Dear Pip, Joan, Alan and Brian (and all)
I'm very, very grateful to you for your responses to something I wrote out of a feeling of desperation and for the practical purpose of saving my husband's sanity! (I've been a difficult, short tempered, distant and downright prickly person at home for the past couple of weeks.) It felt like a very selfish act, to thrust my own - lengthy - situation at everyone when I know perfectly well that we are *all* facing our own difficulties - especially Geisha. So it's very humbling indeed to be thanked for that. I'm still learning about AR and while I can clearly see how the dynamics of relationship supersede every other factor in terms of what kinds of practice, growth, empowerment, achievement etc. happen in a classroom, it's harder for me to see how or where to fit that into the AR model. I think I would have responded to my own story by identifying with the experience and perhaps by clarifying what I already understood. I wouldn't know how to begin share it with anyone else in a way that made it useful. (Just as I wouldn't know how to even find the things that Jack discovers in the teaching videos, let alone extrapolate from them. But I love it when he points them out!)

So, dear Pip, thank you so much, and please use anything I wrote in any way that you see fit. I'm just an adjunct. I teach developmental writing (and this semester, reading and writing), at Pellissippi State Community College in Tennessee within an extraordinary department - the Tranistional Studies Department. I do seem to remember that Jack recommended that paper by Moira Laidlaw to me and it is high time I got hold of it. Thank you. 

Joan, thank you also for your loving support and of *course* I don't mind your sharing my story with whomever you wish. I absolutely agree that the under-preparedness is even more (and more critically), a feature of us, the teachers than of these students. I like 'underprepared' as a term much more than the term 'developmental' but I like my own Dept's, rare epithet 'Transitional' students even better for the following reason: A student who had not had the opportunity to learn how to read and write or do math would be underprepared. It would be our job to help that student fill in the gaps and prepare for the rigors of college. A student who has been through thirteen years of a vertical, (colonizing) compulsory education system has not simply lacked the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills. He has undergone actual neurological damage. (That means you and me, too, I'm afraid!) The ones *we* see in our classrooms have sustained the greatest damage. So, before we can even begin to 'fill in the gaps' (at least successfully), we have to reverse the damage. Thus, we help them to transition from "learned helplessness" to empowered, from damaged to whole and from programmed to be programmable, to independent thinkers. That means developing programs whose primary function is this healing, (manifest in re-engagament, 'alert relaxation', focus, reflection, self awareness et alia) and which address the mechanical skills of language and, mathematics as a *means to that end* rather than the other way around. In a nice irony, the outcomes in terms of required benchmarks are satisfyingly higher, and often quite a *lot* higher, than the norm. Teaching something other than, or beyond, Math and English for their own sakes causes controversy and has already put my own department into conflict with other, traditional departments at my college. I won't bore you with the miserable details of the war but it is reflected, of course, at State Board level. (I spent months writing a kind of 'manifesto' for our department in order to help raise awareness - among our own faculty as well as the rest of the college - of what the Dept. is really taking on because, of course, when I became fierce about my students I became fierce about a department that is actually willing to rewrite the whole 'rule book' to help them.) I am just overwhelmed right now at the odds stacked against us and the chances that the light can prevail against the darkness, which seem very small. It feels as if we're destined to 'go under'. At the instigation of the traditional departments, full time jobs are currently being denied to those with advanced degrees in anything other Literaure or Math, on the grounds that, when our department folds and the individual courses return to control of the English and Math Depts., they will no longer be qualified to teach our students. The smug and delighted certainty of our removal, in the face of the miracles coming out of this department, is infamous and utterly debilitating. I'm just holding on tight to the names and faces of individual students for whom I have been important. A single human soul matters as much as a whole world - As Pip  reminded me, what Mother Teresa said to a novice who was in tears because she felt that all her efforts were just a 'drop in the ocean', was, "Yes, but the ocean is made of drops." (I'm really, *really* trying to remember that, Pip!)

Alan, forgive me but I intend, not to forsake but to ignore the vertical as much as I possibly can, beyond acknowledging its importance! I *do* of course, acknowledge it. I maintain, however, that if balance is an x/y axis between which effective and powerful 'oscillation' can take place, then we have a job in front of us to construct any kind of y axis at all. (Indeed, I doubt we have a true appreciation of the vertical anyway, since we have no working, established horizontal from which to look at it!) At least, that's my intent if there remains any point in doing so when the multitude of excuses for social engineering (and lobotomizing), under the dissembling guise of education - with the backing of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and their NGO offspring - seem set to sweep us, and everything I do and believe, into historical footnotes.

Brian, thanks also. The strange thing is that I am only just *truly* coming to see that the most important thing we can articulate isn't what works for our students  (as huge and revolutionary as that might be) it's the love that gives rise to what works. That's quite a big step for me - the ideas, articulation person!

Much love to all,
Sara
________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brian wakeman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 5:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Love in teaching

Sarah,

You say:
something extraordinary happened. I fell in love with my classes: fiercely and deeply in love with them.  I have a fallen in love again each semester and with every class, so far. I've never had any equivalent experience and I know no adequate way to describe it. I can no more explain or define it than I can explain the beauty of a baby's smile. One week I am with a bunch of strangers towards whom I  am well disposed and, I suppose, committed. The next… they possess my soul. Though I cannot explain how or why this happens, it is the only elegant explanation for what has taken place since that first 'fall'. (I know that I am by no means alone in this teaching experience, by the way, but I suppose we each respond to love in our own ways.)
I've never seen these thoughts written before...... but it is something I have felt so important in teaching, indeed in management of a school too.
Education has strong elements of the 'relational', of seeking the good of students, affection, agape love, and the human chemistry of interaction
.
When students see the regard, when they feel the warmth of acceptance, the genuine interest of the teacher in their world, their learning.....then the hard shell bud cases can open to the sun.
I've observed it in 15 year olds, and in adult education.
.... and seen the 'joy' in the face of the teacher.

Thank you for expressing this.

Brian