How to respond to a less than empathetic query from a professor. I’ve
been pondering her dismissal questions for quite a while. Yeaterday, as I
worked to come out from the fogs of my Thanksgiving tryptophan overdose on my 7
mile meditative power walk, I started thinking about Dennis, and came up with
a rather long answer. Here is the first part of it:
“You know most education happens by contagion of either therapeutic or
toxic emotion. As Sigal Basade would say, if you want to retain students,
increase their productivity, and raise the possibility of their success,
welcome them, embrace them, love them, encourage and support them, each and
everyone of them. All life in that classroom, and elsewhere as well, is
connected however you try to remain disconnected. To be connected or to be
disconnected, says Basade, is an emotional decision, not a technological or
pedagogical or intellectual one. And, however, you decide to feel and then
act, as students such as Dennis reveal, your impact, overtly or subtly,
expands, amplifies, lengthens, widens, deepens. It cascades over miles, in
lives, through the years. It effects the world, it influences the future, in
ways you don’t know or can’t imagine. What you can imagine is that
unconditional empathy and compassion, gentleness and love, kindness and caring,
faith and hope, the intent to enrich the lives of others with support and
encouragement, are essential for the nourishment of meaning and purpose in both
your and students' lives.”
“From personal and professional experience, I will tell you this:
there is a connection between service and joy, between empathy andhope, and
between compassion and awe. It is an acknowledgment, as Mother Teresa might
say, that we belong to each other. Human beings are influenced and shaped by
kinship throughout their lives, and the classroom is no exception. Human
connection among students and between each student and the professor is the
best teaching technique. I have found a fullness in that connection, a call to
delight in each student, a putting of flesh and bones and names and faces on
the words ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love,’ and having an ability to be a man of
innumerable second chances. And, I have seen over and over and over again that
its absence creates a cessation of caring, a fragility, a fear, a lethal
absence of hope, and a cruel alienation. Disconnection, sometimes called
‘being objective,’ is a form of spiritual ailment, a tiny spiritedness, a
judgmentalism. It’s what Abraham Herschel called an ‘eye disease’ that is a
basis for an inability to see the full humanity of those fellow human beings we
call ‘students.’ Now, no one can ‘humanize’ students into what they already
are; no one can elevate students to the heights they already hold. No, we
cannot do anything to any student; we have to do it to ourselves. Too many of
us have to ask ourselves why do we presume there’s a distance between us and
the students; why do we so often so readily hold tightly to impersonal and
cardboard stereotypes, generalities, and labels; what is it that is blocking us
so often from seeing the full humanity of each student.”
“I remember that in graduate school we graduates would grumble about
how the professors treated us as ‘lower than whale shit.’ So, why do so many
of us now turn around and treat so many students that way? My refusal to do
unto students what was done unto me gives me the tools to release emotions.
It arms me with the ability to feel. I allows me to be able to understand why,
as Ed Deci would say, we do what we do—or don’t do. It’s a constant exercise
in increasing empathy and compassion. It’s the way to becoming wiser,
humbler, kinder, and more ‘awe-full.’ It slows; it provokes; it enriches; it
uncovers and reveals hidden stories; it honors; it enlivens; it opens the eyes
and heart; it recasts the personal we call ‘student,’ and even ourselves; and,
it emboldens to break through what I call the ‘devalue line’ and to connect.”
“To do that, we have to focus more on establishing human connection
than on changing methods, techniques, or technology. We can’t practice an
elitism that culls out the ‘don’t belongs.' We can’t just focus on and blame
the students. We can’t place conditions on our caring. You know sometimes,
more often than I would like, think that academia is museum in which we
professors practice an obscurantism with resumes, assessments, peripheral
matters of pedagogy, assessment, getting promotion and tenure almost at any
cost. We ultimately have to shake out our pedagogical cobwebs. We have to get
expand our knowledge base beyond our discipline, to learn from the scientific
literature on learning and apply its results. And, we have to assume
responsibility and change ourselves. We have to see that that ‘eye disease,’
which demeans both student and professor with fear and disdain, is rooted in a
deeper ‘heart disease’ of a disconnection resting on on the exercise of power
and authority. We have to see that our conditional ‘I care, if…’ is thin and
imitation caring, a cheap caring that carries no weight. We have to see and
believe, and help each student to see and believe, that there is so much more
in both ourselves and each of them. We have to see that the cure for that ‘eye
disease’ and ‘heart disease’ is community that meshes that professorial power
and authority with an unconditional faith, hope, and love. When we apply that
curative, I assure you, it will transform our vision from seeing an ‘awful’
student or class into an ‘awe-full’ one.”
“Now, it is not easy to change. God, don’t I know that! To transform
ourselves, we have to explore our uncomfortable histories and habit. We have
to admit that they exist; we have to deal with what is it that wants to keep us
safe and comfortable by avoiding the risks of adventuring into the unknown.
And, how well I know that kind of self-exploration can be painful and
terrifying. But, we must have it if we are to teach with integrity and
wholeness. We have to confront anything within us that is holding us back. If
we don’t work on our stuff, our stuff will continue to work on us. It will
continue to whisper in our ears; it will work on us however good our intentions
may be; it will show up at every nook and cranny in our lives, and that
controlling stuff will remain to us the ultimate truth voiced in “It’s not me,”
“I’m not comfortable doing that.” “I can’t.” and “I don’t have tenure.”
“Now, this is not highfalutin or wishy-washy or fluff. Let me go back
to the research findings of Sigal Barsade and her 2016 article written with
Olivia O’Neill in the Harvard Business Review titled ‘Manage Your Emotional
Culture.’ That article led me to an earlier article in the HBR, ‘Employees
Who Feel Love Perform Better,’ and then to still another that appeared in the
Administrative Science Quarterly, ‘What Does Love Have to Do With It?’ While
they are writing about how emotions play in the workplace, their observations
cut across all professions, and certainly are applicable to the classroom. Two
sentences in the first article caught my eye. The first was at the beginning
of the article: 'Most companies pay little attention to how employees are—or
should be—feeling. They don’t realize how central emotions are to building the
right culture.”' Replace ‘companies’ with 'professors.' The other sentence was
towards the end: ‘Most leaders focus on how employees think and behave—but
feelings matter just as much.’ Replace ‘employee’ with ‘students ‘and
‘leaders' with “professors.”
“Between these two sentences, they argue, that what they call
‘cognitive culture’—thinking and behaving —is only part of the story. The
often ignored ‘emotional culture’—feeling expressed silently in unspoken facial
expressions, body language, and vocal tones—is the crucial rest of the story.
And, when you gloss over ‘emotional culture,' you’re ignoring what makes people
tick. That is, emotions determine how people perform tasks, how engaged they
are, how imaginative and creative they are, how happy or sad they are, how
fearless or fearful they are, how resilient or brittle they are, and how
positive or negative they are. They ask what if students came to class
knowing you were really looking forward to seeing each of them and what if they
came to class looking forward to seeing you. They say that love was one of the
strongest drivers of satisfaction and commitment and engagement. What they
call connecting ‘companionate love’—caring about and for one another, having a
compassion for one another, having a tenderness towards one another, being kind
to each other—generated better moods, better performance, more satisfaction,
greater achievement. Love’s opposite, as well as faith’s and hope’s, is
disconnecting, objectifying indifference. That indifference is a toxic
attitude; it is a corrosive that makes it harder for anyone to perform.”
“For me, then, the findings of such researchers as Barsade and O’Neille
communal ’awe-full,’ then, warms the icy chill of ‘awful.’ With ‘awe-full'
comes broad smiles rather than sneers and frowns, wide eyes instead of drooping
eye lids, keen ears rather than deafness, an open and warm heart instead of a
closed and cold one, welcoming handshakes instead of fists, embracing arms
instead of folded ones, boundless energy instead of lethargy, and, above all,
a meaningful purpose. Never old. Never stale. Never routine. Never casual.
Never easy. ‘Awe-full’ is that ‘radical amazement’ of Abraham Herschel. He
said, to paraphrase him, our goal should be to get up each morning and go
through the day seeing the world in a way where everything and everyone is
incredible. Yeah, that pretty well sums up ‘awe-full.’”
Make it a good day
-Louis-
Louis Schmier
http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org
203 E. Brookwood Pl
Valdosta, Ga 31602
(C) 229-630-0821 /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
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mountains,\ /\
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hills" - / \_
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