A chair and pizza. That’s what I was thinking about as I tried to take my mind off this punishing south Georgia outdoor sauna I was plodding through this early pre-dawn morning. Sounds like a weird combination, doesn’t it? Don’t blame me. I didn’t put the two together. One of my non-traditional students, Lilli, did it in her journal. And strange as it may seem, when she did in a one page entry it was a sobering reminder how teaching is a moral act: how teachers can be far more powerful in drawing out the best from human nature and achieve moral changes than we think we can; how we can awaken a sense of rightness for life, alter paths, deepen relationships, nurture, heal wounds, open inner doors; how we can awaken and excite students to an inner reality; how we can encourage them to act in ways that serve a sense of fairness and respect in themselves and others; how we can affect moral, ethical, social, personal, and spiritual consequences that soar far above the intellectual-bound curriculum limitations of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic; how we can plant seeds in beds we cannot afford to let lay fallow which may well take root and change how the generations to come see and shape the world; and how, to paraphrase scripture, all this can happen in the strangest places and in the strangest ways far outside the boxing confines of the classroom.

Does all this sound too dramatic? At face value, it would to me. But now I’m not sure it is, not after I read Lilli’s journal yesterday. Maybe you won’t either after you’ve read about what Lilli wrote in her journal.

But first things first. I’m sure you’re curious how the chair and pizza come into this picture. The chair first. As part of my attempt to break down those separating and isolating walls that exist among students, and to replace a sense of competition with respectful cooperation, I use an exercise in all my classes at the beginning of each term which has come to be known throughout the campus as “THE CHAIR!” Lilli is a student in our first year history class. I divide the class of 60 into twelve groups of five, each of which selects a representative. We push the desks to the wall. In the middle of the room rests a lonely chair. The instructions for this exercise are deceptively simple. “All you have to do,” I tell them with a straight face, “is to sit on the chair.” There are always the chuckles, snickering, and the looks: “You got to be kidding.” “This is a snap.” “Boy, what a an easy way to win a Tootsie Pop.” Then, after a deliberately extended pause, as an impish smirk grows on my face as I continue, “BUT, you can’t sit on the chair the same way someone else has sat on it.” They stop snickerings and a puzzled look comes over their once smug faces. “And, after each group has taken its turn, its must select a new representative. Let the games begin!” Then, I sit back and watch them. First, they sit normally: upright and straight legged. Then they cross their legs, lift their legs, sit slouching, lean, lean back on two or one leg, sit reversed, sit upside down, use books and sweaters and purses, move the chair and sit on each of the sides and bottom and back in a variety of ways, and so on. As the game progresses, the students in each group begin to study, converse, devise, advise, listen, suggest, support, encourage, cooperate, build on each other as the number of different ways of sitting on that single chair climbs into the 30s, 50s, 60s, 90s and the demand on their creativity, imagination, innovation, and cooperation increases. A crescendo of laughter, excitement, applause, cheers, oohs and aahs grows. After all there is a lot at stake: Tootsie Pop for winners. When I finally halt the game with about fifteen minutes left in the period–usually around the 140–150 mark and throw Tootsie pops out to the entire class as I declare everyone a winner, we debrief and reflect on what had occurred. “There was a serious reason behind the fun we were having.” “There are many ways to do and look at something.” “Things can be different without being right or wrong.” “No one way was better or worse than the other.” “We needed each other.” “We respected each other.” “There’s more to something than the common and obvious.” “You can come at something from different angles.” “There was team work.” “We had to see beyond the obvious.” “We had to be creative and imaginative.” “We were impressed with each other.” “Never dreamed there were so many ways to sit on a chair.” Then, I leave them with a question, “Now, what’s the difference between the looking at the chair, the material in this class, each other, and life out there all in the same way?”

Normally, I see this exercise as a way of helping to develop a close-knit, supportive classroom learning community of people who care deeply about each other and assume the responsibility for each other’s success. This time, as Lilli showed me, there was more to it. This time this exercise had an unexpected, unforeseen and powerful impact beyond the classroom, beyond the campus, into Lilli’s home, on the lives of her two pre-school children, at the kitchen dinner table, while they were eating a piece of pizza. In was indeed in the strangest place in the strangest way for a teacher to have an impact.

In her journal, Lilli described how one night last week she had ordered in pizza for her and her two children. The older one eats her pizza by first picking off the pepperoni with her fingers, eating the cheese and crust, and then eating the pepperoni heaped on the side of the plate. As usual, she admonished her younger brother who preferred to eat his pizza with all of its toppings all at once, by saying, “No, silly. You’re eating it the wrong way. Don’t do that. You have to….” Then, she would grab her brother’s pizza, and to his dismay, pick off the pepperoni slices. Lilli wrote: “Normally, I would let this pass as I always have, thinking nothing of it, but this time all of a sudden out of the blue I thought of ‘THE CHAIR.'” This is what she went on to write:

I asked my daughter why was her way of eating pizza the only right way. ‘Because that’s the way I do it and it tastes good to me that way.’ We talked about why we ordered the pizza and my daughter said, ‘Because it tastes good, and if I eat it I’ll grow big and strong.’ I asked her if there were different ways to eat the pizza and still have it taste good. ‘I don’t know,” she answered. ‘Let’s see,’ I said. We experimented. We ate a piece her way and agreed it tasted good. We ate it my son’s way and she agreed it tasted good. Then, my son said we should take off the pepperoni and cheese, eat the dough and then first the cheese and finally the pepperoni. We all still liked the taste. My daughter said, ‘Let’s eat the crust first this time.’ And, we liked it this way. I thought it would never stop. There are as many ways to eat a piece of pizza as there are to sit on a chair! Finally, I asked my daughter, ‘Well what do you think? Which way tastes better.’ ‘Let’s change the rules. He can eat his pizza any way he likes. Next time I’m going to eat my pizza in lots of different ways. It’s fun.’ Who would have thought of using what I do in my history class at the table to start teaching my kids about fairness, humility and respect for others. I’m not going to let this go.

Nor should she.

How wonderful and exciting! What poetry! What magic! What drama! What a crucible for hope! In a kitchen! Over a pizza! Earthshaking? Some cynics would sneer at making such a big deal over such a little event. Not me, because I don’t think for a teacher to have an earthshaking effect the earth has to shake. We teachers don’t have to change the entire world all at once, but if we treat our classes as a moral laboratory and social experiment, and not just as an information bank, we may find that we are able to nudge the world here and there to take, however slightly, a different direction. And though whatever awakening impact the teacher may have may not be obviously dramatic and significant, that does not mean it is any less dramatic and significant.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

I can understand the public’s misconception about tenure. There are times I have doubts about whether it has outlived its usefulness. There are times I feel uncomfortable having what seems at a quick glance a life-time guarantee of a job without any accountability of performance in a time of such drastic and rapid change, and downsizing, when people are concerned about their livelihood. And, there are times tenure, like anything else, is misused and abused. But, nothing is perfect in this world, and we should stop for a moment and reflect on the wisdom of destroying or seriously revising an institution merely because a few people display human faults and cannot live up to the expected ideal.

I am, however, a staunch defender of tenure because I think a position in higher education carries with it a responsibility that is not like any other job. If there is a defense of tenure it is that institutions of higher education must be active, independent critics of society and agents of social change. We in higher education are partly paid to be burrs, to be irritants to the hand that feeds us! And, I do think we are at our best when we are most annoying, when we stand apart from the daily life of society and point out its flaws, when we’re leaders instead of followers, when we tell people what they need to hear and see instead of merely serving up what they want to hear and see, when we’re critics rather than merely submissive supporters, when we are major players in raising the national consciousness above the selfishness, close- mindedness, divisiveness, and intolerance that has characterized American life in recent years.

It is one of the major mission’s of higher education to “tweak noses” of the status quo, to transmit values and take a critical stance, to have an impact far beyond the campus, to use free and fair inquiry as a means of possibly bringing insight and wisdom into social issues. As such we must be able to resist the threat from all sides to impose uniformity of thought and values on either the professors or in the curriculum; on teaching, on interactions between members of the campus community, on interactions between members of the campus community and the community at large.

I see only two reasons for attacking tenure. The first is that we’re not doing our job as critics of society, if we are wrongly defending more of what we should be doing rather than what we are actually doing. I do not believe tenure is defensible if we in higher education limit ourselves to either parochial educational matters, bury our heads in the sand of our subject, run scared for our jobs, remain isolated in a locked ivory tower where we merely talk to each other on society’s dole. Tenure, however, is justified if we carry out our mission and speak out on broader social issues. That brings me to the second reason for which tenure may be attacked. Namely, that we’re doing our job to prick the public conscience and thereby need the protective armor against the attacks from those who benefit most from the status quo or wish to impose their tyranny, and reduce education to little more than propaganda.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Anna and Kathy:

I don’t think it is a matter of technique per se. In that realm what works for me may or not be successful for another. The essential point is that there is a learning objective, a meaning and purpose to the”madness.” And, Kathy, I don’t think it is a matter of bribery. Every day we teachers are educational modeling for the students. The question I keep asking myself is, what kind of a model am I? Do I trudge along or dance the light fantastic? Do I plop the food for thought down care lesson a plate as if I was a grubby short-order cook at a Greasy Spoon or am I a chef who enticingly offers the food for thought as a tasty delicacy? How can students become lovers of learning, enjoying learning, when they don’t see too many models of lovers? How can they get excited if we are not excited with the uniqueness of our world to discover and share? How can we demand that the students see more to learning than the vocational, “how can I use it,” when they have so many “white-collared vo techs” as their educational models? What the students see is what we practice, and what they see is what they are going to practice. It’s what we’re getting so often in our classes and sending out from our classes. So, I have to say and live, “I want to be the best model. I want to model a joy of learning, of being a student and learner myself, a celebrating of the awe and wonder of new things, a greeting of learning as an exciting and expansive challenge rather than as a loathsome barrier; I want to model a learning that promotes an ever-growing person striving for his/her potential.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Well, I just came in from an interesting walk wondering if mosquitos and gnats sleep. I don’t think they do. They, the 77 degree heat, and 97 percent humidity are an unholy trinity–even at 4:45 in the morning–that ordinarily would make walking the darkened streets at this time of year anything but fun and games. Yet, it was a sort of a strangely fun walk this muggy, sticky, steamy equatorial morning even if my skin was quickly getting a pale greenish hue.

I was giggling and at times laughing to myself almost the entire way. With my chest convulsing, my stomach muscles tightening, and my short chuckling snorts, everything was totally out of sync with my feet. I couldn’t breathe properly, my cadence was shot, and I was almost always off balance. I even stumbled once or twice. But, it turned out to be a delightful- -or at least bearable–walk. I had these dancing images of groups of laughing students standing up in class and playfully singing their ABCs. Others were cackling as they did twenty jumping jacks next to their desks. Still others were howling as they struggled to mimic barnyard animals. Their moos, oinks, baas, and cock-a- doodle-doos pierced not only the air, but their spirits as well. That will get them for not getting the correct answer to the questions thrown at them by other students during a game the students devised. But, Casher smiles were everywhere. Then, there was the delightful sight of tears of laughter rolling down cheeks at the sight of Jimmy, a football player, in bonnet and dress, broom in hand, as he portrayed a frontier housewife in a skit. I saw this bright picture of the place rocking during the scavenger hunt presentation as Andy stood up, fishing pole in hand, presented his symbol of Harmine Melville, miming fishing, futilely fighting to reel in his catch, being pulled into the water, and ending his presentation with a feign wipe of his sweaty brow and saying “It’s a whale of a transcendental fish story.” There was this shining vision of the place rocking with spontaneous and uproarious laughter during a brain- storming and mind-mapping session as student furious shouted out, screamed out, poured through the book, feverously writing on the blackboard, walls, and huge pieces of butcher paper. Smiling images flashed across my mind of students jumping, reaching, stretching, as Tootsie Pops hurled through the air in their direction as incentive, reward, prize, encouragement, nurture, support, pick-me- up, or just for the heck of it. I saw smiles appear on student faces and tense muscles relax as the music floated through the air at the beginning and end of class.

I guess these images kept popping up as a lingering effect of thinking about the child within. I think it was also the fact that for the last few days I’ve been reading student journals and evaluations from last term and the first journal entries from this term. And, I’ve been noticing that the word to describe the class almost all the students used, second only to “caring”, was “fun”, and how they joined it into phrases and sentences with other words like “learning”, “excitement”, “interesting”, “enjoying”, “feeling good”, “picked me up”, “experience the class”. I remember one student sort of summing it up and writing, “I did not want to miss one day of class, I looked forward to coming, because it was so much fun to be there and have fun learning. It was some kind of a turn-on An enjoyable and rewarding adventure!”

After reading those journals I knew that I had truly had a friend, a partner, a colleague, and compatriot to whom the students could turn to help them combat the monster of fear, denigration, and tension. I invite this buddy of mine into everyone of my classes to talk with everyone everyday. We enter class arm in arm smiling to the tune of my boombox. No, we bounce, dance, sing, and skip cross the threshold together. We’re allies in our war against that ugly, evil troll. My inseparable pal is beautiful, bubbly, animated. She’s a good fairy. Her name is FUN.

Don’t be deceived by her quixotic manner; don’t mistake her charm for weakness, her joy for frivolity, her laughter for childishness, her skipping for casualness, her excitement for absurdity, her playfulness for silliness, her beaming smiles for immaturity . She always come with her dancing, singing, skipping family of playful, uplifting pixies. They’re named: laughter, excitement, play, joy, serendipity, surprise, glee, merriment, smile, giggle, chuckle, and chortle. And, are as powerful as boulders hurled from a Roman assault catapult. She and giggle can breach thick guarded walls of isolation; with chuckle, she can leap over putrid moats reeking with fear; with laugh, she will enter and refresh defensive redoubts foul with confusion; with glee, she will bring light into the darkened rooms of worthlessness, with chortle, she will electrify dead circuits of hurt, and in the company of guffaw, will blast open up the strongest locked doors of insecurity. Fun floats around the class around dubbing a shoulder here and there with her twinkling wand, daintily saying, “Oh, yes you can”, “See the wonder of it all”, “Go ahead”, It’s safe in here”, “Take it easy”, “Don’t be afraid”, “Let go.” And when that malicious monster of fear and tension growls, with an easy wave of her exorcising hand, with a deceptively delicate voice, she says to that pimpled, twisted imp, “Shoo, shoo, you naughty ugly little thing. Leave these good people alone.” And surprisingly, it starts to move backward, fear in its blood-shot eyes, and slink away. Once that monster slithers out the room and fun spreads around her sparkling dust, I notice that we start learning.

Having fun in class comes naturally to me. Without it, I feel too stuffy. I feel dead. The students look dead. The lights are out. More than once I have been criticized by colleagues for not being serious. I get the feeling that they feel that there’s something wrong, inept, unprofessional, amiss, frivolous, insignificant, if you’re happy. Authority and knowledge equals seriousness. Laughter equals childishness, spontaneity, uproariness, insignificance. Outlandish clowns make us laugh, not professors. We’ll role in the aisles at Steinfeld, but the class room is not a place for leisure. We pay Red Skelton to make us laugh with Klem Kediddlehopper, but the class room is not a theater.

So many teachers are convinced that students must suffer, to paraphrase Hamlet, the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of learning”, that students have to wear hair coats, flay themselves, whip themselves, suffer, suffer, suffer. Must they endure intellectual and emotional asceticism as proof of their devotion and academic piety, as some sort of intellectual cleansing ritual. If they are enjoying, if they are laughing, if they are smiling, they are ne’er-do-well-revelers. They are childish; they are kindergartenish; they are immature.

In so many, too many, of our classrooms, there is painfully little joy displayed and experiences. There’s an all too prevailing attitude that say there seems to be something not quite right about the student and teacher who are happy or in classroom that rocks with laughter. I almost get the feeling that all too many people think there must be something wrong with a classroom where student miss attending class or where teachers and students are sad the class ends. They must be, as the line goes, frivolous blockheads without a grain of common sense in their bodies.

So many teachers take themselves so seriously. They walk into class with a lost a scowl on their face, a sense that their face will shatter if they make the slightest smile. After all, education is serious business; it’s nothing to laugh about. No kidding around in here. There’s nothing to make fun of or light about. Yet, do you know what the students most criticize faculty for in the journal I’ve read and discussion I’ve had? Aside from being so uncaring of them, it’s making the class, as one student said, “so hypnotic and dull and monotonous and repeating and boring and lifeless and stuffy and laughless and mindless and mechanical that it’s almost impossible not to go into a coma just like as you read this sentence.”

But, I ask, why are seriousness and enjoyment antithetical? Why was I reminded only last week that education is “serious business” and I shouldn’t be so “casual” and “childish” about it; why do some of my peers that my classes shouldn’t be kindergarten? Why are so many of us wont to allow this good fairy into our classroom? Are we too rational in our classes, too serious, too organized, too ordered, too controlling, too predictable, to mind-dulling? Maybe. But that dour attitude seems to be to be the more reason to have humor in the class room. When someone’s presentation is dead, when their movement resembled the stiffened pace of the zombie, there’s a sense something is wrong.

I’m no psychologist, but it has been both my personal and professional experience that fun us probably one of the most human revealing experiences I know. It’s been my experience that unless the students are having fun, they can’t have a deep relationship with themselves, with each other, with me, or with the subject. In the classroom fun breaks the straight jacket of convention, the dulling predictability of routine, and boring expectations of behavior. It’s a stimulant, an activator; it keeps you awake and alert. But, I think having fun is, to paraphrase Victor Borge once said, the shortest, most human, and most equalizing distance between professor and student, among students. It brings people together. We have to have a place for zaniness, irrationality, less mundane and more serendipity. That means letting go, trusting students and yourself, to spontaneity, freedom risk, and active environment full of surprises and encouraging wonder. It’s an environment of teasing curiosity, “what’s going to happen next?”

They were having fun in my classes. My God, how academically blasphemous, heretical–and foolish! But I say that I have found that the bonds of caring are easier to establish in an environment of fun and joy. I think that fun, humor, laughter, joy are wonderful tools that bring comfort into a classroom, that they are intimately related to student well-being. I think that there is something sane about being just on this side of foolishness, and something really rational about being just on this side of inanity. Fun lets the student overcome inhibitions, relieve tensions, and raise alertness. We break out of the straightjacket of convention, locking routine, dulling boredom, predictability, and expectations. They can touch spontaneity, and serendipity. When we laugh we open doors and demolish separating walls. We feel closer to one another. We’re more comfortable with one another. Whenever we and the students are happy, we’re all less stressed, more open, more capable of seeing things.

Having fun does not mean taking learning too casually. It does not mean learning is not occurring. To the contrary, it’s almost as if fun is an aspirin to the pain of learning, a relaxant of the tightness of education. I think having fun is the strongest force towards learning. With all the bonding and trusts exercises I use at the beginning of class and through the quarter, I think the environment of natural madness, natural spontaneity, of having fun while learning, does more to bring the students together in caring, trusting, warm, joyous, and productive relationship. I have noticed the during those moments when students laugh, they are more relaxed, more involved, their guard is down, the material seems more connect to them, and they learn more. I sense that fun brings people closer. The students are more open, their vision is sharpened. Fun is a natural pick-me-up. When students are having fun they seem more willing to let go, take a risk. It’s almost as so simple thing as sucking on a tootsie pop opens a slit through which they can peek inside to believe in themselves, find resourcefulness, find creative uniqueness they can rely upon, and daring to dream. I can’t quantify it. It’s just what they write in their journals and what they feel. That’s what I observed, and it’s what I feel.

Should I be firm, serious, keep my feet planted on the ground, keep my head out of the air? We’re having a lively blast while other students are being bored to death. We being songful, laughing and dancing all along the way while others are being so wearisome; we’re learning with abandon, totally and without fear.

Maybe the key–the real secret–to learning is an occasional chuckle, by a good guffaw, a good belly laugh. It keeps the child in all of us alive and playing.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–