Couldn’t sleep.  I guess I was still thinking about a student I’ll call Dave into whom I bumped a few days ago on the back leg of my walk.   We had an interesting conversation that I’ll tell you about at a later day.  For now, he gave me more of an answer to the professor who kept throwing cyber-barbs at me.

 “You accuse me of having a point of view,” I replied to the professor’s criticisms.  “Of course, I do.  Who doesn’t?  None of us are automatons.  You certainly do.  You reveal yours by the emotional tone and language of your flame throwing email.  Admit it; we’re all subjective human beings.    Cold, calculating, disengaged, distanced objectivity is a myth.  So, my point of view is summarized by my ‘Teacher’s Oath.’  In this age of overwhelming and consuming vocational credentialism in academia, we need more than satisfying the requirements of a major just to get a good job; we need to understand we are in the people business as much if not more than we are in the credentialing business; we should have a classroom starting counterpoint of unconditional faith, hope, and love to acquire the means to live a good life as well.  They are clarity and truth and belief.  They’re the light that pushes away the darkness.  They erase the limits imposed on unseen unique potential.  They strip away everything that stands between us and seeing—and unconditionally nurturing—the sacredness, uniqueness, nobility, beauty, potential, and awesomeness of each student.  They don’t allow anyone to get lost in the clutter of tests, grades, GPAs, awards, assessments, and recognitions.”

“There is a yiddish saying, ‘fun gornish gibt gornish.’  It means roughly ‘from nothing you’ll get nothing.’  So, what something comes from the nothing of poor mouthing or ridiculing any student behind her or his back?  Do you think such a negative attitude isn’t revealed in your actions, subtle or otherwise?  Where’s the morality in treating so many as if they’ve passed their ‘use by’ date?  What positives do you find in treating these less than stellar students as the Rodney Dangerfields of academia, giving them no respect?  What uplifting is achieved if your expressed purpose is to go into class, as I personally knew some of my colleagues intended and did, to ‘cull out the herd?’  What kind of excitement do we have if we believe we’re going into that classroom to face a hoard of those we judge to be the unwanted ‘don’t belongs.’   How do you look for, find, and save someone you already have surrendered that person as a lost ‘unprepared?’   How much true focus do we have on those whom we view as distractions from more important things?    How much effort do you exert for those whom you say you don’t have the time.  Tell me the benefits of ignoring those who too many brand as inferior ‘they’re letting anyone in?’  Who is going to walk that extra mile for those condemned as ‘hopeless?’  Is denigration and demeaning and blame creating the best of conditions for learning we can create for the majority of students?   Is forsaking all but the supposed best the only way forward?

“We all tell ourselves and others about how we got where we are.  I know I do.  All I’m asking is:  have you rewritten the story of how you got here, do you really believe you got here on your own, what can you do for those who are not there yet, how much is not enough or enough or too much, who is not a vital piece of the future; which student’s life is not precious; who should be cast out; who is not education’s purpose and meaning personified?  Do you know how easy it is for all this to remain abstract?  Do you know that the way in which we tell our own stories to ourselves and to other, as well as the language we use, has a huge influence on how we see other people’s potential, what we look at and hear about their inspiration and motivation and ability and potential—or lack thereof?  Are those students out there strangers whose stories we don’t know or don’t care to know or aren’t curious about?  What would your story be like if ‘hard work’ and ‘good fortune’ and ‘lucky breaks’ were replaced with ‘unequal advantages?’   Instead of pointing blaming fingers, maybe we should show up in community that what would shred the thin veneer of deafening and blinding ‘strangerness’ so we can be consciously in sight and sound of each other.  Maybe, instead of throwing up our hands in frustration or gnashing our teeth in anger or twisting our face in writhing dread, we ought to look at ourselves and ask ourselves better questions and ask better questions of each of them.  Maybe we should think about what happens when we do all that all the time.”

“Remember, what we think and feel, we practice; and, what we practice, we become.  If you can practice a positive language, if you can practice leaning into unconditional acceptance and connection in the classroom on a regular basis, you’ll start to reexamine your memories, and then you’re going to be more likely to do those practice more automatically.  It’s what the psychologists call a ‘learned response.’  For me, it has closed the distances.  It has removed all the angst and divisiveness.  And, it has replaced them with a loving. hopeful, supportive, encouraging, joyful, meaningful, purposeful, and ‘awe-full’ engagement.”

“Now, I understand that one of the hardest things to do in class is to stay in community when you feel a surge of agitation, disappointment, frustration, and despair.  What nourishes my spirit when I’m getting a feeling of being drained, is each day to read and to swear to live consciously by the tenets of my ‘Teacher’s Oath.’  I also understand that there can be great fear—and risk—in inviting the unknown into one’s life; there can be a horrible and disturbing disorientation behind all that anxiety and frustration.  But, if we accept the assurances offered by the ‘hard evidence’ of the scientific research on learning, we can see that no student is irreversibly a slacker;  we can see potential ‘human becomings’ rather than fixed ‘human beings’ in a class; we can move to a rhythm of wondrousness in the classroom; we can offer unconditional understanding, sympathy, compassion, caring, and kindness.  You know, I’ve been in education for all but the first five years of my life:  as a student in kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school, high school, college, and graduate school:  as a TA and part-time instructor; and, finally as a college professor for 46 years until I had to retire.  And, I can tell you that for me as a student and as a professor, the finest moments were the ones that had nothing to do with tests, grades, GPAs, degrees, titles, grants, publications, and recognitions; they weren’t ones you could really put your fingers on; they weren’t ones that you could assess and quantify—or, perhaps, even explain.”

“But, how to describe what I call those ‘you just don’t ask’ moments.  I like the serendipitous words ‘mysterious’ and ‘inexplicable,’ though so many academics gnash their teeth and contort their faces at the sounding of those words because they supposedly so go against the grain and are such an anathema to academics’ demand for objectivity and ‘hard evidence.’  Most academics love, have a lust for, answers, closure, resolution, clarity, certainty.   They live within imagined stereotypes, generalities, and labels that seems to conveniently and comfortably—and safely— explain everything about students.  Yet, the more we see and listen to each student, the closer we come to each of them, the more we see each is a proverbial “exception to the rule.”  Heck, if we saw and listened, we’d see that there are so many exceptions to the rule, the rule would be obliterated.  And so, the more we accept ambivalence, surrender to contradictions, are unafraid of paradoxes and seeming inconsistencies in both each student and ourselves, and almost everything else, we tolerate and become comfortable with ambiguity, not to feel the insatiable urge to make the classroom “unmysterious” and explicable.   I don’t truly know why I had the epiphany when I had it; I don’t know why I responded to it as I did; I don’t know why I accepted having had cancer as a gift as I did; I don’t know why I was uplifted by my cerebral hemorrhage and why being a “walking 5% miracle” made such a dramatic impact on my outlook on teaching in particular and life in general.  I do know this.  Each experience, and others, determined the course of my life; each proved to be a great gift to my aspirations; each readied me more and more to go into the ever deeper inner recesses of myself where I was wont to go, not knowing what I would come up against, and have a conversation with myself about things I hadn’t known or wanted to know, to see and to listen to and to face up to what I had buried, rationalized away, ignored, but which was that which was holding me back from reaching my full potential as both a teacher and human being.  And, it wasn’t as terrifying as I feared.  To the contrary, I was humbled, stood in awe and in wonder, before the inexplicable mystery of it all.  And, I understood how subjective all of our views—me, colleagues, students, everyone—of reality really is and how we have the power to choose to change our view of ourselves and others.”

“With your indulgence, I’m going back to something I shared almost six years ago to the day.  To quote myself, ‘What’s that saying about what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger? Maybe, then, we all too often don’t give thanks for the unwanted challenges, altered courses, and to things that turn our world upside down. After all, if you can’t hit the curve balls, you’ll sure as hell will strike out. Maybe, then again, we ought to give thanks for such unseen blessing, discovering that we can come out okay because bearing the burden and consequence, and facing down adversity, we emerge tougher and better than ever, able to be more, believe more, have faith more, have hope more, do more, be in community with others more, and imagine more.’”

“So, you see, I have come to believe in mystery and the inexplicable, and to trust them.  I’ve been close to too many students, read too many journal entries, had too many small talk and serious conversations, read too many of their “how I feel today” words, and have had too many unexpected personal experiences not to find that these two words, full of hints and guesses, bring full meaning into the lives of  those human beings in the classroom.   And, as such, I’ve found that each person is a mixture of the penetrable and impenetrable to reason, of the expected and surprise, of the seen and unseen, of the known and unknown, of the aware and unaware.    I  mean, tell me, why  is that when a hard and fast formula doesn’t fully solve and explain each student taken individually, we call that person “an exception to the rule?”  And, a sensitivity to this mixture, unseen in skewing impersonal percentage and stick-figure stereotype and cardboard generalization and flattened labelling, is essential for according to each student dignity and respect and nobility and sacredness and uniqueness, for being hospitably….and patiently….and generously…. open to and welcoming and seeing and embracing and supporting and encouraging and forgiving and listening to each student, for evaluating our feelings in terms of empathy and faith and hope and love and caring and kindness and compassion, for judging our reactions to what is happening around and before us in terms of focused and keen acknowledgement of the humanity and uniqueness and sacredness of each student in order for us to be human:  taking nothing and no one for granted; never treating anyone casually; never thinking anyone is less than phenomenal.”

“Now, I am not talking about dreamy head-in-the-clouds optimism or wispy gossamers of  assurances that everything will turn out okay or oozing beliefs that everything will be perfect.   I’m talking about a feet-on-the-ground struggle supported by insights from the finding of scientific research on learning.  And, yeah, it’s not a piece of cake.  It’s a struggle.  I’m talking about struggling to get students to believe I am sincere.  It’s a sweaty and achy struggle to rip out the restricting brambles of self-deprecation and fears.   So, yeah, it’s  a struggle to resist and to defy ‘ah, me’ pessimism and frustration.  It’s a struggle to be understanding rather than agitated when things inevitably don’t go as you wish and expect.  I’m talking about struggling to be continually empathetic, supportive and encouraging.  It’s a struggle not to throw up your hands and walk away with an ‘I give up.’  I’m talking about struggling to be committed, to remain determined, to continue to persevere.  I’m talking about being realistic, about seeing each student as she or he is, about who she or he could become, about who she or he might become, and about who she or he is afraid to chance becoming all at once.  Doing all that is a struggle, a struggle to tell each student what I see, a struggle to help each student see as I see, struggle to see all the new possibilities and opportunities, struggle to make that struggle worthwhile, struggle to make that struggle exciting, struggle to fill that struggle with joyfulness.  I’m talking about a struggle to make all that into realities.  And, that is why I say teaching is not easy, but oh so joyous.”