THE BIRTHRIGHT TO MAKE MISTAKES

The pre-dawn streets were quiet places where the quiet can enter and warm your heart.  For me, that quiet opens a space for slow down time while I am hurrying along the streets; it provides chances for focus and clarity that the hussle and bustle of the normal day does not.  It’s a precious wedge of time, when I am alone, that lets me go to that serene place within me where I felt that wonderful, renewing, and energizing connectedness with myself.  In that pre-dawn darkness, a thought dawned on me that was prompted by a lot of what I read in this month’s, “The Failure Issue”  of the Harvard Business Review.  Do we really teach students how to achieve?  That is, after all is said and done, one of their birthrights.  Yeah, we inundate them with a flood of information.  Yeah, we say we develop their critical thinking skills.  Yeah, we say we train them in problem solving.  But, do we teach them that mistake is a gift?  Do we teach them more about “bad mistakes” than we do “good mistakes?”  Do we teach them that the ability to learn from mistakes is one of the most important capacities they can learn?  Do we really teach them how to exercise their birthright to achieve?  I wonder.  I wonder because in the process of all this transmission and development and training, we strip students and ourselves of the very essence of achievement that is our second human birthright: the birthright to make mistakes and learn from them in order to achieve.

Fifteen years ago, I started learning that the only real mistake is in being afraid to make a mistake, not making one.  We educators should not put a condom over our classroom in our quest to practice only “safe teaching.”  We shouldn’t post “Mistake-free Zone.  Violators will be prosecuted” signs around our institutions.  But, we do.  Why is that?  Why is it that we in academia don’t cotton mistakes of ourselves or others?  Why do we think of mistakes as cosmic warps.  Why are we so often horrified and inflamed by mistake.  Why do we accused and condemn, and even burn in effigy those who misstep?  Why do we see mistakes in ourselves and others as signs of being “weak” and/or “no good at?”  Why do we welcome an “aha” and shun an “oops?”  Is it that we’re really hypocrites, seeing mistake as a badge of honor of honor while on the hand treating it as a scarlet letter?  Do we platitudinously celebrate mistake as a learning tool while in reality treating it as an anathema?  Do we treat mistake as a taboo because we’re afraid of vulnerability, hidden imperfections, weakness, a sense of inadequacy?   Are we in fear for our reputation, authority, our precious selves, our image, our ego, our carefully constructed identities?  Are we afraid to be shaken from our complacency, our pride, our arrogance? Why does the prospect of making a mistake strike terror in our hearts? Why do we cling so tightly to our lesser half?  Why do we deny that mistake is the cost of achievement, that is, if we don’t have the confidence and courage to make a mistake, we won’t strive to achieve.  If truth be told, mistakes may be unfashionable, but they are necessary and inevitable.  That inner strength we call confidence is the “cheapest” form of self-motivation, but it is the most crucial, the hardest to create in ourselves much less in others.  Yet, do we have a “cognitive bias” or an “attribution error” that urges us to only reflect on our “successes” and thus prevents us from understanding that simple but challenging truth?  Do we really –I mean, really–understand that?  Do we really know how to accept mistake; do we really know how to learn from mistake; do we really know how to rebound from mistake; do we really know the difference between “bad mistake” that we let hold us back and “good mistake” that we use, in the phrase of Charles Kettering, to “fail forward.”  If we don’t, if we make a doozie of a mistake about making mistakes we’re in big trouble, and we may mistakenly not even know it!

Louis

ON BEING INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL

Her questions:  “You talk about being spiritual in your teaching.  What does that mean?  How can you be both an intellectual and spiritual?  Isn’t it an either/or proposition?”

My answer:   “Let me put it this way.  A student once came up to me in class on the first day of the semester to inform me that ‘I am an honors student.”

“I answered, ‘I’m glad to hear that.  But, tell me, are you” an “honors person?”‘

“She didn’t understand my question.  I told her, as I now tell you, that we each should focus on who we are rather than merely on what we do, or have, or know.”

“Now, before I go any further, let me say what I think my ‘spiritual’ is not.  It’s not synonomous with formal religion or institutionalized church.  My ‘spiritual’ has no interest in and is not rooted in any isms or -ologies.  It doesn’t mean a strict adherence to some dogma, dogmatically following the “true way,” meticulous performing rituals or ceremonies, having an exclusive possession of truth, or being on some higher plane.  It’s not a promise to be more knowledgeable or have greater insight.  It’s not a preaching of a gospel or starting a movement.  It’s not asking for some monastic withdrawal and isolation.  And, because I love my glass of red wine and bit of cheese each day with my Susan, it certainly is not a rejection of material things.”

‘Spiritual’ for me, as I once said over a decade ago and have struggled to lived by since, is to realize I am not a ‘ human thinking,’ ‘human doing,’ ‘human having,’ ‘human feeling,’ or ‘human knowing.’  I am a ‘human being!’   At that time I wrote a poem at the end of which I asked, when there are no titles to display, when there are no roles to play, when there are no masks to wear, who is each of us?  So, to paraphrase the Bard, I ask, do you really believe the resume doth make the person?  We often heed the “ghost of the machine,” that we are some apparatus that can be disassembled into separate parts.  So, we point to this separate intellectual and that distinct spiritual, of this emotional intelligence and that social intelligence and those multiple intelligences.  But, the reality is that such talk is merely for the sake of convenience and to segregate and isolate each from the other has no bearing on reality.  Emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and actions all interact and influence each other.  ‘Spiritual,’ then, is my personal story of learning that I am a holistic, harmonized ‘human being,’ and learning how to live my life holistically from the essence my integrated and inseparable heart and mind and soul rather than from the facades of my pocketbook, position, title, social role, or resume.  It’s about turning myself upside down and shaking all the nonsense of appearance and image out of my soul and striving to live a life of compassion and unconditional love.  I think when I mean ‘spiritual,’ I mean being true inside, for I truly don’t believe I can see clearly and honestly what is outside until I can see clearly and honestly what is inside.  It’s about my personal development and transformation to a connection with and unity of all that diversity in here and out there.  This is not ‘values added.’  It’s ‘values ingrained.’  It’s ‘values essence.’  That is, like chameleons, we take on the color of our moral character.  I mean being and living those values, not just saying or listing them.  I mean having and exercising character that focuses on three things.   First there is service to others, giving of myself to others.  Second, there is everyday practicing of those values in the everyday world.  And last, there is a humbling, liberating, and honoring of differences rather than an accusing, denigrating, enslaving, and demand for conforming.  By ‘spiritual’ I mean a way of living that permeates my emotions, attitudes, thoughts, and actions in everything I do in concrete ways.  I mean not cubby-holing my professional apart from my personal apart from my social life.  I mean not separating what some would call my spiritual life from any other aspect of my material life.  And, if at the end of a day I can pause, think back, take a deep breath, and give out an honest fulfilled “aaah,” I know I’ve done it that one day.”

“You see, I am not spiritual in my teaching, or in my gardening, or in my periodic sculpting, or in my occasional poetry, or in my spoiling of the grandmunchkins, or in my nudging of Susan, or in my conference presentations or in my workshops, or in my pre-dawn walks, or in anything else I do or with whomever I do.  I am spiritual in me.  That is critical.  I think it was Rumi who said let the beauty that you love be who you are, to which I add:   and be what you do.  That means, always being intensely aware and mindful of, to paraphrase Jon Kabat-Zinn, that wherever I go and whatever I do, there I am.  I mean being, what my son, Michael, calls that “romantic-realist.”  The two are so deeply, and often invisibly, enmeshed you can’t tell them apart.  I draw upon them to avoid the extremes of doing nothing on one hand and attempting to do everything on the other, but always striving to do a bit more.  You see, I’m really not looking for meaning; I’m looking for significance; I’m just looking to feeling intensely alive.  Who was it that said you can’t give your life more days, but you can give your days more life?   Doing that, however, is not a piece of cake; it’s not something you can do in your sleep; it doesn’t ‘come naturally;’ it’s not something you can do eyes closed, legs crossed, arms outstretched, upraised fingers pinched together.  No, if all weath is the product of labor, then, all of life’s riches are equally the result of determination and effort.  So, you’ve got to open your eyes, get up, and move around.  You’ve got to out there, get ‘down and dirty,’ exert and sweat, consciously and conscientiously work at it each day.  But, if you can do that, I tell you, you’ll see a new world being born in front of your eyes.  And, as you fill the world with your own special dreams and desires and hopes and loves, as you inhale that fresh and empowering air, you will come to life, be alive, feel that you’re living fully, and know that you’re part of the solution rather than a cause of the problem.”

“Now, one last word.  Someone told me that neuro-research is reducing all what I have said to firing of mere neurons.  My answer is that there is nothing “mere” about any firing neuron.  If anything, that research makes me fired up, intensely aware of connections within myself, and connections with both myself and things beyond and larger than myself.  There’s more to my answer, but for now that’s enough.”

WHAT EI AND SI ARE ALL ABOUT

Someone asked me what I thought Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence are all about.  I answered, “I have a challenge for you.  Forget about all those separably identified intelligences.  Instead, focus on the whole living person, on mind and body and spirit and whatever taken inseparably together, void of partitioning walls.  I challenge you to think of us humans not as divisible creatures made up of parts, but holistically as whole entities.  In fact, developments in the cognitive neurosciences are increasingly making it clear that the brain performs all the cognitive, emotional, and social functions once attributed separately to either the mind or spirit, or body or soul.  We humans are not dualistic bodies and souls.  As Nancey Murphy says, we’re holistic ‘spirited bodies.’  So, if we’re homo sapiens’ ‘knowing man,’ know that breaking down humans into divisions breaks down.  Focusing on one at the expense of the others becomes irrelevant.  Attacking one while extolling the other becomes distorting and inappropriate.  We gain nothing and lose everything in our attempt to understand both ourselves and others if we practice a form of scientific or religious dualism.  If you can, then, be interested in the intimate inter-relationships of body, soul, spirit, mind rather than separating and cataloguing them. Then, you’ll see that it’s not what EI and SI and CI (Cognitive intelligence) are about; it’s who they are about.

In simple terms, I’ve found that these intelligences are really about both “them” and “me.”  They have an emphasis on human totality and connection and service both at the individual and group levels.  They are about connecting reverence, devotion, morality, and ethic in every aspect of ordinary life, both personal and professional, in a way that makes no person ordinary or separated.   They are about being more engaged with life itself, more openly engaged in every moment, everywhere, with everything and with everyone.  They are about living with, working with, caring about, and tending to yourself and to those around you; they are about thinking, spirituality, morality, and ethic.  By spirituality, I mean “my” spirituality as much as I do “our.” I mean going empathetically and compassionately into and beyond ourselves in a way that fulfills and satisfies ourselves.  It’s that selfless “good selfish” thing.  By “morality,” I mean a reflective life based on a vision of who we wish to become, what we wish to attain, and our attitude towards both ourselves and others.  By “ethic,” I mean not only following my vision, but studying and understanding–and accepting–the demands placed on me by a sense of service to others.  It’s that Zen “awareness,” “mindfulness,” and “otherness” of ourselves and others  That is, connection and ethic, crossing the divide to unite “me” and to unite “me” with “them” into a community of “we,” working and living with others whomever they might be.

You see, if you listen to understand, you’ll be much better able to make yourself understood. If you read others to be empathetic, you’ll be better read by others.  If you listen well, and you’ll learn the most effective way to say whatever you have to say.   For we teachers this is important.  After all, there are others in the classroom with us, and we have to attend to those others.  We have to be able to read the emotions of others.  We have to combine vision and application.  We each have to live by an ethic vision that challenges us not only to be good persons, but to be good for both ourselves and others.  That is, we must get past altruism and use our insight in the service of others, for if you make a decision with an open heart and embracing arms, you seldom will make the wrong decision.  After all, to paraphrase Leo Buscaglia, if you are closed hearted, you only wind up holding yourself.  One of the realities is that each of us and them is a whole person existing in different dimensions; that we’re unitary creatures, not divisible ones; that our intellect and emotion and socialization are intertwined, not separated.  A second reality is that we’re hot wired to connect; we’re dependent on one another.  We’re intertwined.  We need community, and when we don’t have it, we’re out of sorts; we’re off balance; we’re thrown into the depth of aloneness and lonliness.  So many of us like to and are more comfortable if we take us apart to understand how we work.  But, that really doesn’t work on humans as it does on car engines.  So, Emotional and Social intelligence, emphasize a wholeness, of engaging in an inclusive, student loving way of teaching.  They, taken together with Cognitive intelligence, rest upon an acceptance that we humans are idiosyncratic, dynamic, whole, non-reductionist, and social entities.  So, Emotional and Social intelligence, emphasize a wholeness, of engaging in an inclusive, student loving way of teaching.  These two intelligences promote, then,  love of people, an open heart, embracing arms, and a weakening of self-absorbtion.   The anxiety, dissatisfaction, resentment, disappointment, resignation, fear, sniping, anger, all around me aren’t particularly attractive alternatives.

Louis

BINGE DRINKING

BYU holding a star basketball player to its honor code,  putting integrity before expediency, putting the value of character before the value of money, putting ethical and moral commitment over a top seed in the NCAA basketball championship tournament, about being mad over an honors code violation rather than giving in to “March Madness,”  looking into the eyes of the violating player rather than expediently looking away, putting the “game of life” ahead of a few basketball games?  Gosh! What will they think of next!

That, stupid Spring Break, and an article I read in USATODAY a few days ago got me to think about binge drinking.  Let’s talk about it.  Now, you think that I’m going to talk about wild, animal house like, beer and toga parties.  I’m not.  That’s for later.  Right now, the binge drinking I’m talking about is getting intoxicated on grades.  Worse, I’m talking about getting addicted to, being controlled by, being owned by, and being enslaved to grades.  I’m talking about students, faculty, and administrators who are testscoreoholics and gradeoholics.  I’m talking about teachers who give students test answers.  I’m talking about teachers/professors who teach to the test.  I’m talking about administrators who fudge and alter test results.  I’m talking about college faculty who manipulate their grading system with dropping or doubling or curving or extra crediting, at times with an eye on evaluations in their quest for tenure and promotion.  Am I exaggerating?  Maybe.  Nevertheless, I’m talking about academics who have bought into the myths about equating grades and scores with learning in spite of all the research that has dispelled those Taylorist fables.  I’m talking about institutions that allows students to drop courses up to mid-term and beyond in order not to jeopardize their GPAs.  I’m talking about advisors on my campus who tell students to drop classes in order to keep their GPA high enough so they don’t lose their state HOPE scholarship.  And, watching all this going on, you don’t think students go along with what the administrations’ and their professors’ actions make acceptable to them?  Students aren’t as stupid as we think.  They’ve been taught and have learned how to play the system.

When push comes to shove, the excitement or depression or stress over grades create their own unethical urges.  So, you gaze at the high-stakes college landscape and you see in the shadowy corners corner cutting, cheating, rationalizations, alibis, excuses, apologies, and a lot of looking the other way when things get challenging: conduct unbecoming, fudging scores, ghost writing papers, crossing the line, and inclinations to take the easy way out.  It’s a place where the pressure is on.  It’s a place of nods and winks.  It’s a place where personal accountability take a back seat to lame excuses, expediency, that quick fix; where we become apologists with implausible denials that shift responsibility with a age-old blaming “the system made me do it” or “it’s the way the world works” or “everyone is doing it” or “it’s no big deal.”  Well, if it is no big deal, why sit at the game table and play the cards?  No. What we call “pressures” are little more than temptations that we use as explanations and exonerations.  Enticement, temptation, pressure, whatever you want to call them, are not justifications.  No, it’s about ethical and moral commitment, about choice and responsibility, about resistance and refusal to submit and surrender.  It’s more about grades than some healthy doses of determination, perseverance, commitment, dedication, and all that stuff.

Now, who has the responsibility for putting grades in their proper place?  The students?  No.  Well, maybe some. But, by no means all.  To call them adults, is “professor-speak” for shirking our responsibilities. Remember, they didn’t come out from the womb as shallow “grade getters.”  They were taught like seals to feel, think, and act this way if they wanted the fish of grades and scores tossed to them.  Just read a recent expose in USA TODAY in its March 10th issue entitled “For Teachers, Many Ways And Reasons To Cheat On Tests.”   Well, while there may be many ways to cheat, there isn’t one reason to do it.  So, we have to unlearn students, help them to break deep rooted habits.  It is we who must diligently teach, enforce, advocate, and model personal integrity. It is we who have the greatest responsibility to create an ethical culture that nurtures the virtues of honor, honesty, and fairness. It is we who must unlearn students and help them learn to learn, to become deep learners, to become life-long learners.  It is we who must actively instill values, shape attitudes, and teach them a love for and dedication to honesty; to do what is right, because it’s the right thing to do, not because of what they will get from it, but because of what they will become by it.  You see, there is a world of difference between getting good grades and living the good life.  The first is shallow; the second is deep.  The first creates a hollow, light-weight person who is blown about the surrounding winds; the second results in a rock solid character able to withstand all the storms.  We can help students become artists who paint their own portrait in the pale water colors of shallow and short-lived grade-getting and test scores or use a palette with the deep, rich oils of honor, spirituality, peace of mind, and self-respect. Personally, I stand up and cheer  “Bravo; you go BYU!”

Louis

A QUICKIE AND PROFUNDITY ON THE CORE OF EDUCATION

In my defense, two things hit me square between the eyes this week.  First, students are dropping like flies because of the raging epidemic of “spring break fever” that is racing through and ravaging my campus.  And, then, there’s an editorial by David Brooks that appears in this morning’s New York Times.  Together they got me asking once again just what is at the core of education.  Is it technology?  No!  Is it pedagogy?  No!  Is it cold, distant, clinical objectivity?  God, no!!  Is it accountability?  Sorta.  I say “sorta” because we are, more often than not, accountable for and to the wrong things.  For when all is said and done, when all is peeled away, all you have left is people:  humanity, the foundation of which are very human emotional and social relationships.

And, most of us just don’t get it or don’t want to get it or are afraid to get it because we have such a superficial and shallow view of the people in the classroom.  So, we so distort our perceptions.  The classroom is flat!  We are flat!  They are flat!  Education is flat!  We have become monotheists.  We grovel before, submit to, and worship at the foot of the one god of reason.  We heed its high priests’ commandments,  “Thou shalt be objective!”  “Thou shalt count!” “Thou shalt measure!”  “Thou shalt honor thy reason!”  “Thou shalt honor IQ!”  “Thou shalt not be emotional!”   Obeying these divine ordinances, we engage in rituals that strip the vibrant flesh from our and their bones.  We hold ceremonies that drain us and them of life-giving blood.  We pronounce ourselves and all we do to be emotion-suppressing, cold, clinical, calculating, distant, and disengaged.  We amputate ourselves and them of emotion and social relationships.  All that remains is a one-dimensional, dehumanized, lifeless, cardboard image as if everyone was flattened by a steamroller in a cartoon.  We believe intellect wins over all.  We believe reason controls all.  We believe all can be calculated, measured, quantified.  After all, we are homo sapien, aren’t’ we?  We have risen above wild beastly emotions, haven’t we?  We are civilized, aren’t we?  We are no long barbarians, aren’t we?   So, we look for and value–and defend–only that which we can measure; we focus only on what we can quantify.  We paint our lives, their lives, only by numbers.  We spotlight numerical grades, IQs, SATs, GPAs, LSATs, GMATS, and a host of professional board tests.  We recognize and award and honor only on the basis of that we can calculate.  We only use measurements to assess, to make accountable, to make answerable.

But, when it comes to the most important things like how to use and for what purpose to use our information and skills, to how to develop morals and ethics, how to hone personal character, how to build social relationships, how to educate emotions, we fall from grace.  We get so emotional!  We get so subjective!  We get so agitated!  We become so unreasonable!  We become so human!   Imagine that!!  Most of us become hot-under-the-collar, aggressive, sweep-of-the-hands rejectionists.  We bluster excitedly from the rooftops, “That’s not my job.”  Yet, we blind, deafen, and dumb ourselves with our own emotional.   We demand the facts.  We want to see the studies.  Then, we they are pushed under our noses and placed in front of our eyes, we smirk and ignore the latest findings of neuroscience, psychology, and all the behavioral sciences with dismissing, self-serving, defensive “In my humble opinion,” or “I believe,” or “I don’t believe.”  We throw tomatoes, shrieking, “Trouble maker!”  Worse, we point blaming fingers, screaming in high-pitched voices, “Iconoclast,” “Non-conformist,” “Dissenter,” “Unbeliever,” “Apostate,” “Defiler,” “Heathen,” “Heretic!”  Worst of all, we level inquisition-like charges of “nonsensical,” “irrational,” “touchy feely,” “fuzzy,” “new age,” and “sappy.”

But, I tell you, from decades of both personal and professional experience and study and reflection, we thrive, students thrive, only when we realize we are “feeling ‘man,'” “social ‘man,'” as well as “thinking ‘man,'” only when we edify both our and students’ emotions, only when we hone human relationships, when we stop Jim Crowing emotion and socialization from reason, only when we understand that all three are joined at the hip, only when we develop intellectual skills in conjunction with social skills and emotional skills, only when we mined for and smelt and use attunement, awareness, otherness, attentiveness, empathy, kindness, courage, trust, respect, and service.

No, it’s not the god of reason to whom we should be paying sole homage.  But, if you want to remain monotheists, become acolytes of the god of love.  For, as Lao Tzu and a host of others have said over the ages, love is what commands all, powers all, guides all, and binds us all:  how we think, how we feel, how we relate, in whom we have faith, for whom we have hope, in whom we believe.  The day we start doing that will be the day we start looking at education differently, at students differently, and at ourselves differently.  And, that day will be the day we start transforming from doing important things to becoming significant persons.

ON BEING A TEACHER

UNC 81 duke 67!!  Heart still pumpin’, even though I’ve taken off my “Thing One” Carolina blue wig.  And, while this true blue Tarheel is flying high, I know, in the end, THE GAME is really just that:  a game.  Life and teaching are not!  That came home after I opened my mailbox this morning to find a question thrown at me.

“Dr. Schmier,” a young professor asked me, “what’s your secret to why you feel the way you do about teaching?

I answered simply, tersely, but profoundly, “Four words:  ‘epiphany,’ ‘cancer,’ ‘cerebral hemorrhage.'”

I went on to tell her, “They said the cerebral hemorrhage will never reoccur, but you never know.  All I can say is that if it never happens again, they were right.  But, I’m not waiting around wasting a second of my second life for a second.  They told me ‘things will get back to normal,’ but they’re wrong.  There’s no normality to which to return.  Since that experience in September of 2007, I’ve been going through a very deliberative reflective process thinking about priorities in my life, about life styles, about outlooks on life–far more than when I had my epiphany in 1991, far more then when I had cancer in 2005.  Some of my dearest friends tell me ‘to deal with it and get over it.’  Well, I have dealt with it, and I am going on, but I refuse to get over it.  And, I don’t want to forget that.  I use it to prepare me to make the most of what comes my way.  You see, if there is one thing I learned once again during my recovery and never want to forget, its this:  focusing on me, on my hurts, on my fears, on my problems is not uplifting; it doesn’t make for happiness.  Helping others is uplifting and transforming; it converts hardship into joy, confusion into clarity, aimlessness into purpose, everything into meaning and significance.”

“All of what I’ve been through has made me live even more ‘intentionally.’  I am stronger, and more capable, probably in ways that I’ll never be fully aware, and I choose to use that ever-growing strength and ability in the service of my most treasured visions.  Sure, it’s a blessing that I’m still here.  If there was a reason for it, I don’t understand it.  And, I don’t try.  I don’t look for answers because I believe I am the answer; instead of looking for meaning, I believe I create meaning; instead of looking for fulfillment, I have faith that I will be the fulfillment.  All I can say, to have survived unscathed a massive cerebral hemorrhage that you should not have survived, much less come out of it unscathed, will knock the self-absorption and arrogance out of you “right quick.”  Now, I haven’t made big changes; I’ve just made more changes.  I’ve been “truckin'” since 1991; I’m just keeping on ‘truckin” more than a little more.   I’m just keeping on living the way I started living since 1991, but just more than a little more and deeper than a tad deeper.  I keep on dreaming; I just feel the dream more.  Instead of being consumed with doubts and fears about what might happen, I concentrate on what I will cause to happen; I intensely listen to my heart and see with it, and do what closely resonates with what I listen and see; I don’t worry about what others think; I don’t ask for guarantees; I accept and embrace whatever randomness comes my way.”

“So, I am a more deliberate teacher because that randomness puts opportunities to serve and help others in my path.  Let me be emphatic:  I just think that it is my responsibility to help an individual become not only informed and skilled, but become a good and just person as well. And, being a teacher perfectly positions me each day to do just that.  At this point in my life, my dreams and desires are more in line with who I truly am than they’ve ever been before. What I appreciate about teaching is that every moment is unique and powerful, every moment puts me into contact with people whom I can help help themselves, every moment adds to a life of richness.  If you want to live the good life, it’s in the classroom where the real state-of-the-art that is practiced is the “state of the heart.”   Too many academics think that when they focus on research and publication, on promotion, on grant getting, and on tenure it is as if they can see as far as the horizon, and have been quite satisfied that they can see everything that there is to see. I once walked those scholarly paths to those dizzy heights.  But, as Lao Tzu said, once I let go of who I was, I started becoming who I could be.  You see, I, too, did not know what I did not know that I now know: when I touch a student, when I help that student help her/himself help her or him to start letting go and to start becoming who she or he was capable of becoming, when I help change a life, when I help alter the future, there is SO much more beauty and truth about who we are and who we can be that lies so far beyond that old horizon.”

“In the last 20 years, with readiness, willingness, purpose, intention, and service in the service of my highest values:  unconditional faith in, belief in, hope for, and love of each person we call ‘student.’  Especially ‘love,’ Lao Tzu was right when he said ‘love’ is the most powerful passion because it controls the head, heart, and senses.  So, I use all my energy to take an active role in my journey.  I make life happen, to make it go forward, although it doesn’t always happen the way I expect or wish.  But, then, I’m not frustrated, dissatisfied, disillusioned, angered, and/or resigned when it doesn’t because I am never playing the ‘perfect’ game or the ‘100%’ game or the ‘it’s all about me’ game.  Nevertheless, I have been blessed to participate what I call miracles.  When I assess the collective impact they have had on my vision, my heart and soul, my sense of meaning and purpose, my motivation, my commitment, those times in the archives and libraries pale in significance and power to those times in the classroom.  And I confess those times I hear from students, and the joy I feel of ‘a job well done,’ reconfirm the path I am struggling so hard to walk.  It brings me such inner happiness, such deep fulfillment, such inner accomplishment, such inner peace.  This is why I am a teacher.  I commend to all the same search for happiness.  And, notice I haven’t said a word about method, technique, and technology.  As Jon Kabat-Zin says, ‘after the ecstasy, the laundry.'”

Louis