It has been a while, over three weeks I think, since I last glided through the quiet, early morning streets. A knee wrenched by stumbling over a raised crack in the asphalt saw to that. It is amazing how quickly you lose it if you don’t keep up the walking. This morning I wasn’t consciously thinking at first about anything much except the ache in my legs, the searing heaves in my lungs, and what seemed like the very real possibility of a heart seizure. If anything, I was wondering why I couldn’t quietly accept the slowing physical momentum of age instead of putting myself through such torture. Then, about half way through the route my mind began to play its games, probably from pain induced delirium. In the midst of the surrounding darkness, I caught sight of the moon and I suddenly started thinking about “the brightest.” It may seem odd to think about brightest in the midst of darkness. But, the gray of dawn had begun to make its faint appearance on the horizon and I began to wonder about its relationship to the receding darkness. The dark sky, I thought, was merely a present, but not necessarily a permanent, state of affairs. It seems to say little about the coming of the dawn that can herald an unknown future brightness.

I guess I really had something on my mind. It was the matter of the “brightest students” and the supposed “not-so-bright”. I have to admit that when it comes to the issue of those people who elevate and brag about “bright students” and the so often ignored and supposedly embarrassing “not so bright,” I cannot be coldly objective. About such matters I do not wish to be abstractly intellectual. I will not be scientifically theoretical, and I do not wish to idealistically philosophical. I cannot be detached. Education is a human issue. It’s about human life, human hopes, human dreams, human futures. At least, for me, there is nothing impersonal, detached, abstract, theoretical, or cold about issues dealing with real people. We can fool ourselves into believing that our job is just to teach a subject. But, the truth is that no action by a teacher is impersonal, no attitude is detached. Like it or not, by gesture or word or glance, by display of concern or disinterest or disdain, by inclusion or exclusion, we touch students’ lives. We open or close minds and hearts and souls to what’s out there. We foster or shatter dreams. So, I admit that I can’t be impersonal.

I was reminded of that reality in a self-evaluation a student wrote last week before I left for a conference on teaching college freshmen in Washington, D.C. It posed an agonizing topic that tugged at me all weekend. After my walk I went back to re-read it. My heart ached no less than when I first read it. It glassed my eyes with sorrow and anger. “I know you believe in me,” she agonized as she explained why she felt she had not reached her academic and personal goals for the week. “You support me and encourage me. But it is so hard. No teacher but you has ever cared about me. I have been told so many times with so many words and so many gestures by so many teachers and by so many other people that I am mediocre or worse. I want to believe you. I am so afraid to believe you. I am afraid to find out who is lying to me, if I am what they say or any better than what they say.” No, I can’t be impersonal.

If that entry weren’t enough, that passage stirred memories, excruciating memories, of my ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) son being thrown about by the winds of an uncaring educational system. Those words also stirred memories of an event that had occurred a few years ago as I was climbing my own cliff.

It was the beginning of the school year. A teacher from an elementary school in a nearby county called me. She wanted me to come and talk to several classes of fifth and sixth graders about old photographs that I had been collecting for my photo-history of Lowndes County and Valdosta. I initially balked at the suggestion. Though I’ve coached tee-bat baseball with this age group, I had no training in dealing with them in a formal classroom situation. To this day, I vividly remember her reply to my hesitation.

“Oh, it won’t be any trouble,” she blandly assured me. “They’re only first and second level students. They probably don’t even know what a camera is all about. Some can hardly read. All you have to do is show them a few pictures and say a few words about each. They get bored quickly and start getting unruly. You shouldn’t have to take more than about ten or fifteen minutes of your valuable time and then you can go.”

Her tone of voice was so matter-of-fact, so ho-hum, so resigned, so unexciting, so uncaring, so demeaning. It really annoyed me. The more I thought of that telephone call, the more upset I got. Here were children who needed encouragement and support the most, who needed caring attention the most, who needed to be told by word and deed that they mattered. Yet, I got the feeling they were getting the least, that they were being tagged, sold down the river by teachers who felt there was little prestige in teaching at that level, teachers who felt the second they first set foot in that classroom that the students were beyond learning and weren’t worth the effort.

I decided I wasn’t going to that school and go through the motions to give the teachers some relief time. Those kids weren’t going to be just another line in the “Community Service” section of my annual self-evaluation. Those kids deserved more than they were getting. I thought and thought and thought. After a while, I got an idea.

The teacher and her two colleagues were somewhat surprised when I walked into the library room totting all sorts of paraphernalia: camera, camera bag, copy stand, lights, and original photographs. The students were all quiet and orderly, their hands folded on the tops of the desks, blank looks on their faces. The teachers were “shhhhhing” and whispering to remind them not to move. As I laid my equipment out on the table, I noticed one young man in the back of the room stretching to see what I was doing. I invited him up to the table.

“Oh, no,” one teacher exclaimed. “They’ll all want to some up.”

“That’s ok. That’s what I’m here for,” I replied, and, as if I were playing THE PRICE IS RIGHT, enthusiastically invited the students “to come on down,” and look close hand. They rushed up, giving out little screeches of excitement and noisily shoving chairs aside. I could see one teacher annoyed at my disruptive influence on his class discipline, or should it be called crowd control.

One curious youngster immediately picked up the camera.

“Don’t touch Dr. Schmier’s camera,” one frowning teacher lunged forward as she sternly warned with a threat. “It’s very expensive and if you break it you’ll have to pay for it.”

She scared the hell out of me! I could see the brief glimmer of interest and curiosity in the student’s eyes disappear as she quickly, with fear and disappointment screaming out from her facial expression, placed it back on the table as if were a proverbial hot potato.

“It’s OK,” I softly said. I picked the camera up and handed it to her. “You’ll be careful.” The little girl smiled; her eyes beamed, as I put the camera strap around her neck, and she carefully began caressing the camera and looking at it from all angles, showing off to the others who crowded around her.

“Now,” I announced, “how many of you would like to copy one of these pictures for my book?”

Their hands excitedly shot up.

“But,” I warned with an impish, but encouraging, smile on my face, with a deliberate, confident tone in my voice, “you’re going to have to do all the work.”

The children poured over the equipment like ants at a picnic. I could see the nervousness on the faces and in the movements of the teachers. With lots of encouragement, a nudge here, a demonstration here, a suggestion there, a question now and then, these students figured out how to copy a photograph. With a minimum of guidance from me, they opened the camera, loaded the film, mounted the camera on the copy stand, turned on the lights and directed them, placed the photograph on the stand, and even focused the lens, and took a picture. It took time, more than ten or fifteen minutes. It took the entire period. Out of the corner of my eyes, I noticed the teachers were periodically checking their watches. I didn’t care. I looked at one straight in the eyes and quietly, but noticeably, shook my head in less than subtle admonishment, and moved my lips in silent murmur as I telepathed like a Betazoid (that’s Star Trek talk), “How can you be bored? Look at those kids. Notice them. There’s electricity in this room. How sad for you.” It was exciting to watch the facial contortions of determination, reasoning, decision, concentration, curiosity; to listen to the cacophony of squeaking “what’s this for,” “what’s that,” “silly, do this,” “let me show you,” and “this is how it goes.” “no, it doesn’t.” “yes, it does,” “see!”

To the surprise of the students themselves, they did it! And when all was said and done, they had such a sense of pride in what they had accomplished. As I hugged some of them and clapped in praise of their achievement, their eyes shone, their lips smiled, their faces beamed. In sad reflection of their attitude, all the teachers could do was to stand quietly. It was almost as if they resented the students’ achievement because it was proof of their less than committed devotion to their craft. No, I can’t be impersonal.

These students, the student in my class, my son, have been marked absent from classes. The teachers assumed there was something wrong with them because test scores or grades say that they are “ones you can’t do anything with,” or the “ones who just aren’t smart,” or the “ones who won’t ever pay attention”, or the “ones who…….” These students are not dumb. They are not without potential. They have gifts and talents to be nurtured. They are just caught in and thrown about by a smart-dumb, socially segregating game. They are not without feelings. They are made even more marginal in these classes which reinforce the notion that their place in society is inferior. They are caught in a conspiracy of low expectations. They are being educated to be invisible, to be life’s failures. They are placed among the “outs”: sorted out, weeded out, cast out, left out. They have been told in subtle and not so subtle ways that they don’t have much of a chance to make anything of themselves; that nobody needs them, nobody wants them, nobody cares about them. Shovels, mops, dust rags, dishes, and fast-food spatulas are the only images in their crystal balls. Yet, it has been my experience both as an educator and as a parent of a bright, but almost discarded ADD son, that learning occurs, not just when someone sees how it materially benefits him or her, but when that person realizes he or she can learn and when he or she believes they can learn.

I am not loyal to an educational structure that is dedicated to academic selection, personal exclusion, and intellectual elitism. I have a deep, emotional, unswerving commitment to an educational structure that affirms the right of each student to succeed, to an institution of inclusion dedicated to the principle of individual and personal cultivation and reclamation, to an educational approach that provides standards of opportunity no less than academic standards, that believes there is more to education than academic achievement, that is convinced it’s not what you can’t do, but what you can do that counts.

By the way, the photograph those students took did appear in my book. No, I can’t be impersonal.

Watch your ego! That warning was bouncing around my brain as I struggled to walk on an aching wrenched knee in the black south Georgia morning. But that counsel had nothing to do with my physical agony. It had been issued in gentler words by a Canadian professor of English with whom I have become friends and with whom I talk on an e-mail list. He was uneasy that I might be stepping over the line and inadvertently creating a cult of personality in my classes. He was trying to alert me to the possibility that if the students became dependent on me, they would not learn or want to learn how to learn about things without my urging, without wanting to please me, without needing the support of assignments and textbooks and exams and marks. He worried that the student who works hard because I inspire him or her would not continue to do so after he or she leaves my class. He worried that I will have given the students, in his words, “a good, big fish–but I won’t have taught (him or) her to fish.”

It was a timely caution as I thought about some discussions I had with two students and about another’s journal reading in class. It truly is all so easy to let one’s ego get in the way and step over the line. It is something to which I am very sensitive. I think about and have to deal with it almost everyday. Are there risks? Of course there are risks, but we shouldn’t let the fear of failing stop us from striving to succeed. If we did that, none of us would have struggled successfully as tots to walk.

I think that anyone who is concerned with students must be careful as he or she struggles to become that proverbial “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on stage.” We do little good if the students’ eyes follow our movements; if while being physically off-center we remain psychologically in the center. To replace one form of “Learning Dependency” with another accomplishes very little, and to perpetuate such LD is not my goal. I firmly believe that more often than not, it’s not what we do in class that makes a difference, but often what we allow to happen. For that process to develop, however, a kickstart and encouragement often must occur just as we once hand-cranked the car to start the motor running. There is so much pain out there; so many albatrosses hanging around necks; so many impairments. Even a teacher or professor who wishes to assume the identity of a guide, to be meaningful and effective, must have the trust of those he or she guides. Trust has to be earned by the human display of respect, caring, concern, and ability. We just have to struggle to know when to let go and/or to push away. If we are not successful at that, then, we would be exercising just another form of control and self-gratification. It’s curious, but things just keep popping up in my classes that are to that point. I had conversations with two students today. The first student is quiet, shy, ladened with low self-esteem. He came up to me before class and said in so many words, “Dr. Schmier, I really felt good about myself when I took that risk you urged me to take and spoke up for the first time in class to disagree with Melinda. The others in the triad congratulated me. They’ve been trying to get me to talk for a long time, but you know I was too scared about being wrong and looking dumb. I felt really good about myself. Thanks for kicking my butt. Keep doing that each day.”

I answered in so many words, “You did it. I and the others only believed in you and encouraged you. I’ll encourage and support you, but it’s you who has to start kicking your own butt. If you depend on me then you’ve accomplished nothing. Your drive must come from in there (pointing to his chest) not from me. You have to want to do it; you have to do it, not me or any one else. I may be icing on the cake and the class may be a place where you can take those first steps, but what are you going to do if you get into a class where the prof doesn’t care? Don’t use me as a crutch. Don’t do it for me; do it for you. Think of how you feel this moment about yourself. Don’t let that feeling out of your grasp. Build on that. Take another risk, keep taking steps. But only you can walk.”

It wasn’t but a few minutes later that a second student came up to talk. “Dr. Schmier,” he admitted what I already knew, “I’ve been fucking up all quarter and bringing my triad down. I’ve had a bunch of shit on my mind, a lot of pressure from the folks, and I’ve had it with myself and all this crapping around. If I give it everything I have, can I still pass the course? I want to make my parents proud of me.”

My answer was something to the effect: “Make yourself proud of you. What really should matter, the grade or the realization and the effort? Should the grade be more important than your commitment to excellence? The truth is John (not his real name) that you can’t have the first without the second. Read the syllabus. What does it say about climbing mountains and putting in effort? Besides what does your sense of self-pride say you should do, rise to the occasion or tuck tail and run away? You’ve got four weeks left. That’s a long time. You’re talking now, but will you start walking? I believe you will surprise yourself, but only if you believe it as well.” And so on and so on.

My conscious craft is more concerned with empowering the students than merely informing them. But, I can do only so much. Ultimately, the ball is in their court. And, if what I do results in expressions of appreciation or gratitude, what’s wrong with that? I still remember and acknowledge those few, very few, teachers and professors who cared enough for me as a person. Let me end by quoting from a student’s journal. I had noticed Monday that she was different when she came to class. Something had happened. She had a glow of confidence about her. She was interacting with the others in the triad differently. She suddenly was participating in class, asking questions, answering questions, challenging positions. It was as if she had decided to come out from a shell. We all discovered why when she surprisingly volunteered to share these two entries with her classmates. I was so struck by her words that I got her permission to share her thoughts with you:

“Thurs. Oct. 28: Today, revelation and knowledge struck like lightening. Dr. Schmier read one of his journal entries about blueberries about when he became aware that he needed to connect with his students and how he had to struggle to face the truth about himself. When he read that, my last (I hope) barricade fell. This guy is for real. If he can do that why can’t I face me. Then tonight I had an intense talk with Dave (brother). Dave started talking about me being submissive & getting an identity. My jaw dropped. I asked him why he said that, and he said that it needed to be said. Dr. Schmier had asked the same exact thing a couple of weeks ago….Well, I thought a lot about what they had said and wondered how to get my identity. I’m still not sure, but at least I have something to strive for now. Also, tonight I realized the significance of our self-evaluations. They are to get us started in evaluating ourselves in general. We can apply the same principle to other aspects of our lives. For ex. in our class that we had the big discussion about prejudice, I began to evaluate myself. Do I or don’t I? Against who? Why? Do I like it? How do I change? Can I change? I just feel I learned so much today. I’m excited! Even though it had nothing to do with history, I learned about me. That’s the most important thing I can ever learn. And I’m ready to get my self evaluation today!

Fri. Oct. 29: Today is quiz day over 15 & 16. I got the guts to ask my question about the Indians. Dr. Schmier delayed handing out the quiz to let the class deal with my confusion. Also, on the quiz there was a question that I knew the answer to that my triad disagreed with. But, I had studied hard and this time I wasn’t going to back down. I persuaded them to use my answer and low and behold I was RIGHT! Since I stuck to my guns and wouldn’t let them change it, we got it right. But the important thing is not that we got it right, but that I stood my ground. I’m going to participate in class next week. I know I’ll learn a lot more that way.”

To be a part of that transformation, I will take any risk.

I ask my students to journal voluntarily, reflecting about themselves, others, me, the operation of the class, and life in general. I journal along with them. I don’t collect the journals; I don’t read them; I don’t grade them. As a sidebar, at the suggestion of the students, next quarter I will start making the journals mandatory, collect and read them each week. At the beginning of each class, I ask if anyone has a journal entry he/she wants to share with the class. It’s a way for us to share with others our feelings and attitudes, to come out from behind our walls, to act as role models for the more reluctant members of the class. I read entries from my journal to the class as well. No one volunteered to read an entry today. So, I read one of mine. Then, as we were about to end class, one student, a female African-American, called out that she wanted to read two entries from her journal. She said that she felt “you all ought to hear what I’m thinking.” We sat down and listened. It proved to be worth being late for the next class.

At first, we all thought she was talking about a new boyfriend. I soon found out how wrong I was. She caught me way off guard. When she was finished, I was stunned, speechless, my eyes a bit glassy. We all left the class without a murmur. I was hesitant about writing about her entries even though she gave me permission to do so. A little voice whispered in my ear, “Louis, if you do, you’ll get your butt pinned for tooting your horn.” I listened at first to that voice and sent personal messages to a select few. But, another voice was making me uncomfortable. “Coward,” it screamed. “You believe in what you are doing. Don’t you trust your colleague’s out there? There’s a lot of academic learning and personal growth going on here with what you are letting the students do. Her entries reflect that. Let everyone else see that. What the hell is wrong with the celebration of teaching?” After receiving the advise from those few to whom I sent the message, I’ve decided to risk the heat and send it out. It’s a testament to the brilliant light that can flood a classroom, a campus, the world, if only we care enough to help the student turn on the inner glow that lies within all of them. Here’s her entries. I think she was courageous in sharing them. I’m thankful she did. They are pearls that encourage me, uplift me, and tell me the effort is worthwhile:

When I first walked in class I saw many different people.
When I saw dark faces a sigh of relief came over me. I
felt comfortable with people that looked similar to me.
In high school it started out that way but then I began
to change. It is so easy to talk to people of the same
race but it takes a little more to talk to people that’s
different. Although I learned a lot about people in my
high school the same cycle occurred when I got in
college. The more I sat in the class the more I began to
talk and interact with people different from me. Now I
sit in class with all of these people not looking at them
as being black or white but as being people. We are all
unique and have similar goals and objectives. I know
that if we disagree we can talk about whatever and we can
agree to disagree. In this class I have learned a lot
about myself. If I seem to be extra happy in this class
it is because of the people in the class. I am happy
because I know many years ago I wasn’t allowed in a class
full of people not of my race. I think that I am
privileged to be in this class with all of those unique
people because I know I can learn something from each one
of them and they can learn something from me.
She then added an original poem:

There’s a new man in my life now.
I see him every day.
He makes me feel so good inside with the words he say.
I talk to him about my thoughts.
He never tells me I’m wrong
He’s always encouraging me, making me feel so strong.
If there is a day when I’m feeling confused,
He guides me in the right direction acting as my muse.
I’m not sure if he knows the way I feel.
But, he makes me feel special; he makes me feel real.
He not only teaches me the things I need to know,
He teaches me how to understand, how to learn, and, most
important, how to grow.
Please don’t get me wrong.
This new man is not my lover.
He’s one of the best teachers I know, not like any other.
This unique man’s objective is very clear to me.
It is to help and encourage me to be the best that I can be.
Because he is so caring in my heart he’ll always be near.
This man has done a lot for me, this man named Dr. Schmier.