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She had struggled, but in the end it was to no avail. Was she disinterested?  No, although her lethargy said otherwise.  Did she have any potential?  Of course, although you couldn't have guessed by the way she acted in class..  Did she make an effort?  Yes, herulcean, but not in the way you would ordinarily think.  Was she enthused.  Yes, but came across as apathetic.  Was she incapable?  Well, no, but no one could have guessed she was really incapacitated.  Was she unable?  Yes, in many ways, but not in any of the ways most would have concluded.  Only I knew of her inner struggles that were creating obstacles to her performance.  I saw it in her eyes; I read it in her body language.  I heard it in her voice.  More importantly, I was reading her daily journal entries in which she poured out her heart.  She wouldn't talk with her friends outside class.  Members of her community in class did not know what was going on.  She wouldn't communicate with them or work with them; she wasn't focused.  I told them, all I could tell them, was that she had "stuff" tearing at her heart.  They did not know why she always had a distant glaze in her eyes.  One community wrote me that she seemed to always have a tear ready to form in her eye.  I told him that I had his back and temporarily to pick up her slack.  I gave her slack.  I engaged her.  I supported and encouraged her.  I told her she could contact me at any time if she needed to talk.  You see, her father had died of brain cancer a couple of weeks before Christmas and her "ex step-mother" has disowned her immediately after the funeral.  At eighteen, she did not know how to cope;  she needed someone with whom to talk; she could only talk with me through her daily journal;  I replied; I tried to help her cope; I shared myself with her.  She wouldn't let me break confidence to ask for help in helping her to cope; she wouldn't seek help on her own to cope; she rejected my offers to help her seek help; in the end, she couldn't cope.  She didn't cry; she was sad, angry, numb, hurt, lost.   She felt she was dishonoring her father by trying to get on with her life; she felt she was displaying a disrespect of her father by coming back to school.  Others  assumed, she was one in the category of "don't belongs."  In reality, she hadn't given herself enough time to grieve, no one had.  After a few weeks, she abruptly picked up, stopped coming to class, and wouldn't answer my e-mails or texts or phone calls.  I hear she left school.  Others thought, "good riddance."  I knew otherwise.  

This brings me to two articles I was reading in the Harvard Business Review by John Kotter and Teresa Amabile.  They found that in business, efforts to change people or to help them change themselves, despite all the talk, efforts, and money spent, are more often than not doomed to failure.  I submit that is just as true in academia when it comes to both faculty and students.  The reason for the high failure rate to implement change is that leaders don't know what they're doing because not only are they're trying to do something to someone who really has to do for her/himself, they really don't know to whom they're trying to do anything.  So, unknowingly, they fall back on stereotypes; they grope and fire shots aimlessly in the dark.  

Does that makes sense?  Let me put it this way.  Do we professors really know--really know--who each student is?  Or, are we guessing, assuming, presuming, stereotyping, generalizing, "attributing," and blindly firing away?  Are we trapped by perceptions, stereotypes, generalizations, and assumptions trapped inside our heads and hearts?  Amabile's would answer these three questions with:  no, yes, yes.  That means, if we accept that at the core of education learning is change, our teaching is not going to be lastingly effective.  And, because we can't adapt to the individual needs of individual students whose needs we don't know, we can't make modifications and adjustments; and, because we can't really adapt, our attempts more often than not will wither, fail, and die.  And, of course, we throw up our hands in frustration and resignation with a "these students today....; and, we lay all the blame on the student.  The truth is that in the classroom, as everywhere else, we pay so much attention to visible activity, and we pay so little, if any, attention to that one critical, not looked for and thus not as easily seen element in performance, that driving force of performance:  inner emotion.  Any workplace, including the classroom, is emotion-driven; emotions, and subsequent attitudes, have enormous impact on what the jargon calls "outcomes."  That is true for learning; it is true for teaching.  Emotion-activity is a cycle during which influences in any place and in any manner and at any time can have a positive or negative influence on feeling activity, thought activity, social activity, and physical activity.  

Combining Kotter's and Amabile's studies, I ask: if we're so concerned with the state, nature, and level of student performance and achievement, if we are so concerned with retention, are we, should we be, as concerned with the attitude and emotion that are the driving and directing energies of student performance?  If we're so concerned with teaching outcomes, are we, should we be, as concerned with the attitude and emotion that are the driving and directing energies of professorial performance?  Most of us, regrettable, would say that is not our job.  I say it must be.  Our personal, family, professional, and social history is not in the past; it is present all around and inside us.  People feel and think differently because they have different stories.  How do we break out from our ensnaring, stereotyping, attributing habits of mind and heart?  How do we read each student's history?  How do we acquire an empathy for each student?  One answer is to understand that we are in the "people business" as well as in the "information and skill business."  Another answer is that we have to voraciously gather new information about and insight into each student and use it in ways most of us don't or don't want to bother imagining.    

I assert that most of us, when we enter a classroom we may, at best, look at and are influenced by the outer trappings of students, if we look at all.  But, even if we look, we don't see their inner workings.   And, agreeing with Teresa Amabile, from my experience, we're ignoring a crucial factor in a student's performance:  what's going on inside that student.  Students are human as are we.  They don't check their hearts and minds at the door any more than do we.  They don't close the book on their histories.  Like us, they are a mass of emotions, perceptions, experiences, assumptions, conclusions, purposes, suspicions, fears, likes and dislikes, can and can't, wants and don't wants, do and don'ts, memories, pains, beliefs about themselves and others to which they react and which makes sense of what's going on.  This inner nexus creates a dynamic that impacts on performance and achievement.   They, like we, are experiencing the push and pull of thoughts and emotions of satisfaction or irritation, suredness and confusion, answer and question, direction and drift, love or hate, accomplishment or frustration, joy or sadness, focus or distraction, energy and fatigue, and a host of other influences.  All these intertwine to affect their motivation, perceptions from moment to moment, relationships, and performance.  There's the inner play of family, friends, lovers intertwining to affect their motivation from moment to moment—with consequences for your performance that day.

We need a level of access beyond that of an outside and distant observer. But, how?  Like Amabile's methods, I rely on the classic form of the personal journal. Every day, each student sends me a journal entry, for my eyes only.  Each day, I read upwards of revealing 150 to 180 entries.  This way I see how they feel and think, and get an inkling into why they act or don't act as they do.  I see them struggling to juggle the family, academic, financial, and social pressures and demands acting on them.  Very often the detail, richness, and intensity of their entries, revealing the inner working of their lives, gives away the extent to which the people and events of the day are influencing their thoughts and emotions and actions.

One last word, especially to those who say none of this is part of their academic job description or they don't have the time.  We can talk of cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligences and social intelligence.  We can talk of Howard Gardners multiple intelligences.  But, people do not exist in separated emotional, intellectual, and physical compartments.  There is nothing simple about people or any one component of a person.  "State of mind," "state of 'heart,'" "state of connection" all interact in complex ways to have an impact on the "state of doing."  No one, you, me, or a student, has a chance of being understood unless we pay close attention to all components, especially emotion, and their interactions.

Make it a good day

-Louis-


Louis Schmier                          http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org       
Department of History                        http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta State University 
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