Happy New Year to you all.  As we of the Jewish faith say on Rosh Hashonah, may this coming year be filled only with honey and sweet apples for you and yours.  Susie and I just arrived home last night after two weeks of spoiling our San Francisco grandmunchkins and are preparing to head out for MLK weekend to spoil our Nashvile grandmunchkin, as well as to visit my best friend/UNC roommate/brother-in-law who is recovering from his second major surgery in a month.  I just told my President of the University–or now that I’ve retired, it may be “ex-President”–coming home has a weirdness about it.  It’s the first January in 46 years that I’m not greeting students at the door to start a new term, doing beginning-of-the-term classroom community building stuff, getting to start knowing each other, reading their daily journals entries.  In fact, as we drove past the campus, watching students cross the street, I told Susie that I had experienced a teaching TIA and went into “micro-funk.”

Anyway, this morning I was ready to get back into my new swing of things by starting to share with you stuff I written about during the five hour flight from San Francisco to Orlando where we had left our car.  It was stuff on “distance” and “belief,” “practice” and “training” that had been stirred by a conversation I had with the son of a math professor at the beginning of the flight.  Then, as I was sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee, getting ready to hit the streets, I read a piece in the Washington Post by Jason Reid about the Washington Redskins’, RGIII.  For those of you who are not up on the National Football League, RGIII is Roger Griffin, the Redskins’ quarterback.  The column was titled:  “Robert Griffin III has a knee to repair, and a mind-set to hone.”  That is, RGII has to change his inner playbook.  He has to change his approach to himself and to the game of professional football if he is to remain in the game.  “By being honest with himself,” writes Reid, “Griffin, 22, could find the right path.”

That piece took me off this morning on another, but related to what I had written about, road.  I know that for most academics one of their greatest strengths is their greatest Achilles heel:  intellectual prowess that borders on the arrogance of the expert.  That is, even when they are at their best in the classroom, even when their heart and mind is not in the classroom, they think they’re much better than anyone else.  Or, at least, there is no question that they believe they are doing a good classroom job.  It’s an “I-am-good-in-the-classroom” or “I-have-been-teaching-for-X number of years” or, “I-know-it-and-so-I-can-teach it” self-centered philosophy that slows acceptance of latest research on learning and hence the need to change to at best a snailish ooze to an in-the-service-of-others philosophy.

There is nothing gallant about an assured self-righteousness that says you can turn things on and off, that you can turn off the resume-centered researching scholar, turn off the fearful “what will they think” quest for tenure and turn on the consummate people-loving teacher when you enter the classroom.  We give lip service to being able to serve two masters:  time-consuming lab/archive/field scholarship and time-consuming classroom teaching.  We convince ourselves, contrary to the research, that we can maintain an esprit de corps in both.  But, I’ve witnessed and learned over the decades, and even this past first month of retirement as I prepare an e-book, that even in the best of workoholics something has to give.  As I was reading that piece, a opening passages from John 10, the passages of the good shepherd and his sheep, came to me.  Read it!  Read it as John 1-10 dances with metaphorical phrases describing the good teacher.  But it was John 1:11-13 that jumped into both my heart and mind.  It goes something like:  “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.”

That ties together what I was going to share, will share in coming days, what I had written in the plane.   So, if we are honest with ourselves.  Do we see ourselves as the shepherd or a hireling? Somehow we have to get our attitude right before we can right what we do in the classroom.

Louis