Sometimes, what I call those "you just don't ask" happenings occur in
rapid fire succession. First, there was a simple June 14th FaceBook message
from a student who was in class over 20 years ago, part of which read, "I'm at
this crossroads....If you have the time I'd love to chat with you." I made the
time. I called. We talked. The next day, as if by kismet, came a David
Brook's New York Times column called "The Building Blocks of Education" that
talked about the need to bring back into the classroom emotion that had been
driven underground by reason. And finally, Monday, the 20th, there were the
parents, whose three sons were in class with me decades ago, who came up to me
while Susie and I were at a workshop for her hearing aides. "After all these
years, they still talk of how you and how you changed their lives," the mother
said of her sons. All this reminded me of something Elie Wiesel said, "We must
not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a
universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of
anguish, and with some measure of triumph."
After the workshop, when I got home, I put it all together. I went to
one passage from Brooks' column that struck me. Drawing on recent research,
the key factor in the classroom, he said, is the unconditional and "essential
love between a teacher and a student: the teacher’s willingness to pour time,
attention and care into the student." Love!! He ended his column with these
resonating words: "Today we have to fortify the heart if we’re going to
educate the mind." Fortify the heart!!
Reading some of the student's message to me, I thought to myself, "How
true. God, I've been 'writing' Brooks' column for years; that has been at the
core of my vision; and, that has been the underpinnings for all I have thought,
felt, and done for decades. "The heart of education is an education of the
heart" and "The absence of heart is the greatest aliment of education." I went
over these sentences time and time and time again. They flashed across my mind
in rapid fire like a moving neon banner sign. On that infrastructure, too
often shattered into smithereens by far too many academics using the
jackhammers of impersonalizing stereotype and generalization, inattention and
disinterest, rests faith and hope. It creates such an important enveloping
atmosphere needed to be deeply inhaled so schooling and credentialing can be
alchemize into education. I looked up above me, taped to a shelf above me was
a passage from Proverbs 4:23: "Watch over your heart with all diligence, for
from it flows the springs of life."
"Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the
springs of life."
Neat words. They mean it's all about attitude, attitude, attitude.
Beliefs have the power to create. But, alas, the building blocks of
learning--faith, hope, and love--have been blocked from being used. The power
of character of perseverance and curiosity and imagination and optimism, has
been dissipated. Emotions, especially self-worth and love, have been driven
from the classroom. The requirement of self-esteem has little classroom
esteem. To think of love in the classroom is unthinkable. Dealing with
debilitating stress is not stressed. The need for connection has been
disconnected. Belonging isn't a consideration that belongs in the classroom.
Paying attention to each and every student doesn't get much of the attention of
academics. The mindset messages of how students conceive themselves and their
purpose have been set aside and are of no mind to most professors. Grit has
been sanded smooth. We academics are good at academics, at transmitting
information, and at credentialing. They are terrible, however, at constructing
a necessary character base. That's what the research findings of Harvard's
Ronald Fryer has said. The gist of this research, supported by the earlier
work of Ed Deci, Carol Dweck, Barbara Fredrickson, and others is that you can't
buy or bribe students with rewards and punishments system of grades or GPAs.
Students are not really motivated, much less inspired, by what is called these
"external motivators." Reattaching amputated love does. Reconnecting the
connection does. Caring about students, unconditionally caring, does. Those
emotions, too often driven underground inspire students to care about
themselves, to believe in themselves, to have confidence in themselves, to have
hope for themselves. Bathing students in love tends to wash away their grimy,
isolating and debilitating sense of aloneness, loneliness, and hopelessness.
Bathing students in love tends to soothe their anxiety. So, I argue that an
education of the intellect without a comparable education the spirit is both
mindless and heartless. It is setting both students up with an inability to
deal with mistake and to see error as failure; it is not helping anyone to
learn to resiliently regurgitate sadness, anger, and fear. It renders everyone
fragile and paralyzed with a sense of worthlessness. The paralyzing anxiety
students feel, the atrophying is detrimental to giving and receiving an
education. I tell you, from the research and from constant experience, that
bathing students in strong connections of love will wash them with senses of
belonging, worth, confidence, faith, and hope. Love is the source of
attention, of noticing, of valuing unconditionally each student. This doesn't
happen with posters, with sloganeering, or with high-sounding mission
statements. It happens with genuine intent resting on genuine perception,
unconditional perception, that each student can succeed, that each student is
worth caring about, that each student should be noticed, that each student can
be creative, imaginative. It happens when each teacher genuinely lives the
first tenet of my "Teacher Oath": "I will give a damn about each person in the
class! I will care! I will support! I will encourage! I won’t just mouth it. I
will live it! Each day."
There's more, but that's for later.
Make it a good day
-Louis-
Louis Schmier
http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org
203 E. Brookwood Pl http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta, Ga 31602
(C) 229-630-0821 /\ /\ /\ /\
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mountains,\ /\
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hills" - / \_
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