You know, when I talk of seeing a class as an “awe-full” gathering of “sacred ‘ones,’” I have to make a confession.  It was not always so.  For the first 25 years of my career in higher education I always had proclaimed that “I care about students.”  And, I believed it.  After all, I never poor-mouthed any students.  Never.  The true inkblot of that statement was, however, as I admitted when I experienced my explosive and unplanned epiphany in 1991, it lacked authenticity.  I was being dishonest with myself.  If I was asked, “Do you see this or that student?” was the question. I probably would have answered, “No.” With patronizing eyes, I saw the fiction I wanted to see in order to make me feel I was right.   I felt that since I was saying that I cared, no one could say I didn’t.  But I came to realize how wrong I was. I had not been living what I had espoused and what I had thought I meant.  I actually had been using a fake language of caring; or, at least, an incomplete sentence.  It should have been a highly selective and judgmental statement of  “I care about some students” and “I care about the good students.”   Like the onlookers in the story I told the professor in my previous reflection, I only asked those “others” to reach out to me; and if they did not, for whatever reason, it was fault; it was not my responsibility to do anymore.   I had not been like the saintly man who entered the river and extended a caring, loving, helping hand to help the “others.”  My epiphany started to change all that.



	Now, before I go any further, I want to say that it’s okay to be frustrated, resigned, and even angry at times.  You don’t have to flay yourself if you occasionally experience these  emotions.  But, only occasionally.  Not all the time.  As a recovering “academic bias” addict, I can bear witness that while you can have negative feelings you can’t allow those negative feelings to have you.  When the negative feelings towards those “others,” are constant, they create an unconscious and addictive “academic bias.”  It’s not the negative feelings that I felt and lived out that were the problem; it was the fact of their constant presence and overwhelming control that was the real problem. But, the deeper problem than having an “academic bias” addication was not admitting to why I had those feelings in the first place.  Nevertheless, while being hooked on these negative attitudes made me feel that I was in the right, but they never made me feel joyful.  Those narrow attitudes proved to be a detriment to both me and those “others”—until I had my epiphany.  Before the epiphany I concentrated most of my time and energies on the “good students” and left the “others” to their own inadequate devices.  That was even truer when I went off on my scholarly research and publication binge between 1976 and 1991 in an effort to conform to the required image of the “academic norm” and to prove my own scholarly worthiness.  I admit that my addictive perception sapped my energy and creativity and imagination in the classroom.  Worse still, sniffing those emotions, I felt I was on high; my degrees, titles, position, and scholarly renown gave me the right to feel that I had made it, to feeling privileged, and maybe even feeling superior, to those “others.”  They allowed me to play convenient “head shaking” finger pointing blame games at both those “don’t belongs” “others” and “the system.” 



	At the core of my epiphany, was me.  For some mysterious reason, I found myself accepting rather than denying; I found that I didn’t become a combatant throwing self-righteous arguments at myself.  Somehow and for some reason, I was ripe for the pickings.  I was able to engage myself in calm conversation, to put myself under my own magnifying glass, and peer into my soul.  I brought long banished memories into the open, and in doing that I opened myself to new possibilities.  While I did not like what I found, somewhere I found the strength I didn’t know I had to deny them.  I discovered that unconscious “academic bias” hidden within me was masking the deeper biases I had against myself.  I was not at first comfortable with the confession that my family upbringing issues were still inadvertently and and unintentionally preying upon me, that I was still more of a prisoner of those experiences of being treated as an ignored second son, that I still had a need to be seen and be valued, and that I still needed constant reassurance to bolster my weaken self-esteem and self-confidence even at the expense of all those “others.”  I did not like seeing how so selective and limited were those “I care about students” words.  I was saddened when I realized how callous, corrosive, and cynical they made me toward those “others,” especially if they seemed to act as a dragging anchor on my insatiable quest to fulfill my own personal and professional needs.  Then, I came to see the evidence that was as obvious as the nose on my face.  By fulfilling my needs, I was ignoring the needs of those “others;” that quest for recognition and security and assurance had made me numb to the needs of those “others.”  I was doing to those “others” what had been done to me when I was one of them.



	 Don’t think facing up to myself quick, easy, or simple to engage in honest self-awareness, self-examination, self-reflection, and ultimately self-admission was not challenging, if not painful.  But, I had to come clean with myself if I was going to get clean and clean up my act.  I had to find ways to no longer need my older needs that fed on my weaknesses and anxieties.  I had to find new drives, new directions, new dreams, new purposes, new visions, new meanings, new fulfillments.  To do that, I had to take personal responsibility for what’s happening to both me and those “others.”   I had to admit that I had been an unwitting accomplice, aiding and abetting in perpetuating the feeling of most of those “others” that they were “don’t belongs.”  I had to admit that I had voluntarily submitted to the demands of “the system.”   It was the only way to acquire a new consciousness, a new sense of self,  to transform myself form what the social psychologist at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, calls a “righteous mind” to a humble one, that would change both my attitude and my ways about both myself and all those “others.:   to find the “awe-full” in those I once had seen only as “awful.”       



	That adventurous feeling of finding ways to dispel conclusions I had long made about myself and each student, which were wrong more often than not, was thrilling.   To find ways to instill in myself a “growth mentality,” and help each student do likewise, was really freeing. When you start humbly to admit that you’ve made past mistakes, when you get to actually start understanding yourself, when you start understanding others, when both you and they let mutual trust and respect drop your and their guards, when you and they learn something new about yourself and each of them and themselves, when you and they see each other’s humanity, that’s really both a self-esteem and self-confidence builder.  And that, I think, is one of the most important potential emotional tools we have to foster learning.   Because once you open yourself and are open to new possibilities and new opportunities, once you truly unconditionally and non-judgmentally value both yourself and each student, once you’re motivated by empathy, once you replace hostility with the virtue of hospitality,  once that rubber hits the road with methods to open yourself and each student to each's unique potential, once you see the results both in yourself and others, once those “don’t belongs” such as Dennis start revealing that they just might have the capacity to belong if given a real chance, once those “let anyone in” show they just might have it in them to deserve being “let in,” you can’t stop and let go.  You can’t go back into your previous blinding matrix.  You refuse to put back on your chains and go back into your prison.  You break out of your own echo chamber.  You begin to see that there is more to your own story and the story of each student, and are able to internalize those tales.  You just can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  It’s kind of a new addiction to caring and kindness, to faith and hope and love.  And that is a “awe-full” feeling. 



Make it a good day



-Louis-





Louis Schmier                         		http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org       

203 E. Brookwood Pl                         

Valdosta, Ga 31602 

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