Louis
We all talk about the “joy of learning.” Well, if we’re serious, and if I could, I would banish two sets of fear-ridden, stifling, enslaving questions from our campuses in the name of AC: academic correctness.
Student: “Is this important?” “Is this going to be on the test?” “Will this affect my grade?” “Why do I have to take?” “What do you want?”
Prof: “How do I grade that?” “What if it doesn’t work?” “What will others think and say?” “Will this affect my getting tenure?” “What do you want?”
I was developing a special decal that was a play on one of my “Schmier’s Word For The Day” that I still have hanging over my computer. It never came to pass, for I came up with the idea during what unexpectedly proved to be my last semester in the classroom. I had planned to give it to any student who with more than a modicum of hubris proudly pranced around like a peacock “I’ve done my best” or sighed defensively “But, it’s the best I can do.” The decal was going to read: I.C.D.B.T.! Can you guess what the initials mean?
Louis
Well, as you all know, a good part of central and north Georgia have been getting hammered by ice and snow for which they are unprepared. Here in much warmer South Georgia, while I was waiting with snow shovel in hand to clear my walk of the two flake snowfall, I heard of people up the road having died because didn’t know how to survive the ravages of this white stuff either in their homes, on the sidewalks, or on the roads.
That got me thinking about Linda Ellis’ “The Dash.” It’s a poem in which she writes about that short line representing a person’s lifetime chiseled in a tombstone between the dates of birth and death. At the end of her poem, she asks, ” So, when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash…would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent YOUR dash?”
I always say, even in reluctant retirement, I will live my life and forget my age; I will, as I have been doing, do something with my life that outlives my life. I was thinking about my “dash,” what I have done with my time on this earth and what trace would I leave behind for having been here. So, wouldn’t it be interesting to write your own obituary? Or, write the eulogy you would give at your own funeral? Or, at least, write the inscription to be chiseled on your tombstone. What would you write?
Louis
I was thinking of going back to my unfinished fourth “one thing for a student to learn” about stress when I got a short, private message. The four sentences read, “Just wanted to let you know that I married her, and I’m stilling ‘continuing’ with small steps. Our conversations when I was a freshman are still changing my life. I am a better person and businessman because of them. I and many others thank you for touching me the way you did.”
Another side track onto a trunkline.
Yesterday, I was watching a YouTube clip of the final five minutes of the eleventh episode, “Knowledge or Certainty,” of Jacob Bronowski’s thirteen part ASCENT OF MAN, ” In it, he warned of “the assertion of dogma that closes the mind.” To which, I would add, the closes the heart as well.
It really struck me. I wish I had had the students in the Holocaust class watch the entire episode, especially those last few minutes. That little phrase reminded me of another of my “one thing for students to learn” that I wrote on the whiteboard and we discussed during the first days of the term: “Don’t just answer questions. Question answers.”
Questioning is the assault weapon against certainty, dogma, and absolutism. It’s the cure of mindless acceptance. It’s the gauntlet of challenge. It’s the fount of curiosity. It’s the foundry of creation and innovation. It is the tool of reflection, examination, experimentation, movement, imagination, change, reform, revolution, transformation, growth.
As for me, when I was a classroom professor, during the discussion of these particular words, I’d always say, “Don’t be afraid to ask me why we do things. If I can’t tell you why we do something in a way you understand, I’ll throw it out. Now, you don’t have to agree with me, but you should understand my ‘why’ and that I’m not doing something either on a whim or because everyone else is doing it. Just see that there’s always a ‘method to my madness’ and a ‘madness to my method.”
And, taking advantage–maybe testing me–ask they did. As they inevitably peppered me with questions throughout the semester, I learned so much from all those “why do you do this” or “why do we have to do this” that they’d throw at me: why did they have to write on the whiteboard a one word “how I feel” as soon as they come into the classroom, what did sending me confidential daily journal entries have to do with learning history, why did we briefly discuss “Schmier’s words of the day” every day, why did they have to work in communities, why did the communities have to be stranger, gender and racially mixed, why did we devote so much beginning-of-the-term time to classroom community building “getting to know ya” and “rules of the road” exercises, why didn’t I lecture like other professors, why did I care so much about them, why did they have to watch YouTube film clips, why did they have to write “issue papers” for each project, why did they have to do hands-on projects, why didn’t I give tests like all my colleagues, why didn’t I believe in and give grades, why did I come up with my “Teacher’s Oath,” why did they have to take the course that has “nothing” to do with their major, and on and on and on the questions would run. And, I would patiently answered everyone of their questions either individually outside class or in the class.
Thinking about their questions and answering them kept me on my toes . They kept me sharp. They held my feet to the fire. They forced me to honestly look at my “why.” They helped me make sure I wasn’t unthinkingly engulfed by some pedagogical rage, by some “sounds good,” or jumping on some technological bandwagon. Those questions kept me out of the prison of certainty. Those questions always banished the “ho-hums” of routine and welcomed “wows” of newness. They kept me constantly in what I call “my four-step program”: (1) think slowly about doing something, reflect long and hard on whether it was applying the results of the latest findings on learning, being sure that it aligned with my reflected upon and articulated vision and not just something I had picked up at a conference that sounded good, and then carefully figuring how to do it; (2) implement it; (3) watch closely what was happening as it was happening, whether it was working or not; (4) consciously learning from it, that is, whether it was turning out to be a partial or total “oops” or an “aha.”
Their questions so helped me clarify my thinking and define my feelings. They kept me honest and made sure I didn’t succumb to the easy, quick, comfortable, convenient, and safe; that I didn’t substitute efficiency for effectiveness. They constantly required me to reflect on the purpose and meaning of things we did and what visions pushed me. They constantly kept me experimenting, tweaking, adjusting, modifying, and even throwing out. And, I gained deeper insight into myself and my purpose.
Louis
I interrupt my “one thing for students to learn” series with a response to a message I had received shortly after I had sent out my last fourth “one thing.” Well, it’s not really an interruption so much as a pertinent sidebar.
Almost immediately after I put up my last Random Thought, I received a short one line response: “I still don’t understand why aren’t all your ‘one thing for students to learn’ not focusing on learning content and developing critical thinking skills?”
Once again, I briefly answered, “They are.” This time I referred this western professor to two short pieces in recent issues of the HBR I had just finished reading that coincidently had insights into a more complete answer. One was titled: “If You’re Not Helping People Develop, You’re Not Management Material.” In my extrapolation for our campuses, I would suggest we replace “management material” with “teaching material.” The second is titled, “Does Your Company Make You A Better Person?” Likewise, I would suggest in this one we replace “company” with “your campus.” Following the line in both articles, I would suggest that regardless of what anyone expects from professors in and out of the classroom, being an unconditional catalyst of student personal transformation should be a non-negotiable required competency. Professors should care unconditionally–unconditionally–about each student as a person, caringly offer opportunities for personal growth and transformation, faithfully help each student break negative habits that are controlling and limiting and deafening and blinding her and him to their own abilities and potentials. After all, although the connections are not always obvious, the research findings tell us that personal change in belief, feeling and attitude are inseparable from achievement. I always tell students, “If you think you can’t do something, you’re right. If you think you can do something, you’re right. Now, which ‘right’ do you want to be? Let me help you to figure out ways to help you answer that question and to help you find your own right path to follow.”
Yet, after reading some stuff on my university website, I’ve been wondering if so many of us have reduced higher education to two words: job and tenure? Have we academics focused too much on our own job security by giving our higher priorities to and putting most of our energies into running in the “publish-or-perish” rat race in order to get what a departmental colleague once called “a guaranteed job for life” at the expense of classroom teaching matters and serving others? Has “higher” too often come to mean “better paying?” Has “education” too often come to mean only white collar “vocational training” and professional “credentialing?”
What has happened to real personal transformation, to molding hearts as well as minds, to preparing students for living the good life, not just for getting that good job or getting that job for life? I mean, if we don’t help someone learn how to be a respectable and responsible human being rather than just being responsible for getting a respectable grade to get a respectable job, what’s it all for? I submit that the purpose of learning is growth, development, transformation of our hearts and spirits as well as of our resumes and wallets.
I would suggest, as the authors of these short articles suggest, that to achieve both goals professors first should expand their purpose from “How can I get each student to achieve?” to “How can I help each student to achieve while helping her or him transform?” In the spirit of Abraham Maslow, savvy teachers know that doing well on the second part of the last question helps to answer the first question. In the spirt of Carol Dweck, professors should assume the responsibility of helping students–and themselves–change negative or static mind sets to positive, growth, and dynamic ones. In the spirit of Ed Deci, the professors should ask themselves: “How can I harness students’ strengths and interests and passions;” “how can I give them autonomy to use those strengths and interests and passions as a way to see what they can do and be;” “how can I give students ownership of what they do rather than slavishly follow “what do you want;” “how can I help them see the purpose of what they do” so they can answer their own question of “why do I have to take….;” “how can I help them see the meaning in what they do that’s beyond the content in order to allow them to better learn both about the content, about themselves, and those around them.” We should be striving to graduate not just honor students, but honor persons as well.
Louis