Since I’ll be a bit late with the next post on Knowing Oneself, I thought you should be aware of the reason. As some of you may know, due to my friend and former colleague Steve Harmon’s recent and generous Facebook post, with accompanying photo, I was invited and offered the keynote address at Gardner-Webb University’s Faculty Convocation, initiating the new academic year, on Tuesday, August 10^th.  My days were, therefore, pretty much dominated for a few weeks by my thinking, preparing, writing and, as is my habit, “dickering, tweaking, and revising” the manuscript.

That said, and at my wife’s suggestion, I have posted the address here. Since it was about a 22-minute presentation, it is probably the longest piece I’ve ever posted, so feel free to avoid it, if that sounds a bit much! It’s untitled, but here it is:

The last time I was privileged to stand before this group—at least as it was then composed—was over 5 years ago at the last faculty meeting of the 2015-16 academic year, to express my gratitude for the treasured experiences of a post-retirement career that I never could have foreseen or imagined. And then I bid my farewells and I left at the end of the semester . . . . except here I am again, like a bad penny!  Now you can blame the FDIIC for that, but I will venture to thank them for the opportunity to be here as you gather to initiate the new academic year.

Although, after five attempts, I’m now finally and fully retired and haven’t been directly involved in teaching for many years, I need to be absolutely clear that teaching and learning was what drew me into a 45-year career in higher education. It was what kept me absorbed and challenged for over twenty years as a teacher, and I never forgot that it was my real reason for being—even when I went over to the “dark side” of academic administration.

But let me back up and tell you briefly how I got there, because it’s important to what I want to say to you. I grew up in a seriously evangelical and deeply fundamentalist Baptist Church, so when at the age of fifteen or so I experienced a “call to ministry,” that meant only one thing—being a pastor— and as a result, I finished high school and started to college as, what in those days, was called a “preacher boy.”

The college I attended was fairly conservative, but it was still a ways beyond the narrower religious world in which I had been raised, so it was an eye-opening experience when I discovered a broader understanding of “a call to ministry,” especially Martin Luther’s view that a person’s life work—no matter what it is—is not simply a job or occupation; it’s a calling, a vocation, as today’s scripture reading affirmed (Romans 12:1-7).

Equipped, then with a more inclusive understanding of my calling, it began to dawn on me by my sophomore year, that my gifts lay more in the world of teaching than in pastoral ministry, an idea which was helped along by some teachers with whom I engaged in rich learning relationships and who provided some very appealing models that I thought, maybe someday, I could try to emulate. So I moved through my basic seminary education and on, very deliberately, to a doctoral program so that I might be qualified for a teaching position should the possibility ever arise.

And it was in that doctoral program that I was drawn into a relationship with the teacher who would become my major professor, and from whom I caught “like a cold” a love for philosophy, which became the major area of my doctoral program and my dissertation.

After serving, then, in pastoral roles for several years, lo and behold, that teaching opportunity in the field of philosophy did open up in a series of unpredictable “falling dominoes;”—I will spare you the details—and so the rest, as they say, is history.

But this bears repeating: Being engaged in teaching and learning and, later, seeing even my administrative role as enabling others to be directly engaged with students, is what I saw as my calling.

And this – this – bears saying: I entered into my role as a teacher of philosophy, and other classes as well, carrying with me the spirit and the passion of my major graduate professor who had so inspired my love for the subject—and, while at times my reach almost certainly exceeded my grasp, it has had a profound effect on my life.

I know that the world of education and of student culture has changed, not always for the better, since my time in the classroom, but I continue to believe that the kind of learning that grabs and transforms does still happen, most often in the relationship between teacher and student—as my own experience has so strongly confirmed—and that this is the magic that keeps us vital, that keeps us coming back.

I am aware that there are some administrative and staff persons present this morning. While I am primarily addressing this gathering of faculty, I have not forgotten what Luther taught me—you also have a calling and sometimes it leads you to be in contact with students in ways that are directly or indirectly related to their learning experience at Gardner-Webb and that in such encounters you, too, may make a rich and teachable connection that has a memorable effect on a student’s life. 

I hope, then, that all who are present will hear what I have to say, not as“preachy” cliches, but as thoughtful words and genuine affirmations that are meant for you personally–each and all of you.

Because I want to celebrate the honored and honorable work you do—what Ernest Boyer called “the sacred act of teaching.”

There are certainly some reasonable things to say in the world of teaching and learning about such issues as academic rigor, curricular content and structure, pedagogical methods, and the like. 

I have engaged in those discussions and I have strong feelings about them.

I deeply believe, for example, that we need to reaffirm the classical notion that thinking is not something alien to the universe, but rather endemic to what it means to be human, such that our teaching is infused with the confidence that—occasional evidence to the contrary—our students and our colleagues are capable, as Parker Palmer puts it, of “thinking about thinking.”  Without this kind of education, we run the catastrophic risk of becoming a nation of technically competent people who, however successful their vocational preparation, have never learned to use those abilities—now termed, ironically and mistakenly in my opinion, as ”soft” skills—I’m speaking, of course, about such things as reason, critical thinking, problem-solving, and imagination, the very capacities that will enable them to enter a conversation about a broader world of ideas and cultures.

But when all is “said and done,” I deeply believe that at the heart of what we do is this: if students are to have a genuine encounter with learning—and if education is not about that, then I don’t understand it at all—it will happen most often because there is an engagement, “a meeting,” with a teacher.

I know that there is a lot to distract you these days from that central focus and to allow your sense of calling to get a bit stale. And so, that said, let me address briefly “the elephant in the room,” with a few words of response to the effects of our unique experience with this pandemic.

I’ll start by confessing that I’m no expert on this subject and while I have experienced the results of the pandemic on my personal life, I did not experience it in anything resembling “being in your shoes.”

Although I’ve done some research on the subject and heard more comments than I could number from my wife, who has walked in your shoes, most of what I have to say is my own attempt at a “common sense” approach.

Obviously, this 18 month pandemic that has happened, and at some level is still happening, will, almost certainly, be unforgettable.

As Guy Sayles reminded us in his recent blog, this long season of necessary isolation from one another—and from students—has caused us to realize how crucial our physical presence with one another is and how we have suffered from its absence.

Fatigue of various kinds—physical, mental, spiritual—has settled-in on many of you, I’m sure.

A substantive survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education found that, even near the middle of the pandemic, faculty were feeling overworked, stressed, and thoroughly exhausted; experiencing high levels of hopelessness, anger, and grief. Some of you may have wondered if you’re on the edge of burnout, which has been shown, by the way, to be rampant in higher education. Its effects are nothing new to our world, of course.

Some of you have no doubt experienced it before, but there is no question that the pandemic has brought it on with a vengeance and an intensity we have never seen. 

I don’t want to dwell on this but I think one thing needs to be said. Note that one of the typical effects of burnout is a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.In a word, a sense of failure.

If I have one comment—no, make that one plea—with regard to the effects of “pandemic burnout” it would be this: Please, see it for what it is—the response of your body and mind to the overload that this sweeping and insidious attack on your health and wellbeing has imposed upon them,

a mental and physical reaction out of your control,

and in no sense a failure on your part.

What is within your power to decide is how to confront its effects and find a way to move beyond them.

This isn’t a therapy session, of course—I wouldn’t be qualified to lead it anyway—but there are certainly resources available here from people who are qualified, as well as from relationships with supportive family and friends. I urge you to seek what is there.

With the often-quoted words of Winston Churchill, “Never let a good crisis go to waster,” I’ll move on now.

The pandemic aside, then, it’s awfully easy these days to get caught up in “performance anxiety.” Assessment and institutional effectiveness have entered the permanent vocabulary of higher education. Everyone wants you to prove you are doing a good job by evaluating and documenting and quantifying.

It’s enough to make even an easy-going person cranky. As Kenneth Ashworth put it in a wickedly insightful article, “by the time (we) devise all the tools dictated by others to carry out our responsibilities, (we) find there is no room left in the toolbox for the instruments that used to make the job fun, such as creativity, flexibility, experimentation, and initiative.  No wonder some of (us) wilt like a carrot pulled up once too often to see if it is still growing.” 

Now, the exaggerated reality embedded in that humorous sarcasm aside, I want to acknowledge what I’m sure, in our best moments, we all know: that

it is right and reasonable for us to indicate what we expect our students to learn, and to demonstrate our effectiveness in achieving those goals.

But having said that, a host of things are left unsaid, including balancing accountability for “anticipated results” with those exhilarating learning experiences that happen in “a magic moment” that couldn’t have been anticipated or put into some measurable formula.

In Parker Palmer’s words, “Authentic teaching and learning require live encounters with the unexpected, that which we did not know would happen until it did happen.  If these elements are not present, we may be training or indoctrinating students, but we are not educating them.”  Results are certainly not irrelevant, but the bottom line, beneath all the other stuff teachers must do, is the student’s encounter with learning in their engagement with a teacher.  That’s where the magic is and we lose sight of it at our peril!

I’m convinced that it happens most often

• when the student understands why the teacher values the subject,
• when the student sees that the subject has transformed the teacher’s life,
• when the student is invited to learn in a  relationship that is personal and calls for encounter, and struggle, and change. 

That kind of learning, in any field at all, is the kind that grabs and transforms; that enlarges the capacity of the mind, rather than trying merely to stuff it with information, however useful. 

That is liberating learning, and it is relevant to every subject in every educational setting, and to every teacher’s encounter with students.

I know it doesn’t happen every day with every student or teacher;

I know that students are sometimes resistant;

I know teachers are sometimes resistant.

But it does happen and it’s the magic that revitalizes you, that keeps you committed to what you do.

This is the heart of the matter, without which the whole enterprise is ashes.  Curricula come and go, but great teachers and eager students, like ripples in a pond, go on forever. It’s the hidden curriculum and without it, a curricular structure designed by “Divine wisdom” itself would be an empty shell and a bad bargain at any price.

Now both alongside and within that sacred role that distinctively belongs to you, let me offer briefly an idea that has become one of persistent building blocks of my mind: and that is the notion of community. 

I’m sure that’s partly because I experienced and was nourished by a supportive community of colleagues for the majority of my professional life,

partly because teaching and learning does not/should not happen in isolation,

and partly because I never had the confidence that I could do it alone. 

This sacred enterprise requires an individual and a community that, in Parker Palmer’s words, “creates a space in which conversations of respect and consequence can occur.”  And while it’s clearly helpful in such conversations to share what worked and what didn’t, the connections, Palmer says, are “not in their methods, but in their hearts—meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit converge.”

“Small wonder, then,” he says, “that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart.” Even more reason, then, to affirm and cultivate that supportive community available in those moments “when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able.”

And yet, as important as we acknowledge it to be, community is not easy, and it’s not always a natural thing to do in the world of teaching.  There is that tendency sometimes to take the attitude that “my classroom is my castle, and the sovereigns of other fiefdoms are not welcome here.” Now if that attitude seems foreign to you, then I’m happy for you, but I confess that I do recognize it, shamefully at times in my own history and in the professional lives of some of my colleagues.  The price of it is isolation, and professional loneliness. The plain truth is that isolation is not necessary.  We can and should “connect” with one another.  As the saying goes, “Even the best teachers have bad days.”

While I wouldn’t characterize myself as “a best teacher,” I do recall, so vividly even now, a class during my second year of teaching.  It was one of two sections of the same general education course I was teaching.  I was preparing, substantively and procedurally, the best I could—despite the fact that graduate school had taught me all about content and virtually nothing about process and pedagogy—and I was doing well to stay a week ahead of the students.

The morning section was going pretty well, by my lights,but the afternoon section . . . . totally sucked!

Almost everyone sat there like stumps on logs,

body language full of passive aggression,

unresponsive to every attempt to elicit conversation. 

The one or two exceptions in the group were soon smothered by the pall of apathy that settled over the class.

About mid-semester I confessed to the class my frustration—that I knew it wasn’t working and was willing to accept my part of the responsibility, make some changes—what suggestions could they give me to make this better? 

It was like waiting for an echo in a closet—nothing came back. 

So I plodded through the rest of the semester, imparted information, gave the tests, reported the grades and walked away feeling like a failure. 

How I could have profited then from the kind of supportive community of colleagues which I later sought out and found!  Faculty groups that met on a regular basis to learn from one another, sharing everything from coaching in subject matter, to methods and techniques, to learning styles, to “critical moments”—whether they were “Eureka” moments or “crash-and-burn” moments. 

I don’t think I ever would have survived without such collegial gatherings; at the least, I would have been a far less effective teacher and a more impoverished self. 

And so as I  commend to you the enrichment and sustenance you can find in your own community of teaching and learning and urge you to seek it, I also celebrate with profound gratitude what you do and I encourage you to affirm, and to cherish your irreplaceable role and your sense of “calling” in “the sacred act of teaching.”

And finally, I leave you with this: some years ago, while doing background reading in preparation for playing the role of King Arthur in a production of Camelot, I discovered a famous passage from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, where Merlyn speaks in his role as mentor to Arthur, but they are words for all of us—teachers, administrators, staff, and students alike—in the community of teaching and learning. And this is what he said:

“The best thing . . . is to learn something.  That is the only thing that never fails.  You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, . . . you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled into the sewers of baser minds.  There is only one thing for it, then—to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.  Learning is the thing for you.”

May it ever be so for you, and for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you!