Hello Sara,

I am so glad that you wrote.  I wonder if your experience with those  
students was based on your openness to love them.  In my corner of the  
world, we are often afraid to use the word. It sounded like the  
strategies you created were born of that love and as a direct response  
to your students needs.  I think love as a core value for teaching is  
the indeed the most wonderful way to teach.  I'd love to hear you talk  
more about your story.  I think you'd like the work on Invitational  
Education which emphasizes that everyone matters. Have you read any of  
Nel Nodding's work?

I am glad the heron was meaningful for you.  That means talking about  
it wasn't in vain. I admit I was crying as I wrote and was fighting  
the hurt little voice inside me that was saying, "What was the point  
of saving her when she died anyway?"  I wasn't able to change the  
final outcome for her.  Yet I know I would do it again in a heart beat  
just for the chance to try to make a difference for her, and the  
chance to share her life for a moment.

On Tuesday, if I can get my essays done by then, my husband and I are  
going to camp at a Provincial Park at Lake Huron for a while. By  
Tuesday I'll be out of the conversations for a little bit.   I'll need  
to stop by at a bookstore and pick up some of the books you've all  
suggested to me.

Thank you very much,

Kathy



On 15-Aug-10, at 1:54 PM, Salyers, Sara M wrote:

> Dear Kathy and Alan and Jack,
> yesterday - while nursing a headache that my grandmother would have  
> described as 'enough to frighten the French', I was swithering over  
> whether to write and say something about Kathy's e-mails or just  
> keep quiet for a while if not altogether.
>
> Alan, the irony here is that it was your frustration at banging your  
> head against a wall that led to Kathy's response and then Jack's and  
> that thus brings me back to this forum. (You know, the trouble with  
> banging your head on the wall for a while is that, with all that  
> ringing in your ears, you may not notice when you've made an  
> impact!) So now I would ask, could you stay and be the the  
> struggling life that pulls those like me into the river? (Thanks for  
> the wonderful living metaphor , Kathy.) Because *this* is the  
> conversation I'm looking for - the one that I'd give a lot to be  
> allowed to enter.
>
> I've been looking for a particular kind of conversation. (Not a  
> better conversation, nor one that excludes joining in with other  
> conversations - just one that I badly need to have at this stage of  
> my own evolution.) Like Kathy, my head has been 'exploding' with all  
> that has been opening up in front of me, in my own case for the past  
> eight months. There are many things I really want, maybe even need,  
> to share with others in a way that is true to the experience itself.  
> I want to say, for instance, that I fell in love with my whole class  
> last semester and that I *know* that was why our classroom became a  
> magic lab instead of a writing lab. I want to find out if others  
> have seen and felt the same things. I long to share my amazement as  
> I watched myself becoming whatever they needed me to become: an  
> indefatigable cheerleader for every person there, without exception;  
> technologically proficient (yeeaaarrrgh); preternaturally perceptive  
> on occasion and on others just looking over and over again until I  
> could *feel* what I was seeing in my classroom; a facilitator who  
> helped them to 'fall in love' with themselves and one another. I  
> really, really want to have a conversation with someone about the  
> fact that 'what worked' among those strategies I invented, were the  
> ones I came up with in direct response to what I experienced my  
> students experiencing. And the fact that these hugely successful  
> strategies were ones for which I only figured out the rationale  
> AFTER I had already implemented them!
>
> I want to acknowledge you all and apologize for my own shortcomings  
> - particularly my cowardice! Although it was deeply important to me,  
> I let someone else jump into the river first. I was afraid to speak  
> from the place I was advocating because I am not any kind of expert  
> and I was afraid that I would sound ignorant and untutored. Along  
> came Kathy who blurted out the same fear and then went straight  
> ahead and talked openly about the way that her research is grounded  
> in her neglect of her own well being and happiness and the hypocrisy  
> of making a stand for others that you will not make for yourself.  
> While I advocated the eye/I of the story, described the deadliness  
> of academic jargon) and then included a very desiccated 'narrative'  
> of my own, Kathy sent us the heron.