THE “TEACHER’S OATH,” X

       You know, I’m collapsed here in the Atlanta airport, waiting to board the plane that will carry me back to my Susan’s arms.  I’m brain tired and physically exhausted, and in a few days I’m facing a tryptophan coma induced by a caloric overdose.  For you outside the States, that means that very special and unique American holiday of Thanksgiving is only a few days away.  I’ll be heading up to Nashville to be with one son’s and my sister’s family as I leave my Lilly family.  From overstuffed to overstuffed.  Four days of exchanging, uplifting, reflecting, challenging, connecting, and learning at the Lilly Conference among friends, old and new, will fill you.  Lilly is a working teaching conference, a joyous reunion,  a reflective retreat, and a spiritual experience all wrapped up in one.  Four days of “working the crowd” with my “Teacher’s Oath.”  For me, once again, the Lilly reaffirmed that we teachers have more moral and life-shaping influence than anyone else except maybe within families.  The Oath challenges those fixed, clinical, disconnecting attitudes that keep us from unconditionally loving and caring about each and every student, that keep us from our humanity and that of others, that keep us from fully embracing teaching.  One night, as I was reading the Oath to get myself prepped for one of my presentations, I realized it was a treasure map to riches rivaling that of Monte Cristo trove.  You see, living richly is not necessarily a matter of living high on the hog.  It is living with purpose, with meaning, with authentic joy, with significant in every second.
       The Oath says unconditionally love each and every student more than you love your labels of yourself and them; it says each of those students are diamonds in the rough; it makes us think about our responsibilities and the consequences of our attitudes and actions; it asks us how well do we treat people who are in the same room with us but seem a world away and with whom we have little in common except our humanity; it says we are at our best when we notice and help those who are most in need of us; it demands–yes, demands–with a lot of unconditional TLC that we create a classroom filled with a powerful, invigorating, positive teaching TLC, a “therapeutic learning climate,” for everyone to breathe.
       Let me let you in on a little secret to decoding this treasure map.  The secret to happiness, lasting happiness, in teaching is to give yourself away; the more you give yourself away, the humbler you are; the humbler you are, the quieter you get; the quieter you are, the more you see and listen; and, the more you see and listen, the more awake and alert you are to others.  So, the most powerful way to improve the classroom is to improve yourself; the best way to create purpose for others is to bring purpose into yourself; see beyond yourself and you’ll see not only others but inside yourself; seek to understand and you’ll be understood; listen and you’ll be heard; show your loving, hopeful, encouraging, supporting face and you’ll be surprised at the faces looking back at you.  So, peer keenly into that mirror and polish it with a passion and joy.  It arouses the strongest emotions and creates the most powerful of connections.
To follow the Oath, you have to have a sharp empathetic eye for each student.  But, empathy is but a first step.  It means nothing if it isn’t lovingly converted into action.  Now, that is challenging!  But, it is fulfilling!!  It is significant!!!  If we want to make the world a better place, we should enrich and improve lives, not just fill heads and hand out credentials.  We should help people develop, debate, understand, reform, revere, and enact their own oaths.  We have to help them help themselves make the big choices in life.  We have to help them help themselves become the people they are are capable of becoming.  To do that, we have to face up to, live, and deal with both our own complexity and that of each student.  And, if it takes more time and effort, so be it.  Lives are at stake.  The future is at stake. Take and live by the Oath.
Louis

THE “TEACHER’S OATH,” IX

I’m starting to put on my Lilly conference game face and getting myself in the groove.  Reading David Brook’s column in yesterday’s NY TIMES (11/15) certainly helped.  It was timely since it fits in with what I was thinking about.  Curious, for my Holocaust course, I have been reading Daniel Goleman’s VITAL LIES, SIMPLE TRUTHS and Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel’s BLIND SPOTS.   Added to that I was pouring over Teresa Amabile’s article, “Inner Work Life.”   Brooks’ column and these three–two of which he refers to–are pertinent to the meaning of the Oath.
We academics are human.  Unfortunately, we far too often deny our humanity; we far too often cocoon ourselves in our disciplines; we far too often cloak ourselves in our scholarship; we far too often concentrate on the belief that we are solely rational, thinking homo sapiens; we far too often pride ourselves, maybe almost inflate ourselves with an arrogant air of superiority, as being unemotionally and disengaged “objective.”  But, we are human, and degrees, titles, positions don’t invalidate that simple truth!  For human beings, there is no such thing as “objective.”  We, like any fellow human being, never see; we perceive, and it’s through the lens of perception that we best serve our “selfs.” Yet, we too often deceive ourselves that the lower order of emotion only distorts the higher order of reason; we too often accept the fallacy that there is no interplay between cognition and emotion; we so often deny the research which finds that thoughts, feelings, and action are very tightly intertwined; we too often assert in defiance or ignorance of the neuro-scientific research that emotion and cognition are in separate cubbyholes rather than interact in very complex ways; and so, we don’t want to understand how what Teresa Amabile calls “inner work life” is crucial to what I call “outer work life” of both academic and student; we too often deceive ourselves into believing we are above what is called “motivated blindness,” “normalcy prejudice,” “bystander syndrome,” and/or “blind spot-ness,” that is, we believe of ourselves and students what is in our interests to perceive and believe, and what is emotionally satisfying to accept; we process the facts we like; we inflate our virtues; we deflate our vices; we follow the ways we want to act rather than the ways we should act.  When we deny our humanity, however, the danger is that far too often these self-deceptions, these perceptions, are in conflict with simple truths.  And the truth is that the professor with the longest scholarly resume or the greatest renown, in the spirit of the Greek tragedies, may also be the most one dimensional, least engaged in the classroom, least caring of individual needy students, and have the most disconnected experience with students while the seemingly most unprepared, quietest, most unmotivated, most disinterested students may just have unique as yet untapped potential waiting to be mined with caring, faith, and love.

So, we should dare to understand that when anything happens on both sides of the podium, it triggers interacting cognitive and emotional processes, each feeding the other, each validating pre-existing perceptions, affecting  motivations and performance. For me, then, literally taking the Oath each morning is a tool to counter any tendency to be conditionally caring, to fight off the onslaught of temptation to compromise by vision.  In some ways, the Oath is an intervention, for it is a  recognition of the sins that lurk disguised in our “normal,” “average,” “blind spots,” and “vital lies.”  It’s a reminder of the quicksand that can suck me down into rationalizations to justify weakening my sense of service. Struggling to keep it in the forefront of my mind and heart each day, struggling even more to live it each day, helps me to come to terms with my humanity;  it asks me to put my heart and soul into teaching as well as mind and body.

I am driven, then,  by a sense of dedication and obligation to follow a philosophic code, to live in a code of honor, to abide by this Oath is a way of keeping my spirit aloft.

Louis

THE “TEACHER’S OATH,” VIII

Be love, now.  Be faith, now.  Be hope, now. Be empathy, now.  Be compassion, now.  Be all these things, unconditionally, now.   Respect life and every life, now, for it and they are so short.  We don’t have an language in academia to talk about this kind of unorthodox thing.  To most academics “A Teacher’s Oath” is cause for eye-rolling, dismissal of utopian puff and fluff; it’s hallmarkish, new agey, touchy-feely; it’s academically uncool; it’s non-quantative; it’s immeasurable;  and, it’s “unassessible.”   For me that is sad, for too many of us academics have given up the search for personal meaning as we aim to fit in, belong, submit, and be controlled by “the system.”   Rather than figure out what we’re each about and develop a personal vision that gives a special sense of purpose to teaching, that endows a sacredness to what we do as teachers, we enclose ourselves in cells others have constructed for us.  The sadness is that when we do that, we not only compliantly and submissively grovel and kiss up, we deny our “onlyness,” the unique space only each of us stands in; we empower a fearfulness and powerlessness; we remain in the valley of darkness and can’t walk to the sunlit top of our inner mountain where that little voice in our heart and soul resides.

It is not what the Oath is or says, it’s what the Oath does.  The Oath shouldn’t be an anomaly, for the only people who make a difference are the ones who are crazy enough to believe they can, and push both themselves and students.  I guess I’m one of the insane.  To me the Oath is, in the words of Peter Senge, the way to personal mastery; it comes from within; it is the sense of why a person is alive; it is the fundamental soul of a teacher.

And, the outer layers of my pedagogy come from the core of my being, from responding to people and circumstances with my heart.  I don’t want to be just a credentialist, a transmitter of information, a tester, a grader, an assessor, a developer of critical thinking.  We are supposed to be good at being human.  Teaching and learning are not about information or technique or method or technology or assessment.  They’re a holistic “and,” a blending of knowledge, pedagogy, technology, and people.  I start with putting loving and caring into people; then comes the method, technique, and technology, driven by a desire to do something meaningful and significant.  I want to help students become their own learners, their own questers, their own thinkers, their own deciders, better persons.  I want to democratize access to learning so students would not have to be dependent on a priesthood of intellectuals and professionals.  It is more often than not the exercise of classroom love; I hope it is my defining character, and I want to communicate that love through how I use the methods, techniques, and technologies.  It is tough and challenging.  To truly live teaching is to take full responsibility for living teaching. And to do that, means to exercise that responsibility with love in every moment.  It means we have to touch the deep value of our selves; it means the less we think of tenure, promotion, research and publishing, the more we think of people; the more we think of people, the more we will put into teaching; and, the more we put into teaching, the more powerful and meaningful and significant will be our efforts.

Now, I realize that my real job is not to conform to what others think, not even students, but to know and to help students know that life’s goal is to find our unique way, our unknown path, and thereby to find a way to transform from enslaved ass kissing to embolden kicking ass.   That means, at the end of the day, teaching is done with the heart; it’s the Oath that sets my heart on fire, and at the heart of the most effective teaching tool anywhere is a heart on fire that ignites other hearts.  If that be insane or crazy, so be it.  It’s the way to help each student help her/himself become the person she or he is capable of becoming, and thus to make her or him a better person and this world better.

Louis

THE “TEACHER’S OATH,” VII

Back to my conversation with this professor at Lilly-North about my “Teacher’s Oath.”

“I’ve found that professors become so easily jaded, resigned, annoyed, angered almost in proportion to the extent the classroom to them isn’t the most important, meaningful academic place to be and teaching isn’t the most crucial academic thing to do.  It’s also like something you said.”

“What was that?”

“‘I don’t have tenure.’  Getting tenure, getting promoted, getting that grant, research, publishing, job guarantee, and quest for renown too often, far too often, get in the way of teaching.  Think about it.  Academics just love, demand, ‘peer review’ when it comes to publications, but talk about ‘peer observation’ when it comes to classroom teaching and all resistant hell breaks out.”

“Is that wrong?  After all, we have to put food on the table, pay our bills, put clothes on our kids, pay the mortgage.”

“At the expense of sacrificing students?  Yes!”

I explained that it’s always the students’ learning we sacrifice,, especially in those first year courses, those super and super-duper courses, with those inexperienced adjuncts and TAs; it’s not our scholarship that we’re willing to sacrifice.  For eons, administrators and professors have argued that the sole purpose of academia is scholarship—the more the better.  In the classroom, they explain, the purpose is to transmit information and credential.  Those conveniently narrow images, deeply embedded in the Ivory Tower, mould the attitudes and actions on most campuses, lip service to teaching not withstanding, constraining professors to focus on resumes and GPAs. Their decisions are expressed in terms of tenure and promotion, and the nature of assessment. I say convenient because they can black out the fact that whatever they do shapes the lives of the students.  They can ignore the fact that they are players in a classroom game of learning they don’t understand.  Without a purpose other than getting a salary or merely transmitting information, the classroom is so often a breeding ground for ‘ah me’ self-pity and ‘they’re letting anyone in’ misery.  The classroom sours because it doesn’t really work in favor of all that sweet tasting tenure and scholarly stuff.

As we talked, I told her that the Oath makes you aware of the responsibility of building people.  It uses human values, not scholarship or the quest for tenure, as decision-making criteria.  The Oath helps you sweeten teaching, filling moments with wondrous life and passion and purpose, even when its challenging and tough.  And it is tough, but teaching, while you have to work hard at it, doesn’t have to be hard work.  Following the Oath helps create a powerful momentum of purpose.  And, purpose gives you a reason to get going each day and strengthens your determination to persist when the going gets tough. Purpose pushes you firmly forward when circumstances want to push you backward.  And, I would argue that the only real failure is to hold back and be inauthentic.  No, the Oath is a guide, a moral and ethical guide, a code of conduct, a check-list of commitments,  if you wish.  Having a purpose in life is a lot of work. It is also an absolute necessity.

For me, the Oath is a map to keep on the purposeful road and not get lost.  Purpose makes all the difference in being able to live a deeply reflected and articulated vision.  The crucial factor in any undertaking is not what you must do, but why you are doing it in the first place.  You know the real secret, essence, and nature of teaching, I told her, is about learning, growing, changing, caring, daring, overcoming, giving, serving, and loving.  And, as you do that you get adventure, challenge, beauty, joy, significance. It’s a challenge for those who want to be better teachers.  It helps you walk through the minefield in the direction of effective teaching of being too hard and too easy on ourselves, between feeling hopeless and complacent, and between self-satisfaction and self-rightousness.  It’s a key to giving it our all at any given time with any given student to care about that student while consciously devoting ourselves to continuous self-improvement.  Taste the beauty, feel the possibilities and touch the purpose, hear the dream.  Purpose makes all the difference.

Louis

The “TEACHER’S OATH,” VI

I thought initially those two-liners that I sent back to that professor.  I thought that first line said it all about what should be our view towards students, but now slowly I’m beginning to see it means more, especially having added that second line.  It also means what should our view be towards ourselves.  To be honest, I’ve taken myself deeper with my reflections on the meaning of my “Teacher’s Oath” than I had expected.  The Oath is as much about facing up to ourselves as facing students; it’s a mirror reflecting ourselves as much as a window into students.  That outside mirror is a sharp and accurate reflection of our inside essence.  After all, every aspect of our lives is influenced every second by now we imagine teaching to be. And so, the kind of face we put on determines the kind of world we see and experience; and, what you get is who you are, how you act, and the way you think and feel.

The time we spend in the drousy darkness of fear, anger, frustration, annoyance, resentment is time we cannot spend in the awakened light of gentleness, empathy, compassion, love, joy, happiness, growth, kindness, satisfaction, fulfillment, significance.   You see, nothing is inherently boring, nothing is inherently fascinating, nothing is inherently interesting.  It is a matter of our choice.  Each student is a sacred human being if we choose to see her or him that way.  The classroom can be filled with endless riches if we choose to see it that way.  So, if we see the Oath as both window and mirror, as a guide to teaching others and self-teaching, to empathy and self-empathy, to compassion and self-compassion, we can use the Oath to get a better grip on ourselves and teach better; we can shift from negative blaming for everything that is not to our liking to positive responsibility.  We can transform from a “doesn’t matter” attitude to making what we do in the classroom matter.  Maybe this is what the Oath is also about: close that joyless and loveless, frustrated and resigned internal file outlining all the experiential examples of why “they don’t belong” or “students today don’t….” as well as  a bunch of files proving “I’m not good at….” or “I can’t….” from which we draw old perceptions and attitudes about ourselves and others, and inject them into the present to create our own reality as reasons to withdraw from students and maybe even create a pathological, weeding-out classroom climate.

For me, then, the Oath is a solvent that helps clean up the sludge of blame that clogs the arteries of joy, loving, kindness, empathy, and compassion.  Blame is such a hinderance to being awake and free.  When we blame others and circumstances with a host of “made me do it” for things that just don’t feel right, we enslave ourselves to circumstances and surrender our ability to change things; when we blame, we are not committed or dedicated, and we let the flimsiest excuse stop us; when we blame, we become close-minded and close-hearted; when we blame, we make half-hearted attempts; when we blame, we stop noticing and forget that it’s action that matters, not the need to blame.  When we let go of blame, stop being “response-unable,” we become “response-able,” things get quieter, more peaceful, less threatening, more empowering, and we focus on and take control of that one thing we can change:  ourselves.  And, it’s change and growth that are the signs of true, deep, and lasting learning, aren’t they–for us as well as for students.    For me, change is synonomous with choice; choice, in turn, is synonomous with responsibility; responsibility is synonomous with self-empowerment.  And, empowerment is synonomous with taking it all in in order to let it all out.

Louis