Lordy, it was windy out there this morning. "Windy" isn't the word for it. Powering walking two miles in swirling up to 25 mile an hour winds, I felt I was on a treadmill. Struggling to keep my balance and not be blown helplessly about by sudden gusts like the pine needles and leaves whisking around me, by the time I got back into the house, I felt had just pounded the streets for fifteen miles. Talking about winds and leaves (how's that for a segue), I was thinking of a conversation I had with a young professor a couple of weeks ago at the Lilly-South conference on Teaching in Colleges and Universities which we have been since carrying on through e-mail. The key to our exchange was something she forlornly said in Greensboro: "I'm worried about getting tenure. So, I have to be careful what I say and do, and not do anything that might hurt my chances....Didn't you lay low before you had tenure?"
"Yeah, kinda, not really," I answered. "Having or not having tenure really had nothing to do with it. It usually doesn't. Tenure is usually a convenient excuse to hide deeper inner stuff as it was in my case. Long stories. To get to your question, I'll ask you a question I didn't begin to ask myself until my epiphany twenty years ago, and though I'm constantly asking it of myself, it hit especially home when I battled cancer and then struggled through my massive cerebral hemorrhage: 'Aren't you also worried and unhappy about feeling that deep inside you know you're not being who you are or are capable of becoming?'" Then, in our short on-going exchanges, I wrote, "....I am deathly afraid of living the unlived life, of going a day without feeling fully alive. Feeling fully alive to me means doing what is important and enjoying it at the same time, and making sure that everything I do is both joyous and important. And, that includes my teaching. You know, over the past twenty years years my teaching has become more and more fun and significant, 'serious fun' as I call it, because I choose to see it as both enjoyable, important, and fulfilling. That's why after nearly forty-five years in the classroom, I'm still going strong; I'm still having fun and know I'm doing something very important. I just don't go quietly through the day and let anyone tell me how to feel about teaching. And, as far as significance goes, teaching, what I see as real teaching--teaching of the whole person, teaching of the heart as well as of the head, teaching both how to live the good life and how to make a good living, teaching to help each student become the person he or she is capable of becoming--beats hands down getting tenure, receiving a title, publishing a book, this conference plenary I gave, all of them combined. It's a variation on that Jewish adage, touch and change a life, and you've touched and changed the world...." ...."I will not let anyone make me feel professionally guilty, unhappy or insignificant, 'non-professional' as I have been called. I will not walk around, stooped, self-denigrating, ashes on my head, wearing hair cloth, atoning for some academic sin which, according to our university mission statement, I have not committed. Sure, there are those on our campuses who, contrary to what they say publicly who feel that teaching, especially only the survey, core, and FYE courses as I have chosen to teach, or writing and publishing only about teaching, or going only to teaching conferences, is 'non-professional.' And sure, too many see teaching as some interfering thing, something beneath them, something they aren't in academia really to do or were trained to do, something that they have to do to put food on the table. And sure again, too many really want to put the time in the classroom into the lab, archive, or out in the field. Now, if those people want to be researchers and scholars? Fine. I have no bones with that. But, leave me alone as I leave them alone; respect me as I respect them; share with me as I share with them. We, teacher and researcher, both have a vital role to play in a student's education. All I ask is that they just don't try to force their flattened views on me, to mold me into the one-dimensional person they want me to be, and allow me walk my own 'professional' road...." ...."I've made my scholarly bones. I have more than a line or two for a scholarly resume. I more than successfully ran in the publish-or-perish rat race. I was once the authority in my scholarly field. Now, I've chosen a new field and am just as scholarly and professional in it. I feel the genuine significance in focusing all I am and have on teaching in those survey classes, classes which help students make their critical transition from teenage high schoolers into their adulthood and 'profession-hood,' and set them on their own personal, professional, and social life courses--pun intended..." ...."The distinction between insignificant and significant, 'non-professional' and 'professional' is a personal and unfair judgement call. Any situation is what it is. How I feel about the situation is my choice. I will not cooperate with anyone to demean or ignore me. Instead, I choose to feel professional, enthusiastic, empowered, and meaningful. Let me tell you a secret, it's better to choose to feel truly better; you'll be happier when you choose to be sincerely happy; you'll feel far more worthy when you choose to see what you're doing is invaluable. Only two things matter; that you truly love what you're doing and doing what you truly love; and, that you know what you're doing matters both to you and in the life of each student, and why it matters, no matter what anyone else thinks, feels, or says...." "....So, unlike most professors, I added the scholarship of teaching to being a scholar in my discipline--added, expanded, broadened, not replaced; I intently and continually study and learn about learning. My strategy and tactic is to close the gap between what science says I should do and what to many in academia say I should do. I study 'mindset,' 'flow,' 'attribution,' 'connection,' 'autonomy,' 'community,' 'cooperation,' 'resonance,' 'leadership,' 'dissonance,' 'mindfulness,' 'love,' 'otherness,' 'awareness,' 'creativity,' 'praise,' 'change,' 'alertness,' 'hope,' 'communication,' 'emotional intelligence,' 'fear,' 'motivation,' 'social intelligence,' 'happiness,' 'resilience,' 'caring,' 'positive intelligence,' 'relevance,' 'purpose,' 'fun,' and on and on and on it goes. I share what I've learned, and why and how I test out and utilize in my teaching what I have learned. I share how and why I go into class on my own professional, caring, loving, fun, and significant terms, bearing the weight of knowing, for better or worse I am a world-changer and a future-shaper. Now, a lot of academics will attack with the sling and arrows of it being touchy-feely, flighty, fluffy, fuzzy, new-agey stuff. My protective armor is in the scholarship of teaching, in what I call the 'brain-ology' theme of recent Lilly conferences on teaching; it's in title of the plenary I just co-presented, 'The Neuroscience of Caring.' Touchy-feely? Flighty? My armory is filled with latest findings of the cognitive- and neuro-sciences, which most professors haven't heard about, much less studied and applied, that say otherwise...." Make it a good day -Louis- Louis Schmier http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org<http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org/> Department of History http://www.therandomthoughts.com<http://www.therandomthoughts.com/> Valdosta State University Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ (O) 229-333-5947 /^\\/ \/ \ /\/\__ / \ / \ (C) 229-630-0821 / \/ \_ \/ / \/ /\/ / \ /\ \ //\/\/ /\ \__/__/_/\_\/ \_/__\ \ /\"If you want to climb mountains,\ /\ _ / \ don't practice on mole hills" - / \_ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. 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