Just came in.  It's a chilly "brrrrrrrry," 31 degree, overcast morning out there.
No colorful streaks of dawn. The skies are woolen gray.  The air has a light smothering,
ashen hue.  There's a gray feeling that the color has been sapped out from everything.
And as I started working to get back to my pre-op power walking distance, I thought about
gray.  Poor gray.  Who would lift a toasting glass to gray?  Few I know.  Who would think
to get up in the morning, brew a pot of delicious coffee, step outside, take a deep
breath, walk five miles, sit down with a hot cup, and feel "God, it's a bright, beautiful
gray day?"   Probably not many.  I will after this morning.   In fact, when you enter that
classroom you might consider proclaiming "What a magnificent gray class."   Use a
monotonous color associated with the doldrums and blahs to describe that glorious
gathering of those whom I call "sacred ones?"  You bet!.

	Poor gray.  It gets a bum rap it doesn't really deserve.  I say this because for
some reason a piece in the Washington Post a few weeks ago by Phillip Kennicott has been
tugging on my mind.  In it he was down on gray.  He wrote about the drabness of winter's
gray, accentuated by the fact that it follows the celebrating colors of the holiday
season.  He was down on the color gray calling it a dulling color like "pewter gray" and a
corrupting color like "blue gray."   In one sense he's right.  After all, does anyone
remember ever having seen gray Christmas lights adorning homes, trees, or malls? 

	But, I think he's done a disservice to such a deserving color.  You see, when it
comes to teaching I like gray.  I find nothing tedious or ordinary about it.  In the
classroom is it the most colorful of colors; it is the most dynamic; the most precise; the
most challenging; the most lively; the most invigorating.  No, gray in the classroom is
not a "neither-here-nor-there-color;" it's an "on-the-mark" color; it's a "full-of-life"
color; it's the purest of colors.  It's the color closest to the reality of real life.
It's a "keeping-you-on-your-toes" color.  It's an awareness color.  But if you don't like
gray, you've forsaken most of who and what is in the classroom; you've bleached out all
that is colorful; you've erased names; you've blurred faces; you've made for uniformity,
conformity, and monotony.

	Why?  Gray is a gray area color. Gray is a nuance color, a color of complexity and
complications.  It a defying defining color.  It's a stereotype-buster color that
spotlights the individual.  It finds the holes in the statistical averages.  It is,
therefore, for me a poetic color.  It's the color of the extraordinary.   It's a color of
the subtle; it's a color of the sublime.  It's the color of the valuable.  It's has such a
bright side to it that I almost have to wear sunglasses.  None of that simplistic, over
simplistic, distorting, unreal, flattening, life-leeching, herding, stereotyping,
faceless, nameless, cut-and-dry, and black-and-white stuff with gray.   With gray you
can't mindlessly categorize and label into distorting corrals.  You can't dehumanize the
classroom. 

	That's why gray is so vibrant.  It smartens up education.  It's the color Carl
Jung would have referred to when he said you have to put aside your formal theories and
intellectual constructs and axioms and statistics and charts when you reach out to touch
that miracle called the individual human being.  And that is exactly what we do or should
be doing:  reaching out to touch each individual human being each day in each classroom.
You know, many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.  What would
it mean, then, if you saw each class as a gathering of separate and sacred ones, if you
treated each student with a sense that he or she was of infinite value?  I can tell you
what I do.  As I praise the miraculous-ness of each student, each student appears valuable
in my eyes; and, as each student appears to be valuable, I am obligated to treat him or
her as a valuable not to be lost.  Then, I find that I am more inclined to look each
student in the eye and see a noble, sacred, unique, miraculous human being, not a
student,.  The result is that I can't help but treat him or her with the infinite respect
and concern to which he or she is entitled.  After all, isn't that how each of us wants to
be treated?  Why should we be any different when we treat each student?

	I like gray, then, because when it comes to students and teaching in academia,
there so often deafness to Jung's warning; there's a consequent laziness of ideas, a
susceptibility to simplified explanations, and a playing of a numbers game.  This
stereotyping is always and totally unethical and immoral because it lying.  Not every
person is guilty of the charge that's leveled or of the perception imposed.  No, its gray
that inoculates each person in that classroom with the life that stereotypes and
classifications and categorizations had sucked out.  It's gray that tells us that the life
of the classroom is an intricately woven carpet with many different colored and
differently layered threads brought together in different patterns.  And while we have to
reduce this complexity to manageable proportions for the sake of conversation, the
tendency is too often to over-simplify and consequently to distort, and, then, to refer to
that distortion as if it is absolute truth.  The result is that we unfairly don't deal
with the whole person; we judge, assess, and rely exclusively on one or two things; we see
selectively because, once again, many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our
point of view.      We see a GPA, a test grade, an SAT score, an award, a recognition,
skin color, special needs, clothing, tattooing, body piercing, accent, gender, sexual
orientation, etc, etc, etc.  We academics see each other no differently.  It's akin to
appraising a diamond by merely looking at one facet or designing a house with only one or
two walls or reviewing a book after reading only a few pages.  There result is that we
lose the sense of the sublime and subtle, we're blind to the totality and wholeness of the
person, and we, therefore, reduce real people--as well as ourselves--to inert abstractions
and staid statistics and lifeless constructs.  

	That's the real dumbing down in education.

	So, here's to enlivening gray.  I think I'll e-mail Kenny and give him "gray" as
another word for my Dictionary of Good Teaching.

Make it a good day.
 
      --Louis--
 
 
Louis Schmier                                www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History                   www.newforums.com/L_Schmier.htm
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698                   /\   /\  /\            /\
(229-333-5947)                                /^\\/  \/  \   /\/\__/\ \/\
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