Last Monday was a nice day. It was an awesome day. It was a disturbing day. It was a profound day. It was an educating day. It didn’t start out that way. I had returned a week earlier from an exhilarating two days of offering master teacher presentations to students, staff and faculty at North Carolina State University. For the past week, I and the students in the three classes we have together have been engaged in a group of exciting “getting to know ya” excercises as we struggle to break old classroom habits and start forging a learning community. I should have been on a high, but I was lower to the ground than I want to admit. I was smiling on the outside, but my smile inside wasn’t as sincere and strong. Besides my angelic Susan, only one person noticed it–Kelly. Kelly, whose experiences I had shared almost two years ago; Kelly, who I hadn’t seen in a year; Kelly, who had taught me about the power of caring; Kelly, who almost two years ago taught that nothing we do or say is impersonal; Kelly, who was about to teach me again.

It started with a soft, familiar “Dr. Schmier,” coming off to my left as I headed to my office. I turned. It was Kelly. The sunshine suddenly got brighter, the morning slightly warmer, the air fresher, my spirits higher, my smile broader. We embraced like long lost friends. We talked about things. I asked how things were with her. “I’m here,” she proudly and confidently replied. That said it all to me. She asked me how things were going with me. Except for a 2,000 lb gorilla called house rennovation going wild, “good,” I replied. I told her about my son, Robby, beginning to find his way, about my excitement in classes, about just returning from NC State and having touched a student, and preparing to go off to an international conference on teaching.

“Then why don’t you look like you’re flying as high as you should? What’s happenin’? And don’t you shit with me.” she perceptively warned.

“Oh,” I slightly sighed, “I guess going off to other conferences and giving these presentations on other campus sometimes gets me down. I do all this stuff at other places and here I’m generally ignored. I guess this is one of those days I’m stupidly letting it get to me. ”

“Stupid is right,” she snapped back. “Ignored? By who? What are you talking about? Let me put you in your place. You’re listening to the wrong people,” she sternly reprimanded me.

She looked square into my eyes. “You know,” she said in a shift of mood, her voice now quiet and soft and emphatically pleading for me to listen, “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. You hear what I’m saying? I’d be dead! Real dead!! No one ever really cared what was goin’ on inside me, but you. Nobody really saw into me but you. Hell, no one really saw me. Not those people who said they were my friends, not one professor, no one. They didn’t really care if I was here or not, or lived or not. They all disrespected me. I was nothin’ to them no matter that they said or did. I was just a name on a roll in a grade book. People come by words and wanting to do things easy. It’s the doin’ of things that means something. They really didn’t care if I smoked or not or did what. I’d be dead if it weren’t for you.” She turned towards me with glassy eyes, “I thought I could change my ways and keep my old friends. I heard you saying I couldn’t. You were right. To get back, I had to give up everything and change everything. I did because you said I could and was worth doing it. You know, two of my six friends from that time are dead now!” she quietly whispered with an tearful agony that nearly shattered by eardrums and resounded through by soul. “I’d be the third. I’d be one of them if you didn’t show me that I was worth loving and I could soar. I’d be a dead loser lyin’ in a grave instead of being here a live winner. I love you for that. You listen to that!”

Someone walked by, breaking our trance with a smiling yell, “Hi, Dr. Schmier. How about throwing me a Tootsie Pop.”

I pulled one out from my pocket and hurled it in an arc to him.

“See what I mean. There’s more than a Tootsie Pop in his askin’. That’s who you better keep listening to and don’t mind those others. You have touched people on this campus in ways you don’t know. You know only a part of the good you’ve done and probably will never know it all. If I hadn’t told you, you would never have known how taking that picture with me for a button started changing my life in spite of me and saved me from being a dead pothead. Titles? Awards? Being ignored by other professors? And all that stuff? Shit! Let me tell you something. You’re a smart man. You have all these degrees and you have written all these books and you’ve gone to all those places. But, you listen to me. Don’t you ever forget that they ain’t nothing compared to the love you have for each student right here on this campus whether you know them or not!! If you don’t have true love for each student, you’re nothing no matter who you are and what you do!! You hear me??”

Tears came to my eyes. “Thank you,” I quietly said.

We hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. “I love you,” she said, “for loving me. Now you go and love some other student who needs it, and think on what I said.”

I have been for the last few days. And, during my walk this morning this is what I came up with:

If I lecture eloquently, but don’t have compassion for each student, I am not a teacher;

If I am spirited in the classroom, but I am blind to the spirit of each student, I am not a teacher;

If I love to go to teaching conferences, offer workshops on teaching, but I don’t have love for each student, I am not a teacher;

If I write books and articles, but am not interested what I write on each student’s heart and soul, I am not a teacher

If I have all these degrees, but I don’t truly care one degree for each student, I am not a teacher;

If I have organized my classes completely, but I don’t see the goodness in each student, I am not a teacher;

If I creatively and imaginatively present the subject material, but I don’t imagine that the real subject is each student, I am not a teacher;

If I know the essence of my subject, but I don’t truly struggle to know the essence of each student, I am not a teacher;

If I focus only on the active, loving, motivated, vocal, confident, skilled student and do not see the unique qualities in the passive, unloving, unmotivated, quiet, less skilled student, insecure, and perhaps frightened, I am not a teacher;

If I am firm, expect discipline, require hard work, but I am not kind, respectful, flexible, and understanding, I am not a teacher;

If I show great interest in my subject and great disinterest in each student, I am not a teacher;

If I impart students with a sense that learning is merely taking a course, doing an assignment, passing a test, getting a grade, acquiring a degree, I am not a teacher;

If I invest my life in my research to secure renown and tenure, and invest little in the life of each student, I am not a teacher, have secured very litte, done little of importance, and leave little behind.

If I am filled with subject and prestige, but am empty of care for each student, I am truly unfulfilled and am not a teacher;

If I am enriched by my research and experiments, but feel distracted by dealing everyday with students, I am not a teacher;

If I see wonders in my research, experiments, but do not see wonders in the classroom, I am not a teacher.

Kelly is right. Fame fades, presentations are forgotten, articles become seldom read, books go out of print and fall apart, pens and pencils get used up or lost, positions are filled by someone else, people die, but the love of a teacher for a student is never replaced, changes the world, makes the world a better place, and flourishes eternally. Yep, of organization, preparation, presentation, knowlege, prestige, position, award, title, and love for each student, Kelly reminded me to see once again that the greatest is love for each student.”

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Nice walk this morning. The hot, stagnating south Georgia summer is letting go and the invigorating, cool touches of fall are strengthening. As each of those wisps of fresh autumn air touched me, I started thinking about a bunch of separate but associated things. I thought about a long conversation I had with a student yesterday. She hadn’t cared about really learning anything. Nothing that occurred in class, nothing I had said or done, nothing the other members of her triad or others in the class had said or done had changed her attitude. She just wanted to get a good grade as fast and easy as she could. She wanted the most by doing the least. I thought about a comment a colleague made to me a few days ago as we discussed the beginning of the fall quarter. “Students nowadays,” he said, “are failing in their responsibility to learn. And, there isn’t much I can do to change that.” I thought about several comments I picked up in conversations on the internet: “Students are responsible to make learning happen in the classroom.” “Students must bring their own motivation to learn.” “Motivation must come with the students.” And, as I walked the dark streets of Valdosta, I wondered why the attitude of so, so many students in the course of their educational experience seems to have run an unnatural course contrary to today’s weather pattern, from an excited “wow” to a stagnating “ho-hum.”

Yet, so, so many did bring that enthusiasm and motivation with them to school–at first! But, then something happened. And, I sure do have a lot of questions about that. They seem to increasingly lose a readiness to learn, an excitement to learn, a desire to learn, an interest to learn, a motivation to learn, a need to learn, a reason to learn, all of which they had before they entered the school systems. Why does the phenomenal learning curve of most small pre-school children practically quickly begin to level off as they go up the grades in school and is practically flat by the time they enter college?

They became become reluctant learners, reluctant about going to school as they grow older. Why? Why is school far more often than not a “I’d rather be somewhere else” place? I mean just think about it. Do you remember yourself as a student? Do you remember how much you just couldn’t wait to be allowed to sit in a regimented classroom for six hours a day? Do you remember how you just loved doing homework? Do you remember how you looked forward to those tests and arrival of report cards? I don’t. Do you remember where you wanted to be or imagined where you had preferred to be? I do, and it was any place but my place in the school room. Do you remember what it was you really wanted to learn. I do, and it was anything but Latin or algebra or English or history. Why?

Before children enter the classroom, they’re always asking questions, in touch with the world about us, touching it, feeling it, smelling it, holding on to it, crawling over it, climbing it, digging into it, tearing it apart, putting it together, soaking it in. No place was too dangerous; no place was off-limits. They’re asking, “why is the sky blue;” they’re picking up worms; they holding frogs up to their faces. They’re curious as heck. Without a school room, without tests, without grades they learn the language of their parents and possibly other languages as well; they learn the majority of their vocabulary that they would use daily; they learn how to throw, catch, walk, run, skip, jump, swim, ride a bicycle, use the bathroom, draw, print, count, (reading if our parents gave us a bit of help), and take in a hundred of other things through their pores that they would do for the rest of their lives. If you wanted to keep these endlessly curious kids out of things you had to put things out of reach and put up a razor-wire fence.

Now, we have to put up a razor-wire fence to keep them in school and their hands are in their pockets. Why? What unpalatable recipe turns their feasting on learning into something of a hunger strike. What put that bad taste for food for thought in their spirit? Did the children somehow get exposed to a pollutant and caused them to undergo some unnatural, grotesque genetic mutation of attitude whereby the pleasure of learning was replaced by the pain of it? Did they errantly look at some kind of Medusa, have the rush of their vibrant life forces sucked out of them, and become cold, silent, immobile stone so that they’ve lost the capacity to play at learning and learn by playing? What is it that drains their power and dims their lights so that they go silent and immobile, and their zest slows down to rest so that learning hard becomes hard to learn?

Why have they generally been transformed from excited learners into bored test takers, grade getters? Why has the sparkle of inquisitiveness in their eyes turned into the blank stares of passive note-takers? Why is the prevailing question in their spirit changed from “why” to “what do you want?” What sucked out the life juices of excitement leaving an inert residue of boredom? What stiffened their once sponteneity and flexibility? What was it that redirected their wonder of the world about them to wondering about a grade? What was it that remodeled their risk-taking into playing it safe? What happened to them? Why do they hate history, find math boring, see a foreign language as a struggle, treat English as if it were a foreign language? Why are they, as someone calls it, “passion deprived?” And, my last “why.” Why are the students almost always solely blamed for this? Lots of questions. No firm answers.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

It’s about 5:00 a.m. I just came in from an exhilarating six mile walk that more than usual put me deeper and deeper into a reflective mood with every step. Those pre-dawn hours are inexplicable magic for me. These dark streets before dawn are a meditative quiet and calming place and time for “getting to know me.” In those moments before the interfering and energy draining noises of the day begin their encroachment, I find the discipline and rhythm of walking is my entranceway to my inner voice. It is a time during which I settle with myself, coming out from a night’s rest and preparing for the rest of the coming day.

I find it is a time when I stop hearing myself think and start feeling myself feeling, when I get outside the outside world and inside to my inner space and my inner being. I find those pre-dawn moments it to be a paradoxical time when nothing is happening outside and everything is happening inside; it’s a stimulating time away from outside stimuli; a time of walking in the darkness that is walking into the light; a time of becoming quiet, venturing hushness, discovering silence, escaping stillness, enjoying and annoying tranquility, and exploring serenity; a place and time of a scheduled appointment with myself for remembering, renewing, reviving, refocusing, rebalancing, reentering, restrengthening, and reflecting; an essential place and time when I most reacquaint myself with who I a am.

I hadn’t taken a step out from my house when I started thinking about some comments that popped up during several conversations in which I was engaged on various discussion lists during the past week or so. “Oh, Louis. What do you know,” someone wrote me, “you’ve got it easy. You have tenure. You’re free to do what you want.” Another said, “You’re at a university. You don’t have to deal with….” Still another argued, ” Your students are motivated and want to be there. You don’t how lucky you are.”

And you know, I thought this morning, there was a time not too far in the distant past when I had thought they were right. I always had said to myself that as a college professor I was free to do what I wanted in the classroom, that the college classroom is closed tighter than the bedroom door, that no one tells me what to do, that no one interferes; that no one spies on me; that no one observes without my permission; that no one keeps me from acting as I wish, that I can run my class any way I want, that I very, very seldom have to answer to parents, that I can cover however much material in whatever way I decide, that I am my own master.

Yet, as I look back, that supposed freedom now seems so hollow and shallow, so illusory. If I was so free to make my own decisions, why did I often feel chained, restricted, helpless, thrown about, trapped within a set of forces, by the action and decision of others, and by a “system” I could barely influence but certainly not control: Presidents, Deans, VPs, department heads, colleagues, memos, admissions, registrar, bursur, regents regulations, accountability, transcripts, memos, grading system, memos, deadlines, office hours, room assignments, class sizes, advising assignments, evaluations, course assignments, meetings, meetings, and more meetings, and, of course, the type of students on campus. It was ironic. Here I had pronounced publically that I was so free and independent, that I was so free to make my own decisions and do my own thing, and yet privately I so often felt so impotent, so imprisoned, and so powerless within the system. There were times I roared like a lion for all to hear and felt so sheepish where no one could see.

There was a time when I would find it so easy, yet so subtle I almost hid it from me, to point the finger of blame at something or someone for my problems: “The hell with it, nobody appreciates me” or “I’m so worried that they won’t grant me tenure if I screw up” or “I won’t get that raise if they don’t like what I do,” or “They won’t grant me my promotion if I stir up too many waters,” or “If I’m too big a pain in the ass, they won’t…..”, or, “If I don’t kiss ass, I can’t…..”, and so on. There was a time not too long ago that when I didn’t get that position, when I didn’t get that promotion, when that paper wasn’t accepted that I felt colleagues let me down; there was time not too long ago when students didn’t do as I expected and demanded of them that I felt they let me down. In truth, I was letting myself down and surrendering myself to them.

Over the past six years, I slowly came to realize that tenure and my scholarly reputation may have given me a far greater latitude with those external controls, to be able to scoff at and snub them a bit more than my newly hired junior colleagues with a shorter resume and lesser professional reputation. But, I slowly and painfully discovered I remained an inmate in a deeper, darker, more confining, and more isolated prison cell: myself. Despite my words to the contrary, I kept myself locked in by having only one way of looking at myself, at what I do, and at the students.

It was only recently that I told someone that on my campus I have the reputation for being “off the wall.” So, I am free to live up to my reputation and be off the wall. But, now that I think about it, that’s not really true. I do what I do and believe what I believe because six years ago, at the young age of 50, I painfully discovered a way for changing my underlying belief in myself, about things around me, and in others, as well as for changing what I do. No sure-fire how-to-do formula. No guaranteed fix-it technique. No, mysterious incantation. No, magic elixour or dust. No, something far more disarmingly simple yet profound that proved to be a vast untapped resource and strength: telling the truth. I came to realization that I “just” would have to struggle to be honest with myself. And the truth was that I thought I was free, and I had to admit I wasn’t; I thought I had been satisfied, and I had to admit I wasn’t. Now I have a relentless hunger and thirst, relentless desire and need to root out the ways I had limited myself and to discard those beliefs and techniques I had used to deceive myself from seeing what truly is. It meant trying key after key, going through door after door, crossing boundary after boundary, breaking wall after wall, building bridge after bridge. It meant letting go of the self-satisfying, pat answers and grabbing hold to the questions. It meant re-opening the book and start reading the never-ending story, of searching constantly for understanding, accepting that there is no ultimate answer. It meant entering a state of openness, accepting the truth that any “answer” is at best an approximation that is forever subject to modification, adaptation, reapplication, improvement–never final. It meant letting a curious “let’s see” surface. It meant an unending broadening of my self-awareness and awareness of others, of trying to see more of the human playing field. It meant continually deeping my understanding of myself, people and forces. It meant “the spirit of love.”

That’s a hard word in academia, love. But, it is at the heart of the true freedom of teaching–of anything for that matter; it is the true soul of meaningful and learningful classroom experiences. I have come to realize that love has everything to do with attitudes and intentions–and actions: of the commitment to serve the students; of a commitment to something larger than myself; of visualizing an academic world that is not deeply self-centered and self-interested; of the willingness to be open and vulnerable; of a willingness to suspend certainty; of a willingness to exchange in the spirit of the question mark rather than of the exclamation point; of a willingness to share in order to influence and be influenced, to teach and to learn; of the commitment to the students’completion and his or her becoming all that he or she can be; of the commitment to my own completion and becoming all that I can be.

As I slowly and humbly came to that realization–not by intellectualizing, philosophizing, or theorizing, but through personal experience–a deep chord resonated within me that I still have trouble describing, even to myself. There was something new inside me and something new out there. It drew me into a whole new series of commitments and connectedness, educational insights and personal changes; it led me to see an invisible wholeness in myself, in others, and in things that is so often hidden by divisions and separations which we have invented and by which we have become trapped. I began experiencing teaching and life in a way I then had no way to describe. I began involving myself in approaches that seemed in line with my new understanding. I began experiencing a broader vision, wider goals, a higher energy, a true aliveness within me, an aliveness in everything I did.

I am forever learning the difference between “freedom to be and do” and “freedom from.” The former is the freedom to create what I want I honestly desire. It’s the freedom of personal mastery. Freedom. It’s the heart of teaching; it’s the heart of learning. I am always working on the struggle for freedom. The freedom to be free to be truly myself–free of the imposing and imprisoning restrictions of my own self-prejudicies, free of the traps of my confining preconceptions of others, free of the chains of the limiting preconceptions others have about me–to live and teach freely so that students may be free to learn how to learn and live freely.

With that inner sense of freedom, I ardruously discovered that each of us can in some manner, shape, and form create something new, something that has value and meaning, something that is important, something that leaves tracks in the sand, something that touches someone’s soul, something that alters the future, something that says I was here. Every time I feel that freedom at work, it’s like holding each of my newborn sons!

Make it a good day.

–Louis–