Lordy, it was windy out there this morning.  “Windy” isn’t the word for it.  Powering walking two miles in swirling up to 25 mile an hour winds, I felt I was on a treadmill.  Struggling to keep my balance and not be blown helplessly about by sudden gusts like the pine needles and leaves whisking around me, by the time I got back into the house, I felt had just pounded the streets for fifteen miles.  Talking about winds and leaves (how’s that for a segue), I was thinking of a conversation I had with a young professor a couple of weeks ago at the Lilly-South conference on Teaching in Colleges and Universities which we have been since carrying on through e-mail.  The key to our exchange was something she forlornly said in Greensboro:   “I’m worried about getting tenure.  So, I have to be careful what I say and do, and not do anything that might hurt my chances….Didn’t you lay low before you had tenure?”

“Yeah, kinda, not really,” I answered.  “Having or not having tenure really had nothing to do with it.  It usually doesn’t.  Tenure is usually a convenient excuse to hide deeper inner stuff as it was in my case.  Long stories.  To get to your question, I’ll ask you a question I didn’t begin to ask myself until my epiphany twenty years ago, and though I’m constantly asking it of myself, it hit especially home when I battled cancer and then struggled through my massive cerebral hemorrhage:  ‘Aren’t you also worried and unhappy about feeling that deep inside you know you’re not being who you are or are capable of becoming?'”

Then, in our short on-going exchanges, I wrote, “….I am deathly afraid of living the unlived life, of going a day without feeling fully alive.  Feeling fully alive to me means doing what is important and enjoying it at the same time, and making sure that everything I do is both joyous and important.  And, that includes my teaching.  You know, over the past twenty years years my teaching has become more and more fun and significant, ‘serious fun’ as I call it, because I choose to see it as both enjoyable, important, and fulfilling.  That’s why after nearly forty-five years in the classroom, I’m still going strong; I’m still having fun and know I’m doing something very important.  I just don’t go quietly through the day and let anyone tell me how to feel about teaching.  And, as far as significance goes, teaching, what I see as real teaching–teaching of the whole person, teaching of the heart as well as of the head, teaching both how to live the good life and how to make a good living, teaching to help each student become the person he or she is capable of becoming–beats hands down getting tenure, receiving a title, publishing a book, this conference plenary I gave, all of them combined.  It’s a variation on that Jewish adage, touch and change a life, and you’ve touched and changed the world….”

….”I will not let anyone make me feel professionally guilty, unhappy or insignificant, ‘non-professional’ as I have been called.  I will not walk around, stooped, self-denigrating, ashes on my head, wearing hair cloth, atoning for some academic sin which, according to our university mission statement, I have not committed.  Sure, there are those on our campuses who, contrary to what they say publicly who feel that teaching, especially only the survey, core, and FYE courses as I have chosen to teach, or writing and publishing only about teaching, or going only to teaching conferences, is ‘non-professional.’   And sure, too many see teaching as some interfering thing, something beneath them, something they aren’t in academia really to do or were trained to do, something that they have to do to put food on the table.  And sure again, too many really want to put the time in the classroom into the lab, archive, or out in the field.  Now, if those people want to be researchers and scholars?  Fine. I have no bones with that.  But, leave me alone as I leave them alone; respect me as I respect them; share with me as I share with them.  We, teacher and researcher, both have a vital role to play in a student’s education.  All I ask is that they just don’t try to force their flattened views on me, to mold me into the one-dimensional person they want me to be, and allow  me walk my own ‘professional’ road….”

….”I’ve made my scholarly bones.  I have more than a line or two for a scholarly resume.  I more than successfully ran in the publish-or-perish rat race. I was once the authority in my scholarly field.  Now, I’ve chosen a new field and am just as scholarly and professional in it.  I feel the genuine significance in focusing all I am and have on teaching in those survey classes, classes which help students make their critical transition from teenage high schoolers into their adulthood and ‘profession-hood,’ and set them on their own personal, professional, and social life courses–pun intended…”

….”The distinction between insignificant and significant, ‘non-professional’ and ‘professional’ is a personal and unfair judgement call.  Any situation is what it is.  How I feel about the situation is my choice.  I will not cooperate with anyone to demean or ignore me.  Instead, I choose to feel professional, enthusiastic, empowered, and meaningful.  Let me tell you a secret, it’s better to choose to feel truly better; you’ll be happier when you choose to be sincerely happy; you’ll feel far more worthy when you choose to see what you’re doing is invaluable.  Only two things matter; that you truly love what you’re doing and doing what you truly love; and, that you know what you’re doing matters both to you and in the life of each student, and why it matters, no matter what anyone else thinks, feels, or says….”

“….So, unlike most professors, I added the scholarship of teaching to being a scholar in my discipline–added, expanded, broadened, not replaced; I intently and continually study and learn about learning.  My strategy and tactic is to close the gap between what science says I should do and what to many in academia say I should do.  I study ‘mindset,’ ‘flow,’ ‘attribution,’ ‘connection,’ ‘autonomy,’ ‘community,’ ‘cooperation,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘leadership,’ ‘dissonance,’ ‘mindfulness,’ ‘love,’ ‘otherness,’ ‘awareness,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘praise,’ ‘change,’ ‘alertness,’ ‘hope,’ ‘communication,’ ’emotional intelligence,’ ‘fear,’ ‘motivation,’ ‘social intelligence,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘resilience,’ ‘caring,’ ‘positive intelligence,’ ‘relevance,’ ‘purpose,’ ‘fun,’ and on and on and on it goes.  I share what I’ve learned, and why and how I test out and utilize in my teaching what I have learned.  I share how and why I go into class on my own professional, caring, loving, fun, and significant terms, bearing the weight of knowing, for better or worse I am a world-changer and a future-shaper.  Now, a lot of academics will attack with the sling and arrows of it being touchy-feely, flighty, fluffy, fuzzy, new-agey stuff.    My protective armor is in the scholarship of teaching, in what I call the ‘brain-ology’ theme of recent Lilly conferences on teaching; it’s in title of the plenary I just co-presented, ‘The Neuroscience of Caring.’   Touchy-feely? Flighty?  My armory is filled with latest findings of the cognitive- and neuro-sciences, which most professors haven’t heard about, much less studied and applied, that say otherwise….”

Louis

 

As I was saying before Judy “interrupted,” I am not so naive or cavalier to believe that choosing to be yourself is a proverbial “piece of cake.”   Far from it.  Nor is it an enticingly comfortable topic, for it certainly doesn’t fall into that category of convenient, safe “how to” pedagogical quick fixes, easy tricks, simple solutions, magic wands, guarantees, and sometimes fadish so many academics are seeking.  It has nothing to do with what I call a “Little Jack Horner Syndrome” and/or “sustaining innovation” of which Clayton Christensen talks.  And, at the same time we always diverted by the tendency to play the easy blame game with the lamentation of “students today aren’t;” we seldom look at ourselves and play the very difficult responsibility game.

But, if you really believe in assessment, you first must assess yourself; that is, don’t assess what you do, but who you are.  It is essential!  As Anais Nin said, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”  Percep- tion!  Teaching, as Richard Boyatzis says in his RESONANT LEADERSHIP, and that would include classroom leadership, is an extension of who we are and what we perceive about ourselves and others.  So, if we really want to learn about and choose to apply that underlying principle of teaching, to paraphrase Pogo, first meet your friend–or enemy–and discover he is us.  It is crucial that we make the hard choice of taking a hard, honest look in the mirror to see who we are before we think of who “they” are and what we do.  It is critical we acquire a challenging, uncomfortable, inconvenient, vulnerable, and sometimes painful mindfulness: a look at and inside ourselves, a knowing what is going on inside us, making a few uncomfortable and even painful admissions, being at peace and in tune with ourselves, being awake and aware and attentive to the surrounding circumstances and the people around us.  You see the journey into the classroom begins and continues with the journey inside yourself.

Again, easier said than done.  And, not simple or quick.  I’ve been on these rocky and twisting journies for the last twenty years.  But, every day I am reminded that each of us is fighting that over-the-shoulder “what do they want” war against those people who want to make us into the person they want us to be.  If we choose to succumb, and it is our choice, to lose that battle, to obediently follow edicts of “do as I say and do,” how do we celebrate our uniqueness, how do we get filled with fulfillness, how do we  achieve the possibilities that are ours, how do we live our own significance, how do we live our life on our own terms?  Do we let someone else ghost write our lives?  If students do that with a term paper, we call it cheating.  What’s the difference?   We are not here to read someone else’s script, to live out someone else’s idea of a satisfying and successful life.  And that’s where choosing to develop a vision driven authentic purpose, a meaningfulness, a significance of self and what you do comes in.  What is it that would make you feel more complete, more right with yourself and the world, more fulfilled, more satisfied, more significant, more authentic than anything else?  You have to choose to let go into order to grab those “whats.”  You have to choose to let go of your perceptions, judgments, assumptions, fears, habits, and inhibitions.  And again, it’s not easy, simple, quick, comfortable, convenient, or painless.  But, it’s the way to convert your time and energy from being rudderless and adrift to charting and steering a course.

You know, life, as well as our professions, is a struggle as it is. You add to that struggle  by needlessly choosing to be either aimless or powerless, or both.   Even if it’s not a particularly fashionable vision, get one.  Get yourself a purpose for today, for tomorrow, for the day after that, for next month, for this year, for next year, for your life. And be sure it’s an authentic purpose, or it won’t be of much value.  Make sure it is the essence of who you are; it’s what you sincerely feel while you’re doing what you’re doing; it is the way of meaningfully traveling through your life; it is your life.  Don’t heed the seductive Sirens, avoid getting stuck on the shoals and reefs, and you will feel that slow transformation from defeated, dismayed, sapping, destructive anguish, apathy, and even disinterest into solid, energizing, creative, potent determination and commitment.  A vision driven purpose is that area in your life that cannot be diminished by anything or anyone.  When your “why” is so meaningfully yours, when you choose to tank up with it, when you choose to make it solidly connected to your “what” and “do,” nothing and no one can hold you back; you will discover and activate strengths, energies, skills, capabilities, possibilities, meaningfulness, significance, and effectiveness beyond your wildest dream.  Maybe more important, your “why” becomes the armor that deflects the slings and arrows; it defangs and declaws; it helps you learn powerful positive lessons from both your disappointments and satisfactions; it gives you the strength to bear any burden and prevail through any challenge; it gives you the energy and motivation to drive through any obstructing barrier; it allows you to take everything in stride; it transforms challenge from halting obstacle into transforming opportunity; it takes you not only to where you want to be, but to where you must be.  When you choose to be purpose driven, when you choose your “why,” you’ll always find the way; and, then, you’ll find your way.  Risky?  Yes.  But, damn, it’s freeing and exhilarating.

Touchy-feely, fluffy, fuzzy, new-agey stuff?  The latest findings of the cognitive- and neuro-sciences say otherwise.  More on that later.

Louis

Well, Judy (not her real name) caught me again.  She came up to me after class as I was erasing the “how you feel” words off the white board and said, “You really gave it to a lot us today for slacking off.  But, I don’t understand something.  What really got to me is that you did it in a way that said to us, ‘I’m not angry.  I’m just sad.’  It was almost as if you were pleading with us to kick ourselves.  How can you not be angry with us?  Why didn’t you yell at us?  Why haven’t you given up on some of us?”

I stopped and turned to her, and smiled.  “Look, it’s not even mid-term yet.  There’s lots of time left.  You want to be a teacher.  Well, learn that learning is unlearning; it’s a process–a process–of getting rid of old habits with new ones.  That takes constant practice, practice, practice.  So, I don’t expect everything to go perfectly the first or any or all the time.  I expect more than a screw up or two from more than one or two of you.  I’m helping you to learn from your screw ups.  I’m just reminding you that just because you’ve screwed up, I won’t let you convince yourself that you’re a screw-up.  I won’t let you take the easy way out and surrender.  So, I’m in your face and hopefully help you to get in your own face, to help you learn from your screw up so you’ll screw up less next time.  But, more important, the most important, learn that each of you are different.  You have different stories and are at different points on your roads.  That’s the really diversity in here; it’s not gender or race or religion or student or whatever; it’s that each of you are your own unique ‘you.’  You’re not ‘a student.’ You’re a ‘Judy.’  No one in here or anywhere else is ‘a Judy.’  That makes you a special, unique, invaluable and rare one-of-a-kind.  I have no idea what you’re capable of doing or where you’re capable of going and who you are capable of becoming.  I’m struggling to help you see that neither do you.  I’m struggling to get you to understand that you’re not even a fixed ‘I am,’ but an always changing ‘I am becoming.’  You might say that I’m struggling to change you from thinking of yourself ending with a period to ending with a question mark.  That’s why I always tell you that if you trust me and give me a chance, if you trust you and give yourself a chance, together we’ll challenge you to ‘loosen or untie the “nots” in your “I cannots,” kick yourself in your “cans,” and see what happens.’  Sure, I don’t love what some of you are doing or not doing right now.  But, that has nothing to do with me still loving you, having faith in you, having hope for you, and believing in you.  It’s has nothing to do with your smarts, abilities, talents, or your potentials.  It has everything to do with your attitudes and efforts.  And, it has everything to do with my attitude towards and efforts with you.  So, for me, the only way to teach,” I answered quietly, “is to teach to your attitudes and efforts by always seeing in each of you each moment an unrepeatable miracle, no matter what.  I would love for you to ask yourself, ‘What does he see in me that I don’t?’  It’s a hard supporting, encouraging, and never stopping one-on-one struggle to get each of you to ask, much less to, answer that question,  and then teach yourselves to use both the question and answer.  And, if and when you do, well, who knows what can happen or who you can be.  But, on that day you see yourself as that miracle, you’ll start kicking ass.  And, you’ll never stop kicking.  Guaranteed!”

“Oh,” she whispered.

Louis

I’m at the airport in Atlanta, on the floor.  As I wait for the boarding call, I find that my brain, which thought was drained by three days of excitement at the Lilly Conference on Teaching, is racing.  I’m thinking of something John Zubizarreta said, “I want them (students) to learn to take risks and accept challenges.”  He was explaining why on a wilderness trip with students he asked students to jump off a cliff into the river during a plenary he was offering with Scott Simkins about whether the academy was adrift or not.  As he spoke, I remembered how I once used trust exercises  in class at the beginning of the semester.   And, then, as I listened to those around me, muttering a “oh, I could never do that,”  I wondered how many academics in that audience would take the risk and accept the challenge of jumping off the ledge into the water?  It’s not a rhetorical question.  How can we give what we don’t have to give?  It is a metaphorical question because on their campuses so many would stop at the cliff’s edge with the words:  “I don’t have tenure.”  Those four “little-big” words are proving to be the most powerful, and pernicious, words in academia.   And, usually, they were invariably preceded or followed with, “I have no choice.”  Then, would follow the flood of halting explanations, debilitating excuses, paralyzing rationalizations, deflecting blames, survival descriptions, and responsibility-defying-student-sacrificing postures.  That inundation hid the truth, as I told one colleague what I told a student, saying you have no choice is having made the rational and emotion choice to have no choice.

As a brief aside, that deluge was also proof that we cannot multi-task.  We cannot accept the risk and challenge to hear and listen to that angel whispering in one ear to do whatever it takes to make a difference in someone else’s life, to unconditionally love, care about, have faith in, and have hope for while listening to the devil in the other ear tempting you with promises of survival in your own life.  We cannot listen to and follow unconditionally our social and caring instinct while simultaneously allowing our survival instinct to lay on  self-serving, restrictive, and excluding conditions.  So, listening to our amygdala, most of us heed that angel only to the extent it is safe, convenient, comfortable, legitimatizes, and at best hones what we are already doing;  that is, doing that which is not menacing.  It’s that “sustaining change,” that rationalizing “in my humble opinion” Clayton Christensen talks about in his THE INNOVATOR’S DILEMMA.  It that “little Jack Horner syndrome” of deluding ourselves and believing it is enough to courageously talk the “I care about students” while we too often fearfully walk the “I don’t have tenure.”

Anyway, choice and psychological repair, that’s what I want to reflect about while it’s still fresh in my soul.  Choice!  Well, as I told a friend a while back, at this stage of my life, at the bodily age of 71 and still a young 18 in spirit and somewhat physically spry, after a forty-five year academic career and still counting, after surviving myself, after having an enlightening epiphany, after overcoming cancer, and after miraculously–that’s the only word that fits–getting through a massive cerebral hemorrhage without a proverbial scratch that normally kills or seriously disables 95% of the people who have experienced that type of neuro-bleed, I am more afraid of living the inadequate life than of dying.  I don’t let my physical age define the age I feel and act.  I refuse to get old as I get older; as I age, I refuse to become aged. “I,” no one else, has made those choices..

Choice and cultural repair! If I depend on some particular thing, or person, or situation for my happiness and fulfillment, if I worry about “what will they think,”  I’m setting myself up for problems, certainly a lot of self-induced stressed. When I depend on what I cannot control, I open the door to fear, anxiety, disappointment, and a host of other negative experiences; I surrender me to it or them.  So, when it comes to classroom teaching, am I supposed to be “same ole, same ole” traditional and conventional, and ignore the spate of recent business, neuro-scientific, and psychological research that has application for teaching and learning?  Am I supposed to succumb and become the person others want me to become?  Am I supposed to do what others, most of whom are uninformed about the recent research findings, want me to do?  Am I suppose to put the keys to my happiness on someone else’s keyring?  Am I really supposed to be the vehicle of others’ intentions?  Am I supposed to go quietly through the day?   Am I supposed to let them define me by their “this is the way it has always been” criteria?  No!  I choose to define myself.  We all do, and I have to be empathetic for those who choose other than I do:  empathetic, not condemning, but not necessarily agreeing–and, certainly, nudging.

Choice and social repair!  I’ll tell you, one of the best days of my life–second only to the night I first met Susie on that fortuitous 1965 blind date at Chapel Hill–was not when I received my Ph.D. or when I received a copy of my first book or when I was granted tenure.  It was the day I decided my life was my own; it was the day that, without apologies or excuses or blame, but with a good deal of fear, I alone accepted full responsibility for my own life; it was the day I broke and threw off the enslaving shackles and proclaimed “free at last!”  And, I figured out how to keep it that way!  The greatest sense of stability and liberation in the classroom specifically and in life in general comes from not being a slave to anyone or anything, not worrying about what others think, not performing as others would have me, not having to prove anything to anyone, and not conforming to the demand and opinion of others.  Over the past eighteen years or so since my epiphany, I have learned that my life is the result of all the conscious and unconscious choices I’ve made about whose voices to heed, what paths to walk, what vision I may or may not have, and in what direction I go.  I am my own person–unless Susie wants me to do something.  And, that is the reason my Provost recently commented, “Louis, you’re always smiling.”  It’s because I am always smiling inside.

Choice and emotional repair!  As I had begun slowly and cautiously to control the process of choosing, I found that I had begun to take control of all aspects of my life. I slowly found the freedom that came from being in charge of myself.  It was and is almost too simple.  When I take control, I have control.  When I stop looking over my shoulder, I look forward and have my eyes on the prize.  When I take the responsibility of the choices I make, when I silence that blaming and excusing and rationalizing whispered or proclaimed “the devil made me do it” or “it’s the fault of the ‘system,'” when I replace “you made me…” with the recognition that “I made me…,” I am in charge of me; I am the only one who owns me;  I am my own person:  I decide how to react to and respond to people and circumstances around me.

Choice and responsibility!  Of course, I am not so naive to believe it is that easy or that simple  And, of course, the social fabric of academia is powerful, and the social, psychological, cognitive, emotional relationship between the individual and “the system” are so much deeper and more complicated than anything that can be grasped in a simple statement, much less any proposed solutions.  It easily succumbs to description, but it defies solving action.  Academia as a whole is not a monolith; with he rarest exception, each of our campuses are balkanized at the college or school, departmental, all of which are at each other in turf wars.  At the personal level, we each have unique and unequal personal stories that have taken us on different paths, that we are situated at different places in our lives, that we are living at different times in our lives.  What we do need is to break barriers, build bridges, and create an orderly, trusting, safe, supporting and encouraging campus wide community to replace the present warring and threatening balkanizing variety.  Easier said than done.  So, while I admit I don’t have the answers, I do have the questions.  And while Pogo is right, the real enemy is us, that we each are “the system,;” in the spirit of Ghandi, we each must muster the strength and courage to be the change we want to see;  and, if we want to change the world, we have to take the rise and pick up the gauntlet to start with ourselves.  Now, from personal experience of having paid dearly for being me, I am not so naive not to know it is easier said and written than done, that it will take a herculean courage that requires vast  reflection, reexamination, and rethinking.  What saddens me is that so much of this supposed rethinking is being done by people who, too often in their own interest–and survival–stopped thinking and standing up when they arrived on a campus long before they had become faculty.  Enough for now; they’re boarding.