I should really title this reflection “Behavioral Teaching” because I’m asking what’s the difference between an “awful” and “awe-full” perspective a professor has of students? Possibly it’s a question of a lack of academic imagination and subsequent expectations. Possibly it is whether a professor sees her or his role as an information transmitter and skill developer rather than as a character builder. Possibly it whether a professor focuses on credentialing for better jobs to the exclusion of specifically concentrating equally on values for building better lives. Possibly it’s whether or not a professor confuses passing a course with proverbial life-long learning. Possibly it’s whether or not a professor mistakes immediate performance—passing a test and getting grade and having a certain GPA—for learning things that down the road actually foster inner and lasting change and growth, and tap each’s unique potential. Possibly it is a conflict with age-old approach to students, relying more on blurring impersonal and dehumanizing stereotypes and generalities and labels on one hand then on the fact that there are real people in that classroom. Possibly it is that most professors don’t think well of each and every student, but only of the “good student.” Possibly it’s all of the above.
Let me back up to Friday’s morning walk. As I approached the railroad crossing, tasting my medicinal meditative silence, I started thinking about that past student waiting there last week in his car. His words seemed to start dancing across my mind like sugar plum fairies. I was trying to put together him, a recent David Brooks’ Oped piece, “The Art of Thinking Well,” in the October 13th issue of the NY Times and a PBS News Hour interview of Richard Thaler, Noble Prize winner in economics for his work as the “father” of behavioral economics. Then, about a mile further on, turning to walk the full perimeter of the Publix supermarket’s parking lot it happened. A car turned into the lot just behind me, passed me, and then abruptly stopped. The door flung open, blocking my way. The driver jumped out, screaming, “Holy shit! Schmier!! Is that really you?”
“Dennis?” I asked with obvious surprise. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in over a decade. Yet, little did I know he was about to be my catalyst.
He ran over and while gripping me in a loving bearhug went on, “Yeah. You remember! What’s it been, doc, fifteen years since we were in class together and about ten years or more since we last talked? Damn I’ve missed you!! But, you were never far from me.” He put his hand into his pants pocket and pulled out what looked like a blank Scrabble tile. On it was scribbled was the word, “dare.”
“See? It’s my ‘word to live by’ for today. I still read all those ‘words for today’ that you wrote board in your illegible handwriting and we discussed for a few minutes. And, I’m also still doing that daily ‘gratitude exercise’ at the end of each day that you had us all do for class.”
Oh, do I remember Dennis when he first came into class. He started out, as I loving called him, my “Dennis the Menace” and ended up being my “Dennis the Blessing.” We must have talked for almost 30 minutes, leaning on the car, its engine still running. Now, he held himself with a joyful confidence that was far different from the round shouldered, angry, sad, distrusting, reclusive, uncooperative, resisting, and ever-challenging freshman I first met. He was now with a consulting company which was sending him to the Miami area to help deal with the ravages of hurricane Irma. He had pulled off the highway to get a bag of ginger snaps to tide him over on the road. Kismet. Serendipity. What I call “you just don’t ask” moment. He told me how I had never given up on him when everyone else had; how I had helped him come out “from a dark place” by clearing out a “pile of inside family and personal trash” that was “eating at” him, “tearing” him up, and holding him back; how he consequently made “incredible discoveries” about himself by “taking the chance of trusting you and my community members,” by doing the “those hard hands-on projects;” how, “with you always there,” he saw he could do what he first thought he couldn’t do; how our talks challenged who he had accepted who he was; how his journaling had helped him “see inside” himself and “open myself to myself;” how he came to believe that he was the sacred, noble and valuable person I believed he was; how he learned to live with a “yes” every day; and, how he learned to be committed to that positive outlook.
“You didn’t just help me pull my grades up, you helped me pull myself up out of my pit…You gave me your hand, your loving words and your loving hand and your loving hugs and yourself when everyone else had used their hands literally to only angrily slap or smack me down and walk away.…you raised my spirit when everyone had crushed it…you helped me see I was worth those hugs and I could live up to your hope and faith in me….And, I knew I wasn’t the only in that class that you did it with….Damn, it was magically the way you seemed to see inside each of us. You had such a different mentality from all the other professors I had and did things so differently from all of them. How you used your imagination and creativity to come up with the stuff you had us do blew a lot of our shit away. I learned more important things in your class that I use today than in four years of college as a business major.”
We hugged and promised each other to keep in touch. As he drove off to get his ginger snaps, I just stood there momentarily frozen, heavily breathing, mouth tight with tearful emotion, wondering “what the hell just happened?” For the rest of my walk I never felt the concrete; my feet were like hover boards, flying a few inches of the ground. As I told two of my favorite ex-colleagues whom I bumped into while they were sipping their Friday morning coffee at a local eatery (another delightful 30 minute interlude of my walk this morning), Dennis just wowed me. “I guess,” I told them, “I passed my ‘five year test’ with him.”
Why am I telling you this? Not to toot my horn, but because in Dennis pulled it all together. And, in that confluence I now had my answer to a flaming message I had received the previous day from a professor at a northeastern university. That professor had written, among other things, “…You and your soupiness are a travesty to higher education….You are obviously not the objective professor you should and must be, ” he said. “You’re just deliberately being subversive and mischievous….You are so completely unscientific that whatever you say has nothing worthwhile to consider.buoyant…”
Thinking of that student, Brooks, Thaler, and Dennis, I answered, “I plead guilty, and I plead not guilty. Yes, I am not ‘objective.’ As a human being, I cannot be. I am not wedded to that distorted view of human behavior. What you call an ‘awful student,’ is likely one who does not act in a way dictated by an abstract, non-existing specie created by academia. That student is likely one who deviates from the predicted behavior of that idealized image, one who is not the determined and committed ‘mini scholar’ academics expect and demand, one who is not ‘easy to teach,’ one who doesn’t know how to do everything already, one who does what I call ‘dumb stuff,’ one who ignores threats of being flunked and still does quirky and irresponsible things. She or he is one who has problems with organization, deadlines, self-control, self-expression, critically thinking, concentration, and god knows what else; she or he is one who is being torn and distracted and tossed about by matters outside the classroom and inside her or him. I mean, tell me, who truly is ‘objective?’ No one is an unemotional, purely logical, Dr. Spock. Are you? Certainly, your message doesn’t seem to be free of emotional and subjective judgment. At least, it doesn’t read that way. That people don’t always act in cold rational calculating manner, even if they have high academic degrees or large bank account, or high IQs is a given. That they don’t always make choices that are in their best interests, that they irrationally let anxieties and fears immobilize and silence them is so obvious, except maybe to those academics who claim to be objective, totally free of bias, claiming to use only the sharp reason of their rational brain, free of distorting irrational emotions of what you condemn as a ‘soupiness.’ Nevertheless, there is a lot of lively human life that defy robotics in the Ivory Tower.”
“I also admit that I do have a mischievous mind. I do like to tweak the nose and be a burr under the saddle of self-righteous, arrogant, archaic, and distorting traditions. I do misbehave in the sense I no longer unquestioningly tow the resisting traditional classroom line. And, yes, I have become something of a maverick in that I will more often than not refuse to be boxed in by the proverbial academic box. After nearly five decades in the classroom, all that is a buoyant fire-retardant against burnout because I am a rebel with a very serious cause and an ever-arming arsenal. That cause gives me an ever-invigorating purpose and meaning without which I’d be dead in the water. It is to give an unconditional and non-judgmental damn. It is to make each student a believer in herself and himself. It is be there along side each student, strongly supporting and encouraging her or him, helping each of them help themselves reach for their unique potential that they so often know they possess. In that cause, my greatest assets, from which I acquire my greatest insights, is seeing and listening, seeing and listening to myself and others, seeing and listening to the emotional fingerprints of facial expressions and body language and vocal tones, and finding a commonality in our humanity.”
“Now, too many academics say all that is irrelevant and of no concern to them. It should be for two reasons. First, don’t think teaching is always a bed of roses. Don’t think that I wasn’t at times put to the test and pulled to the edge. Don’t think I didn’t take deep breaths and face ‘compassion fatigue,’ or ‘empathetic distress.’ Don’t think there weren’t any times I wasn’t annoyed, disappointed, frustrated. Then, I always seemed to be brought back and had an infusion of life by a conversation with a struggling student or by a revelation a student wrote in her or his daily journal entry or by a community’s highly creative project. At those times, I see and listen inside. And, I see that when things are honkey dory or are a piece of cake, they are not growth mediums for me or each of them. Second, each student is a very real human being, and those supposed irrelevant things are relevant; we should bother with and be bothered by them if for no other reason than they have a serious impact on performance. It is wrong to imagine anyone, you or me or anyone, being so infallible, so rational, so perfect that they are automatons. Moreover, those supposedly irrelevant things, what someone once called ’the rubbish of excuses,’ such as low self-esteem, weak self-confidence, illness, family situations, broken loves, test anxiety, job demands, fear of looking silly, fear of being wrong, fear of their grade being aversely effected, children, family pressure, peer pressure, personal history, ingrained habits, etc., are relevant. Matters that supposedly don’t matter—that ’trash’ students are supposed to leave at the threshold—do matter. If truth be told, neither you nor I drop that trash at the threshold or at the edge of campus. We all bring our debilitating and halting trash, which I have previously listed and need not repeat, into the classroom with us. We all do. To deny our or their human imperfection, human frailty, human foibles, is a subjective bias on your part. Your consequent frustration, and resignation, and even anger are subjective emotions. That subjectivity impacts on your attitude, your thinking and feeling, about that student. That subjectivity has an impact on the nature of whatever interactions you have or don’t have with yourself and others. You are no more a Dr. Spock than I am or the supposed errant student is. So, let’s trash all that trash talk about leaving one’s trash at the classroom door’s threshold. Student’s can’t help but bring it in; we can’t help but bring in our own. And, that is worth considering, if not accepting.”
“Now, for your claim that I am ‘unscientific,’ you’re right and you’re wrong. If you want ’science-based’ evidence, either do the science or read the science. While I don’t do the science, I fill my arsenal with the writings of the likes of Carol Dweck, Ed Deci, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Peter Senge, Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi, Howard Gardner, Abraham Mazlow, Barbara Fredrickson, Carl Rogers, Sonya Lyubomirsky, Martin Seligman, and a host of others. I didn’t just read them; I reflected with “how can I use it” on the findings of that science. As I did, I unschooled and schooled myself; I questioned old ways while I saw possible new ways; I experimented with ways to apply the findings of the science; and, consequently, I changed my ways, sometimes dramatically with ‘out-of-the-box’ stuff, as I followed the way shown by that science. I think that makes me very scientific, at least, science-based. And, if we are going to benefit from all that research, if we are to enable students, we can’t eschewed our or their humanity; we have to admit that there are holes in what we need to know, that are critical to know, about both ourselves and students. We have to admit that there is nothing that “vulcanizes” any human being we call professors or students into a Dr. Spock. When we don’t make those admissions, when the students act irrationally, when they make poor choices, we point the “don’t belong” blaming finger at them, and wash our hands of all responsibility. If we recognized the importance of those outer and inner forces, if we accept that the heart is as influential as the brain, if we had a more reasonable understanding of why we and they do as we and they do, if we had a more realistic assumption, we’d be less inclined to throw up our hands in frustration or point in anger or slump in resignation; we’d work harder to do our classroom job better. In a simple request: We need ‘behavioral academics.”
“And, finally, if I am, as you say, ‘soupy,’ it is a good tasting, nutritious soup. I’ll leave you with a story I just read:
The story goes that a man had fallen into a river. He was not much of a swimmer and was in real danger of drowning. A crowd of concerned people wanted to rescue him. They were standing at the edge of the water, each of them urgently shouting out to him:
‘Give me your hand, give me your hand!’
The man was battling the waves and ignored their urgent plea. He kept going under and was clearly struggling to take another breath.
A saintly man walked up to the scene. He too cared about the drowning man. But his approach was different. Calmly he walked up to the water, waded in up to his waist near the man, glanced lovingly at the drowning man, and said: ‘Take my hand.’
Much to everyone’s surprise, the drowning man reached out and grabbed the saint’s hand. The two came out of the dangerous water. The drowning man sat up at the edge of the water, breathing heavily, looking relieved, exhausted, and grateful.
The crowd turned towards the saint and asked in complete puzzlement: “How were you able to reach him when he didn’t heed our plea?” The saint calmly said:
‘You all asked him for something at a distance, his hand. I offered him something near him, my hand. A drowning man is in no position to give you anything.’”
“The question, then, is: how can we best be there with all we have, putting all our chips to the center of the table with an ‘all in’—body and soul—unconditionally for each and every student? How can we offer a lending supportive and encouraging hand? For a start, we have to be forgiving to ourselves and students that we’re all human, that it’s okay for you, me, and them to be human, to be fallible and frail human beings. Then, we have to find ways with empathy and compassion, without condition and judgment, to offer each student a caring shoulder, a kind ear, and a loving heart. I think we all need a reality check, that there are real people in that classroom, not idealized or demonized ones. We have to accept that there are psychological, personal, social, and emotion factors that explain why we or any student thinks, feels, and does what she or he does or does not do what we desire or expect. God, from seeing how my own experiences and memories played on my thoughts, feelings, and actions, do I know that. What we need is an application to Richard Thaler’s ‘behavioral economics’ in the classroom and on campus with what I’ll call ‘behavioral teaching’ and ‘behavioral academics.’”
Louis
I call him “Gus.” He was in the first class I ever taught, an Introduction to Political Science at the University of Hawai’i precisely 50 years ago.
All I recalled about him was that he was about 30 at the time, noticeably older than the not-quite-20-something freshly minted high school grads who dominated the group.
On a visit to the islands about a decade later, I was strolling down Kalakaua Ave., the “main street” of Waikiki, when a then-not-quite-40-something man came bounding across the street shouting my name and grabbing me in an enormous bear-hug. “It’s me, Gus, from Poly Sci 110!”
I finally pulled him from my memory file and happily accepted his invitation to boy me a coffee. He then laid out the story. Gus, it seemed, was a rather successful insurance agent, a devout Christian, a faithful husband with two precious children. He had, however, regretted not finishing college, so he had returned part-time to pick up the few credits he needed to complete his degree.
With only one more course need, he told me, picked mine almost randomly and that choice changed his life … in fact, I changed his life!
Something I said in class triggered a deep personal response. He abruptly abandoned his career, his wife and his children and (with a store of wealth from a decade of hard selling and wise investments) took up full-time studies again. He completed an MA and a PhD in a remarkably short time, not in Political Science but in Psychology. He had established a lucrative private practice and had found time to write a textbook on his specialty (he mailed me a copy a few days later and I still have it … somewhere).
Gus’s “specialty”? What else? Family Therapy!
Now an addition four decades later, I have no clue what I might have said that precipitated such a dramatic change in at least four lives. Gus, of course, was ecstatic, but I am not sure his ex-wife and children shared his enthusiasm. Anyway, I didn’t press him at the time and I chose not to keep in contact – though he had pressed his business card in my hand when we parted.
I am sure I “taught” him something, but I am equally sure that it was not something I had intended. For anyone eager to “make a difference” in students’ lives, be careful what you wish for.
Howard, whatever it was you did, you didn’t “teach” him anything. You “touched” him; you “touched” his inner spirit that was yearning to be touched. And, in so doing, you changed his world and altered the future. What more can you ask in life. Congratulations. One question, though. Why did you not choose to keep in contact when he seemingly wished to do so?