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!