Just came in from a four mile walk in what can only be described as a “return to sanity” temperatures. No more, as someone said, cryogenics for the living. It was a delightful, shorts and t-shirt, pre-storm, cloudy 65 degrees. And talking about sanity, I got an e-mail yesterday from a professor at an eastern college asking me, “How do you keep what’s happening on your campus from driving you insane?

“Nothing!” I answered. And, then I added cryptically, “And, everything!”

By “everything,” I meant simply that whatever abyss the mind creates, the heart can bridge. So, at the end of the day, my day, I know that the only part of the universe I can truly effect is my universe, that all I can truly control is me. The vision I follow is my vision. My most important job in the service of each student is to be my authentic me, to live what is true to me, to let my light shine to show a way, to share my insights and energy, to have emotions and thoughts and actions that flow freely from the core of my spirit, to make the contributions I can make, to offer the gifts I have to give, and to refuse to become someone others are trying to make me into.

So, in a strange way, those already existing 150 student super classes and impending 350 student super-duper classes have done me a favor. What is coming from the depths of my being is growing more intense and more concrete as it works its way outward In my classes, I am more keenly on the lookout for and am more consciously aware of the wonders in the classroom we call students; I focus even more intently and intensely in order to evoke the sublime from the mundane; I concentrate more on seeing in the supposed ordinary the extraordinary; I am even more committed and dedicated; I persevere even more on creating a caring, supporting, encouraging classroom community resting on the pillars of unconditional belief, faith, hope, and love for each and every student in those classes with me. I may not be able to change the world, but I sure can influence my world and, as Ghandi said, be the change I wish to see in the world. Am I displaying my romantic realism, as my older son would describe it? Sure, but there is nothing weak, passive, or naïve in that being. I don’t forget, as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once said, “Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”

That is why each day I consciously focus on my why, on “what is my vision,” on “why am I here,” on “what is my purpose,” on “what is meaningful,” on “what is significant,” and “what is fulfilling.” I focus on why I feel, think, and do what I feel, think, and do. And, then, I focus on living my why. I focus on not getting caught up and dragged down in the day-to-day academic and administrative clutter. I focus on treasuring, admiring, and appreciating each student. I focus on having faith in, belief in, hope for, and love of each student. I focus being a servant teacher. I focus my “big picture” and the constant struggle to make it so.

Hey, before you say anything, I’m no Thoreau who thinks I can withdraw from the “real world” and make the classroom into my Walden Pond. At the same time, I know that what I hold in my heart and soul, I will see in my world. When I am hopeful, faithful, peaceful, believing, and loving, everything has an aura of hope, faith, belief, and love about it. I know that where my passion, attention, commitment, dedication, perseverance are constantly and consistently focused, is where my teaching will go. I also know that having and believing in a vision, a purpose, a why, is not enough. Vision requires responsibility, reflection, articulation, and implementation. It entails awareness and otherness. It calls for service. It demands I put my committed, dedicated, persevering money where my mouth is. It may even call for discomfort, inconvenience, and risk. But, and it is one heck of a “but,” at the moment I compromise on my vision, I would lose the way of my why, the flame would die down, the joy would be lost, the meaning would lose its meaning, and the fun of it all would be gone. We only honor our vision when we uphold it during the hard times, not just during the easy ones. I am that romantic realist. I admitted it. It’s my body armor. I won’t and don’t let people cloud my vision. I’ve got better things to do than spend all my time warding off the naysayers. Instead, I daily focus on and live my why. I am just not going to accept any invitation to do or be otherwise.

Don Quixote, move over. You’ve got company in dreaming the impossible dream. Impossible? Coming to think of it, as I tell the students, impossible things are done every day.

Louis

 

Anyway, to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable truths of which I spoke, we shouldn’t believe we’re the smartest persons in the room. You may get compliance, but you won’t get commitment with an imposed “be reasonable and agree with me” posturing or a submissive, hat-in-hand “yes, sir.” We all should have a lingering awareness and admission that way down deep, buried somewhere, in each and every one of us, there is a little of this psychosis in each and every one of us. One way or the other, no one should be seduced by a feeling of innocence, or be carried away by one’s own self-righteous, or be warped by “eeyore-ish” certitude, or be swept up in blaming someone or something else, or be duped into thinking there exists a simple formula and that the choice is a stark either/or in successfully walking the tightrope. For example, I know many members of the faculty are cynical because don’t know, want to know, understand, and respect the enormous pressures being exerted on the highest administrative offices.

So, should we accept disconnection, miscommunication, and distorting simplification? Should stop taking heed? Should we stop exerting our own pressures? Should we stop listening? Should we stop asking? If we do stop, from where will come the understanding and respect? From where will come the determination, the saying power, the moral imagination? From where will come the dedication to replace mere undedicated obedience? From where will come the joining of forces and high morale to meet and overcome adversity? Remember that in both supposed opposing yin and yang there are a connecting, balancing, and interacting “y” and “n.” So, I will ask some, just some, of my questions. What is the vision of higher education? What is the purpose of it all? Are higher educators evolving or devolving as many in both administrative and faculty levels remain ignorant of or ignore what science is telling us about learning? Does size, then, really matter? That is, are these increasingly one-dimensional, distant learning, large classes merely an enlargement of the disconnection that is already going on in too many of our smaller classes? Are we really using our creative juices to find our way through these demanding times? In these days of necessary sacrifice, who and what are we truly sacrificing? In these heady days, whose heads are we lopping off?” Are we merely protecting to the death what we perceive are the needs of our resumes, our scholarship, our tenure, our research, our publication–and our sports? To save handing out pink slips to faculty, are we’re increasingly pink slipping the education of many students in larger classes, especially in those “super” and “super duper” classes? Are we going from deep water learning into the shallows of grade getting and threatening to run on the destructive shoals with these classes? Are we succumbing to short range immediacy of “right answers” at the expense of very expensive sacrificing of lasting “true answers?” Whom are we really serving? Are we asking students to carry extra loads while we faculty members resist truly increasing our loads? Are the offerings of both the value of a true education and the humanity of the student being placed on the sacrificial altar? Is the sacrifice we’re talking about the sacrifice of the student and by the student, especially that novice first year student, and not really for the student? How do we graduate good students who are more importantly good persons? How do we help that student learn how to make a good living and live the good life?

Where is Solomon when you need him?

 

 

 

Time to be a cold grump!  I admit it.  And, it has nothing to do with the temperatures outside.  

             Well, the economy has done it.  It’s pushed my campus over the edge, or, at least, it is offered as the excuse.  True, on my campus, like most campuses, it’s been crunch time.  Our budget is looking more and more like a luscious plum shriveling into a dried prune.  On the other hand, our enrollment is growing like a sweet succulent Georgia peach on a branch in spring.  This push-pull had been putting enormous pressure on our facilities, course offerings, administrative staff, faculty, the truth of our mission statement, and the honesty of the glowing words in our recruiting brochures.  And, it’s going to get worse.  To meet these challenges, challenges that would cross Solomon’s eyes, VSU is speeding up its pace on the low road to ever increasing its size of classes.  We broke ground in December for a two million dollar “lecture hall” building with two 350 seat classes.  We already have instituted “super” 150 student classes.  Now, we’re entering the realm of “super-duper classes.”  I’ve heard these classes being called “strategic options” in terms of “immediate needs.”  Immediate and tactical? Sure..  But, long-range and strategic?  No.  Others call them “adaptive efficiencies.”  Efficient they may be when it comes to information transmission.  Effective when it comes to deep learning?  I seriously doubt that; the recent science about learning questions that.  We’re doing bigger, more efficient classrooms, but not better, more effective ones.  We’re disconnecting when the science says we have to connect even more.  We’re still in what I call the “medieval mode” of educating when all the science on educating says we have to come up-to-date.  We’ve created more classroom space in which we can transmit information to more students in one shot.  But, we do it at the sacrifice of vital inner space.  Unfortunately, too many people think you can change the form without having an impact on the essence, that you can alter the size without touching the perceived and actual value. So, I argue that such super and super-duper classes are really “herding corrals,” “dehumanizing crowds,” “impersonal throngs” in which a student will be lost as an individual.  I am glad I was out of town at the time of the dedication.  I don’t think I would have attended in any event.  What that brick and mortar and glass stand for is the “right answer” to the economic pressures, but not the “true answer” about the essence of an education.  It is so against both my philosophy of wholeness education and what cognitive science’s current research on brain activity is teaching us about learning.  It sets in inflexible concrete the prevailing myths of higher education that I’ve recently talked about, that is, that higher education is merely a bulimic process of teaching as talking and stuffing information down a student’s throat on one hand, and learning as merely hearing, note-taking, test regurgitation, grade getting, and GPA amassing on the other.       

            This lecture hall building, and the already in place “super classes” are symptomatic of the higher education’s core struggle between its Yin and Yang.  It is not always peaceful co-existence and easy balancing act between a host of seemingly irreconcilable “right” and “true” truths.  Education is part emphasis on research and discovery in the lab, archive, and field while it is part ignoring or resisting the results of up-to-date research and discovery when it comes to classroom teaching.  Education is part professional when it comes to scholarship and part amateur when it comes to classroom teaching.  Education demands we academicians be up in and on the scholarship of our discipline and doesn’t demand anything approaching that we be equally up in and on the scholarship of teaching; it is part making the hands-off proclamation that “students are adults” and a part so often tightly dominating and treating them as children.  Education is part idealistic and part realistic; it is part Ivory Tower standing apart from society and it is part a part of society;  it is part fiercely independent of society and it part meekly dependent on society; it is part developing people and communication skills, and it is part developing critical thought skills; it is part developing the independent individual and part promoting both teamwork and social interdependence; it is part encouragement of individual creativity and imagination, and it is part imposing conforming “do what I want;”  it is part test taking and grade getting, and it is part learning; it is part of “the now” and it is part “of the future;”  it is part doing what is assessable and part doing what is beyond assessment; it is part controlling and part granting autonomy; it is part an information transmission business and it is part a people business; it is part emotional and part intellectual; it is part knowledge amassing and part character building; it is part personal transformation and part professional credentialing; it is part learning how to live and part learning how to make a living; it is part servant teaching and part being served; it is part hopefully nurturing and part cynically weeding out; it is part warm, embracing, empathic, and compassionate through Bridge, First Year Experience, and Learning Community programs, and part unaccepting, uncaring, disengaged, clinical, and distant in those super and super duper classes; it is part very human and part very technological; it is part dedication to each student and part dedication to the discipline; it is part student centered and part professor centered; it is part fearlessly proclaiming that we academicians are masters of our fate and part fearfully accepting that we academicians prisoners of “the system.”   

             So many academics proclaim that students have changed over the years.  Have they?  Really?  With over forty years in the classroom, I think not.  Such proclamations are defensive rationalizations.  Our institutions have changed.  Our missions have changed.  Our role in society has changed.  Our visions have changed.  But, most of us academicians fight not to change, clinging by our fingertips to deeply entrench provincialisms.  I can’t help coming back time and time again to the often damming, but shunned and ignored PBS’ “Declining By Degrees.”  It’s as if Karal Capek will be roaming our campus from now on taking notes for another sequel to R.U.R.  We may be becoming big enough to serve institutional and faculty needs, but will we remain small enough to really serve societal needs and know who each student is in order to serve their individual needs?  Those students in those super and super duper classes will be sent into a deeper twilight zone.  They will be there, but they will be so remote it will be as if they are not there.  They will be far more on their own, inexperienced and immature, thrown to the wolves.  They will be far less connected.  Their spirit will be less cultivated, if cultivated at all.  Invisibility will arise within them.  

             What am I talking about?  I just heard a startling statistic.  In our “pre-super-duper” class stage, one-third of our first year students are already on academic probation.  I haven’t verified that number.  But, if it’s anything approaching accuracy, I wonder who really bears the responsibility for that situation. 

             More later……

Louis

A “brrrrrrrry” good morning. I just came in from getting the newspaper and I my frozen face is as Carolina blue as my UNC scrubbies. My hands are so cold that the hot cup off coffee I’m tightly holding to thaw out board-like fingers almost turned to coffee slush. The temperature here in supposed warm and sunny South Georgia is lower than it was in Tahoe last week: 17 degrees, 12 degrees if you factor in the wind chill!!!! Later, its ice skating on my koi pond and snow boarding down the fire ant hills for me!!! Brrrrrr!!! Double brrrrr!!!

Talking about cold, stirred by some stuff on higher education that I’ve been reading, by some more stuff I’ve been reading on research on how each of our brain operate, by what the SACS study we’re suffering through for reaccredidation I know won’t study and comment on, and by starting to get into the groove for the start of the new semester tomorrow, I was thinking about some chilling questions this morning.

Do we professors know, really know, what we’re doing in the classroom? Oh, I don’t question that the profs know the stuff of their discipline, but do they know, truly know, how to teach it? Most don’t. Are we professors trained in leadership and public speaking, both of which are requirements in the classroom? Most aren’t. Do we professors know, really know, or care to know, who is in the classroom with us? Most don’t and don’t care to. Are we professors really trained for the classroom with the same rigor we are trained in our scholastic discipline. Most aren’t. After being in the classroom for over 45 years, I have come to the same conclusion many others, both inside and outside higher education, have reached: teaching in higher education is largely haphazard, largely confined to the realm of tradition and guesswork, at best to on-the-job, trail-and-error, seat-of-your pants, almost intuitive navigation, to unverifiable claims and presumptions and assumptions and stereotypes and mythologies. They all revolve around the usually unexamined and widely accepted propositions that if you know it, you can teach it; that teaching is little more talking or controlling discussion; that education is solely an information transmission and skill development business rather than a people business; that professors are the paragons of inhuman, emotional-less objectivity; that learning is hearing, note-taking, test taking, and paper writing; and that the legitimacy of this process is evidenced by the test grades, course grades, and cumulative GPAs.

As a result almost everything is focused on the blind rituals of scholastic education, which are formal, structured, and supervised–and worshipped. And, the SACS study will not change that, for it has been my experience of having undergone three previous such processes that the people of the SACS study will only study “outwardness” as they swarm all over our campus. They’ll look at, discuss, and raise questions about courses, programs, resumes, assessment, objectives, and, of course, those supposedly know-all-and-see-all syllabi. They, like most of us, will give little, if any, thought to emotional, social, and character education, which remains generally ignored, unsupervised, informal, and haphazard. They won’t go into personal inwardness: the flow of spirit, attitude, personal vision, inventiveness, creativity, uniqueness, renewal, refreshment. That is sad, for, as David Brooks once said, since the latter, which governs how and to what ends we use the former is much more important to our personal, professional, and social long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

Yet, coming into what is proving to be an anorexic picture of higher education is cognitive science’s revealing, challenging, but richly nutritious research on the brain. It’s uncovering the nature learning. It is, therefore, revealing what I call a bulimic process of serving up, ingesting, and vomiting up that information with very little time and effort given to digesting that information into knowledge and wisdom; that both teaching and learning is based on a highly unnatural, inefficient, ineffective, questionable, and subjective, fear inducing, threatening, stifling, and often debilitating reward and punishment system on both sides of the podium.

 

Teaching is an ancient craft which has had very little refitting over the millennia. Until recently few people really had any idea of how the traditional way of teaching and learning affected and was affected by the workings of the brain. Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education coming together. But, at the same time that togetherness spotlights a reality: what the science says we should be doing in our field and what we are still doing are fields apart.

This relationship is new and still awkward. To be sure, there is a ton of bandwagon, scholarship-of-teaching hyperbole weighing down a lot of good “brain-based” research. But, at the same time, the good stuff is more often than not falling on deaf ears. While the brain research is giving us a lot of food for thought, there are seven other inter-related traditions in higher education are at work that are squelching most appetites to alter eating habits. First, there is the Ivory Tower’s too often lofty, remote, self-validating, elitist, and isolating “what do they know” that breeds resistance to change and disdain for any sort of answerability and accountability. The result is that you will often get reluctant and resigned compliance, but not enthusiastic commitment and dedication. Second, lip service notwithstanding, there is the heavy emphasis on research and publication and a depreciation of the scholastic value of teaching in the hiring, promoting, recognizing, awarding, and tenuring processes. Third, there is the fear-ridden, self-centered, stifling don’t-rock-the-boat, submissive what-do-they-want quest for the job guarantee of tenure. Fourth is the prevailing inadequate training for the classroom. Fifth is the deafening, blinding, paralyzing, and atrophying “I know how to teach. I’ve been in the classroom X years” syndrome. Sixth is the wide spread, and often counter intuitive belief, that technology in and of itself is the panacea for all of academic’s ills, that it can meet all of its contemporary challenges, and carry out all of its missions. And finally, there is negative, fear inducing, and debilitating overwhelming misuse and abuse of the faculty grading system we call “assessment” more as admonition and punishment than as improvement, growth, and change.

Nevertheless, there is possibility of transformation, of turning higher education on its head, if we find the courage, strength, commitment, endurance, and perseverance to retrofit this ancient craft beyond merely slapping on a new coat of paint, give it the prestige it deserves, allow for and promote creative experimentation and exploration, and alter its course by replacing dead reckoning with a modern scientific compass and GPS system.

How to do that? Well, as Paul Harvey would say, that’s the rest of the story.

Louis