From an “Awful” to an “Awe-full” Classroom, VII

Please don’t think that I am flagellating myself when I talk of my 1991 life-changing epiphany.  I am not.  Painful as it was, I was experiencing that biblical adage:  the truth shall set you free.  Boy, did it.  It was the beginning of coming to terms with myself by acknowledging, recognizing, and accepting the truth that my emotions of insecurity and fear had had a significant impact on my attitudes, feelings, and actions towards myself, students, colleagues, and “the system.”   In the first half of my career,  I rationalized that the “system” had put me in a damnably untenable position so that I could not adequately simultaneously serve the two demanding masters of the classroom and archive; that to research and publish, and secure grants, I had to give research a higher priority than classroom teaching.  I mean how can an academia, resting on the inordinate prominence of research and publishing scholarship, not have an institutional subconscious bias that truly minimizes classroom teaching to all those supposed blank faced, “unprepared,” “unmotivated,” “unprepared,” mediocre or poor “don’t belongs.”  After all, if you don’t have passion and compassion for each and every students, you’ll enslave yourself to “the system,” perpetuate it by becoming part of it, and have little incentive to act on behalf of anyone beyond the select few “good students,” those “proto-professionals.”  How could academics rooted in this soil, then,  not be tainted by disparaging all but the “good” students.  How could academics standing on this ground not feel disconnected by the feeling that dealing with those less stellar “others” was a waste of their valuable knowledge and time?  Consequently, if we look closely and honestly, most academics subtly, if not overtly, have a pernicious concept of the priority of research and publication over classroom teaching.  It’s that thing known as “dedication to the discipline.”   If we look closely and honestly, so many would have to admit that the classroom did not have their sustained and undivided attention, that they had the constant feeling that while in class they needed to be somewhere else doing something else to lengthen their resume; that the demands of classroom teaching got in the way of meeting the more important demands of research and publication  necessary to acquire academic reputation, promotion, and the acquisition of that protective tenured position.  It’s really a kind of brutality—with all the best of intentions, proper  utterance, aspirations, and latest technologies—for all those “don’t belongs.”  Do you know how the toll that disinterest takes on so many students?  It makes so many students feel alone, disrespected, devalued, and abandoned in the classroom.  How I know that.  Not only was I one of the disposables in academia as a student, but as a teacher I read the students’ daily confidential journal entries in which they spilled their guts out.  And, that’s the thing most academics are missing:  knowing what’s ticking inside each student that’s having an impact on their time in class.
So, for me, in the years that followed my epiphany, as I honestly read my past story, I changed the theme of the coming chapters.  I acknowledged that my “I care” was so anemic; that I did not have the emotional fortitude needed to deal with the depth of the problem.  Over the following years, having heart-to-heart discussions with myself,  I broke with tradition; I no longer would let those who would practice an elitism and denigrate the less than stellar students teach me how to teach, nor would I follow their lead; I would no longer be the person others wanted me to be; I would be my own person; I “decentered,” if not abandoned,  “scholar-ness” in my professional life; and, I no longer saw education as solely a credentialing process.   To me, the purpose of an education was to see each student as a precious human being, to ensure the well-being of each and every students, to provide each of them with a path to a sense of fulfillment, to help them be the writers of their own story, to focus as much on helping them learn how to  live the good life as well as learning how to get a good job.
That exploded my whole sense of what I was doing as an academic.  I became less an academic and more of an educator.  I became more of a collaborator who empowered each student with an autonomy and treated each of them with respect and empathy than a “I know best and will tell you what to do” distant and disconnected authority figure.  To be sure, it was a huge challenge to clean the “don’t belong” mud off those gems.  First, of all I had to tear through the opaque curtain of labeling and find ways to delve into the depth of the real stories of what is happening with each student.  I had to learn to listen and see in order to be guided by knowing and understanding who each student was rather than merely hear, look at, talk to, and make assumptions dictated by cardboard stereotyping, generalizing, and labeling.  Second, I recognized my limitations, but, without knowing anything 100% or expecting to succeed 100%, I kept my options open in order to navigate through those limitations with each student.  And finally, even though I didn’t have all the necessary information, couldn’t always know my impact, could make mistakes, I decided that not to give it a shot was worse than taking a chance.  Only then could I live with and learn from the consequences, assume responsibility rather than blame, throw away techniques that didn’t work, and experiment with new techniques.  It’s the way I have found to aspire and then inspire
Please don’t think I’m being cavalier about the difficult and dangerous place any attempt to change and buck “the system” can put you in.  I was a victim of academic abuse.  Behind my back, I was denounced as “subversive” or ridiculed as “coddling” or denigrated as “new agey” or dismissed as “bosh” or demoted as “non-professional.”   I was accused by traditional colleagues of threatening them with my non-traditional methods.  And, even on more than one of those silly and irrelevant post-tenure reviews my changes and methods were used against me as evidence of weakness and possibly incompetence, and as proof that I wasn’t a collegial “team player.”    I was, however, lucky.  Protected by the result of my epiphany, those slaps didn’t bruise me.   I was now secure, very secure, in my own skin.  That  strong self-confidence and self-esteem meant I no longer was looking over my shoulder.  I no longer worried about what other people thought.  I no longer sought to please “the system.”  Drawing on the arsenal of the scientific research on teaching and learning gave me a imperviousness and resiliency against any slings and arrows hurled my way.  They had shown me and anyone who cared to read and listen that unconditional and nonjudgmental faith, hope, and love for each student were not “soft,” “soapy,” “fluffy,” or “touchy-feely.”   If anything, they were a call to arms.   When something as big as my epiphany happens, when you later “beat” cancer, when still later you survive a massive cerebral hemorrhage as a “5% walking miracle,” you know all the subsequent years are on the house.  You don’t waste your precious time pouting or “kissing up.”  You don’t dwell.  You find something that is lovelier and higher and more beautiful.  You find something bigger beyond yourself.  For me, that bigger something was becoming a servant teacher, reaching my hand out to each and every student, confidently knowing I could make a difference; that I could change the world and alter the future.  With that kind of attitude we can get to the higher ground and teach beautifully each and every student unconditionally, to have faith in and hope for and love of the “least” of the students, in a far too often tarnishing, selective, judgmental, weeding out, and snarky academic culture.
Over the years, as I read Rogers, Mazlow, Gardner, Deci, Dweck, Fredrickson, Goleman, Senge,and a host of others, as I studied the research on ”how we learn” and “why we do what we do,” and “resonant leadership” and “emotional intelligence” and “social intelligence,” as I experimented with ways to apply the results of that research, as I weaned myself away from lecturing and dispensed with testing and grading, as I threw the limiting question “how do I grade this” into the trash can, as I struggled to help both myself and each student change from a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset,” I realized that teaching and learning are personal.  They are as much, if not more, soulful as they are informational.  They demanded that I get my soul into the classroom.  They required that each day all of me had to be in that classroom.  Putting all my chips to the center of the table was the only way to get into the soul of each student and help each of them get their own soul into learning.  And, as I began to find ways to help each student believe in herself and himself, we all found that everyone deserved to be “let in” and no one was a “don’t belong.”  Some, like Dennis, just needed more attention, support, and encouragement to bring themselves along.  When I and the students didn’t feel marooned alone on an island, when we were aware of each other, when we were attentive to each other, when our relationship was based on the lubricants of authenticity, trust, respect, connection, we were at ease with each other.  The imprisoning walls of “strangerness,” “alone-ness,” and “loneliness” began to crumble before the assault of unconditioned faith, hope, and love..  Nothing felt forced or threatened, or threatening.  There was no constricting and toxic stress.  It created a creative, imaginative, fear-free relationship.  It created a sanctuary for the exercise of autonomy and ownership.  Students in the class grew to be comforting, supporting, and encouraging friends.  They could take risks without fear of recrimination, demeaning, or shaming.  In the classroom they had the opportunity to overcome themselves and see how awesome and awe-full they could be. They could see what potential lay within each of them.
The students always celebrated the fact that the likeliest thing to happen in class is that something unlikely would happen. The unspoken question in the class was whom would you like to become.  The unspoken answer was “let’s see.”  And, as those “others” transformed in both my and their eyes from “awful” to “awe-full, as teaching became meaningful and fulfilling to me, as teaching aligned with my personal and professional dreams and visions, as teaching came into sync with the core expression of my values ultimately expressed in my “Teacher’s Oath” and “Ten Commandments of Teaching,” as I came to believe I could make a difference, as teaching became the top priority in my professional life, as unconditional and nonjudgmental and nonselective compassion and empathy rooted in faith, hope, and love for each student became hallmarks of the classroom atmosphere, I became both inspired and, as the Dennis and that student in the car and a host of others have testified, inspiring.  It was as Dennis said, “I now see that achieving in that class was almost the same with becoming closer to who you truly could be—for both you and me.  Damn, we could almost taste our potential as you helped us to drag it up from deep within us ‘unbelievers’ and imagined ourselves being better than we thought we were.”
That’s what made teaching so damn “awe-full,” exuberant, exhilarating, satisfying—and fulfilling!
Louis

From an “Awful” to an “Awe-full” Classroom, VII

You know, when I talk of seeing a class as an “awe-full” gathering of “sacred ‘ones,’” I have to make a confession.  It was not always so.  For the first 25 years of my career in higher education I always had proclaimed that “I care about students.”  And, I believed it.  After all, I never poor-mouthed any students.  Never.  The true inkblot of that statement was, however, as I admitted when I experienced my explosive and unplanned epiphany in 1991, it lacked authenticity.  I was being dishonest with myself.  If I was asked, “Do you see this or that student?” I probably would have answered, “No.” With patronizing eyes, I saw the fiction I wanted to see in order to make me feel I was right.   I felt that since I was saying that I cared, no one could say I didn’t.  But I came to realize how wrong I was. I had not been living what I had espoused and what I had thought I meant.  I actually had been using a fake language of caring; or, at least, an incomplete sentence.  It should have been a highly selective and judgmental statement of  “I care about some students” and “I care about the good students.”   Like the onlookers in the story I told the professor in my previous reflection, I only asked those “others” to reach out to me; and if they did not, for whatever reason, it was fault; it was not my responsibility to do anymore.   I had not been like the saintly man who entered the river and extended a caring, loving, helping hand to help the “others.”  My epiphany started to change all that.
Now, before I go any further, I want to say that it’s okay to be frustrated, resigned, and even angry at times.  You don’t have to flay yourself if you occasionally experience these  emotions.  But, only occasionally.  Not all the time.  As a recovering “academic bias” addict, I can bear witness that while you can have negative feelings you can’t allow those negative feelings to have you.  When the negative feelings towards those “others,” are constant, they create an unconscious and addictive “academic bias.”  It’s not the negative feelings that I felt and lived out that were the problem; it was the fact of their constant presence and overwhelming control that was the real problem. But, the deeper problem than having an “academic bias” addication was not admitting to why I had those feelings in the first place.  Nevertheless, while being hooked on these negative attitudes made me feel that I was in the right, but they never made me feel joyful.  Those narrow attitudes proved to be a detriment to both me and those “others”—until I had my epiphany.  Before the epiphany I concentrated most of my time and energies on the “good students” and left the “others” to their own inadequate devices.  That was even truer when I went off on my scholarly research and publication binge between 1976 and 1991 in an effort to conform to the required image of the “academic norm” and to prove my own scholarly worthiness.  I admit that my addictive perception sapped my energy and creativity and imagination in the classroom.  Worse still, sniffing those emotions, I felt I was on high; my degrees, titles, position, and scholarly renown gave me the right to feel that I had made it, to feeling privileged, and maybe even feeling superior, to those “others.”  They allowed me to play convenient “head shaking” finger pointing blame games at both those “don’t belongs” “others” and “the system.”
At the core of my epiphany, was me.  For some mysterious reason, I found myself accepting rather than denying; I found that I didn’t become a combatant throwing self-righteous arguments at myself.  Somehow and for some reason, I was ripe for the pickings.  I was able to engage myself in calm conversation, to put myself under my own magnifying glass, and peer into my soul.  I brought long banished memories into the open, and in doing that I opened myself to new possibilities.  While I did not like what I found, somewhere I found the strength I didn’t know I had to deny them.  I discovered that unconscious “academic bias” hidden within me was masking the deeper biases I had against myself.  I was not at first comfortable with the confession that my family upbringing issues were still inadvertently and and unintentionally preying upon me, that I was still more of a prisoner of those experiences of being treated as an ignored second son, that I still had a need to be seen and be valued, and that I still needed constant reassurance to bolster my weaken self-esteem and self-confidence even at the expense of all those “others.”  I did not like seeing how so selective and limited were those “I care about students” words.  I was saddened when I realized how callous, corrosive, and cynical they made me toward those “others,” especially if they seemed to act as a dragging anchor on my insatiable quest to fulfill my own personal and professional needs.  Then, I came to see the evidence that was as obvious as the nose on my face.  By fulfilling my needs, I was ignoring the needs of those “others;” that quest for recognition and security and assurance had made me numb to the needs of those “others.”  I was doing to those “others” what had been done to me when I was one of them.
 Don’t think facing up to myself quick, easy, or simple to engage in honest self-awareness, self-examination, self-reflection, and ultimately self-admission was not challenging, if not painful.  But, I had to come clean with myself if I was going to get clean and clean up my act.  I had to find ways to no longer need my older needs that fed on my weaknesses and anxieties.  I had to find new drives, new directions, new dreams, new purposes, new visions, new meanings, new fulfillments.  To do that, I had to take personal responsibility for what’s happening to both me and those “others.”   I had to admit that I had been an unwitting accomplice, aiding and abetting in perpetuating the feeling of most of those “others” that they were “don’t belongs.”  I had to admit that I had voluntarily submitted to the demands of “the system.”   It was the only way to acquire a new consciousness, a new sense of self,  to transform myself form what the social psychologist at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, calls a “righteous mind” to a humble one, that would change both my attitude and my ways about both myself and all those “others.:   to find the “awe-full” in those I once had seen only as “awful.”
That adventurous feeling of finding ways to dispel conclusions I had long made about myself and each student, which were wrong more often than not, was thrilling.   To find ways to instill in myself a “growth mentality,” and help each student do likewise, was really freeing. When you start humbly to admit that you’ve made past mistakes, when you get to actually start understanding yourself, when you start understanding others, when both you and they let mutual trust and respect drop your and their guards, when you and they learn something new about yourself and each of them and themselves, when you and they see each other’s humanity, that’s really both a self-esteem and self-confidence builder.  And that, I think, is one of the most important potential emotional tools we have to foster learning.   Because once you open yourself and are open to new possibilities and new opportunities, once you truly unconditionally and non-judgmentally value both yourself and each student, once you’re motivated by empathy, once you replace hostility with the virtue of hospitality,  once that rubber hits the road with methods to open yourself and each student to each’s unique potential, once you see the results both in yourself and others, once those “don’t belongs” such as Dennis start revealing that they just might have the capacity to belong if given a real chance, once those “let anyone in” show they just might have it in them to deserve being “let in,” you can’t stop and let go.  You can’t go back into your previous blinding matrix.  You refuse to put back on your chains and go back into your prison.  You break out of your own echo chamber.  You begin to see that there is more to your own story and the story of each student, and are able to internalize those tales.  You just can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  It’s kind of a new addiction to caring and kindness, to faith and hope and love.  And that is an “awe-full” feeling.
Louis

From an “Awful” to an “Awe-full” Classroom, VI

I should really title this reflection “Behavioral Teaching” because I’m asking what’s the difference between an “awful” and “awe-full” perspective a professor has of students?  Possibly it’s a question of a lack of academic imagination and subsequent expectations.   Possibly it is whether a professor sees her or his role as an information transmitter and skill developer rather than as a character builder.  Possibly it whether a professor focuses on credentialing for better jobs to the exclusion of specifically concentrating equally on values for building better lives.  Possibly it’s whether or not a professor confuses passing a course with proverbial life-long learning.  Possibly it’s whether or not a professor mistakes immediate performance—passing a test and getting grade and having a certain GPA—for learning things that down the road actually foster inner and lasting change and growth, and tap each’s unique potential.  Possibly it is a conflict with age-old approach to students, relying more on blurring impersonal and dehumanizing stereotypes and generalities and labels on one hand then on the fact that there are real people in that classroom.  Possibly it is that most professors don’t think well of each and every student, but only of the “good student.”  Possibly it’s all of the above.
Let me back up to Friday’s morning walk.  As I approached the railroad crossing, tasting my medicinal meditative silence, I started thinking about that past student waiting there last week in his car.   His words seemed  to start dancing across my mind like sugar plum fairies.  I was trying to put together him, a recent David Brooks’ Oped piece, “The Art of Thinking Well,” in the October 13th issue of the NY Times and a PBS News Hour interview of Richard Thaler, Noble Prize winner in economics for his work as the “father” of behavioral economics.  Then, about a mile further on, turning to walk the full perimeter of the Publix supermarket’s parking lot it happened.  A car turned into the lot just behind me, passed me, and then abruptly stopped.  The door flung open, blocking my way.  The driver jumped out, screaming, “Holy shit!  Schmier!!  Is that really you?”
“Dennis?” I asked with obvious surprise.  I hadn’t seen or heard from him in over a decade.  Yet, little did I know he was about to be my catalyst.
He ran over  and while gripping me in a loving bearhug went on, “Yeah.  You remember!  What’s it been, doc, fifteen years since we were in class together and about ten years or more since we last talked?  Damn I’ve missed you!!  But, you were never far from me.”  He put his hand into his pants pocket and pulled out what looked like a blank Scrabble tile.  On it was scribbled was the word, “dare.”
“See?  It’s my ‘word to live by’ for today.  I still read all those ‘words for today’ that you wrote board in your illegible handwriting and we discussed for a few minutes.  And, I’m also still doing that daily ‘gratitude exercise’ at the end of each day that you had us all do for class.”
  Oh, do I remember Dennis when he first came into class.  He started out, as I loving called him, my “Dennis the Menace” and ended up being my “Dennis the Blessing.”   We must have talked for almost 30 minutes, leaning on the car, its engine still running.  Now, he held himself with a joyful confidence that was far different from the round shouldered, angry, sad, distrusting, reclusive, uncooperative, resisting, and ever-challenging freshman I first met.  He was now with a consulting company which was sending him to the Miami area to help deal with the ravages of hurricane Irma.  He had pulled off the highway to get a bag of ginger snaps to tide him over on the road.  Kismet.  Serendipity.  What I call “you just don’t ask” moment.  He told me how I had never given up on him when everyone else had; how I had helped him come out “from a dark place” by clearing out a “pile of inside family and personal trash” that was “eating at” him, “tearing” him up, and holding him back; how he consequently made “incredible discoveries” about himself by “taking the chance of trusting you and my community members,” by doing the “those hard hands-on projects;” how, “with you always there,” he saw he could do what he first thought he couldn’t do;  how our talks challenged who he had accepted who he was; how his journaling had helped him “see inside” himself and “open myself to myself;” how he came to believe that he was the sacred, noble and valuable person I believed he was; how he learned to live with a “yes” every day; and, how he learned to be committed to that positive outlook.
“You didn’t just help me pull my grades up, you helped me pull myself up out of my pit…You gave me your hand, your loving words and your loving hand and your loving hugs and yourself when everyone else had used their hands literally to only angrily slap or smack me down and walk away.…you raised my spirit when everyone had crushed it…you helped me see I was worth those hugs and I could live up to your hope and faith in me….And, I knew I wasn’t the only in that class that you did it with….Damn, it was magically the way you seemed to see inside each of us.  You had such a different mentality from all the other professors I had and did things so differently from all of them.  How you used your imagination and creativity to come up with the stuff you had us do blew a lot of our shit away.  I learned more important things in your class that I use today than in four years of college as a business major.”
We hugged and promised each other to keep in touch.  As he drove off to get his ginger snaps, I just stood there momentarily frozen, heavily breathing, mouth tight with tearful emotion, wondering “what the hell just happened?”  For the rest of my walk I never felt the concrete; my feet were like hover boards, flying a few inches of the ground.   As I told two of my favorite ex-colleagues whom I bumped into while they were sipping their Friday morning coffee at a local eatery (another delightful 30 minute interlude of my walk this morning),  Dennis just wowed me.   “I guess,” I told them,  “I passed my ‘five year test’ with him.”
Why am I telling you this?  Not to toot my horn, but because in Dennis pulled it all together.  And, in that confluence I now had my answer to a flaming message I had received the previous day from a professor at a northeastern university.  That professor had written, among other things,  “…You and your soupiness are a travesty to higher education….You are obviously not the objective professor you should and must be,  ” he said.  “You’re just deliberately being subversive and mischievous….You are so completely unscientific that whatever you say has nothing worthwhile to consider.buoyant…”
Thinking of that student, Brooks, Thaler, and Dennis, I answered, “I plead guilty, and I plead not guilty.  Yes, I am not ‘objective.’  As a human being, I cannot be.  I am not wedded to that distorted view of human behavior.  What you call an ‘awful student,’ is likely one who does not act in a way dictated by an abstract, non-existing specie created by academia.  That student is likely one who deviates from the predicted behavior of that idealized image, one who is not the determined and committed ‘mini scholar’ academics expect and demand, one who is not ‘easy to teach,’ one who doesn’t know how to do everything already, one who does what I call ‘dumb stuff,’ one who ignores threats of being flunked and still does quirky and irresponsible things.  She or he is one who has problems with organization, deadlines, self-control, self-expression, critically thinking, concentration, and god knows what else; she or he is one who is being torn and distracted and tossed about by matters outside the classroom and inside her or him.   I mean, tell me, who truly is ‘objective?’  No one is an unemotional, purely logical, Dr. Spock.  Are you?  Certainly, your message doesn’t seem to be free of emotional and subjective judgment.  At least, it doesn’t read that way.  That people don’t always act in cold rational calculating manner, even if they have high academic degrees or large bank account, or high IQs is a given.  That they don’t always make choices that are in their best interests, that they irrationally let anxieties and fears immobilize and silence them is so obvious, except maybe to those academics who claim to be objective, totally free of bias, claiming to use only the sharp reason of their rational brain, free of distorting irrational emotions of what you condemn as a ‘soupiness.’  Nevertheless, there is a lot of lively human life that defy robotics in the Ivory Tower.”
“I also admit that I do have a mischievous mind.  I do like to tweak the nose and be a burr under the saddle of self-righteous, arrogant, archaic, and distorting traditions.  I do misbehave in the sense I no longer unquestioningly tow the resisting traditional classroom line.  And, yes, I have become something of a maverick in that I will more often than not refuse to be boxed in by the proverbial academic box.   After nearly five decades in the classroom, all that is a buoyant fire-retardant against burnout because I am a rebel with a very serious cause and an ever-arming arsenal.  That cause gives me an ever-invigorating purpose and meaning without which I’d be dead in the water.  It is to give an unconditional and non-judgmental damn.  It is to make each student a believer in herself and himself.  It is be there along side each student, strongly supporting and encouraging her or him, helping each of them help themselves reach for their unique potential that they so often know they possess.  In that cause, my greatest assets, from which I acquire my greatest insights, is seeing and listening, seeing and listening to myself and others, seeing and listening to the emotional fingerprints of facial expressions and body language and vocal tones, and finding a commonality in our humanity.”
“Now, too many academics say all that is irrelevant and of no concern to them.  It should be for two reasons.  First, don’t think teaching is always a bed of roses.  Don’t think that I wasn’t at times put to the test and pulled to the edge.  Don’t think I didn’t take deep breaths and face ‘compassion fatigue,’ or ‘empathetic distress.’  Don’t think there weren’t any times I wasn’t annoyed, disappointed, frustrated.  Then, I always seemed to be brought back and had an infusion of life by a conversation with a struggling student or by a revelation a student wrote in her or his daily journal entry or by a community’s highly creative project.  At those times, I see and listen inside.  And, I see that when things are honkey dory or are a piece of cake, they are not growth mediums for me or each of them.  Second,  each student is a very real human being, and those supposed irrelevant things are relevant; we should bother with and be bothered by them if for no other reason than they have a serious impact on performance.  It is wrong to imagine anyone, you or me or anyone, being so infallible, so rational, so perfect that they are automatons.   Moreover, those supposedly irrelevant things, what someone once called ’the rubbish of excuses,’ such as low self-esteem, weak self-confidence, illness, family situations, broken loves, test anxiety, job demands, fear of looking silly, fear of being wrong, fear of their grade being aversely effected, children, family pressure, peer pressure, personal history, ingrained habits, etc., are relevant.  Matters that supposedly don’t matter—that ’trash’ students are supposed to leave at the threshold—do matter.   If truth be told, neither you nor I drop that trash at the threshold or at the edge of campus.  We all bring our debilitating and halting trash, which I have previously listed and need not repeat, into the classroom with us.  We all do.  To deny our or their human imperfection, human frailty, human foibles, is a subjective bias on your part.  Your consequent frustration, and resignation, and even anger are subjective emotions.  That subjectivity impacts on your attitude, your thinking and feeling, about that student.  That subjectivity has an impact on the nature of whatever interactions you have or don’t have with yourself and others.  You are no more a Dr. Spock than I am or the supposed errant student is.  So, let’s trash all that trash talk about leaving one’s trash at the classroom door’s threshold.  Student’s can’t help but bring it in; we can’t help but bring in our own.  And, that is worth considering, if not accepting.”
“Now, for your claim that I am ‘unscientific,’ you’re right and you’re wrong.  If you want ’science-based’ evidence, either do the science or read the science.   While I don’t do the science, I fill my arsenal with the writings of the likes of Carol Dweck, Ed Deci, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Peter Senge, Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi, Howard Gardner, Abraham Mazlow, Barbara Fredrickson, Carl Rogers, Sonya Lyubomirsky, Martin Seligman, and a host of others.  I didn’t just read them; I reflected with “how can I use it” on the findings of that science.  As I did,  I unschooled and schooled myself; I questioned old ways while I saw possible new ways; I experimented with ways to apply the findings of the science; and, consequently, I changed my ways, sometimes dramatically with ‘out-of-the-box’ stuff, as I followed the way shown by that science.   I think that makes me very scientific, at least, science-based.  And, if we are going to benefit from all that research, if we are to enable students, we can’t eschewed our or their humanity; we have to admit that there are holes in what we need to know, that are critical to know, about both ourselves and students.  We have to admit that there is nothing that “vulcanizes” any human being we call professors or students into a Dr. Spock.  When we don’t make those admissions, when the students act irrationally, when they make poor choices, we point the “don’t belong” blaming finger at them, and wash our hands of all responsibility.  If we recognized the importance of those outer and inner forces, if we accept that the heart is as influential as the brain, if we had a more reasonable understanding of why we and they do as we and they do, if we had a more realistic assumption, we’d be less inclined to throw up our hands in frustration or point in anger or slump in resignation; we’d work harder to do our classroom job better.  In a simple request:  We need ‘behavioral academics.”
“And, finally, if I am, as you say, ‘soupy,’ it is a good tasting, nutritious soup.  I’ll leave you with a story I just read:
The story goes that a man had fallen into a river. He was not much of a swimmer and was in real danger of drowning. A crowd of concerned people wanted to rescue him. They were standing at the edge of the water, each of them urgently shouting out to him:
‘Give me your hand, give me your hand!’
The man was battling the waves and ignored their urgent plea. He kept going under and was clearly struggling to take another breath.
A saintly man walked up to the scene. He too cared about the drowning man. But his approach was different. Calmly he walked up to the water, waded in up to his waist near the man, glanced lovingly at the drowning man, and said: ‘Take my hand.’
Much to everyone’s surprise, the drowning man reached out and grabbed the saint’s hand. The two came out of the dangerous water. The drowning man sat up at the edge of the water, breathing heavily, looking relieved, exhausted, and grateful.
The crowd turned towards the saint and asked in complete puzzlement: “How were you able to reach him when he didn’t heed our plea?” The saint calmly said:
‘You all asked him for something at a distance, his hand. I offered him something near him, my hand. A drowning man is in no position to give you anything.’”
“The question, then, is:  how can we best be there with all we have, putting all our chips to the center of the table with an ‘all in’—body and soul—unconditionally for each and every student?   How can we offer a lending supportive and encouraging hand?  For a start, we have to be forgiving to ourselves and students that we’re all human, that it’s okay for you, me, and them to be human, to be fallible and frail human beings.  Then, we have to find ways with empathy and compassion, without condition and judgment, to offer each student a caring shoulder, a kind ear, and a loving heart.  I think we all need a reality check, that there are real people in that classroom, not idealized or demonized ones.  We have to accept that there are psychological, personal, social, and emotion factors that explain why we or any student thinks, feels, and does what she or he does or does not do what we desire or expect.  God, from seeing how my own experiences and memories played on my thoughts, feelings, and actions, do I know that.  What we need is an application to Richard Thaler’s ‘behavioral economics’ in the classroom and on campus with what I’ll call ‘behavioral teaching’ and ‘behavioral academics.’”
Louis

From an “Awful” to an “Awe-full” Classroom, V

I was sitting for more than a few minutes on the concrete fence of a bridge, my early morning meditative walk interrupted, arms folded, head bowed, eyes closed, waiting for the long and slow freight train to pass, holding my inner silence against invading attempts of the relentless clackity clack of the train’s wheels,  concentrating my thoughts on part of a sneerful message I had received from a professor.  “How could you be so full of awe for a student whose performance is awful,” she asked with obvious disdainful agitation.

Just then, as the last car of the train had passed and the barriers were beginning to lift.  The passenger side window of a near-by car lowered.  The driver leaned over.  “Hey, Schmier!”  I opened my eyes and I looked up.  “Thought I recognized you.  Its been over fifteen years.  I never told you that the only thing I remember from my first year at VSU was all that stuff we did in your class.  Just wanted to say that you were the only professor who made me feel that I was somebody who mattered, and was important to you.  I never let those feeling go.  You made. everyone feel that there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do if we put our head and heart into it.  Because of that I was determined to show you and myself that I was worthy of being noticed.  Do you know that you helped me to stretch myself like no one else has in ways I didn’t know I could.”  He quickly turned his head to see the cars in front of him moving as someone honk a horn behind him.  “Oops, gotta go.  Bye and thanks.”  And, he pulled away with a wave of his hand before I could take a step or say a word.  I felt like the townsperson at the end of an episode of the Lone Ranger wondering who was that masked man.  But, I had my answer to that professor.

“You ask how could I be in awe of a student who was awful?  It’s because I was once that ‘awful’ student,” I answered.  “And probably would have become a drop-out had it not been for one caring professor, Dr. Birdsal Viault.  Having graduated 86th in a high school class of 252, I was told that the teachers had decided that I was the college bound graduate least likely to succeed.  Because they and all my college professors, save Dr Viault, had thought about me and allowed me to think of myself simply in the one dimension of my ‘says it all’ ugly and low—very low, very ugly—GPA.   To add salt to my wounds, would you believe that my sophomore English professor, after I failed one of my written essays wrote on  my paper—and I remember his exact words to this day 58 years later—that I was an ‘appalling blight on this institution?’  How could I nurture who I was if I didn’t feel recognized and acknowledge for who I was, if I wasn’t accorded worth, if I wasn’t treasured, if I wasn’t rendered inherent dignity, if I didn’t matter, if I wasn’t important, if I wasn’t a somebody?   No one knew my story.  No one cared about how my family upbringing had undermined my self-esteem and eroded my self-confidence, both of which had a negative impact on my performane.  No one cared to know that I was working three jobs to get through school.  It was only because ‘Bird’ saw an “awe-fullness” seen by no one else, including me.  Because to them and me, to be seen, and appreciated, I had to be academically ‘handsome.’  And, if beauty exists in the eyes of the beholder, that meant I had to have honors level grades.  Anything less made me that homely ‘don’t belong’ blight, not warranting their time and concern.  Yet, what my transcript revealed to both them and me, was a small fraction of who decades later I discovered I was.  Solely relying on that transcript to define me was like setting a dinner table for twelve guests using only a fork.   Any hidden and potential ‘academic handsomeness’ I might have had was all so hidden in a shadowy mist to both me and them.  That opaque veil, that ordinariness, they and I drew over me now seems so obviously wrong. Well, relying on that single indicator, they and I were not obviously wrong then; the other dimensions about me were just was not obvious to them and me.”

“Now, I admit during the first 25 years of my professional career when in ‘honoring my discipline,’ I dishonored so many students   While putting on the respectful faces of  ‘Doctor’ and  ‘Professor of History,’ I disrespected so many students.   Succumbing to a drive to survive, and with a deep reassuring need to thrive, I succumbed to becoming like ‘one of them.’  If we think about it, and admit it, the academic culture encourages us—demands us—to think that if we conform to do certain things and take certain steps, if we don’t stir the waters and do as expected and toe the academic line, even if in the process we compromise ourselves, we will get to certain crucial milestones of success.  It was an academic version of living the lines in ‘Ole Man River”:  Get that degree!  Get that appointment!  Get that grant!  Publish the research!  Get that promotion!  Get tenure!   I, like so many of us academics, for a variety of deep personal reasons, had succumbed to the enslaving perils of higher education.   I, like most academics, allowed that quest for what I’ll call ‘academic celebrity’ and ‘academic security’ to deafen, blind, bind, confine, and numb me.  I allowed that quest to feed me a diet of playing if safe with dishes of ‘I can’t,’ ‘I’m not,’ ‘It’s not me,’ ‘I’m not comfortable doing that’ and, above all, ’I don’t have tenure,’  I had imprisoned myself with anxious-ridden and submissive looking-over-the-shoulder ‘what will they think” and  ‘how will this effect me acquiring tenure’ and ‘will this help get me that promotion?’   And, while I was looking over my shoulder, I was not seeing each student.  Or, I saw that what I perceived as ‘awful’ students were detractions, if not obstacles, to my quest for academic accolades.  We so wrongly assume that we have total control of  our destiny.  And, when we discover that we don’t, that nothing we can do gives us that total control over students and colleagues and administrators, rather than accepting the truth of that messy reality, we so often wallow in compromising ourselves with ‘enthusiasm depletion’ by resignation, lethargy, reluctance,despair, frustration, anxiety, anger, bitterness, fear, excuse, rationale, and blame.”

“Then, on that fateful autumn morning of 1991, as I have extensively written, for a variety of reasons, I suddenly and unexpectedly had had enough.  I found myself forcing myself to face myself and to face up to myself.   I was at the top of my academic game as an acknowledged authority in my field.  I had a huge resume; I had tenure; I was a full professor.  Yet, I heard myself uncontrollably admitting that while I had it all, I felt I had so little; I felt so hollow.  My outer facade not withstanding, I was sad; I was unsatisfied; I was miserable; I was unfulfilled.  As I uncontrollably exploded, I heard myself revealing the love-hate-fear relationship of pursuing an academic’s version of success that I had allow to be placed on my life.  I heard myself unexpectedly erupting with an admissions that all those grants, conference workshops, or a publications didn’t make me feel all that accomplished as I had convinced myself.   I heard myself spewing out about the internal problem of not being able to serve two masters, about the internal argument between the part of me that wanted to be an unknown but master classroom teacher, a Birdsal Viault to all students, and part of me that had to be a successful scholar to achieve in academia.  The latter had won out for so long.  But, no more.  I decided I had had too many academic face lifts.  Now, I needed a ‘soul lift,’ for I realized that, as Abraham Herschel said, indifference to the wonder in each person is the ultimate sin.”

“So, beginning to connect with and seeing myself in all those ‘awful’ students, I began to move from a strictly defined professorial hierarchical identity encompassing discipline, degree, title, and resume to something of a more freeing, unbounded, and pleasurable sensibility of being an authentic, sincere, caring, kindly, and serving human being.   I began moving from a desire to be visibly important to an overwhelming desire to do out-of-the-limelight important things.  I forsook renown and accepted possible unknown.  I began to ask myself several pointed questions: ‘Is a professional resume of degrees, titles, grants, publications all there is of me?’  “Are they all that they are cracked up to be?’  ‘Is a grade all there is of a student?’  ‘Is it all that it’s cracked up to be?’  I was determined to be someone who, except for Bird Viault, I hadn’t had in my young life.  I was going to give each student the gift of seeing, accepting, validating, treasuring, and embracing her and him for who she or he is, for who she or he can become, and be committed to being with each of them on part of that journey.”

“Beginning to ask such questions was for me at the core of my epiphany in 1991.  It was like a hurricane rattling and then blowing down what proved to be house of cards.  The initial revealing moments that started to lay me bare were tear-filled.  Seeking the answers proved to be heart breaking and heart mending as I struggled for my heart to break out of a shell into the open.  They were the first vulnerable, unsure, shaky steps towards looking at myself, each student, the classroom, as well as everything and everyone off campus, in a different way.  I started trading in the traditional audience-oriented academic brand for a student centrism.  I started a never-ending search of my own authentic, sincere, and honest soul with a “Let’s see who you could be, who you should be.”  It was to be a sharp transition from scholarly professor to loving classroom servant-teacher, from going cold turkey on research and publishing to focusing all of me on classroom teaching.  And,  that ultimately wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.  That is, once I did the hard part.  And  what was that ‘harf part?’  Well,  to paraphrase Rumi, the Sufi mystic, to both survive and thrive—with the steadfast presence, support, and encouragement of my dearest wife, Susie—I began an excavation project to remove all barriers within myself that I had placed in my way from seeing the bigger perspective that ‘awe-full’ presents.  Over the subsequent years, going through a ton of upheaval, after some heavy lifting, I saw that it is the values, beliefs, and philosophy of both life in general and teaching in particular that ultimately years later I was to enunciate in my “Teacher’s Oath,” was at the root of an emerging guiding vision.  It was a vision filled with the unconditional faith, hope, and love inherent in ‘awe-full.’  It is ‘awe-full,’ not “awful,” that is a schooling of joy with an energetic, purposeful, and meaningful ‘enthusiasm infusion.’  It was in “awe-full,’ not ‘awful,’ that new possibilities and opportunities were born.   It was ‘awe-full,’ not ‘awful,’ that served me and each student best.  It was ‘awe-full,’ not ‘awful, that filled me with gratitude.  It was like being increasingly brightened and reved up by the revealing dawning sun as it edged over the horizon and cut through the darkness.

“Then, I went further.  I asked myself,  “What would happen if I focused on both my and each student’s unseen but unique potential?  What if I optimized my classes—unbound by any professorial ‘how will I grade this’ and ‘how will I be evaluated by students’ by me or by students’ ‘will this be on the test’ and ‘is this important,’—for what I came to see as real ‘life-long learning and living.’  What if I focused consciously and daily on finding ways to simultaneously transmit information, develop critical thinking skills, and build up each student’s character, all of which would increase the possibility of accomplishment and true happiness throughout their lives?  That optimized focus became an explicit part of my individual mission, guided my north-star enunciated vision in my written ‘Teacher’s Oath.’  That is, unconditionally to have faith in, hope for, and love of each student; to help each student help herself and himself become the person she and he is capable of becoming; to help students think about their lives and not just their professions, to graduate as honors persons possessing a moral compass rather than just honor students possessing a degree and a credential; to help them decide who they want to be and not just what they want to do; to help them learn to play the responsibility game rather than the blame game; to know that while things happen to them in unpredictable ways, they have the profound power to choose the effect that has on the kind of people who they become; to help them understand that professional accomplishment, fulfillment, and happiness aren’t necessarily synonomous terms; and to send them on their way with a strength of character and deeply ingrained values that will help them keep from losing their way.  I did just that. I reflected on, articulated, and shared my beliefs, my values, my philosophy of both life them.  And, to my amazement it worked.  That is what being ‘awe-full’ had done and still does for me.  That is why I am in awe of each student, her or his GPA be damned!”

Louis