WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT TEACHING FROM MY GARDEN

      It is the first day of winter, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, Robert Frost’s darkest evening of the year. So, early this morning I went out “dashing through the snow,” South Georgia’s wintry snow, that is. No, not the white stuff that’s blanketing a lot of the country. I’m talking about the brown stuff. We here in south Georgia have been having a month long heavy blizzard of crunchy, sticking in everything and everywhere pine needles. With our thermometer hitting the high 70’s, the white stuff wouldn’t last very long. Anyway, during this academic seasonal break and the break in our seasonal temperatures, “Tis the season” to get into my flower gardens before Susan and I head off for nearly two weeks of spoiling rotten our west coast grand-munchkins.

      While I was raking, mulching, weeding, transplanting, seeding, plants, and cutting beds, I found I was Charles Dickens writing my own Christmas Carol of semester past, semester present, and semester future. I saw all sorts of metaphorical lessons in my garden for my classroom teaching and about each student. I thought I’d share them with you:

1. You know, there is nothing “dead” about the dead of winter. As an avid gardener, I must be an optimistic futurist, for I know that all the flowers of all the tomorrows in my garden rest in the seeds of today.

2. There is beauty, obvious and hidden, in the garden, and as I look for it, I’ll find it. And, as I find it, I will realize and be grateful for the gracious gift has been given to me.

3. Two years ago, I lost over 300 prize amaryllis in a matter of two weeks to some disease. I have been slowly replacing them ever since. But, it taught me a lesson, a big lesson. The gorgeous blooms one season, mean nothing. Pests, climate, and a host of other factors mean that every season is going to be a new challenge. What worked one season may not or may need tweaking the next. Past success means nothing; nor does past failure. If I want my garden to bloom, I can’t rest on either laurels or failure. I’ve got to approach my garden like I’ve never done anything before and just go out there and work at it in it.

4. You know, when I see a seed or bulb I perceive a blooming flower. All seeds and bulbs are in the process of becoming.

5. As a gardener, if I enter my garden doubting that a seed I sow or bulb I plant, that doubt will make me lose my commitment and dedication to doing whatever needs be done to nurture it, and the feeling of accomplishment I might have acquired if I did not fear the attempt would not occur.

6. No two places in my garden are the same; no two seasons are the same; no two plants are the same. A gardener is always an “attempter,” a “pusher,” a “let’s see-er.”

7. If I want to improve the blooms on my flowers, I don’t tend to the existing blooms. The blooms you see are created by the roots you don’t see. So, I can change tomorrow’s blooms only if I strengthen the hidden roots. After all, it’s not about watering and feeding the plants; it’s about retaining the water and nourishment after I’ve left the garden.

8. As a gardener I am always uneasy of defining gardening as the quest of the prized plant, if we mean a topiary approach of pruning plants in a quest for the supposed perfect specimen, if we mean the perfect garden layout. Personally, I have a different conception of gardening. I prize the method of cultivating a flower so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth. It shouldn’t be any different in education with the cultivation of a student.

9. Students are like flowers. To grow and bloom, they need warmth, nourishment, and caring.

10. If each of us could see the miracle of a single flower, our whole attitude towards life would change. It’s no different with seeing a student.

11. Those who contemplate the beauty of each flower find reserves of strength that will long endure.

12. Working in the garden, big or small, is, in the end, all about the joy of helping a seed or bulb bring itself to bloom. And, that joy is the fruit of patience, persistence, nurturing, acceptance, caring, and loving.

      Susan and I warmly and sincerely wish each of you a glorious holiday season, merry Christmas, happy Chanukah, joyous Kwanzaa, and may you know only moments of heart-filling joy and reap only rich harvests of smiles in the coming year.

Louis

ON WINE, A GOOD BOOK, AND TEACHING

     This week is, as Dickens would say, the worst of times and the best of times. It is a black, snarling, teeth gnashing time of coming up with those very anti-educational things we call final grades. It is also a sunny, smiling, and radiant time in each of my four first year American history survey classes we have that I call “Closure.” No more journals, films, issue papers, “words for the day,” study questions, evaluations, communication logs, exercises, projects, and a bunch of other stuff. Just shared reflections on what it all meant. Instead of torturous, anti-learning final exams, this last day we all meet is a time when each of us, including me, brings in something to find if there are any jewels of the semester’s sweet challenges in the toad’s crown, to paraphrase Shakespeare from “As You Like It.” It’s a time when we each openly delve within to see if we’ve come near the five “whys of it all” I discuss on the first page of the syllabus under the heading: “Why are we going to do all that we’re going to do, and what do I hope you get out of this course.” Closure, then, is far more than about what each student has learned about history or about pondering just what it is each of them has done or not done or about getting a grade. It’s more about focusing on what it all says about what each learned about their uniqueness, ability, capacity, talent, and potential. Closure is a brief and conscious contemplation about if and how each of them might have grown and changed. That is, “closure” is like attempting to see that this final day of the semester is an end without a conclusion, something that is both timely and timeless. It’s about saying “this is who I was when I came into class and this is who I am leaving this class and this is who I know I can become.” It is that brief time, sometimes very emotional, we each openly reflect on the “I won’t forgets,” that is, what being together for a semester meant to each of us and what it is that we are taking with us and within us beyond the intellectual constrictions of grade-getting, the physical confines of the classroom, and the time limits of the semester.

      I work hard, not always successfully, to consciously, visibly, and vocally inoculate meaning and purpose into everything, to create an experience to remember, to make the classroom into something of a ten week long “last lecture” that lasts, to create an Energizer bunny environment that goes on and on and on, to make the classroom experience so memorable that students will talk about it for years to come, and to make the classroom experience a transforming one for each student. And so, at the beginning of the week I was struggling. I was mumbling about the house, “What to bring in?” I looked around and around and around. Then, on Monday morning, just before the first of the four classes would meet, it hit me. I smiled. I went to the cupboard and grabbed a wine glass. Next, I went to the bookshelf and picked out a book. Then, I walked to campus for that last time we would meet as a class carrying my objects.

     Why a wine glass and a book? I’m glad you asked. You know the end of the semester is a bitter-sweet affair for me. There’s always within me a tug-of-war between the people I’ve come to know–and love–in those classes ending and the adventure of meeting a new set of people in classes beginning. I guess it’s the usual conflict between two “natures” within each of us: the comfortable and reassuring call of the known and the nervous curiosity-stirring call of the adventurous voyage into the unknown.. But, there’s more to it. It’s like sipping wine and reading a book. When I am sipping a wine whose taste I dislike or reading a book I’m not enjoying, my face wrinkles up like a pug and I can hear myself saying “Ugh, rotgut!” or “What trash!” or worse. I either spill it out or put it down and walk away; or, I either feverishly gulp it down or race furiously through it with a sort of “let’s get this over with” attitude; or, my mind drifts to other places and times, and I can’t wait to get away from them with a relieving “thank goodness” wave of a good riddance. But, when the wine is to my taste and I like the book, I slow down with a soothing and satiating warm glow of “aaah” enveloping me. I don’t want to rush away from the moment; I want to take a look around and see their beauty. I want to savor each drop or word. I don’t want to say goodbye to the time I’m in and the place where I am. I don’t want an ending to the richness of the experience to live, to achieve, to feel, to learn, and to grow. And, for the last seventeen years since my epiphany, though, like each of us academics, each student certainly needs additional aging and editing, I have never felt anyone in any class, especially those first year students, to be anything other than a good glass of wine or book.

Louis

LEAVING TRACKS

      Today started in a nonchalant way. Got up at 4:30 am, turned on the computer, brewed some coffee, and did the Washington Post crossword puzzle online. Then, I opened my mailbox before I went into Web-CT to read student journals and project evaluations. As I rolled down the message headings, exercising my deleting index finger, I stopped and opened a message titled, “no longer a by-stander.” It was from a student whom I’ll call Don. His words sent me into silent, slow motion:

Dr. Schmier, in this course on the Holocaust you gave me a chance to completely change the way I think, feel, and believe I didn’t want or thought I needed. I have to be honest I took this course only because it fit my schedule. I was one of those who laughed as we were crowed into a make-believe boxcar on that first day as we were forced to watch some pictures of a death camp. I wasn’t happy that you required that we journal every day on our own prejudices and on the prejudices we witnessed. I didn’t see the point. It was busy work to me. I thought it was stupid that you said that our prejudices have an impact on our feelings, thoughts, and actions and that from such supposed little things that we do unthinkingly and naturally come the big things of disrespect, hatred, segregation, lynchings, and the Holocaust.

I guess you could say I grew up in a racist family, which of course is going to make me somewhat racist. Well, more than somewhat. I never realized that growing up this way had affected me the way it had until watching the films and answering those reflecting questions and journaling and working on the play as a victim. And I didn’t even know it until a couple of weeks ago. Something happened then that changed my view of you, this course, me, and of other people who were different than me. I was in the farmers market getting a watermelon (I know that this is hard to believe because it isn’t the season for watermelon but this is a true story) and I saw this black women who my dad would call the “N” word and I thought to myself that she was a “N” because that was how I was brought up. But, then, a flash of some people from the last film hit me and I remembered how it felt being put in the boxcar heading for a death camp on that first day in class and I caught myself saying ‘That’s not right’ and feeling I had done something wrong. I let it pass. Anyways I was checking out, but they don’t take credit cards, and I only had 2 dollars. The watermelon cost like $3.68 and I hear some woman behind me say “I have to buy gas but I don’t need all of this 10 dollars and I have been helped out before so here is 2 more dollars.” The woman that gave me the money was the woman who my dad would have called a “N woman.” This nice lady who I thought was just an “N” gave me 2 dollars just for a watermelon that I didn’t even need. This lady was poor because she told me that she had been waiting to get gas for a month just so the price would go down. My eyes teared up and I felt like a horrible person. I saw her differently. She changed while I was standing there. Well, I know I changed. She wasn’t a ‘n’ (no more in capitals). She was just a nice person with different colored skin. I thought about that and what I had believed for days and days and went back over my journal entries and looked at myself. It wasn’t easy admitting stuff to myself. I talked with my friends who told me to forget it, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. As you might say, it was stuck fast in my heart. If it wasn’t for this class I wouldn’t have felt like this. It’s your fault, but a nice and important fault. Things were happening inside me I didn’t know were happening and I’m not sure I understand. My dad and I had a hot talk over Thanksgiving when I told him not to use the ‘n’ word in front of me and even asked why he thought the way he did. I wasn’t going to be a by-stander and a perpetrator this time or anymore. He wondered what ‘communist stuff’ you were teaching here. For the first time in my life I stood up to him (I surprised him and myself). I told him quietly, ‘Respect. Plain old fashioned respect that you always talk about. No exceptions. Respect for myself, respect African-Americans, respect for women, respect for homosexuals, respect for other religions. To treat everyone like us and different from us with respect. No exceptions. That’s what he’s teaching me and that’s what I’m learning.’ He just gave me a startled straight face and a humph. We were kind of quiet with each other for the rest of the time, but something happened between us, something good I think. I think or want to think that there’s a respect that wasn’t there before. So, I just want to thank you for teaching this class the way you did. You didn’t preach from high up. You just let us find our own way by showing us the way with the films and speakers and journals and the play. Thanks for helping me start to make myself a better person. I’m going to make sure this lasts and grows, and start teaching my father–slowly.

      “A nice but important fault.” It felt warm to be “blamed” that way. God knows how many times I re-read his message. It sure got me to thinking. In simplest terms, we academics too often calculate success by status, renown, and position. The traditional way of looking at someone’s academic life is to read the resume of her or his accolades and achievements, that is, the degrees, tenure, publications, grants, and administrative positions. Seventeen years ago, my definition of success started changing from “important” to “significant,” from wanting to be important to wanting to do important things. You know that’s what Peter Drucker meant when he urge achievers to “move beyond success to significance.” Sure, feeling academically successful, having that list of publications and grants, having secured tenure, having received that promotion, having acquired that title, can make someone feel satisfied and accomplished. I know it did me. But, feeling significant, feeling that your life means something, knowing that your life matters, knowing that you made a difference–a positive–in someone’s life, knowing that the world is a bit better for you having been here, well, that’s another thing. And, I’ve found out since 1991, that’s far more potent and lasting than any book, article, grant, or title. I loved the scholarly things I did and accomplished, but it doesn’t match up to making a difference in someone’s life. Having helped a few people help themselves to become the people they are capable of becoming: that’s really what I want to be remembered for.

Louis