It is cold out there this morning! Mid-twenties!! The air had a slight chill that was akin to liquid nitrogen. I thought for a time or two that I was going to be quick frozen. By the time I came in from my walk my skin was the same color as my Carolina Blue grubbies. I quickly lunged for the warmth of a steaming cup of fresh brew. It was to no avail. My ice-cold hands quickly turned it into ice coffee! Now I know how Midas felt.

Talking about a deep chill is a good lead-in to two interesting and interconnected pieces about the less than warm temperatures of traditional medical bedside manners that I’ve just read. The first was Geoffrey Kurland’s MY OWN MEDICINE: A DOCTOR’S LIFE AS A PATIENT. It’s interesting. Kurland, an accomplished pediatric pulmonologist, stricken with leukemia, talks of his revelation of how doctors are present at and involved in emotionally charged moments throughout their careers. Yet, with unacceptable rarity they are not trained to listen, to be empathetic, to be sensitive, to create rapport, to generate trust, to just plain talk, to be human. They may have great medical skills at opening up people, but far too many have weak people skills that close people up. Kurland describes his own sense of diminishment, devaluation, disempowerment as a patient at the hands of his medical colleagues. He talks about how the attending physicians ignored what’s fundamentally important and meaningful to him as a human being. I wonder what wondering we academics would be led into if one of us published MAKING THE GRADE: A PROFESSOR’S LIFE AS A STUDENT?

The second piece I read was an old article discussing how the national medical licensing exam will include on a trial basis examining “patient encounters.” It seems that there is a push in some quarters of the medical profession to transform a major complaint into a major concern. That is, there is an attempt afoot to establish a balance in a science-heavy curriculum with a “best friends” training to forge vital connecting and supportive relationships between two human beings known as patient and physician. The Licensing Board is devising what I call a testy test in bedside manner.

If I remember my history of science, it once was, before the time of scientific and technological innovation, before the likes of Jenner and Lister and Pasteur and Koch and penicillin and Pfizer, that all doctors generally had to offer was compassionate listening. Then, the empathetic patient concern model of warm caring went by the wayside as it was replaced by the chill of an unemotional disease treating model. Doctors substituted what I’ll call “presence” with antibiotics and surgical “procedures” rather than balancing the two into a healing wholeness. Yet, recent studies show that good communication leads to good clinical practice and better outcomes for patients. Patients want to talk; they want to be respected; they want to be noticed and heard; they want doctors to care about them as individual human beings. Other studies show that doctors can learn a lot about a patient’s malady, as well as about a patient’s needs, by listening to the patient.

Now, take the words, “physician” and “patient,” and replace it with “teacher” and “student.” There you have it. Not much difference too many times in too many places. Communication qualities such as listening carefully, making eye contact, touching, noticing body language and showing empathy, being understanding and sympathetic may sound like emotional fluff to many intellectual-oriented academics. But, as my good friend, Alex Fancy, would say, they’re really the right stuff. After all, compassion, empathy, sympathy are attitudes or spirit made flesh and bones. That bears repeating: in academics so many are so far into their heads and subjects that they are so far removed from the essential and integral human element in education. They so often underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to touch and turn a life around. It bears repeating because it only takes one person who truly and caringly sees and listens to turn a life around.

Anyway, I had an impish, perhaps treasonous, thought. What if such a test in bedside manners was part of our examination for our academic degrees. Wouldn’t it be interesting. Let’s be honest. In a people business such as is education, too many of us just don’t have the people skills. Most of us have not been trained in such skills. Many of us see ourselves in the information discovery and/or delivery and transmission business rather than in a people serving business. For too many, their future is not really at stake, their job is not really on the line, and their prestige doesn’t really depend on their relationship with students. So, such skills are superfluous.

If nothing else, it doesn’t take a proverbial rocket scientist to know that patients who feel rapport with a doctor are more likely to do better medically. We’ve all been there. I know I have. A few years ago, as an out-patient I had what I call “open hand surgery.” It sounds more dramatic than mundane carpel tunnel surgery. Anyway, the prep nurse was one of those Dorothy’s house should have hit. As she man-handled me, I kept looking around for her broom. Boy, did I want to throw water on her so she’d melt. I am sure she was technically competent, but she had the bedside manner of a hungry tiger about to pounce on a delicious lamb. She was abrupt, stone faced, cold, distant, unreassuring, and harsh. Let’s just say that I was, to say the least, not a relaxed happy camper as I went under. She might as well have been an unfeeling robot. I experienced an infantilization. (how is that for a made-up word) I felt slighted, overwhelmed by a harrowing, alienating, and frustrating feeling of aloneness, helplessness, and diminishment.

Ever come out in an out-patient recovery room. I had this amnesic, almost panic, attack, “Where am I?” The place had the look and smell of a morgue. Unnatural and noxious scents of antiseptic and anesthesia heavily fragranted the air. There were bodies all around me. I knew I was dead. Slowly, as the fog began to clear, I cursed that wicked witch in white whose unruffled manner made my last minutes on earth unpleasantly tense, uncertain, unsettling, and frightening. Then, I felt a soft, caring touch on my hand. I heard a soothing, caressing, angelic voice softly whispering in my ear. “Dr. Schmier, everything went well. Your wife is outside in the waiting room. I told her you’ll be out in a short while. You’ll be with her very soon. Just close eyes and rest. Don’t worry. I’ll be here and I’ll take care of you. Everything will be fine……” My panic disappeared, my muscles relaxed, and I gratefully closed my eyes. I may have had a thin line of a slight smile on my face.

Now this nurse I am sure was just as technically competent as the first, but unlike the first, she wore a halo instead of a cone hat; she understood she was as much, if not more, in the people business as in the medical business.

It’s no different in academics. Studies, and my professional experience, show that students who feel a rapport with a professor, who are a member of a supporting and encouraging classroom community, who are respected and trusted and cared about are more likely to reach out for their as yet hidden potential. The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. Why can’t so many of us understand that?

There is a Native American saying: speak only half as much as you listen. I’m not sure most academics even listen half as much as they speak. Yet, seeing eyes and listening ears mean a seeing and listening heart; they mean being aware; they mean taking an intense and sincere and caring interest in what is being said; they mean hospitality, respect, appreciation, nurturing, and wonder; they mean being open to something new about a new person; they mean not being preoccupied with what to say when the other person stops; they mean an intense silent conversation; they mean not acting like Alice’s hare, even if you are in a hurry; they mean knowing beneath the spoken words is their meaning; they mean knowing that words have no meaning, people who speak the words have all the meaning; they mean paying close attention to whom a person is; they mean creating deeper silences in yourself; they mean not talking to yourself while the person is talking; they mean getting the ears, eyes, mind, and heart operating at the same speed; they mean not judging, labeling, analyzing, diagnosing, prognosing before the person is finished; they mean not having prejudiced notions, preconceived opinions, cynical attitudes, suspicious feelings; they mean creating a safe place for whatever is said; they mean surrendering yourself to the needs of others. Seeing and listening are acts of love, for you make yourself accessible, you give yourself, you make yourself vulnerable, to someone else’s words and feelings. They mean a continuing form of embrace.

Let me offer a medical scenario. You have severe stomach cramps. Your family members rush you to the emergency room. The physician reluctantly leaves his other more glamorous treatments, has never seen you before, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t display any empathy, doesn’t listen carefully, shows little sensitivity, doesn’t notice body language, doesn’t have a record of your medical background, doesn’t get one, doesn’t examine you, doesn’t answer your questions about your symptoms, doesn’t create rapport and trust, doesn’t honor your feelings, and doesn’t communicate clearly. The doctor is rude, condescending, abrupt, inattentive, and, like Alice’s hare, has no time for unnecessary “small” talk however necessary and “big” such talk may be to you. Yet, in the literal wink of an eye, like Flash of the comic books, he or she utters a precise “I know exactly what’s wrong” diagnosis, prescribes a specific drug, offers an exact prognosis, and is off in a whirl and blur.

What kind of doctor would you think this person was? Ready to chase after an anbulance chaser? Isn’t this exactly what too many of us academics so often do when we enter a class, especially one of those uneducational, depersonalizing large classes, and more especially those unprestigious, non-professional, mere “bread-and-butter,” huge first year survey classes where we more often than not give mere lip-service to a humanities curriculum? The students lose, have stripped from them, their individuality, identity, and their humanity. Let’s admit it. Most of us academics in higher education were not trained as classroom teachers. Most of us are groping amateurs, although many are educating themselves and seeking on-the-job training. But, even then, too many of those struggling to up-grade themselves are concentrating mostly on technology and technique concerned with transmitting the subject material. Like medical school students, most of us weren’t trained in bedside manner, communication skills, and student encountering. Far too many of us haven’t learned about learning or haven’t applied what we’ve learned about learning. Most of us are still far more consuming talkers rather than see-ers and listeners.

Now, is there hope for those who don’t or won’t recognize that academic performance on both sides of the podium is behavior driven? Sure there is. We have to take the time to learn how to see and to listen. But, that isn’t the same as learning new technologies or methods or techniques. It can work if we work long and hard at it. It may look easy, but not talking or doing, just seeing and listening is not simple. The greatest barrier in learning how to see and to listen is the illusion that so many of us have created that convinces ourselves that we already do it–and do it well. And, we casually dismiss students with a “what do they know,” when they say we don’t. I know. I did it.

I am a recovering talkoholic. I now know that it’s harder to stay awake than you think. I now know that it’s harder to stay alert than you think. I now know that it’s easier to be in a daze than you think. I now know it’s so easy to ignore the human details. I didn’t now that or want to know that when I was hooked on orating. When I was addicted to talking, trust me, silence was my enemy and I didn’t listen or see most others. I was too busy wanting to be seen and to be heard. I was too busy to notice that there were others in the classroom. I was so shut up in myself I couldn’t shut up. I was so untrusting of myself and others than I didn’t trust the silence of just seeing and listening. And, I wasn’t really listening to what I was saying about myself and students. I was saying that I didn’t really want to participate in those around me regardless of my pronouncements to the contrary. Then, after my epiphany in October, 1991, I started learning that the highest development of seeing and listening is seeing and listening to myself. I started to take a long and honest look at myself. I started to think about why I saw and listened at little as I did, how I saw and listened to what little and to few that I did, and understood what it takes time to change old habits. I started working hard and long to learn how to be still, to see and to listen, to get into a routine where nothing is routine, to find that place where everything and everyone has a special place, to become mindful–and grateful–for the everyday things in everyday life, to cherish the extraordinary value in each ordinary person. It was a herculean effort of will and perseverance. It was slow. Small steps. There were setbacks. Many colleagues saw my need for changing as a sign of weakness. Some still do. Some felt threatened by my transformation. Some still are. Nevertheless, I continued to hear the call of authentic selfhood and true presence. It was a journey inward, downward, and outward. Slowly, I began to understand that the less my mouth spoke, the more my heart spoke; and the more my heart spoke, the more my life spoke. I also began to understand that as I learned to truly see and listen, I was opening myself to my experiences and living in community with others. I was becoming attuned to what was not yet visible in me and others, to what was seeking to emerge, and to what was weaving that emerging spirit into the flesh and bone and behavior of myself and each student.

To keep my eyes and ears, as well as my heart, open and to see the wonderful sacredness in the ordinary, each day I engage in at least one of three exercises. One exercise, in which I asked participants in a recent workshop to engage, I call “water journaling.” It’s simple. From the moment I get out of bed, I consciously look for and see, hear and listen to water in any place, at any time, in any form: saliva in my mouth, tears in my eyes, the toilet, the shower, the steam, the sink, the toothpaste, the shaving cream, the fishpond, the cup of coffee, the dishwasher, the puddle in the street, the fountain on campus, the vapor in the air, etc. etc. etc. You get the point. I then make a brief journal entry of each time I hear water, see it, and feel it. Try it. I am always amazed at how this simple exercise sharpens my senses and hones both my awareness and mindfulness, and how it becomes almost impossible to ignore the usually ignored. The second exercise I often do is to slowly, ever so slowly, play with a raisin (a blueberry or strawberry in season), roll it in my fingers and feel every ridge in every detail, stare intently at, wonder about its origin as a succulent grape, magnify its shriveled patterns, take it to my nose and deeply inhale it’s smell, let it sit on my tongue, feel the rushing flow of saliva, play with it, and let my tongue and palate and cheek and gums and teeth feel every line in every wrinkle. The third exercise is simply to just sit down and draw a picture with the intent awareness of something I’m looking at. It forces me to take notice of the horde of ordinarily unnoticed extraordinary and tinniest but important of details. All three exercises are a form a form of meditation, for as I sensitize and focus myself to that single raisin or to water or to the particulars of a scene, I prepare myself and renew my habit to be aware of, to be mindful of, to appreciate, and to focus intently on each immediate moment and person. And so, over the years, I’ve developed the habit that when I walk across campus, down the halls, into a classroom, or into a workshop room, I see and listen to nothing but “sacred ones.” And believe me when I say the more “sacred ones” you delight in, the more people you consider to be a reason for comfort and joy and blessing, the more blessed joy will comfort you.

The medical examing board recognizes that poor communication leads to poor clinical practice and poorer outcomes for patients. If we teachers do not understand ourselves as communicators, we won’t accept that our first responsibility is to be effective see-ers and listeners. Let me put it this way. If you don’t sincerely care about the person as a sacred individual, you won’t truly want to take the time and make the sincere effort to see and listen; and if you won’t take the time and make the sincere effort to see and listen, you won’t get to know the student; and if you really don’t know a student beyond knowing a name, you won’t appreciate a student; and if you don’t appreciate a student, you won’t truly understand a student; and, if you don’t understand a student, you will tend not to have high regard for and tend to disregard him or her no matter what you say. Then, your academic diagnosis, prescribing, and prognosis will fall back on labeling, on too often existing impersonal, disconnected, disrespectful, distorting, and denigrating stereotypes, assumptions, and preconceptions. And when the student doesn’t do what you demand or expect, you’ll put all the blame on him or her while exonerating yourself.

To paraphrase Pearl Bailey, for a student to talk to a teacher whose door is closed is enough to tie the devil up in knots. No, the best way to understand and deal with students is not to talk about them, it is to see and listen and stay intently aware and mindful of each of them. Now you may not see eye to eye with a student, but listening ear to ear and seeing heart to heart will have a far better chance of unleashing potent forces of change and transformation seldom dreamed of.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

It’s an early crystal clear Sunday morning. Sun is still asleep. There’s a heavy chill in the air. Just did my five miles. Coffee’s not yet out. So, while I’m waiting, I’ve leaned against a cold iron handrail while sitting on the chilly concrete entrance steps to the Marcum conference center jotting down whatever is about to flow out. I’ll probably share this on the internet Monday or Tuesday when I get back to Valdosta.

While I was on the oval track, walking in my winter grubbies for the first time this year, I was thinking and feeling that this Lilly conference on collegiate teaching has been especially an “E” conference. It has been “e”xhausting. My brain is numb and I am physically tired. Sleep is not really an option around here. It has also been “e”xhilarating. My spirit is soaring. Like my friend Joe Loweman, I came Wednesday evening to this gathering of learners on the campus of Miami University reluctantly and in my head. About noon today, I’ll leave reluctantly and be totally and deeply in my heart. That always happens. The people do that to me. That is the way it should be. Lilly is more of an experience or a retreat if you let it be than it is a stuffy professional conference. Yet this year I got deeper and my spirit soared higher than usual. It probably began with with the uplifting people at my Thursday pre-conference workshop; the probably continued that night with the wake for the loss of a good colleague and friend;it probably was the hugging and greeting and schmoozing with old friends and colleagues on Wednesday, some of whom had had a hard year; it probably was the more than usual schmoozing with new-made friends and colleagues; it may have been the deeper than usual learning and reflection at more than a few of the sessions; it certainly was the stirring people in my three hour workshop on Saturday who took me off into an “e”xhilarating emotional and spiritual realm I had not planned on; and it probably was a marvelous and honest young woman (she’ll love me for that), Regina Barreca, with whom I hope I’m starting a friendship.

In this electronic age, everything is “E-” something or other. Not being a contrarian or iconoclast, I think we all should jump on the “E” wagon–but on a different “E” wagon in a different parade. I’m not about to talk about electronic teaching or learning. No, for me the “E” in teaching means something basic. It means something that closes the distance and humanizes the electronics. I’m talking about “E”nthusiastic teaching, “E”xcited teaching, “E”nergetic teaching and, above all, “E”ffort teaching, all of which incessantly keep the fires burning and prevents “E”xtinguishing burnout.

Now what I am about to say may shock you. I truly believe we teachers must be show offs. I’m not talking about the rude, disrespectful, arrogant, self-righteous, or sarcastic caustic type of show off. Let me repeat that: I am not talking about the rude, disrespectful, arrogant, self-righteous, or sarcastic caustic type of show off. At this conference I saw one heck of a show off in the mould of what I am talking about: Regina Barreca. She “talked” to us about humor, teaching and learning, feminist theory. Those who didn’t understand what she was doing called her presentation “just a stand-up comedy routine” that had nothing to do with teaching. It had everything to do with teaching. She didn’t just stand up there and there was nothing routine about it. She just didn’t drone on in humorless lecture fashion that humor can take the edge off touchy issues; she modeled it. No one was on edge about what is an ordinarily edgy subject; we were falling off the edge of our seats. She didn’t blandly say that we can’t merely practice what I call “safe teaching.” She whipped the condom off of that room–and no one even noticed it. She didn’t show us exciting as watching paint dry “studies have shown” slides. She didn’t read to us from power point slides as if we were all illiterates. She didn’t bore us with self-promoting citations of authors to prove her position that enthusiasm in the form of humor can enhance learning. Whether it was a doubting or affirming shaking head, she grabbed us and she held us. Details of her presentation and reflection of it are still reverberating within me. The only risk we took engaging in this risky subject was losing bladder control from the incessant laughter; the only stress we felt was the pain in our laughing stomachs. As a Sicilian from Brooklyn, it was on fitting that she was a Mt. Etna lava flows of enthusiasm that inundated us. Among other things, Regina was saying that we should get excited, bounce all over the place, jump for joy, and dance. And, if we can burn brightly with authentic “e”nthusiasm anew each moment, each day, each week, each semester, there is no way in hell we can’t light up–or burn out! In a demonstration par excellence, using humor, we saw that we can’t closet ourselves and our energy. We can’t be shy or fearful or guarded about showing our excitement. The demonstrative “E” in teaching in any form isn’t buffoonish; it’s serious stuff. It’s not distracting from the subject; it’s on the mark. It’s not impovishing; it’s enriching. It’s not amateurish; it’s highly professional. It takes the intimidating and makes its intimate. And, it takes the risky out of the literal and metaphorical risque.

Never forget that the opposite of laughter and excitement and fun isn’t work. Their opposite is debilitating, stagnating, dulling, distracting boredom!

We’re living at a time when it’s easier to show off our “e” in teaching. We shouldn’t be embarrassed or shamed to show off our enthusiasm for each student. I believe in the kind of enthusiasm that gives me an open and transparent personality so that what’s in my heart and soul radiates out. I let my enthusiasm be a motivational light, a purpose light. I give away my enthusiasm. Otherwise, anything I say would be shallow and hollow and certainly a damper. I let my actions talk my enthusiasm for each student.

Think about it. Do you know of anything great that was ever achieved without enthusiasm and excitement? As I asked some colleagues recently, have you ever known anyone with the blahs who has reached for the “ahas,” ever gone to the stars, ever set sail on an adventure, ever discovered anything, ever built things? When you’re not enthused, when you’ve got the “downs,” it’s pretty hard to get it up, to keep up your stamina and resolve. When you’ve got the blahs it’s pretty hard not to have leadened feet and a heavy heart; it’s pretty hard not feel vulnerable and discouraged; it’s pretty hard not to feel stuck, to mope around, and to grumble in the shadows; it’s pretty hard not to feel extinguished. To open this heart blockage and get the blood flowing again takes a strict regimen of daily doses of yearning, zeal, hope, and wonder. Yearning looks to break routine; zeal produces energy; hope creates an optimism; and wonder counters indifference. Taken together they are a natural angioplasty of enthusiasm.

Let me let you on in a secret. Yeah, Gina was a pistol. Yeah, she had a heck of a routine. Yeah, we were rolling in the aisles. But, she was not using humor to promote herself. She was using humor as her form of enthusiasm to help others help themselves become who they each are capable of becoming. And, that is serious stuff. Our worst enemies are not those whom we call enemies; our worst enemy is our lack of enthusiasm for what we do and for whom we do it; our worst enemy is our fears; our worst enemy is that we are not authentically happy at what we do.

If I was on Mount Sinai, one of the key commandments of teaching I’d inscribe in stone is: “Thou shalt be enthused about each student each day.” That is, if you’re going to teach, do it with all your heart. Be emotional. Be human. There no harm in it; there’s only harm in denying and suppressing it. But, the “E” in teaching isn’t just any ole energy; it’s a special kind of energy. It has an inner warmth and feeling and vigor and freshness; it has an eagerness, a curiosity, and a giving. It’s a doing what you love and love what you’re doing and loving each person you’re doing it with and for. The worst bankruptcy in the world is the teacher who has lost his or her enthusiasm for each student. I mean how do you light a fire if you’re all wet? If you want the students to have a chance of being enthused about themselves and the subject, you first have to be enthused inside about yourself and each of them. Once enthusiasm for each student is truly within you, once it is strong and meaningful within you, it will begin to radiate out and touch each student like a powerful force working in your favor. And while it doesn’t cost anything to have it, it’s absence is a heavy price to pay. No, a teacher with the blah can’t raise a student’s aspirations for what he or she can become and to release his or her energies so he or she will get there. On the other hand, if teachers and students are enthused about each other, not just the subject matter, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. I see that every day.

Now, I admit that I know Regina only for a day or so even if we talked, laughed, kibbutzed, drank, and danced. I found her to be a kindred spirit of many with whom I’ve associated these past few days, “newbies” and old timers alike, who keep or aspire to keep the fire burning without getting burnt out. I will bet she, as do others, have many miraculous moments with students, that they work hard to make those miracles happened, that they move their lap to where those miracles are falling. I will bet my bottom dollar that she, as do I and others, lives the lived life, chooses to inhabit her days, allows living to open her up, looses her heart until it becomes a soaring wing or a blazing torch or a never broken promise. I will swear that she would understand a line from Dawna Markova: “that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit.”

I came away form Lilly a bit more the blossom and a bit less the seed. I was reminded over and over again that working at teaching isn’t enough. You’ve got to capitalize and capitalize on the “E” in teaching. You can’t listen to colleagues’ moans about monotony or detail or preparation. You can’t listen to colleagues’ groans about teaching loads or fatigue. You can’t be stymied by fears. Any time you work at something you run into that grungy stuff. I’ve seldom heard such moans and groans when it comes to scholarly research and publication. You just have to learn to get excited about it all. If I am excited about my supposedly “miserable job,” it isn’t miserable any more, and I roll up my sleeves willingly ready to do the down and dirty stuff. There is real uplifting magic in that “E” in teaching. Enthusiasm spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment. I’ve learned that you’ve got to enthusiasticly work at being enthused. If you’re not enthused you won’t really work at it. It’ll just be plain ole drudgery work and you won’t get it, and you won’t wait to get out of it.

Now, enthusiasm is not something to be found. It is not something to be acted out. It’s not a technique, method, or pedagogy (I still hate that jargon word). You cannot find your enthusiasm by searching for some person, place, interest or activity outside of yourself. Rather, you express your enthusiasm within the context of your own life and the world in which you live. Certain things can ignite your enthusiasm and help you to more fully express it. Yet the enthusiasm itself exists within you and is always there, no matter what happens on the outside. Instead of going in search of your enthusiasm, put your enthusiasm into everything you do. Even the most mundane task can be spectacularly fulfilling when you approach it with enthusiasm. Rather than searching to find the right job, the right moment, the right place or circumstance, put your passion into whatever you have right now.

Enthusiasm is a choice and making that choice requires effort at times. Anyone who says you can only be enthusiastic when the sun shines has never danced in the rain. I have found that things turn out best for me when I make the best of the way things turn out. I experience true enthusiasm the moment I stopped looking for it and started living it. I realize that every day is a new day that comes with the freedom to choose. Every day is the day that is not like any other day. It is the day to live for all it’s worth.

Every time I open my eyes in the morning I have two questions to ask. “What kind of attitude am I going to have today?” “What am I going to do today that will matter tomorrow?” Every time I throw back those covers I have the choice of being a moaning “why do I have to get out of bed” person and painfully slither to the floor, or I can be a cheering “I can’t wait to get out of bed” person and jump out onto the floor. Every time my feet touch the ground I have a decision to be a stuck, pessimistic, negative, discouraged, why-should-I-be-involved type of person or a touch the ground running, positive, encouraged, look straight into the day, awaken to new wonder, face what’s coming, what’s the next challenge, meet it head on person. Every time I start getting dressed I can feel I’m putting on the same ole styles or I can feel as if I am in a new set of clothes. As I sit and sip my coffee, I can feel filled or impovished. I can allow the negative and disruptive outside world get to me or I can choose to fill the inner me with strength, with faith, with confidence, with love to my very core.

Every day is a day for me, and only for me, to choose the best or the worst, the happiest or saddest, the sunniest or cloudiest. If I don’t take time for having healthy and positive thoughts, I’ll eventually be making time for unhealthy and negative thoughts. I can choose to delight in the beauty around me and in people or I can choose to see the ugly. I can choose to see what is in front of me right now is magnificent or as insignificant.

I stay enthused because I am conscious that every moment I am doing something that matters. Every moment I am exerting my own bit of influence on the direction of life, on the direction in which my world is moving. Even when I’m doing nothing, it matters. For by doing nothing, I allow some of my greatest possibilities to pass by without ever being fulfilled. It will make a difference in the way my life proceeds, a difference for myself and for all those around me. What will the difference amount to? That depends on what I’m doing. I cannot escape the consequences that will surely come from this moment. Yet I can have a very influential say in what those consequences will be, by virtue of what I do with it.

We each were born to be immerse in the intensity of life. We each were designed to live life, not to hide from it. We each must let life get to us rather than let life get away from us. We have to let life move us rather than move out of the way of life. Every day we must choose to accept life rather than let it pass my. We each have to find every reason and seize every opportunity to savor the goodness of life as it comes, moment by moment and day by day rather than spit it out.

Enthusiasm is not a secret. Enthusiasm can’t be denied me by anyone or anything; it is something that I can always choose to have. That’s easy when things go well. When things get tough, I choose to be positive and innovative instead of becoming despondent. If we can do that, if we can have wings rather than leadened feet, that is the awesome and inspiring and moving and exciting wonder of the “E” in teaching. How can I help but be enthused today.

I know I sound like one of those cottage industry motivators or self-help gurus. But, that’s how I stay enthused, that’s how I keep the torch ablaze without burning out day after day after day. I fuel it with inextinguishable and inflamable and inciting enthusiasm for what I do and for each student.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

No walking this weekend. I’ve got a low level cold that suddenly came on a few days ago that I’ve got to catch before headig off to the Lilly conference on collegiate teaching next week. So, Susan and I had to cancel our weekend plans. I’m hunkering down with large doses of echinecea, cups tea laced heavily with sweet kosher wine, and bowels of Jewish pennicilin–homemade chicken soup.

While battling sniffles, occasional aches, stuffed noses, and slight coughs, over the past week I’ve been e-chatting with a few people about some heavy personal and professional stuff. This morning, I read a particularly poingnant message. This colleague talked about struggling to climb “personal mountains.”

You know in one way or another we are all mountaineers climbing our own personal and professional mountains, These mountains are no less real, challenging, and dangerous than a Ranier, McKinnley, or an Everest. Maybe our mountains ae harder to surmount. They don’t really have a summit and we’re forever climbing them, always fighting metaphoric avalanches, crevasses, storms, hidden dangers, changing weather.

So, I think I’ll end what has unexpected evolved into a ten-part reflection on teaching by talking “climbing.” It is another good word for my Dictionary of Good Teaching. It is a deep word, a “more than anything” word. It’s a word for spiritual exploration of the innermost self. For me, it is literally a signature word.

“Climb” also sits well with me because of something I heard a speaker say last week about the glory of the mountain peaks. As I recalled his words, I started staring at a piece of belaying rope that is lazily hanging on the wall behind the computer. It’s a souvenir of a seminal event in my recent personal and professional life. It’s a constant reminder of an ascent I made up a hundred foot sheer cliff face on a North Georgia mountain as part of a wilderness program in which I participated. It had been sponsored by my younger son’s Hyde School in 1991. A day hasn’t gone by since that November climb that I don’t look at the rope and think about that climb. I’ve written about it and what I can only describe as its spiritual impact on me in some Random Thoughts. They’re “The Climb” and “Blueberries.” I have always thought of that climb as a metaphor for good teaching. Today I was staring a tad more intently at the rope as I recalled the speakers words and read my e-colleague’s message.

Those occasionally or perennially snow-capped summits, majestic, basking in the brilliant sunlight of rarified air, crowned by floating clouds, are a symbol of achievement, success, endurance, perseverance, commitment. We are so pinnacle-oriented. They’re the symbol of our desire for personal greatness. We all like to imagine ourselves standing on these rocky zeniths, surveying the breathtaking landscape with an equally breathtaking exhilaration of “I made it!” Yet, what we seldom think about is what is it that we’ve conquered or overcome, what is it that we’ve achieved, to what were we committed, through what did we persevere, what did we endure, and where did we come? As the speaker reminded me, we ignore the value of the shadowy valley depths from whence a climber comes. Yet, the valleys are so important, so essential, for without the valleys there’d be no peaks.

Just how critical are the valleys? It is in the shadows of the valleys where we are frustrated and challenged. It is in the darkened valleys that lie the lessons and the places where we grow. It is in the valleys that we start to scale up to the peaks. It’s in the valley that we begin to learn that in every frustration, in every disappointment, in every challenge, in every ache, in every slip there is a lesson. It’s in the valley that we begin to have self-confidence and self-esteem. It is in the valleys where reside the tough beginnings. It is on the valley slopes that we scale the arduous and challenging continuations.

And yet, so many us let ourselves get down as we face the struggles to climb up the mountains of our frustrations, disappointments, fears, insecurities, and hardships. Where, however, is the law that says frustration and disappointment and inadequacy must make you miserable, burn you out, and stop you dead in your tracks? I know I fundamentally let them do that to me in one way or another for decades. Why can’t they teach us, encourage us, inspire us–if we choose? I now think of frustration and disappointment as a form of passion, as a longing for what truly can be, as a challenge, as an indication that I care. You don’t get twisted into knots about something or someone you just don’t give a damn about. I now think of challenge as life’s way of making sure that I really want the things I’m striving to achieve. Challenge is an excellent tool for keeping me focused on the things that really matter to me. I know, once I learned what these “adversitites” have to teach me, the frustration and difficulty was no more, and the obstacle of the challenge mutated into an inviting opportunity to change and grow.

I read of so many academics who accuse students of wanting to learn “painlessly” without having to climb to the heights. That probably has more than a grain of truth to it. At the same time, however, these same academics want teaching to be likewise “painless.” They moan and groan about students who don’t do what they want, demand, expect. They complain they cannot control students. They complain about teaching workload. They complain of the challenges and dissappointments and frustrations. Teaching is tough; it’s an endless and hard climb. It is fraught each day with challenges, and challenge is difficult, often painful, always demanding, but without it where is the real value, beauty, fulfillment? The value of achievement is in the achieving, in the overcoming of the challenges, in the person I become as a result of going through the process. To have the reward without the effort is to have no reward at all. It’s really silly to expect to get some sort of elation or satisfaction or fulfillmet for doing nothing. It would be like hitchiking to the summit on a helicopter. It’s just emptiness and meaninglessness.

As I think about that climb twelve years ago, my belayer, Curry, had not mapped out a specific route to follow up that cliff face. There was no chalk line to follow. He didn’t place any signs on the cliff face said, “grab here” or “place your right foot there.” I looked at that cliff face and trusted that there was a hidden route and had to trust myself that I would find it. Admittedly, at that time I was scared. I was scared silly. I was sweaty scared. I was cold scared. I was angry sacred. I was hot angry. I was snarling, gnarling, cursing angry. Only later did I realize and admit that I wasn’t angry at the Hyde School leaders who put this wilderness program together; I wasn’t angry at Curry; I wasn’t even angry at the cliff face. No, I was angry at myself. On that cliff among the crevasses, as I struggle to overcome my fear of heights and fear of failure, I uncovered a truth and a meaning. It took everything I had, every ounce of energy, to move just a few inches. I struggled for breath as if I was in the oxygen deprived air of Everest. I had to find the strength in myself to continue. Sometimes, it felt as if I had to squeeze out each movement through a pinhole in my soul. And, none of that struggle had anything to do lack of climbing technique or lack of physical fitness. All of that struggle had to do with the struggle within me. I was angry because I was afraid that everyone watching would see my weaknesses, that the climb would, as it did, lay the true me, the real me below the apparitions of title and degree, bare. I envisioned what was going to happen and what nasties people were going to say about me if I faltered or failed. No, I wasn’t practiced enough that my mind and energy, and especially my spirit, were free for such a breakthrough. For the impossible climb to become a hard climb, for the impossible climb to become possible, it had to be a “surrendering” experience. And, I was at that time a controller, not a surrenderer of control. In a sense while gripping the rock ledges with my finger tips for dear life, I had to let go. For while I held to the rock physically, I had to freefall mentally and emotionally and spiritually. I had to approach things as I never had before and had never tried and never thought I could. I wasn’t really climbing that cliff face; I was facing the crags and crevices looming in my own soul, looking for some foothold and handhold in my spirit. What I didn’t know until I reached the top of the cliff as I fearfully made the first hand reach was that the hidden route was not on the cliff face, but within myself. The magic of that short climb lay in the painful reality I found in myself and the expose’ of things I had successfully hidden from others and myself at ground level. I found then, as I still find today, that I had to discover, invent, and reinvent as I went along, not invent a route, but to discover and invent myself. With every inch upward I had to have that innocent wonder of a child, a refreshed awareness, a willingness to be naive. I had to start with a tabula rasa. I had to be willing and able to turn things upside down, inside out, and view myself differently; to discover hidden things; to see things in a fresh way and question any and all assumptions and preconceptions.

I discovered on that climb that I couldn’t climb high by keeping a foot safely on the ground and I couldn’t get a handhold on the cold ledges by holding my hands warmly in my pockets. Now you may ask, what guarantees did I have that I could scale the cliff. None. Boy, don’t think that I didn’t want some. I demanded them; I shouted out for them. But, I thought I had none. At the time I was at the based of the cliff, readying myself for the climb, I wanted some outside airtight assurance, some hard and fast confirmation that I would succeed.

On the night of climb, in the lodge, after eveyrone had gone to sleep, Curry and I talked in front of the dying fire. We both stared at the flames and whispered to each other, never looking at each other. Curry was not one for useless words. I remember that staccato conversation word for word after all these years. They are branded deep into my soul.

“I was scared I’d freeze during the climb.”

“Nothing wrong with having fear. Just face up to it. Saps the strength right out of it. Won’t stop you, then.”

“You know, I didn’t really know if I could cimb that cliff. I almost didn’t.”

“Well, if you hadn’t made the climb, you’d have known for sure.”

“What if I had frozen on the way up?”

“You didn’t. So, why fret. Anyway, whatever you would have done was more than by staying on the ground.”

“I might have failed”

“Why you keeping your fears alive? You learned from them. You climbed. Think about that. Move on.”

“I was afraid what the others will think if I didn’t make it all the way up.”

“It’s the ‘not climbing’ at all that makes you small, not the ‘being unable’ to make the whole climb. The others would have been the small ones if they didn’t see that.”

“Well, I didn’t think I had a choice. But, God, I wanted a guarantee I’d make the climb.”

“You’re frettin’ about nothing. You had one all along and with all your learning still didn’t even know it.”

“What guarantee did I have?”

“You. You’re the only guarantee you have and need. Time to turn in.”

With that he got up and left me staring at the embers with my thoughts.

He was right. I learned from that day on that I don’t have much faith and condifence in myself if I want guarantees. That if I want certified protections against failure, that if I don’t make the climb unless I have them, I’ll continue to hide behind my fears and doubts and insecurities. I won’t do much if I always want only a marked out route. And often, prescribed options can be disguised guarantees, that is, laid out in advance alternate routes that are no less restricting and inflexible than the original route. Sometimes having too much knowledge about “you can always do… in case of…..” gets in the way of being open to the unexpected, to the unplanned for, to new experiences, to a willingness to take risks, to a daring to be inexperienced, to asking the right questions, to traveling without a map, and to being bold enough to just go ahead and do it–and the heck with guarantees and options.

I find that when I run out of the protection of a triptik and alternative routes, when I no longer worry about getting lost or the consequences, that’s when I start being creative to stay on course. That’s when I stop filling my mind with worrisome and weighty and hesitant “what ifs;” that’s when I stop filling my mind with halting and fretting, and complaining and or blaming thoughts; that’s when I fill my mind with positive, enthusiastic, loving and life-affirming “let’s see what will happen” ones. That’s when the curses of mournful “why me” are be replaced by joyful blessings of “thank you.”

The truth is that the classroom is not a gathering of controlable drones, identical clones, or lifeless mannequins. It is a bubbling human cauldron of relationships, actions, and interactions. It’s a constantly moving kaleidiscope of every hue in the rainbow endlessly forming into an endless number of colored patterns. It’s a world of unimaginable possibilities where control, predictions, guarantees, and even prescribed options are often obstacles. No two moments in a class are alike. Most cannot be prepared for. The probabilities change. Possibilites are always popping up. People and situations change from day to day, moment to moment. They are always new and different and unique.

To be sure, then, things don’t turn out and people don’t do necessarily as I expect. Life isn’t predictable or controllable; why should I think life in a classroom is otherwise. Were it to be so, everything would be so dull and tiresome. But, it’s not. There’s no way I cannot be anything other than alert; no way I can be complacent. Now, I don’t worry or fret, complain or blame. I don’t get thrown off course. I adjust. I adapt. I adopt. I make corrections. I shift my balance. Adapting to ever-changing conditions is not a matter of compromising my values, straying off course, dumbing down my rigor, altering my purpose, surrendering my dreams, or lowering my goals. I find that it is often the ability to adapt that enables me to maintain those values and to reach those goals. I just have to be as extraordinarily as limber as Plastic Man of the comic books, and have the powerful ability to adapt to whatever comes along: semper paratus. There’s Steven Sample’s “thinking gray” once again.

Yeah, climbing is a good metaphor for teaching, and I have been climbing on campus and in class ever since that climb.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

I’ve been talking with a lot, and I mean a lot, of professors off-list from around the country as a result of their responses to my latest “On Teaching” Random Thought series. Most feel trapped in a limbo, stuck between two worlds. At times they have what W.E.B.Dubois called “a two-ness”: living in the two worlds of researching/publishing scholarship and teaching, not quite completely belonging to either or allowed to belong to either. I know how they feel, I, too, have felt that way–and, at times, still do. I have scholarly roots with a national scholarly reputation and a scholarly resume a mile long. In that world of the scholar is where I was trained. Now I am solely living as a teacher and have something of a reputation and a resume a mile long. In this world I have trained myself. I can’t forsake the former. I wouldn’t want to, although I now only engage in it by reading voraciously to “keep abreast” or occasionaly to consult. “They” tell me–well, no one has told me to my face–that it is a conflict between “content” and “process,” that in the latter world where I now reside that is too much process and not enough content. To be honest, no one has told me what “too much” and “not enough” mean. Let me give you an example why I reject that.

I once wrote, and it bears constant repeating I wish studnets realized that history is not as it is too often portaryed: a dull collection of meaningless facts about dead people, a series of flatten names and dates whose significance is only in memorization for a test, a collection of maps and charts and diagrams and statistics. I would hope they would begin to understand that history it is about real, flesh and blood, complicated and mysterious and unique individuals who itched, urinated, scratched, laughed, ate, made love, cried, dreamed, hated fought, killed, saved, loved, and hurt; who–known or unknown–by their mere presence made a difference however supposedly slight or monumental; who had strengths and weakness; who were violent and peaceful, who dreamed and feared, who dared and cowered, who risked and played it safe, who achieved and failed, who fell and stayed down, who fell and got up to strove, who were criminal and law-abiding, who were resolute and indecisive, who led and who followed, all of whom were unique individuals. That is a demanding demand, to bring the material to life, to give the students a living experience, to provide meaning and relevance, in almost every subject. That is the why of field studies, service, internships, shadowing, mock trials, exchanges. etc.

So, I seized an opportunity that I slowly realized that I had been missing for years. I devised a new project this semester. Some might call it a “stealth lecture.” It is really a form of replay of the old TV show, “You Are There.” I call it “The News Conference.” The students were required to read the chapters in the text book on the late 1940s and 1950s. They’d read about the beginning of the Cold War, the Berlin Airlife, Joe McCarthy, “white flight,” the Korean War, Levittown, Rock and Roll, Eisenhower, Sputnik, etc. Each student had to imagine him/herself as a reporter. His or her editor had given each community two assignments. The first was to write 450 wor print column on what life was really like in the late 1940s and 1950s beyond the textbook scholarly analysis. The second was to broadcast a 90 second feature piece on the same subject over either TV or radio. The students researched the period described in two assigned chapters and prepared questions to ask someone about anything who actually lived in that era. No one could ask a question already asked. No one could ask a second question until everyone has asked a question. The person they intereviewed was me. I was born in 1940 and graduated high school in 1958. American Graffiti was a partial biography. I told them nothing that they didn’t ask about and everything they asked about. It was a challenge, but I had to be vulnerable and authentic. But, what they asked. I told them about radio and listening to Fibber McGree and Molly secretly after going to bed, and of our one-inch TV screen my grandfather bought in 1947 and placed a twelve inch magnifying stand in front it and how everyone in the neighboor watched the Friday night fights from Kew Gardens. I told them about how the world stopped on Tuesday night to watch Uncle Miltie, of Captain Midnight, Tom Corbit-Space Cadet, Tales of Tomorrow, Howdy Doody (I was once in the Peanut Galley and squeezed Clarabell’s horn), Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, What In The World, Omnibus, Playhouse 90. I told how we teenagers double-dated and went to drive-in movies–but never saw the movie–and how we went to Richard’s, the local drive-in restaurant, or to While Castle. Yes, Virginia, there was a pre-McDonalds world. “I once heard ‘the Beats.’ Greenwich Village was our hangout on Saturdays when we were teens. We all thought they were boring and sucked….drank watered down rum and cokes for fifty cents….there was The Couch, the Purple Onion, the Pink Pussy Cat….we could drive with a learners permit at fifteen and that’s when we started drinking….no one was serious about drinking and driving in those days….I explained how I came to elementary school with pockets stuffed with stacks of rubber-banded baseball cards, showed them how I flipped baseball cards, and how I clipped cards that are now worth thousands with wooden clothespins to my bicycle to make it sound like a motorcycle. I told them I how I was once brutalized by the police in the days before lawyering up and Miranda and was rescured by my Uncle Benny who was Assistant District Attorney of Brooklyn. I told them of seeing a torpedoed tanker burning on the horizon and how in 1944 the Shore Patrol confiscated the film in my Brownie box camera because the aircraft carriers, battleships, and other vessels docked in Brooklyn Navy Yard was in the background. To this day I remeber that sailor’s admonishing words: “Loose lips sinks ships.” We talked about starting each class day with a prayer and about being given off afternoons from elementary school to attend religious school. And, I described how I was caught by a teacher on a sand lot playing baseball instead of being in Hebrew school, dragged back to the principal, threatened that my family might be mistaken for godless Communists if I didn’t go to Hebrew school, and then paddled on my bare butt with five hard wacks. I described the Civil Defense sirens, atomic attack drills of diving under the desks or leaning against the hallway walls. I explained how one day we came to school and were told we had to learn a new pledge of allegiance. They laughed as I listed ten westerns, two Movietones, three serials, and fifty cartoons I’d see a Saturday in the Delancy theater for a dime. They were mesmerized as I described riding the bus bumpers at the tender age of six or seven, stealing piece of ice off the ice trucks that were delivering ice for our “ice-boxes,” riding home-made skatesboards over the cobble stones by holding on to car bumpers in heavy traffic, of having the good fortune to being able to leave the City during the hot, polio plagued summer and live at my aunt’s “kochalain” bungalow colony in the Borscht Belt of the Catskills (they came to the office to see the cow skull hanging on the wall that I had discovered during a hike in the hills in 1947), of how I made a stick ball bats out of a broomstick and of being a two man-hole hitter, of jumping the alleys as we kids played on the roofs of the tenements of Eastside New York, of waiting each Thursday at the newstand on Ludlow for the delivery of the new comics of Captain Marvel, the Green Hornet, the Shadow, Scrooge McDuck, Archie, Men at War, G.I. Joe, Superman, Batman, Flash, Captain American, etc, etc, etc. “We kids were warned that Rock and Roll was a communist plot….I remember when Elvis came on the Ed Sullivan show….I knew Mr. Levitt….we had prejudices in ‘technicolor’….didn’t know any Joe McCarthy….we ducked our hair with goops of Pomade….had a stockpile of canned food on shelves in a basement room and gallons of ice cream in the freezer…..school gave up classes in slow dancing….could only slow dance at school dances….who paid attention to the news….only news we had as kids was the Movietones in the theaters but we went our popcorn when they came on….teachers cuffed us around if….never smoked and always felt left out….no sex? Let me tell you about necking….hated sanding and varnishing the station wagon each summer….we called each other names like….we stood out in the backyard and saw that little light going over head at night and we were scared shitless….wore coat and tie on dates….never wore dungarees to school….we called it a ‘poon car’….girls always wore dresses and skirts to school and one dates…..one prank I pulled in high school….loved Woolworth’s….those girdles….Jahn’s had the best ice cream….piped the World Series into the classrooms….played soccer….now those charlotte rouses and chocolate egg creams….read the Hardy Boys, Landmark history books, Classic Commic Books….T.V. trays and T.V. dinners….got the mumps, chicken pocks, and measels in one summer….78 records….had my knuckles rapped with a wooden ruler….most of us didn’t go to college….only looked at the pictures in LIFE, LOOK, COLLIERS, and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC that were lying around the house….we were very high middle class until my father went bankrupt….my first true love was….we called them ‘Rocks’….ever hear of a ‘mangle’….our junior high and high classes and teams were integrated….

On and on it went for two days: questions, answers, laughter, descriptions, smiles, disbelief, snickering, amazement, attentiveness, involvement, engagement. I thought of events and pulled up names that I hadn’t thought about in over fifty years!

You should have read their columns and watched how they aired their feature pieces.

“Content” v. “process?” “Information transmission” v. “character building?” “Teacher-centered v. student centered?” “Teaching v. learning?” I think not. There is no “versus” in any method, technique, assignment, project I have devised, whether it is the daily “words for the day,” the beginning-of-semester community building “Getting To Know Ya” and “Rules of the Road” exercises, or the discussion of “Tidbits” or the “Dr. Seuss,” “Hollywood,” “Salvador Dali,” “Rodin,” “Scavenger Hunt,” “Bruce Springsteen,” “Broadway,” “Story Board,” “News Conference,” and the summarizing “N.Y. Times” projects.

It never is for me a conflict of “versus;” it is never for me a confrontation of “either/or;” it is never for a war of this or that. “The lines are clearly drawn and defined,” as one professor said, only because a lot of us draw them and draw them that way. I don’t accept such a cut and dry, black and white depiction. I prefer, as Steven Sample might say, “thinking gray.” For me it is a conscious journey to search for, discover, articluate my “why,” and then consciously and deliberately let that purpose guide me. For me, it is only an on-going struggle and a never-ending experimenting to find and keep the “and” in my “why.” After a decade of reading, studying, discussing, exchanging, listening, experimenting, and learning about learning, I just generally no longer find that “why” and “and” solely and generally effective in traditional professorial lecture, student note-taking, professorial testing giving, student test taking, professorial grade giving, student grade getting format. Did that, for a long time, for almost three decades, and honestly never felt it all that rewarding or fulfilling–or instilling a life-long love of learning in most students. But, that is me. I never ask anyone, nor should I, to copy what I do. They can’t; they are not me. I do ask them, as anyone should ask of me, to hear me out with a true openness, for while they cannot copy me they can think about and reflect what I and what I do represent as a vision. To put it another way, Buckminster Fuller once said, if you want to change how somebody thinks, give up. You cannot change how any person thinks. You can give them a tool the use of which will lead them to think about thinking differently. That is what happened to me. I became a different tool; I began to use different tools. I began to think, feel and do differently. Nevertheless, there are times I feel as if that attitude isn’t reciprocated. Others, on and off my campus, for a wide variety of reasons, exert a spoken and unspoken, subtle and not so subtle peer pressure preferring, wantint, almost demanding I–and others around them–be what they want us to be, be comfortable with what they want us to be comforable, do what they want us to do, say what they want us to say–which is usually what they are, with what they are comfortable, what they do, and what they say.

So, I understand when others feel like a morph (any Trekkie would understand) between the two worlds that are often at odds with each other, requiring completely different skills and perspectives, imposing totally different demands, demanding different focuses, having fundamentally different goals, having the eyes on different prizes.

I cannot speak for those with whom I’m speaking. The only thing I can do is to struggle to make the best of it, resist the pressure to impose and be imposed upon, find ways to merge the two worlds into one, and be true to myself and be authentic to each student.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

This stuff is pouring out fast and furious. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m going into a preparatory, meditative mode as I ready myself to present a series of workshops on creating a classroom learning community at the Lilly conference on collegiate teaching at Miami University in a few weeks. Well, no maybe about it. I’m slowly getting in the groove.

On this heavy, heated, windy morning, I thinking about a a small sculpture I recently completed called “Life’s Twists and Turns.” The more I thought about it, the more I saw how that sculpture is in many ways is a metaphor for teaching.

It started out a piece of ordinary damp kelp ripped up from the ocean’s floor by a storm lying limp on a debris strewn beach in California’s Half Moon Bay. Something extraordinary in that piece of ordinary seeweed jumped out at me and caught my eye. I began to see something. I couldn’t tell you what it was. I picked it up, carried it back to my son’s house, put it in a plastic bag, and threw it into my suitcase. As I flew back to the East Coast, that piece of kelp in the plane’s hold held a tight grip on me. I started sketching an idea on paper, balled up the paper and tossed it, resketched a different idea, ripped that up. After a while, it looked like I had had a snowball fight in the plane. I saw the sculpture. And, then, it disappeared. It reappeared slightly altered, and then once again it disappeared, appeared, disappear. Never was it the same. When I got home I still had a sense of the whole sculpture although I couldn’t put my finger on it and couldn’t explain it in words. And if I told you what it was, it would have been a hesitant unsatisfying “it’s a…it’s a….it’s a…”

Not knowing what potential was there, I touched, stepped back, put aside, distanced, twisted, played with, kinked, stared, untwisted, stepped back, opened up the kink, listened, stopped thinking, curled, snipped off, wish I hadn’t snipped, accepted, and shaped. I learned and unlearned. I abandoned and innovated. I had to be ready for unexpected opportunity. I had to be ready to accept a new and fresh perspective. It was not all that important how I had finally sketched out the sculpture before I stared sculpting. What was important was that I recognized and dealt with the inevitable surprise.

Yesterday, the students in one class were working on the “Salvador Dali” project. Each community had to grasp the spirt of the Depression in the 1930’s and prepared to teach it to the others in the class in the form of an abstract painting. After about an hour, one community got up from the floor, approached me, said they were finished and asked if they could leave. The paper was blank! I look at it. They looked at me with a smile. Then, I got it and I smiled. One of the students asked, “You get it?” Before I could answer, she went on to explain the blank paper was not blank. It was the blinding white out of a snow storm that was a metaphor for both the blinding dust storms in the drought-ridden mid-west and the Depression that obliterated the old ways and made people grope their way to finding new ways for personal and social safety. “This is about the Okies looking to save themselves with a new life in California and Roosevelt looking to save the country with a new life with the New Deal.” These are first semester students!

The week before one community in another class presented its “Hollywood Project,” a six minute film about some important aspect of American life in the 1920’s. There was no sound. They had turned off the sound. In response to shouts of “can’t hear anything” and “Turn up the sound,” one of the members of the community explained, “They only had silents back then until the Jazz Singer came along in 1927.”

So, as with these projects, with this sculpture I had to have an appreciation of the unexpected rather than ignore it or be unprepared for it or scared of it. I couldn’t say “that’s not the way things should be” or “that’s not the way I want things to be.” I had to say, “This an opportunity to….” It wasn’t as simple as it sounds. At times, that piece of kelp drove me nuts. There’s was a kind of organic interplay and reverberation throughout the piece. Every little twist and kink here had an effect there. A slight curl there changed the whole piece everywhere. It was like taking a big bowl of yellow paint. Put in one red drop at the edge and the color throughout the bowl changes. And so, I was forced to learn how to look at the individual area and the whole of the sculpture at the same time. I continued. I absorbed, softened the curl, discarded, followed, modified, and reshaped. There’s almost an arrogance for me to say that I created the sculpture. It reminded me of the saying from the BHAGAVAD GITA that is on the wall in my office: “The self, deluded by egoism, thinketh: ‘I am the doer.'” In fact, I was influencing the kelp while reciprocally being influenced by it. I worked with and on the kelp; the kelp worked with and on me. We were cause and effect partners. We both were centers of the sculpturing. I “told” it what to do and it “told” me what to do. There was no right answer and wrong answer to what “we” were doing. There is only design, and design is governed by this collaborative and generative interplay of possibility and the bounds of constraint. I couldn’t do anything I wanted. I had to accept the limitations of both the kelp and myself, take the limitations, use the limitations, and work inside the limitation. It’s within the imposed limitations that creativity happened. And, everything just unfolded. Everything was done slowly, ever so slightly. No snap judgements. No instant opinions. No giant leap for mankind. No brilliant new insight. No breakthrough experience. Nothing in nature or art or teaching starts out big. No, this sculpture emerged from a process of learning and unlearning, abandonment and innovation, patience and commitment. Yeah, everything just unfolded, grew from a seed idea that was watered by freeing and stretching my mind and fed by unrestrained creative imagination. This wasn’t just dumping instant coffee into hot water. This was a slow brew. The sculpture was a miracle of time.

The result was not what I had originally enivisioned. Now, as I look at that sculpture, standing on the glass shelf, I don’t judge whether it was good or bad, successful or unsuccessful by whether it turned out exactly the way I planned. My achievement was not just in the sculpture. I judge that piece of sculpture by what I accomplished, by what I learned, and how I was altered along the way by way of accomplishing it. Each action I took, each decision I made was a learning process for me. And, I learned that I could not know art unless I did it. As I recently told an e-friend, in the doing is learning and learning is in doing.

You know I have come to realize even more vividly what I already knew: I, each student, everyone, do not have a shortage of creativity. The question is whether I and others are paying attention to, encouraging, being encouraged to experiment with ways to free it up and display the imaginative creativity we and others possess.

Yeah, that sculpture is in many ways a metaphor for teaching.

I am seriously now thinking about learning how to make my new sculpture into a bronze, that is, if I have the mettle.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

(17) Content, content, content. Information. Information. Information. Critical thinking skills. Nothing wrong with them. They’re critical to be sure, but they are not the alpha and omega of education. The great teachers are not content with merely transmitting content and honing thinking skills. Do you know why some educational visions are more powerful than others? The powerful ones go beyond “know,” “think,” and even “do.” They’re the ones that inspire and guide; they’re the ones that have purpose and meaning. We are in an educational age that is content-driven and job-getting centered. As a result, if you look at most students eyes in the classroom, and you may not agree with me, education is deadening. So often so much of the life is gone, sucked out. Content doesn’t offer meaning; it doesn’t inspire; it doesn’t provide guidance of purpose; it just isn’t a turn-on. So, you learn about iambic pentameter. Now what. So you learn about the Battle of Waterloo. Now what. So you learn about phyla and molecules and leverage. Now what. What about life after the classroom? To be sure, content offers extraordinary power. We send “content people” out from our campuses with lots of information and intellectual skills to influence the world in incredible micro and macro ways. They can ravage and pollute the land, blow it to smithereens, war efficiently on each other, communicate instantly across the globe, alter the weather, punch holes in the atmosphere, send people into the limits of outer space, send people to the depths of the oceans, modify genetic structure, change the course of the mightiest of rivers, prolong life, wipe out species, and go faster than a speeding bullet. That’s extraordinary power. It seems to me, however, with acquisition of such power has to go “character skills,” morally responsible ways of living. Over the last decade, this has seemed to me to be a profound problem: merely transmitting information and developing skills to use information is like giving my eighteen month Natalie a bigger and bigger hammer to bang away with. So, teaching starts with meaningfulness. It continues with meaningfulness. Teaching and learning is supposed to help students provide themselves with information, intellectual skills, and help them make sense of and find meaning in what they acquire, do, and will do. When we do all that, education will come alive and be enlivening.

(18) When we talk about “teacher,” the first image that usually comes first to our mind is that of an activity of an individual at the head of a classroom. I submit that teaching is merely not an individual endeavor. In the classroom context it is a class action and interaction of all participants. This communal definition does several things. First, it embraces and includes everyone as a teacher-learner: professor teaches and learns from students; students teach and learn from the professor; students teach and learn form each other. Second, it underlines the often ignored reality that there are no teachers unless there are students and there are no students unless there are teachers. Third, we assess a great teacher on the basis of the impact that person has on the students around him or her. Fourth, it means one person can’t do it all, but be a participant in the doing. So, teaching is a relationship; it is a community activity. Teaching is, therefore, both individual and communal. Think about it. Most people find that a hard concept to grasp. I know I did at first.

(19) Teaching is an “F” word. I’ve said that when I said I am a “F”aith based teacher. I am, however, also a “F”ree based teacher. No, I am not sniffing cocaine. As far as teachers are concerned, we all proclaim to be adherents and promoters of academic freedom. Far too many academics, however, think that such pronouncements are sufficient. Yet, while they claim to be free and freely acting, they’re cautiously looking over their shoulder afraid to take risks, to make mistakes, worried about what others think, concerned with how their quest for tenure or promotion or appointment will be affected. They find it difficult if almost impossible to enter the realm of possibilities. The absence of external controls, then, is not in and of itself freedom. Too many of us are prisoners of controls that are deeper, less obvious, more pernicious, and far more pathological: perceived controls with which we imprison ourselves. First, we’re only truly free when are without anxiety about non-perfection. Reality never shows up exactly according to our plans. The best theories and abstractions are probably the best way to destroy the best in teaching. Teaching is about what we do, not what we say. The students and classroom and academia are not supposed to be perfectly in accord with our ideas. We may not be able to change the academic world, but we must be adaptable, flexible, free to work on perfecting ourselves and our ways to deal with the imperfect and changing world around us. Second, too many of us tend to see ourselves in familiar, tried-and-true, safe ways, according to the images and models we have held tightly for so long. It’s that “this is me” or “I am ….” thing. Too many of us have only one way of looking at ourselves, at students, at the classroom, at our profession; too many of us have only one way of thinking, feeling, and doing. From my point of view, freedom is the “freedom to,” to adjust to the changing scene, to strike out and do something new, to get out of the proverbial box, to stay out of entering any other box, to create something that is meaningful and valuable to both me and each student, to change in order to respond to inevitable change.

As for the students, as I must be free so I must help students help themselves to likewise. Both we academics and students often confuse teaching with bossing. Teaching has nothing to do with position; bossing does. Teaching is not really being in a position where you can tell someone else what to do, although that view may be the result of a set of ideas coming from our society’s historical experience, religious upbringing, our schools, from society in general. When Ph.D.s or scholars-in-residence or whomever are in positions of authority, we expect them to exhibit some “teaching-ship.” Why? The answer is simple. Because everyone will be happier. They will be more effective if they can empower and inspire while they are informing. And when that doesn’t happen, we run for cover. We make every effort to believe it does with a host of rationalizations or excuses when it doesn’t. Why? The answer is simple. Because everyone will be happier.

Teaching is about having the capacity to shape the future. It’s about teachers who empower, inspire, resonate, listen, learn, keep on track with purpose and meaning, authentic, respect and value others, explore, innovate, risk. I am a minimalist when it comes to classroom rules in order for each student to have the opportunity to be a maximalist. To me one of the best signs of a great teacher is somebody who can create a process, bring the students project, and leave. The great teachers don’t have the ego to be there; they leave it to the student to carry on. The great teacher is he who affords the students the opportunity to say we did this ourselves. That was a paraphrase from something said about 2,800 years ago.

In a rule-heavy class, students tend not to be free, tend to stop thinking, and tend merely to slavishly obey. My vision of learning in the classroom led to the establishment of a single rule that invariably has profound constructive impact on almost all the students. I have discussed it many times over the years. So, I won’t belabor you with a description of it: “Remember the Chair.” No other rule is really necessary. I don’t take up all the space. I don’t have to. Like my good friend John Lawry says, we have to get out of each student’s space so that he or she can have his or own space. Doesn’t mean, by myself ,I can make everything happen just the way I want it to, but I feel a sense of deep confidence. I can be part of shaping the future without doing all the shaping. It endows each student with both freedom and responsibility. It says to a student, using Jack Kornfield’s words, “You got good stuff in there young man or woman. Let me see it. I’m going to turn this whole thing over to you. Let’s see how you can do it.” A student doesn’t have to ask permission what to learn, how to learn, in what manner to learn, when to learn. I have found that such an attitude on my part generally builds a desire to learn as a student begins the process of learning. The students experience a degree of real freedom, of what Steve Sample might call “thinking free,” of what Peter Senge might call “real learning,” of what Parker Palmer might call “fearless learning,” and of what Ellen Langer might call “mindful learning.” None of this “what do you want?” from a student. None of this “Is this okay?” None of this “Can I do it this way?” None of this “what if we’re wrong?” None of this “how will this effect my grade?” My answer to such questions is a simple “You heard the rules.” Or I’ll simply remain silent, look at them with a supportive smile until they remember the chair and utter an acknowledged “Remember the Chair.” I have found, and the research bears me out, that the ambiguous, uncertain, freedom-giving rules, as well as supportive coaching and mutual support, will provoke more students to learn than will semi-conscious rote learning, mindless memorization, authoritarian delivery of information, and fearful test-taking.

By the way, freedom is a word we use a lot and don’t think about. For most people it means “you can’t force me to do something I don’t want to do.” Freedom is very meaningful to us because it’s a kind of “don’t tread on me” anti-obedience “I’m going to do my own thing.” For an iconclast and contrarian such as I am, “freedom from” is only one aspect. There’s another and more important sense of freedom. It’s not the absence of something. It’s not merely the absence of overbearing authority, constricting domination, and strict control; it’s not merely the absence of rehesitant and paralytic fear. More importantly, it’s the presence of something. It’s the presence of listening to yourself and not only to someone else. It’s the presence of the experience and deep belief that “I can do it. I can make it happen.” It’s the presence of the opportunity to get out of the rut-worn, conventional, tired, predictable, boring, dulling proverbial box. It the entering into that world of possibilities.

As teachers, if “teacher-ship” is about tapping the capacity of human individuals, we as teachers have one fundamental and critical task. We need to help each student look for, release, utilize, and discover the magic in his or her innate curiosity, imagination, experimentation, and creativity.

Curiosity, imagination, experimentation, creativity, discovery, innovation, invention are the seven reasons we are who we are.

There’s a third “F” in teaching I want to reflect about. I’ve mentioned it before. I’d like to revisit it: fear.

That’s for another time.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–