Zhengzhou, May 26:  Diary,  I once read how Herb Brooks, coach of the “miracle” 1980 American Olympic hockey team that won the Gold Medal, and Phil Jackso, Zen master and pro basketball coach, began their coaching with philosophy, with reflective purpose, not strategy or tactic.  Wonder what would happen if we academics had a deeply reflected up and articulated philosophy of education and teaching, and began our classroom careers with our philosophy instead of someone else’s lecturing, testing, grading methods?   Wonder what would happen if we first profoundly asked a “why” of we do what we do before we merely described or did a “what” we do.  Wonder what would happen if we honestly know what is important to us and figured out how to live our values.  Wonder what would happen if we really know and make the concerted effort to know and pay full attention to who is in the classroom with us.  Wonder what would happen if we notice, are awake to, listen to, are aware of, are attentive to both to ourselves and to those around us.  And, I wonder what would happen if we used all what we experience.   I ask because I know that’s what I had to do when I began to make myself over from professor to teacher in the early 1990s.

Louis

65 degrees outside this morning.  Brrrrr!   I didn’t know that our South Georgia thermometers went down that low.  As I was engaged in my mobile mediation of walking the pre-dawn streets, I thought about how this week I’ve begun to feel it.  My senses have been going on full alert.  I’ve been slowly going deep inside myself in a kind of meditation, getting into the groove, and putting on my game face.  The Lilly-North experience is next week and I’m getting myself ready to learn.  I always get this way about week before a Lilly.  Anyway, I guess that is why what happened yesterday happened.  I was writing my one word of how I felt on the whiteboard as I and each student do each day.  As I wrote the word, “alert,” I was acutely aware that the wet pen was going dry. I looked at it and then glanced at the faded, barely visible, red scribble on the board.  I stared.  “The ink has been used up from use and the pen is now almost useless,” I thought to myself.

Suddenly, a question dawned on me.  Actually, now that I think about it, it was more of a riddle:  What can be used in the classroom constantly and unconditionally without being used up?  Answer:  kindness, wisdom, faith, hope, trust, strength, love, belief, integrity, respect, truth, honesty, compassion, empathy,   In fact, the more you use these “things,” the more you’ll end up with more of them.

Think about it.  Are there limits to how much love your heart can hold, how much beauty you can admire, how much joy you can experience, how much kindness you can show, how much faith you can have, how much hope you can offer, how much goodness you can you imagine, how much support and encouragement can you provide, how much generosity can flow from you?  No!  The proverbial sky is the limit.  And, it doesn’t cost a red cent!

Unlike the ink in that pen, some of the most powerful, significant, valuable, influential things in teaching and life are never depleted.  In fact, the more you use them, the more you live with your heart and spirit, the richer, deeper, more abundant, more profound, more meaningful, more amazing, more energized, more beautiful, more significant, more dedicated, more committed, more fulfilling, more satisfying, more joyous, more complete, fuller, the more miraculous your teaching and life in general become–and the more positively and inspirational infectious they become.  After all, as someone–I forget whom–said, the curve of a smile always sets things straight.  One last word.  Think this all is touchy-feely fluff?  Or, just a bunch of snappy sayings?  They’re not.  They’re the application of the hard science stuff of Teresa Amabile’s “positive feeling,” Carol Dweck’s  “right kind of praise” and “growth mindset,” Martin Seligman’s “resilience,” Peter Sense’s “fifth discipline,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow,” and Richard Boyartzis’ “resonant leadership”–not to mention Daniel Goleman’s emotional and social intelligences.

Louis

My Dean has challenged her faculty by coming up with what she calls “The Giraffe Award,” to be given to the A & S faculty member who sticks her or his neck out the farthest.  It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, among her faculty picks up the gauntlet.  I know that I did.   I hope she means it because I put my neck way out there, placing my exposed nape on the chopping block in the Holocaust class.  Briefly, with a gulp, and in the spirit of Joseph Campbell, I added to what I had planned for the class in order to have a class that was waiting out there for me and the students.  After struggling whether “to do or not to do” for the couple of years, I got over my reluctance, got past my resistance, ramped up my determination, made the commitment, and dove in.  Beyond what I already do in class for the students to have a visceral and meaningful experience, to “de-intellectualize” and “de-statisticalize” an event, a description of which, as Elie Wiesel said, defies language, my additional instructions to them were simple, but profound and daring.  In order to  have a slight chance “to feel and experience” what we’re watching and reading, I challenged them to wear on their chest a bright, yellow, large, noticeable Jewish star with the word “Jude” boldly written on it whenever they were awake and wherever they went.  In addition to keeping a daily “prejudice journal,” they now have to keep a daily “star response” journal to record the responses of others and of themselves.  For the last four weeks, they, at least, most of them, have courageously and heroically been wearing it on campus, out in the Valdosta community, back home:  to classes, on dates, to the bars, at parties, to sorority and fraternity gatherings, to social events, to ball games, to the stores, to church, among family and friends; some were allowed by their employers to wear it at work; some wore it at personal and family celebrations; one wore it to a job interview (she actually got the job on the spot because she did, although she can’t wear it on the floor}. One young A & S “non-giraffe” professor, shaking his head and smiling, said to one of the students, “Well, that’s Louis.  I wish I could do something like that, but he’s had tenure almost as long I’ve been alive.”  As the student reported back to me, she asked a barrage of questions in her journal entry, “I am learning far much more about the Holocaust I couldn’t get from watching films or reading books or even listening to guest speakers.  Don’t you all have something called ‘academic freedom’ to do what you think needs doing for us to learn?  Why is he so scared?  Why is he obviously holding back?  Why isn’t he giving us the all his insight and experience?  Why isn’t he being creative and imaginative to bring …..alive.  He doesn’t have the nerve to do the hard stuff.  Why?”  From the mouths of proverbial babes.

Simple questions; complicated and complex answers.  I’ll just ask what PBS’ “Declining By Degrees” asks.  How many of us professors, public and private bravado not withstanding, have the nerve to take the condom off our classrooms and stop practicing safe teaching?  How many of us are willing to tackle  huge, complex, sensitvie, and controversial subjects in a risky but meaningful way.  How many of us shrink away however we beat and inflate our “academic freedom” chests?   What the heck are we here for, to buckle under to the ever-increasing pressure to teach to some useless standard assessment test, to concentrate on being assessed, to focus on weighty, confining, quantitative  academic standards, to hand out grades, to credentialize, to get tenure and promotion?   No.  the real test is to explore, not to test.  The real test is to be meaningful, not to grade.  The real test is, as one student said, to create a “revolution inside,” to be an agent of change, not to fill in a bubble sheet.  The real test is to endow a student with a tenured love for learning, not to guarantee us a tenured job.  Sure it is hard, the hard stuff always is. And, it may not be fun, but it’s the hard stuff that’s the most fulfilling and meaningful.  And, I ask, to paraphrase Hillel, if not us, who?  If not now, when?   And, you know what?  It’s working.  You should read the student’s journal entries.  I’ll give you one typical reflection:  “After yesterday and being truly bothered by wearing the star, I have noticed myself trying to cover it up a little bit more. However, I think this makes it even more noticeable. Either that or I am more aware of people looking at it now. When I got coffee today, the woman who was making it asked something I had not heard before, and not just why I was wearing it. I explained anyway, but she asked how I felt having to wear it. And I replied to her that it “sucks.” It is not fun to be stared at and I do not appreciate the attention I get from it.  I am beginning to understand and get it and I got to do it then.  I left realizing that I am supposed to feel like an outcast.  I have a whole new feeling about alienation. ”

I find myself being carried along by the momentum; I find myself sighing a sigh of accomplishment that this project just may be doing what an education is supposed to do to me and them:  grant the deepest, most emotional, richest, longest-lasting, and most fulfilling sense of meaningfulness.

Louis

Zhengzhou, May 25:  Diary, ….I was telling a Zhengzhou student that I find that there is a union between scientific studies of the brain and Chinese philosophy.  I explained that the latest of what I call “brainology” shows that there is an anatomical basis for four elements of Zen that are critical to teaching:  Attentiveness, Otherness, Alertness, and Awareness.  Their mutually supporting scientific and philosophical elements translate as and introduce what I have called  “four little big words”: faith,  belief, hope, and love. They combine to form a sense of community, to realize that there are others around whom the classroom is centered and are to be served, to nurture empathy and compassion, to see hidden beauty in the apparent bland, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to see sacredness clothed in street clothes, to see burning bushes everywhere, to know that the classroom is holy ground.  They both are about the social and emotional intelligences of caring about, respecting, being kind to, and connecting with students that is so essential in helping them help themselves perform at a level far higher and beyond their wildest dreams.

Ah, diary, it sounds so seductively clear and simple, doesn’t it.   Well, its not simple and easy.  Too many people too easily go overboard and too quickly unthinkingly jump on the pedagogical and technological bandwagon.   In the classroom, they offer a “faith-based” view, exert a special pull, and draw a special fervor. Too many are blindly tempted into one, magical summary pedagogical “7 habits” or “best teachers do” prescription.  Too many think all they have to do is to take a dose for a cure all.  They unthinkingly think they automatically themselves do everything, they work everywhere, they have great consequences all the time, they need no learning curve, they instantly clear away all obstructing boulders, and that they squelch second guessing or quell doubt.

The formula is pure simplicity:  attend a conference, participate in a workshop, read a book, and whallah:  all is instantly well.  It seldom is, isn’t it.  If for no other reason than it’s about complex and complicated individuals.  Nevertheless, too many people think it’s all about doing.  It’s not.  It’s about being; it’s about attitudes; it’s their inner selves; it’s about the inner selves of others; it’s about change inside.  All I know is that as we change inside we come to understand that when it comes to dealing with what life hands up, without excuses, we play our own hand;  that we can be our own person while still being respectful, understanding, and kind to others; that our lives are in our hands, and that it is up to us to keep playing those hands in a grateful, loving, and serving way.  I think, diary, if we can live a limitless vision–and that is a very big “if”–and help students start doing the same, we all can overcome the heavy and dragging weights of doubts, excuses, fears, judgmentalisms, and angers of our limiting ego that prevent us, to paraphrase a line from StarTrek, from boldly going where we have never gone before.

Louis