As I am inching out from the haze of Susie’s birthday cheesecake induced caloric shock, being totally grounded by both the surgeon and Susie, I have little else to do but ruminate about a question. Rene Decaartes said except for our thoughts, there is nothing in our power. The motherboard of our integrated intellectual, emotional, and physical actions, then, are guided by our thoughts formed by ideas, outlooks, visions, philosophies, and memories. So, this is my question: what if we thought of the classroom as a moral entity? That is, what if we thought the essence of the classroom is the nature and quality of the relationship among people? By that I mean the core of morality is love. Love is at the heart of presence, mindfulness, awareness, attentiveness, alertness and otherness; they are the bedrock of respect for others; respect is the basis of concern for others; concern is upon what empathy rests; empathy is the foundation of compassion. Compassion is upon what sympathy sits. Sympathy is love, respect, concern, empathy, and compassion in action. They are all forms of generosity; they are the glue of connection; they’re the fabric of authenticity and openness; they put us in the present; they give us a presence; they are an expansiveness that brings us out from our tunnel vision imposed by label, stereotype, and generality; they make life happen in the classroom.

Each is limitless fuel. Each operates more and more for the good of both each of us and each of them. Each offers deeper and deeper ethical and moral insight. Each challenges taboos, rejects conventional mores, opposes traditional stances. Each rips out labels and destroys the scaffolds of stereotype and generality. Each allows us to slip gently into another person’s life. And, each is a stronger and stronger foundation of dedication, commitment, and perseverance. The irony is that in their sweat equity is an unbelievable liberation for both student and teacher. It is simply committing the Golden rule to living your life rather than committing it to memory.

Last Sunday, I spoke of some life lessons I had learned in the course of the last 25 years of my life. Life has a way of coming into and getting in the way of each of our lives. Life comes onto campus and into the classroom. It does not need a visitor’s pass, nor does it stop at the classroom door’s threshold. Understanding that we really only wear one hat in and out of the classroom, from my nearly five decades in the classroom, I’d like to take these life lessons into the life of the classroom:

• First, and most important, each teacher should silently sing to her/himself Fred Rogers’ “It’s You I Like.” about each student, and loudly live the lyrics; the way we see each student is the way we treat each of them, and the way we treat them is what they become in our eyes.
• Life in the classroom is not as simple, not as static, as far too many profs make it out to be; actually it is a complex and complicated and dynamic entity made up of many moving “parts;” we cannot be deaf to Heraclitus’ assertion that all is flux and nothing stands still while we teach as if the classroom is a scene in Madam Tussaurd’s wax museum
• We can’t applaud classroom diversity with one hand and shove everyone into impersonal and conforming and uniforming and confining categories, labels, stereotypes, and generalizations; we should see the sacredness, uniqueness, and nobility in that those human beings. If we don’t, there is no loving respect, no caring empathy, no hopeful compassion, no encouraging connection, no supporting community.
• A teacher should be led by a deeply reflected upon and publicly articulated vision of teaching and a philosophy of education, not pushed by her or his problems and fears.
• A teacher is chosen to be a servant to meet the deeper needs of each student and make that four letter word, “love,” resound louder than that other four letter word, “fame.”
• A teacher should not ignore or be ignorant of the latest research on learning while pouring endless hours into her or his scholarly research. Instead, she or he must spend those countless hours pouring over research on teaching methods that encourage learning and generate positive attitudes towards learning, and learn how to apply them.
• I am convinced that a teacher should be a transformer, not merely a transmitter; that she or he should help a student become a better person, not just get a better grade.
• I am convinced more than ever that we teachers, as futurists, should use our teaching talents for something that will outlast us. Each day we should sacrifice what “is” for what “can become.” To use a gardening analogy, the true meaning of teaching is to plant the seeds for a forest through which we won’t stroll.
• Before students will speak, they have to feel noticed, respected, safe, and heard; too often the worse thing a teacher can do is to bring her or his authority and power to bear.
• It you want to be a better teacher and if you want better students, become a better human being.
  A teacher is like a flame; she or he can warm, but she or he can also burn.
• I’ve learned that it’s not enough to do the scholarship; I must do the faith, hope, and love of each student as well, if not more.
• The less you open your heart to each student, the more your heart suffers. If you don’t open your arms and embrace each student, you’ll wind up embracing only yourself.
• The better teachers are the better see-ers and listeners, not the better talkers and more published.
  Effort is not something to be diligently avoided. To wish for a classroom free of challenges, to be dismayed when things aren’t as you wish, to be frustrated that you cannot control circumstances, is to wish for a life in which it would be impossible to find anywhere any time.
• The great teachers never are leached of emotion. They are never so-called objective. They have the ability to enter into the moment so totally that they lose themselves in the power of that moment and bond with the students in the classroom.
• If something is working out well for you at that moment, by all means stick with it. Yet, like all things around you, that moment will change. So, also be open to new and different people, places, methods and things; and, to be a perennial “adjuster,” “tweaker,” and “modified.”
• Getting an education should make hours seem like minutes, not minutes seem like hours.
• Enjoy the difference. Don’t shrink individual students into a common herd. Don’t rob them of their dimensions and flatten them into lifeless, stereotyped placards. Don’t strip them of their names, identity, stories, and uniqueness.
• Students rarely succeed unless they enjoy what they’re doing and they’re having fun at what they’re doing; enjoyment and fun are not the opposite of work, boredom is.
• Teachers can accomplish more and make more of a difference by being interested in other people, by having people as their passion, than they can by trying to be interesting and getting other people interested in them.
• Neither students nor the subject make teaching enjoyable. Teaching is enjoyable when the teacher decides to enjoy it; when they find gratification outside of themselves in service to others; when they delight in the beauty of each student, they make each one of them more beautiful; when they cherish teaching, they make it more meaningful. Everyone has an opportunity to be a great teacher because everyone has an opportunity to serve a student.
• Why do so many academics think that in the fabric of the classroom their fibers aren’t woven together with the fibers of each student.
• No matter how much you plan, life in the classroom will throw you a curve ball. Learn to hit it. Within every pitch thrown at you there’s an opportunity to make a hit and become a better batter.
• Be happy with the little “victories,” and they soon add up to big accomplishments; appreciate and value every moment, and they will add up to a great treasure. There’s no such thing as a small step in a great journey; no such thing as a small attempt in a great effort. No such thing as a small kindness in loving.
• Focus your thoughts and your feelings on the goodness that’s there in your present situation. Then consider what you can do to make that goodness grow.
• You can’t reach out and touch “students,” but you can reach out and touch one, one at a time. Being good and doing good is the best way to feel good; be thankful for being in the classroom and you’ll make it better; focus on the goodness in each student and you’ll do whatever you can to make that goodness increase.
• So many of us so often talk of students as if they are completed adults. First, the research says that, with the exception of “non-traditional” students, they are not adults. They’re at best “protoadults” or”adults in training.” Second, just who among us is ever so complete at any moment in our life that we have no need to grow, change, and transform?
• All students want teachers who are accessible; too many teachers agree to be accessible only to the “good” student whom they find agreeable and when it is convenient for them.
• There is so much more snap, crackle, and pop in the classroom, there is so much more adventure, imagination, creativity, allure, fun, and excitement if it is a dance among equals rather than between professors who want to be treated as kings and students who are treated as servile subjects.
• The enemies to learning are the isolators and alienators of “strangerness,””aloneness,” and “loneliness.”
• On the surface, most students seem completely ordinary. Yet when you make the effort to truly know each of them, you’ll find a unique and fascinating, complicated, and complex individual..
• Finally, and also most important, the best evidence of the quality of our teaching is not that we just produce first-rate students, but that we help produce first-rate people; not just in helping them write a better paper or perform a better experiment or paint better or sculpt better, but in helping people improve their lives. Not just in helping learn how to make a living, but to learn how to live. The proof of the educational pudding is not really in the grades, GPAs, or awards the students receive, but in their character and the quality of the lives they lead.

Now, there is nothing pollyannish or hallmarkish about these observations, for they are an effort, patience, commitment, perseverance, and endurance. They are in accordance with the latest findings of the research on learning. In the last analysis, they are about optics: how we see each student, ourselves, the world about us. They are about otics: how we listen to each student, to ourselves, and to the world about us. They are about lyrics: how we feel about others and ourselves. They are about kinetics: how we act towards others and ourselves.

Louis