technical or technological know-how; I don’t mean only credentialing someone for a professional position; and, I don’t mean coming up with improved classroom methods, techniques, technologies, and assessments. However, they important all that may be, they don’t collectively stack up to helping someone help her/himself to become a better person and to live life to its fullness.

Louis

THANKSGIVING

November is upon us. That means we here in the States are starting to look forward to that very special family holiday of Thanksgiving. It will be the beginning of the season when most of us reflect on what we have to be grateful for during the past year. I’ve doing a lot of that earlier than most. Nearly dying from a cerebral hemorrahage in the middle of September can do that. On Thursday, one day short of seven weeks since my hemorrahage, November 1st, All Saints Day, my 67th birthday, in the neurosurgeon’s office following a follow-up CTA scan, I received the best birthday gift I’ve ever been given. After emphasizing that I am a “very, very, very, very lucky man,” with a smile on his face, the surgeon told Susan and me that while no one can say other than “a non-artery blood vessel” hemorrhaged or why it occurred, I do not have any aneurisms in my brain. I need not worry that it will happen again. Susan’s smile made a Cheshire cat look like a scowling grump. The doctor kicked us out of his office and, with a hand shake and surprising hug, said he never wanted to see me again. And although I’ll have an uncomfortable stiff neck for a while because of what he called a “chemical meningitis” caused by the free blood in my brain and around my spinal cord, he said the scan showed the blood was gone, he released me from all restrictions, took off Susan’s ankle monitor, told me to wean myself off the doses of Motrin, gave me permission both to go back to classroom next semester and to go to China during Maymester. I can slowly– very slowly–start getting my energy back and getting things back to the way they were. Well, I really can’t.

Three weeks before Thanksgiving, I continue to be embraced by an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness. I’m here, having beaten the 50-50 odds that I wouldn’t be. I’m here, unscathed, having beaten those 10-1 odds against me that I would be. I am overwhelmed by the “thinking of you,” “you’re in my prayers,” “miss you,” “anything I can do for you” cards, phone calls, e-mails and “get well” gifts from students. Some have come over to the house to visit; some have helped Susan with such mundane but necessary things as shopping; some have offered to clean the house; some have even cooked dinners for us. I am grateful to the support of my department chair, the department secretary, the department student helpers, and to my four colleagues in the department who, in spite of their own busy schedules, have been unhesitatingly assuming the extra load of covering my classes. All the generosity from so many people who kept checking on me and Susan, all those friends and family who made prayerful and thankful charitable donations in our name, help us out by mowing the lawn or taking out the garbage or piddling around the house or bringing over dinners or just being there without hesitation whenever Susan or I had the slightest need. I am overwhelmed by something a dear colleague told Susan and me yesterday that we have heard before from others, “You have been on a lot of people’s prayer list. You are loved around here.”

I’m thankful for learning what almost not being here has taught me. As a friend and fellow cancer survivor just e-mailed me, “We all know a lot of people who ask with halting, self-pitting moans and groans, ‘why me,’ and stop there.” That reminded me of a real conversation I had with my neurosurgeon’s nurse about six weeks ago. It had been a few days since I had been released from ICU. We were struggling to regulate the regimen of my night meds so I could get some sleep. Out of the blue, she asked me, “Do you want an anti-depressant?”

Caught by surprise, I replied, “Why would I need that?”

“Well, you almost died. Most people in your situation get so depressed and need something to get them through that.”

“But, you just said I was a lucky guy, a very lucky guy. I didn’t die. In this case, I figure ‘almost’ doesn’t count. I’m not going to think about any ‘what if’ or ‘could have been’ death. I’m focusing on a ‘what is’ of continued living. I’m gratefully looking at being one of those rare ‘5 per centers’ who has come out of this untouched. Besides, this hemorrhage has given me a more intense feeling for life, almost a feeling that there is a lot more for me to do.”

“You sure do have a good attitude that most people don’t have.”

“I’ve learned attitude is virtually everything. It’s a powerful force that I can use to take me in any direction to anywhere I want to go. And, it’s my choice of which attitude to have. So, I’m picking a good one.”

I went on to tell her that we ought to thank heaven for our disappointments, difficulties, and misfortunes. It seems it’s so often the best chance to shake us out of our take-it-for-granted complacent-ness, to transform the ills from barriers and quagmires into opportunities, to see misfortune in a different light as good fortune, and to put them in a different place for having placed us in a better place. The world we imagine, be it an office or a classroom or whatever, is the world we experience and the life we imagine, be it professional or personal, is the life we live. It’s not a matter of drawing upon some secretive magic or supernatural power. It’s simply a matter of us choosing what to imagine, of how to direct our creative energy that is our life, and of living it.

Whether it is in the face of a life-threatening disease or a possible rejection or a challenging student, we shouldn’t wallow. Instead, we should be thankful it is us. I said that and wrote about that when I had prostate cancer and when I didn’t really believe my life was threatened, and now I say it even more strongly and compassionately in response to this hemorrahage when I “knew” at the time I was a stroked-out goner. While I can’t take back the hemorrahage, I can use it to make room for a greater and deeper understanding of my life’s purpose and meaning. I’m thankful for that. Let me tell you something. It sure is better to be holed up in house under virtual medical house arrest for seven weeks than be in a hole under the ground for an eternity, and it sure is better for me to receive a house plant and get-well messages when I’m here on leave from the classroom than a floral arrangement and condolences after I’ve left this world.

It may at first seem ridiculous or impossible to feel good when things are not going well. Actually, though, feeling good is really quite pleasant. It’s that teaspoon of sugar that makes the medicine go down. I may sound like Mary Poppins, but being positive it’s a lot better than being negative and feeling lousy. Yeah, so if I have to have any attitude towards this situation as I must, I’m kind of thankful for this hemorrahage. Wish it didn’t happen and wish it didn’t have to put Susan, my sons, my family, and my friends through the ringer. But, it did happen and there’s nothing anyone can do anything about that. But, like anything else personally and professionally, how I deal with it and live my attitude is something I can do.

No, I can’t go back to the way things were. Now my moment to moment awareness of things both great and small is so much more sharpened. In this dark moment, I can see so much light. It’s here, not around the corner, not in the next moment, not out there in the cosmos. It’s here. Today. This moment. Now. Life can be made stronger by the very things that might destroy it–if you let it. If you take each moment to let life touch you, and reach into you, it will delight you. I’m not talking about reaching for the stars, for that better position, for that next grant or publication, or for that longer resume. Life’s real treasures can come in such unassuming chests: the breath in my nostrils, the light in my eyes, the sound in my ears, the touch on my skin; it’s in my Susan, my sons and their wives, my grandchildren, other members of the family, those who call me friend, my colleagues, the students. It’s the daily bread that is the sweetest thing in life.

–Louis–