MY THIRTY SECOND SUMMARY

Very early Sunday morning. Sleepless leaving Traverse City. Thoughts and feelings are racing through my mind and heart. In the plane somewhere over the East coast heading for Jacksonville, rushing home before Kol Nidre. Feeling heady after three whirlwind days of the Lilly-North conference on collegiate teaching. I really don’t need this flying metal cigar to feel high. Susan, sitting next to me, her suitcase crammed full with new delights, is delighted she raised the economy of Traverse City by at least two points. I had three days of non-stop, uplifting, and often intense, schmoozing and education with new and old friends: Todd, Deb, Sarah, Jim, Laurie, Gregg, Cal, Tamara, Ann, Gail, Barbara, Corrine, Sherry, Lou, Chris, Crina, Nancy, Dan, Bettina, Joe. And the list goes on and on and on. I owe them. They replenished, renewed, revitalized, and rewarded me. The neat people at the Lilly conferences do that to me. I’ll probably still be up there long after the plane has landed.

How do I sum up such a satisfying, fulfilling, and certainly educating experience in thirty seconds? This way: the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the students, the more we can cut through oblique and dehumanizing perceptions and generalities and stereotypes of students, the more we can herald each student as a sacred and noble and unique human being, the more we can focus on a faith and hope and love for each student, the more we can cast a bright spotlight on their “becoming,” the more we can learn and accept and apply what is being learned about learning, the less taste we’ll have for negative and destructive weeding out.

Louis

IDOLATRY

      I feel myself sliding inside myself. I feel myself slowly getting contemplative. An introspective mood is enveloping me. The ten “Days of Awe,” Jewish High Holy Days beginning with Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur, are upon me. I actually get an additional dose of deep reflection because the Lilly North conference on teaching is wedge between them. So, beginning at sundown today until sundown ten days from now, I will face unrelentingly the demand that I get out of my head and into my heart and soul. Things are starting to slow down. Things are starting to get profound., To light that way, I am ask to ponder a simple, but profound question. It’s purpose is to make my vision clearer, make who I am more purposeful, and what I do more meaningful: How did I not realize my potential this year, and what do I need to do to correct that shortcoming and make sure that I am better able to follow by vision and to fulfill the purpose for which I am in this world? I think that is a question we in academia should ask about ourselves and what is it we do. So, here goes:

        We are told in the First Commandment, “you shall have no other gods before me.” Yet, so much of academia seems so polytheistic. So many of us are constantly fashioning our own enslaving academic golden calves. We worship idols of information. We throw ourselves prostrate before the graven images test scores, grades, and GPAs. We pay homage to the deity of resume. We race after research, grants, publication, renown, promotion, and tenure in adoration of the divine rat. We grovel before the false god of edu-technology. We perform the ceremonies of lectures, tests, quizzes, grades, GPAs, and “standardized assessment instruments.” And, then, having blindly performed these rituals, having drawn up a magnificent syllabus, having written a brilliant set of mini-conference papers we call lectures, we convince ourselves how great we are as devoted educators. The real issue here is mindless idolatrous worship ritual performance in which all too many academics have replaced the living of educational life with empty lip service and lifeless institutionalization. We have substituted the process itself for the spirit of education, and have begun worshipping something other than education: the rituals and ceremonies themselves. Where’s the purpose, the vision, the meaning? Oh, the prophet Micah would have a field day with us.

       In a subtle, but very real sense, by adopting this attitude those academics have slipped away from educating towards schooling and credentialing. Everyone listens and so many put on a long face and/or nod their heads to show that they, too, are gravely concerned. Everybody agrees abstractly that something really must be done. But when the conversation is over, when the meetings have concluded, when the Monday after the weekend conference comes, nothing is really done, and most academics are relieved to slip back into the adoration of or safe submission to the current system. Ritual piles upon ceremony, reinforced by all these accreditation processes, until all education is turned upside down. These habits infect everything they touch, for we become more concerned with “how do you grade that” than “did they deeply learn,” more with “what” and “how” than with “why,” more with statistics than vision and purpose, more with producing grade-getters and test takers or transcript primpers or at best merely informed people rather than innovative thinkers and better people. We produce few students who appreciate that the collegiate academic experience as worthwhile in its own right. The idea that we can help a student become a whole person, a better person, begins to disappear as the definition of education focuses on classroom structure, job-getting content, and credentialing as the only things that matters. As my good friend, Don Fraser, told me, most of us academics see the wrong “C word.” Instead of seeing the “C word” of caring and compassion and community, we have a barrel vision and only see the “C word” of curriculum content.

Louis

FOG

      The dark, pre-dawn air hung heavy. It was damp, clammy, warm. Everything was blurred by a slight, enveloping fog. As I longed for the calming effect of the starry sky, I thought how in academic certainty can be so fog our senses. And, I thought of another word for Kenny to add to our Dictionary of Words for Good Teaching. Fog. Now, when we think of fog, words like “uncertain,” “lost,” “adrift,” and “blurry” probably jump into our minds. But, when you’re in a fog, when you realize you’re in a fog, you are forced you to lose your complacency, to heighten your senses, to put your antennae on full blast, to squint your eyes and look more intensely, to perk up your ears and listen more closely, to become acutely aware of your surroundings, to focus your awareness, and to concentrate your otherness. In a fog, if it’s not heads up, it’ll be bump into or fall down. So, I’ve found that when it comes to students it is only in a fog that you can hope to see, listen, feel, and think crystal clear. Let me tell you what I mean as I turn the relationship of fog and certainty upside down.

      So, I ask, “How many of us academics live in a house constructed of the often deafening, blinding, distant, numbing, and clinical bricks of certainty, and objectivity? How many of us allow those bricks to create a barrier between us and each student, as well as between us and ourselves? How many of us are swept along by such currents of presumptuous certainty as “in my day” and “student today are?” How many of us so often pretend that the personal context and individual circumstance don’t exist, that they exert no effect on either us or the students, and consequently are of no concern to us? It’s what I call a fog of certainty that can only be dissipated by the breezes of uncertainty.

       I recently told someone, “As I read each student’s daily journal entry, as I read each single word the students write on the whiteboard each day at the beginning of class about how they feel, when I face each student, I am faced with the acknowledged knowledge of not knowing enough about the individual life of a student that is impacting on her or his performance. I can clearly see that I don’t have a complete and certain picture that a preconception, generalization, presumption, or stereotype suggests I have. When I see each student, I see difference. I see a different perspective. I see a different life. No one is without heritage; no one is bereft of experience; no one is devoid of conscious and subconscious memory. Every person is an alternative life to my own. Every one has a unique personal history. It is the basic American principle of diversity: every person is a unique, noble, sacred individual. Each person has different alloys of strengths and weaknesses. Each person lives differently, walks different roads, has different experiences, calls on different memories, has different approaches to life, gets sick differently, has different needs, has different ailments, has different senses of the future, carries different amounts of baggage, has different opinions, totes different types of baggage, and heals differently. Each person dreams differently, copes differently, risks differently, fears differently, believes differently, manages differently, remembers differently, experiences differently, enjoys differently, pains differently, and suffers differently. Each person looks and sees, hears and listens, and thinks and feels differently. To think that none of this comes into play each day, to deny the fact of individual identity, to ignore the truth of individual experience makes us vulnerable to the most pernicious dehumanizing effects of opinion, presumption, assumption, perception, and stereotype.”

      Only when we realize we are groping through a fog of certainty, can we hope find our way out into that clear air of uncertainty. Only then, will we make the Herculean effort to see and listen to and get a feel for each student. In the end, if you don’t love the true mystery and diversity–and challenge–of it all, you’ll miss the humanity of it all. And, I’m not sure we can really get the real education job done if we don’t care about, deal with, and take into account this very human equation.

Louis

MY TWO MINUTES ON “TEACHING IS….”

I haven’t been in the mood to share any thoughts lately. But, yesterday I was at a joyous Bar Mitzvah party and got into a conversation with an out-of-town guest from New York about the economy. In the course of our exchange, I mentioned that Georgia teachers were being furloughed. Her passing but revealing response placed teachers in the derisive category of “overpaid ‘burger flippers’ who have it so easy and don’t do all that much anyway.” She didn’t know me, and in deference to the occasion, I let the comment pass. But, not now. On this Labor Day, when we honor work, when we officially respect and revere working people, when we relax from work, I want to say that teaching requires a lot of work; it demands the intense and lasting “sweat equity” of devotion, passion, compassion, conviction, commitment, persistence, endurance, and perseverance. Contrary to this woman’s views that unfortunately is held by too many both inside and outside academia who far too often treat teachers as rank amateurs or unskilled doofuses, teaching is not an unskilled job; it’s not something you do when you can’t do anything else; it’s not a walk in the part; it’s not a piece of cake; it’s not a 9 to 5 job fraught with overwhelming amounts of vacation time; it’s not merely talking; it’s not something you can do in your sleep; it’s not something anyone can do.

Teaching takes intense love; it’s about falling in love and staying in love with public service; it’s about staying in love consistently and unconditionally with each and every student. Teaching is about deep and acute awareness and otherness. Teaching is always about getting great things done for others, not about getting credit for yourself. Always. It’s always about each of those students, about challenging their habits, about stretching their imagination, about helping them reach for their potential. Always. It’s never about any of us academics, never about enlarging both our resume and renown. Never.

Teaching demands seeing education through the human prism. It’s about treating each student with grace, dignity, gentleness, and kindness. It’s about serving and honoring not only peoples’ motives and wants, but their needs as well. It’s helping others to think as much about life as about the job. It’s as much about passion, conviction, and faith as it is about cold facts. It’s about seeing a nobility, uniqueness, and sacredness in each student that is regrettably invisible to too many others. It’s about being a “hopeless hope-oholic,” a “helpless help-oholic,” “a dreamy-eyed dreamer,” a “restless believer,” a “visionary in action,” a “people-struck lover.” It’s about the healing and encouraging power of consistently, sincerely, and unconditionally caring about and believing in each and every student. It’s as much as, if not more, about being tender and empathetic as being tough and demanding. It’s supposed to be overflowing with moments of indescribable awe. It’s supposed to be amazing, joyous, fun, fulfilling, and satisfying.

Teaching is about being a “romantic realist.” It’s about having your head in the clouds with your feet firmly on the ground. It is as much about the prosaic as it is the stirring; it’s as much about the proverbial prose as it is the poetic. It’s emotionally, physically, and intellectually intense and draining. It’s about putting in long-houred, demanding, out-of-sight, not very glamorous, burning-the-candle, unrecognized, rolled-up-shirtsleeves, so unappreciated grunt work. It’s about compassion and craft, looking and seeing, hearing and listening, noise and silence, insight and sight, instinct and skill. It’s about being prepared for the unprepared, for there are strong currents of spontaneity, impromptu, and serendipity. It’s more about being ready for the unplanned moment than readying the planned way. It’s more about seizing the opportunities offered by the unforeseen events than the offering a prescribed curriculum. It’s understanding and accepting that the most significant lessons are taught and learned more often than not in unexpected moments than in designed discussions or structured lectures.

Teaching is about spending your time and efforts and energies with human capital. It’s about helping each student look at her/himself and look at others. It’s about helping others open their shut doors. It’s about helping people to aim higher. It’s about the power to move people. It’s about making a real difference in the real lives of real people in a real world. It’s as much about enrichment as it is achievement and success. It’s as much about the heart and soul as it is about the brain. It’s as much about forming character as it is providing information and developing skill. It’s about helping others see what is truly important in life. It’s about helping others face challenges, accept difficulties, appreciate the setbacks, and set up priorities on the journey in life. It’s about establishing the foundations of respect, trust, playfulness, self-discipline, integrity, commitment, perseverance, resiliency, and purpose. It’s about helping others choose their own path, experiencing their own course, and forging their own destiny. It’s as much about helping others to learn how to live as to learn how to earn a living.

Teaching is supposed to alter lives. It’s supposed to transform lives. It’s supposed to make each person bigger and better. Someone once said that the way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, to devote yourself to a vision that gives you purpose and meaning. That’s what teaching is all about and what makes it one of the surest ways to significance.

Louis