I’d like to make six quick points off the bat.  First, most classroom professors were not intensely trained as future classroom teachers; they were intensely trained as future research and publishing scholars.  Second, despite the herculean and dedicated efforts of so many Teaching and Learning Centers, the classroom generally hasn’t caught up with the science on learning.  Third, the findings of such scientific research on teaching and learning does not predominately focus on methodology or technology so much as it centers on emotion and attitude.  Fourth, and foremost we need to feel;  a required change in attitude requires a change of both mind and heart.  Fifth, good change comes slowly and arduously; nothing magical and quick and easy about it.  And finally, the academic research and publishing culture does not generally support such change or even emphasis on the classroom, lip service to teaching not withstanding

The overwhelming number of professors, supposed purveyors of change and growth, are stuck in an unchanging time warp.  Think about it.  How many teachers have written such findings as that of the neuroscience of unconditional and non-judgmental “awe,” with its mosaic of faith and hope and love, into their classroom plans?  Not many I bet.  How many have ignored such research.  How many have castigated anyone who sought to apply its lessons as “coddling,” “soft,” “touchy-feely,” “new agey,” “non-professional,” and even “unprofessional?”  I can attest personally the number is quite a few.  To these naysayers, I would say, that no one steps out of academia when “awe-full” is the foundation of their teaching; “awe-full” just puts each person in a different setting; “awe-full” just shifts the center of our being.

I’ll shout it from the rooftops:  the unconditional focus of awareness, alertness, attentiveness  begin with an unconditional faith, hope, and love anchored in unconditional state of “Awe-full.”  “Awful” is selective.  It’s segregating.  It restricts the vision to how it is, much less to how it could be.  “Awe-full,” that too often lonely place, on the other hand, gives us an expanded peripheral vision that includes how it should be and how it could be.  “Awe-full” doesn’t ignore the difficulty of getting into the fray.  It doesn’t play down the struggle to help others see and reach out for their potential.  It does, however, endow a meaning to that arduous effort.  And, that purpose, in turn, creates a joy in rising to the challenge to doing what we ought to do.  Ultimately, then, the question is: what kind of attitudes are we each going to take onto the campus and into the classroom.

Now, I understand, I really understand, when someone abides by creaky “awful,”  that it is easy to get into a throwing-up-your-hands funk, to get into a head-shaking walk away, to get negative, to become frustrated, to get disconnected, to get cynical, to lay blame.  But, the stereotypes, generalities, and labels that lead us to “awful,” are in themselves awful, for they serious miseducate us, create false images, and lead us to errant expectations.  As the great historian Jakob Burkhardt said, “Beware of the simplifiers.”  I would say beware of those whose views explain everything.  We have to see, understand, and accept the complexity, the subtly, and the nuance of what it is to be a human being.   It is the faith, hope, and love inherent in “awe-full” that keeps us imaginative and creative and alive as  the strident shrill and anger  of “awful” does not.  “Awful” is the surest way not to understand each student.  The truth is that whether we surrender to “awful” or continue to fight with “awe-full,” we are reflecting a state of our soul that has little or nothing to do with any student.

The greatest hindrance to teaching, the surest way to a misunderstanding and rejection of any student, the guarantee that we will not ecstatically notice the intensity of life in the classroom, is our acceptance, with an air of self-righteousness and aloofness, of deprecating and blinding concepts, our accommodation with denigrating and deafening stereotypes and generalizations, and our unquestioned approval of debasing and numbing mental labels.  We constrict ourselves by describing students according to our imprudent concepts, expectations, and perceptions we impose on them.  We’ll never be free until we teach with the radical amazement that “awe-full” is, until everything and everyone is incredible, until no one is ever treated casually, until we accept that everyone has a unique potential.  The truth is that we have to discard the impersonal stereotype, generality, and label if we are to see each individual student and have insights into her or him.  And, insight, to paraphrase Abraham Herschel said, is the beginning of perception that disallows any student to disappear from our view.

Ultimately, the question, for all of us, really is: what is at stake?  My answer is the future, the future that lies in the life of each of those sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and even fathers and mothers.  Whose life, then, I ask, does not matter?

More later. Meanwhile….