It’s Attitude, Stupid

Well March Madness has been upon me for several nerve-racking weeks. For you who are not up on college sports, that means being glued to the television into the wee hours of the night day after day watching the NCAA college basketball tournament. As I mourned my beloved Tarhells being knocked out of the tournament by Penn State two weeks ago and look forward to a great weekend of finals basketball, even if it includes Duke, a bunch of things struck me. Here you have these highly skilled players. And what to so many insightful coaches and sport commentators talk about: attitude. It was attitude that was on the mind of the coach of Michigan State, last year’s tournament champion, when he said he didn’t know if his team had the desire to repeat; when a sports editorial talked of smaller schools from the mid-level conferences being hungry to prove they belonged; when a lead article of a sports website read, “It’s all about ATTITUDE;” when a Washington Post article headlined, “It begins inside.”

“It’s all about attitude.” “It begins inside.” Ain’t that the challenging, hard truth. That has gotten me thinking. A professor recently asked me why I don’t talk about the students as being part of the educational problem. Well, I think, like the sports article said, it’s begins inside, not ourside. Anyway, I do talk about students a great deal, but I do not play the blame game. I’m not going to put the onus “out there” on them until I first see that my problem is “in here.” When we think that the problem is “out there,” we’ve got a problem. The problem and the solution are always an “inside job.” The only one who is going to come to the rescue with some solution us, our only real white knight, is ourselves. Wasn’t it Gandhi who said that we have to be the change we seek? Surely, then, we academics have to be the difference we wish to make.

So many of us don’t understand that the only person we truly can control is ourselves, that our opinion of students is a revealing exposure of ourselves, that what we see as a problem rests on our private world of meaning, that how and on what we reflect is determined by our personal and professional values. Our attitude about ourselves as teachers is mirrored in how we relate to students. If we don’t have a sense of mission, we tend to blame and accuse students; if we don’t have a philosophy of education we tend to put ourselves up against the students instead of our potential. To blame, I think, as I once did, is far more autobiographical than we want to admit. To blame, is to be self-absorbed, self-centered by measuring the strengths and weaknesses of students in terms of how they effect us.

So, if you question the comittment, dedication, and competency of anyone, start with yourself before you get to any student. How do you see each student? Could your attitude which effects your behavior, responses, and action be part of the problem? Do you genuinely love this person? Do you have faith in him or her, hope for him or her? Do you truly believe this person has the capacity to grow and develop? I don’t believe any student is naturally incompetent or is purposefully deceitful. Many students just don’t have their act together–yet. There are deep secrets in both their silence and their sound. Assume good intentions. Your deeply held beliefs about someone will create the tone for any interactions you have with them.

We academics think we are so cool. We think we are so objective, uninvolved, unemotional, disengaged, distanced, rationale. And yet, attitudes, unacknolwedged emotions, are the key to every decision we make and every action we take. In the intellectual world of academia that may be heresy. With all this assessment, we’re measuring the wrong thing. We measure what we know. We measure what we do. Maybe we ought to be first asking what do we feel.

Most of the cottage industry of “how to” workshops generally miss the crucial point. To paraphase the first Clinton–if you pardon (pun intended) the expression–presidental campaign: it’s attitude, stupid.

I know. A lot of you are rolling your eyes and smirking. Am I about to get smoked. Here goes. Talent, ability, knowledge, pedagogy, technology are all overrated. Not because they aren’t important, but they won’t take you through teaching’s inevitable wet-sand and those unexpected twists in the road. Using a sports analogy: your ability may say “win;” your knowledge may say “win;” even the technology at your fingertips may say “win.” If your attitude, however, says “lose,” you…will…lose. You’ll be in class without class. Your juices will be stagnant. You won’t be the panachiest person in the room. You will not go anywhere. If your attitude is a “can’t” your feet and spirit will get cemented in your “won’ts” that will soon cure into your hardened “don’ts.” You’ll be like a stranded Ferrari. That very expensive finely crafted machine can run, but it won’t move without fuel in its tank.

It’s attitude that fuels us. That’s what athletes call “putting on a game face,” “getting the juices flowing,” “getting psyched up,” and so on. Attitude determines our approach to teaching; it determines our relationships with students. The type of our attitude is the difference between soaring high into the clouds or taking a nose-dive in the ground, between success and failure; that sharpens or dulls our edge. It’s attitude that will effect the outcome of our teaching more than anything else. It’s attitude that determines whether our problems are blessings or curses, whether we make the inevitable failures friends or foes. It’s always attitude because attitude is in on the beginning and ever-presenting in the continuing, and will affect the outcome of whatever we do more than anything else.

Many years ago, I learned, oh so slowly, that the conversion of my teaching is a conversion of my attitude into action. I always had said that at the moment of my epiphany nearly a decade ago, I started changing. And, I believe that for years. Recently, I realized that I really hadn’t changed. I always had been there. It was my changing attitude about myself that led to magnificant discoveries about myself and those around me. No, no significant change in what I did, how I thought, how I felt, what I noticed, how I taught, occurred only as I started changing my atttide towards myself. Then, followed changes in my attitude about teaching and about each student. I’ll say this again and again and again. The most important technique I have at my disposal–and the most powerful–be it theraputic or pathological, is my attitude. And so much of my attitude is spoken non-verbally.

And, therefore, I can attest from my personal experience that attitudes, unlike diamonds, aren’t forever. The long and short of it is, if we can leave behind the wrong, pernicious, pathological, dark attitude and acquired the right, bright, therapeutic attitude, if we can let go of the negatives we so dearly embrace, if we can stop playing the blame game, we not only will have fuel in our tanks, it will be like turning on our after-burners.

It is demanding. There are challenges. However, to paraphrase some old bankers: anytime you bet on collatoral like knowledge and ability, you’ll lose; anytime you bet on the person’s attitude, you’ll win. Maybe that’s the really lesson of the NCAA tournament, the dot.com bubble, and everything else.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

That Miserable, Magnificant Magnolia Tree

I was cooling off by the fish pond with a freshly brewed cup of coffee this morning. There is still a pinching nip in the air this pre-spring dawn. A bird somewhere in the branches was singing in a punctuated two-note repetitive group of fives what sounded like “pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty.”

As I was watching the soothing rhythmic ballet of the koi and listening to the hypnotic sounds of the water falls, my eyes drifted to the right back corner of the pond. There, not three feet from its edge, stands that miserable, magnificent towering magnolia tree. For some reason I started staring at it, admiringly wondering about it.

There is a huge story about that huge tree. When we first moved into the house nearly thirty years ago, the back yard was unkept, overrun by a myriad of what we call scrub oak saplings. In the middle was a three foot magnolia a sapling. I wanted to pull it our with the rest as I cleared a portion of the yard. Susan wouldn’t let me. It was an omen of things to come. As the magnolia grew in height, so did my misery over it. It now stands a majestic thirty-five feet. It’s branches cast a dark shady umbrella over the pond. Did I say “majestic?” Now, until recently, that is a word I never used when I looked at that tree. “Hateful” or “spiteful” would have been better words

This morning I thought of the many times over the years I cursed that tree, denounced it as a dirty tree because of the huge amounts of denuding and suffocating hand-size leaves it would drop in the autumn. Many was the time over the past twenty-five years I salivated at the thoughts of taking a chain saw to it only to find that it had my angelic Susan as its champion.

“It never blooms,” I would scream as I struggled to unlock the chain she had used to tie herself to the tree’s trunk. “It has never bloomed. It doesn’t bloom. It will never bloom,”

“How do you know.”

“Because I am the gardener around here!”

Next, I tried reason. “It needs sun, but it’s too shaded by the pines and oaks.” That didn’t work.

“You won’t touch it,” she commanded as if I was some anti-environment logger about to clear cut an old growth forest.

When I built the pond, there defiantly stood that blasted tree. I could have sworn I heard it smirk as I received orders to dig around that it or not dig it out at all. “Don’t,” warned my beautiful Greenpeace watchdog, “‘accidentally’ cut any big roots and kill it.” Do you know how much extra work that gave me, especially since I had to dig out the pond by hand?

Then, three years ago, it happened. It was a balmy spring morning after I built the pond and then had to build a “whatever” (I always forget what it’s called) over it to protect the fish from being incessantly bombarded by the dark brown, crinkled missiles the tree threw into the pond. I was crossing the patio headed for a mediative chat with the fish in the pond. I looked up at that blight with a cursing sneer. I angrily thought that the tree, knowing it was protected, always spitefully thumbed its branches at me. At that moment I thought I saw something, a shape and color I had never seen. My eyes strained in the dim dawning lit. Darn if it there wasn’t something there. No it couldn’t be. But, it was. Hidden way high in the crown of the tree ONE secretive white flower peeked out from its green camouflage. I stared. At that moment, a dark blight became a beautiful light. I forgot my anger with that runaway from a landfill. I was so excited that I ran into the house. Tempting the fates and willing to brave inevitable tirade of invectives that would come, I woke my sleeping Susan, dragged her outside in her nightshirt, grabbed her reluctant head and pointed it skyward, and I pointed with a desperate and excited “don’t you see it” gesture.

We both stood there not believing what we were seeing.

“I see it! Wow!!” Then, an I’m-going-to-get-even-for- all-the-aggravation–you-gave-over-this-tree impish smile appeared on her face. “See. I told you so.” Oh, did she rub it in.

“I guess,” making a sheepish stab at some defense, “it’s soaking up the fertilizer I’m feeding the elephant ears, lillies, hosta, and ferns around the pond.”

“All you had to do was feed it?? And you wanted to cut it down,” little miss agriculturalist gleefully admonished me with an accenting wagging finger, “Oh, you of little faith. You had it set in your mind to cut the tree down and wouldn’t see it any other way. So, there. Feed it!!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Well, to make a long story short, the next year the tree bore about fifteen blooms. Last year it had double that number. And, in my eyes that hateful, dirty hunk of wood is now a magnificent flowering thing of beauty.

Looking at that tree, now that I think about this morning, I see how it stands as a monument to a bunch of lessons. The more I think about it, the more insights and lessons I find about success, failure, attitude, change. Six or Seven quick ones will do for now. First, one positive dream is more powerful than an untold number of realities. Second, when I watch a tree, I can see either falling leaves or budding flowers. It’s my choice. Third, there are secrets in silence and in activity. Fourth, a little difference can make a whole lot of difference. Fifth, don’t become a hostage to past attitudes. Sixth, I made the mistake about that tree a friend and learned from it. And finally, there’s nothing wrong or weak about changing your attitude and actions.

No different when we teachers are looking at a student, is it.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

My Teaching Credo, II

There’s a nip in the air this morning. My budding roses are are rosy-petaled. I guess March hasn’t really decided whether to go out a proverbial baa or roar. That chill, however, isn’t just coming from the weather. Over the past week, I’ve received a barrage of icy scoffs from I guess what would be called sceptics because of what one professor at an eastern community college called my “extravagant ambition” and another called my “relentless but unreachable idealism.” A third accused me of being commited to students instead of my discipline. On that charge, I admit that I am a people person. I am a student junkie. I am not edgy about being involved with students because students for me are not “edgy” people who are sitting on the edge of my academic profession. I do not believe that teaching is an “unfamous” endeavor dealing the the “unfamous.”

If there is one principle I have come to honor in the past decade, it is that education is not a world of impersonal forces, theories, principles, statistics, test scores, and subject matter. Drawing on my Emerson, I’ll take a stand and say that is no learning, no teaching, no subject, no education. There is only biography. If that makes me a target, so be it. If there is any–any–relevant insight I have gained in the past decade since my epiphany, it is that the individual, that magical and mysterious human being–student or teacher–in the classroom profoundly matters. I am slowly seeing that the more we are preoccupied with the mechanics, with the technology, with the pedagogy, with assessment, the less we will see the person of the student as well as the person of ourselves. The more we will be trapped by blind spots.

God, all that was brought home this week. What a week it has been. It was one of those “what else can happend” weeks. And, it seemed that all those “elses” happened. I can’t tell you how many hats I had to wear. It started at the end of last week, ran into the weekend, and continued unabated. And, maybe I’m more sensitive, more aware, because of the week it has so far been. It has been a seismic week. It has been a week of tears and sneers. I’ve experienced the proverbial agonizing depths of “no” and the exhuberant heights of “yes.” It has been emotioning draining. It has been a risk-taking time. It has been a time I drooped my head and soul in sorrow for a student or two and a time I raised my hands and spirits in their triumph. There was a moment a day or two ago I faltered. I didn’t want to take anymore. I e-mailed a disraught student with a sighful and tired two word: “Why me.” She immediately replied with a humbling and splash-in-the-face three word: “No one else.” It has been an awesome time. It has been a sad time. It has been a mysterious time. It has been a magical time. What a time.

It has been a time to remember. I just have to say without revealing confidences that I have been reminded this week just how much every class is fraught with an eclectic mix of individuals who come in a variety of sizes, ages, colors, sounds, shapes, experiences, backgrounds, cultures, trials and tribulations, other lives, memories, fears, interests, expectations, tastes, talents, abilities, potentials, and personalities. There is a serendipitousness that assures me that I never know what I am going to find on any given day. I have to be constantly on the alert. No, I have to be constantly aware. I have to listen, see, feel, smell. I can’t stand around flat-footed; I have to be on my toes. I have to be a master at impromptu. Each place, each day, each person is a place of challenge, discovery, surprise where the promise of the unknown beckons from every seat every day. Teaching makes me very aware of the potential of each person, where that person currently is, and where that person can be. The power of care, faith, hope, belief, and love can be challenging. It can be draining. It can, I assure you, more so can be awesome. They are signposts in my heart and mind which I pass time and time again for direction each day as I set forth afresh on new adventures.

I’m not sure most people understand the power of a credo, of constructing a vision, dream, goal, and then believing that it can be accomplished because it ought to be. I have to teach boldly. I believe that whatever ought to be done, can be done; and if it can be done, “all” I have to do is do whatever it takes to get it done. For others that may be extravagant ambition or unreachable idealism or irrational touchy-feely. And, that’s okay. I just don’t believe we can recruit students, work to retain them, give them dreams, and then walk away. I believe if we recruit students it is because we believe in them, and if we believe in them we have a responsibility for their success. For me that credo generates power, generates energy, generates actions, generates stamina, generates the capacity to reach.

You don’t get those same feelings where the subject is the focus and every student is treated as the same. You don’t have a shot at unleashing the full potential of each individual, harnessing the energy and spirit of each student, unlocking the power of each individual.

To paraphrase Goethe, teaching boldly has genius, power, and magic in it.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

My Teaching Credo

This ia the core principle of my teaching, my first principle, around which everything I believe and do revolves:

To help each student become the
person he or she is capable of becoming

By “capable” I mean in terms of untapped potential and unrealized growth; unrealized growth not merely in terms of grades, GPA, diploma, and profession or job. I mean “capable” also in those things that are important during what I call the “alone and quiet” times with oneself: serenity in the face of confusion and conflict, inner stamina against those who would strip away your uniqueness; personal “greatness” without grandiosity; continuous quest.
This is not just a statement about what I do, how I feel, what I think. It is a statement about who I have become and am becoming.

I truly believe that my identity and integrity as a teacher is rooted in being a life-giver and life-affirmer, in being a lid-lifter and value-adder. I would describe that mission as one of being a servant teacher who turns the focus away from myself onto each and every student, who finds out what each student needs, who serves the needs of each student, who consistently and constantly puts each student first in my feelings and thoughts, who does whatever it takes–not just my best–to meet those needs with hope, faith, belief, love, care, persistence, and determination.

And so, at the end of the term, when each student thinks about me, do they say, “My life is better because of him. I am a better person for having known him. He made a difference.” That’s the ultimate and only true evaluation.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–