Lately, I’ve been talking with a professor about the evolution of my philosophy of education, how I employ my credo that encompasses more than merely transmitting information, methods I use to introduce and sustain classroom community, the climate I generate in and outside the classroom, challenges I run into, and techniques I’ve developed for students to learn and retain the material. As our exchanges continued over the past few weeks, I noticed more than the occasional appearance of more than a couple of those throwing-up-of-the-hands, self-focusing, loss of “otherness,” idea killing phrases: “It’s so complicated…..It’ll take too long….I can’t do that….That’s going to cause such problems…..that’s not going to be easy……”

Each parrying comment was like experiencing the torture of 10,000 cuts. Nevertheless, her words were riveting. They seemed to capture a profound sense of desire on one hand, but a willingness eroded by helplessness and hopelessness and fearfulness and resignation on the other. She always seemed to transform challenges from opportunities into obstacles. She always seemed to give control over to others, whomever they were, rather than seize control for herself. She always tended to blame others rather than realize that she was in her own way. As she strung together a host of rationalizations for herself that she wouldn’t accept from students I wondered how many new and ambitious efforts would any of us undertake if we knew for sure that it would be simple, there would be no problems, there was a guarantee of success, and we’d get recognition? And how many worthwhile achievements do we avoid because we fear that it would be complicated, there will be problems, there’s always the risk of failure, and our effort would be less than applauded if not go unnoticed?

Don’t fault her. She is not alone. So, I am about to step up on an academic soapbox as if the campus quad was an adjunct of Hyde Park and make myself a target. If you want to throw tomatoes or eggs, get them ready. Now, if I had the literary skill of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I’d write a poem entitled, “How Do I Kill Thee” and loudly recite it from the heights of my stand. It would be about the myriad of ways we have of resisting change and burying any new concept, method, technique, and approach in higher education. It would a reminder of something John Locke once wrote. He said, new opinions are always suspected, if not usually opposed, if for no other reason than they are not already commonly held and accepted. But, I don’t have Browning’s way with words, so just let me put out a bland counting of ways academics all too easily deflect, resist, reject, kill, bury, put aside, and above all, get in their own way:

It won’t work.
  They’ll think I’m crazy.
  I’ll wait until someone else does it.
  I’ll look silly.
  It’s not me.
  It’s so different.
  I have no choice.
  That’s a waste of time.
  You can’t get to all of them.
  Why are you doing that?
  I have to cover all the material.
  You can’t buck the system.
  How can you assess that?
  I’ve never done it that way before.
  I can’t do that.
  I won’t be able to do my research.
  After I publish….
  That’s hard.
  What if it doesn’t work?
  Can you guarantee it will work?
  It didn’t work the one time I tried it.
  In my humble opinion….
  I don’t believe….
  I believe….
  That’s impossible!
  That takes too much time.
  I don’t have that kind of time.
  I don’t have the time for that.
  Do you know the problems I’d cause for myself?
  It’s too complicated.
  You can’t get to everyone.
  We don’t do things that way around here.
  What will others say?
  It won’t make a real difference.
  They won’t let me.
  The students won’t like it.
  No one really cares.
  It’s not my responsibility.
  They won’t understand.
  That will get me into trouble.
  I’m doing fine now.
  It’s not important.
  I’m not comfortable doing that.
  Later.
  It’s not worth it.
  I’ve got better things to do.
  What a waste.
  I don’t have tenure.
  After I get tenure, I’ll….
  I’m up for promotion.
  After I get promoted, I’ll….
  I’d have to change.
  I can’t change.
  Be reasonable.
.  I agree, but…. 
——————————————————————————–
Etc., etc., etc.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

“Congratulations! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away.” It’s that time of the year. It’s Commencement time and people–academics, parents, relatives, friends, and students–across the land, at collegiate graduations are acting out in one way or another those opening words from Dr. Seuss’ OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO. People are thinking about and talking about students who are about to be on their own as they take their commencing steps out from the structured and controlled world of the classroom into the maze of life. Last week it was a column by David Brooks; this week it was one by Tom Friedman. They were like day and night. The former faulted academia, the latter extolled the unique teacher.

David Brooks was talking about the plight of graduates who have spent their short lives engaged in obeying the commands of taskmastering teachers, getting grades, getting into college, as he put it, “manipulating the world of the classroom,” getting out of college, and getting that career going. But, when these student are spit out into the vast, disordered, almost lawless, career world of adulthood so many don’t have a clue how to travel through it or what they’ll go through as they do. They’ve gone to school, but they haven’t gone to the school of hard-knocks. They’ve walked the hallowed halls of higher education, but don’t know how to walk the high wire and balance life’s ups and downs. They haven’t been taught how to really address the serious life issues posed in Dr. Suess’ humorous verse. Suddenly, young people who were adored BMOCs and admired honor students and acknowledged recipients of this or that recognition, are now reduced to scrambling rodents in the competitive rat race. They don’t have the feet-on-the-ground know-how of what to do when they find that “Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you,” and “you’ll be left in a Lurch. You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.”

“Failure seems but a step away. Loneliness hovers.” Brooks wrote about the funk Seuss mentions that so many graduates so quickly find themselves in. “They often feel stunted and restless (I haven’t moved up in six months!), so they adopt a conversational mode – ironic, self-deprecatory, postpubescent fatalism – that masks their anxiety about falling behind.”

Simplistic? Hyperboly? Maybe. But, something to think about. Brooks is accusing us in the ivied academic world of the Ivory Tower of not really preparing students for the unsheltered “real world” that lies beyond the secluding walls, defensive moat, and protective drawbridge. In other words, Brooks is rightly raising the question whether the sheltered and organized life on campus and especially in the classroom really prepares students for the unstructured and often anarchic life where they can so easily get stuck, in Dr. Seuss’ words, on a “prickle-ly perch” or in a “waiting place,” and don’t have the skills for the difficult task of “un-slumping” themselves. I assume Brooks means that while we may introduce students to the knowledge of a discipline and the skills of a livlihood, we may not be teaching them critical life skills.

Is he right? Do dismiss him out of hand? Again, it’s something to think long and hard about, however such reflection may be uncomfortable. Do far too many of us act as if our purpose is limited to and thus concentrate on improving student performance in the classroom, but not in life beyond? Do far too many of us focus on what students need and will do “in here” in marked buildings and classrooms, and ignore what students will need to fend for themselves “out there” on life’s unmarked streets? Do far too many of us have students learn by the book and not prepare them for a “textbookless” life where more often than not the book is thrown away or quickly becomes obsolete? Do far too many of us presume and assume that student performance in the present classroom predicts how a student will do in the off-campus future? Do far too many of us not consider the addressing of social skills, communication skills, people skills, and life skills in general to be within their bailiwick? To find the answers, all we academics have to do is read Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” and then ask and answer one more little question: What is the ultimate meaning and purpose of what we do?

I posed these questions to an e-colleague. Her answer was quick and short. “Our purpose is to prepare students for the future.” True enough. But, I then asked, “The future of what?” and “How far into the future?” Too often when far too many of us talk of the future we talk of “mastery of the subject” in a class or major curriculum, not of life; we so often limit ourselves to the limited future of classroom lessons rather than life lessons; we so often concentrate on preparing students for the next class quiz, the mid-term exam, final exam, and final grade of the class at hand, rather than for life to come. Teaching for performance in a single class during a single term is vastly different from teaching for use of skills when students are no longer students and are not in school, when they have to decide on their own what to do and where to go, when they are their own “mind-maker-upper.”

Far too many of us teach students how to hit the fast ball without thinking how hapless they will stand as life throws them curve ball after curve ball. So many of us so often forget that we are teaching for the unpredictable future, preparing students not for a classroom test or midterm and final exams, but for unpredictable real world of “tests” when we’re not present to be asked “will this be on the test” or “is this important.” That is, it’s one thing to write an assigned research paper, cram and memorize to take a test on a set of information and skills. It’s another thing to help all students arm themselves with life skills they need as they head into and live in an age in which jobs are likely to be invented and become obsolescent at an increasingly blurring pace. The chances of today’s students staying in the same positions working for the same companies for their whole careers are about zilch.

Enter Tom Friedman. In such a swirling age, Tom Friedman reminded his readers, the greatest skill for success, much less survival, in life’s great balancing act that anyone can have, again in Dr. Seuss’ words, is “just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.” That is, it is not so much information as an agile and sure-footed suppleness, that ability to learn how to learn, and that fearlessness and willingness to learn. Paraphrasing what Friedman rightly said, the best way to be flexible and adaptable is to be fearlessly adventurous, and the best way to be fearlessly adventurous is to learn to have the courage to take risks and risk failure, and the best way to learn to have the courage to take risks and risk failure is to learn how to learn, and the best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who themselves are fearless, imaginative, creative adventurers, explorers, risk-takers, and learners. Those kinds of teachers dance, smile, love, delight, believe, rejoice, understand, listen, see. They help students learn to win the “lonely games” that they play against themselves, get past places that “scare you right out of your pants,” get through the “Hakken-Kraks howl,” and successfully paddle “many a frightening creek.” These teachers themselves are always on the move, love to learn, promote in students’ inventiveness and creativity and imagination, help strengthen students with a fearlessness for change, endow students with individuality and independence, give control over to the students, encourage decision-making and risk-taking, with endless support and unconditional encouragement instill a self-esteem and self-confidence in each student, model and demand of students authenticity and integrity and respect, love each student, rejoice in each student’s unique potential, and work tirelessly not merely to transmit information and knowledge and skill, but to skillfully instill that love and faith in students for themselves, for others, for learning, and for life.

When you take Brooks and Friedman together, you can’t help but know that behind every graduate is a teacher, and what kind of graduate enters life and the places that graduate will go is so largely determined by the kind of teachers under whose influence that graduate came.

Literally, a week doesn’t go by that I don’t go through the joyous and rollicking pages of OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO to remind me of my purpose and meaning. So you know, coming to think about it, and thinking how Dr. Seuss was quoted at my son’s graduation from Stanford’s School of Business, every incoming first year student should be read and read throughout his or her collegiate career and throughout his or her life, “OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO.” So should each of us.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

It was in the university parking lot that it happened. Being that it is between semesters, it had a “ghost-lot” quality to it. The early morning sun was up and already superheating the watery air. I was on the out-going leg of my every-other-day five mile very fast “normal” walk. It’s the only exercise other than carefully lifting my grand-daughter, Jacqueline, that I’m permitted. I’m not allowed to power walk for another two months. A van pulled up along side me. I turned my head. It was crammed packed with a confusion of end-of-Maymester-moving-out everyday household stuff. At the wheel was Medody. As is usual these days, her eyes were gleaming and her face was beaming an inner peacefulness. That loving glow of a haloed cherub was a far cry from those times over a decade ago when she stiffly walked around as if she had pennies on her eyes. Once almost giving up on life, now it takes only a glance to see how she’s now bursting with life. I stopped, smiled, and reached out to clasp her extended hand in a sincerely loving hold as the close friends and fellow travelers we have become. She was one of those who had helped me through my cancer as a decade ago I had inadvertently helped her through the cancer on her soul. We talked for a few minutes. She was finally moving down to Tampa where her husband works, although she’ll be back in the Fall semester to do her student teaching.

After a quiet exchange, I leaned over and pushed my head through the open window. We hugged and gave each other a peck on the cheek goodbye. She drove off as I walked off. Right then and there, as I watched her car turn onto the street, I made myself a promise. No, I took an oath. Nothing will stop me from being there when she walks across the stage.

For the rest of my route I walked with an ease as if I was borne by Mercury’s winged shoes. I had a warmth about me that had little to do with the toasty sun or blanching air. Since that chance meeting a couple of days ago, as I worked on the guest bathroom ripping out the commode and sink and accessories, stripping wall paper, dealing with unexpected problems that always pop up when renovating an old house, decoratively plastering and silver leafing the walls, and painting trim, I felt as if I had received a booster shot of vitamins fulfillment, accomplishment, and satisfaction. Melody has sent me into an ascending spin. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities and opportunities that are always real and present in any given moment if you focus on the good things, about all the worthwhile things you can do on any given day if you appreciate the beauty in each student, about how each of us can help cause good things to happen if we concentrate on what’s worthwhile in each student, about how we each can work to make this world a better place by helping to make a student a better person, and about how great it feels when you give of yourself to others.

So, I have been asking myself some profoundly “simple” questions that demand answering. They have to do sacredness and inspiration. That is, when all is said and done, what do I hold most sacred in what I do on campus? When I’ve got to make choices about my time, effort, attention, and energy, what is number one on my top ten list? What is MOST on my mind? What is MOST in my heart? What is it that I MOST look forward to? What is it that is MOST meaningful to me? What makes me MOST purpose-driven? What is it that fuels my tank, that instills in me a power, that pushes me past my limitations, that sends me soaring into new worlds, that creates a euphoric mood, that invites me to fondly imagine and create, that gets me to dream of a hosts of “what if,” that slows me into wonderment, that lights my candle and overwhelms the darkness, that fills me with an abundance of hope and encouragement, that allows me to delight in beauty and cherish life, that parries discouragement and disappointment, that opens blockading barriers and lets me enter into vast vistas of opportunities, that feeds my joy and gratitude, that gives me the passion for the possible, that opens my arms to the moment, that imparts in me a sense of fulfillment, that thrills me with exaltation, that animates me to fully live life, that gets me up each day with a trumpeting �yes,� and that lets me go to sleep with a contented “yes?”

What, then, in the end, is it that gets me going and keeps me going? What is it that opens the gifts of fun and happiness for me? What is it that I want to leave behind and pass along to others? The honest answers are important, for recognized and acknowledged and uttered or not they’re there; I will draw on them, wittingly or otherwise, to drive and direct myself, and determine which path I will take.

For me, all the answers to all those questions lie in the helping the likes of Melody help themselves to transform their lives so they can strive to become the people they are capable of becoming.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–