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Copyright © Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 10:15:56 -0500 (EST)
Random Thought: Miracles in the Classroom
I was eating lunch at last week's Lilly conference and talking
with some nice people around me. We were from different campuses in
different disciplines. One person kept looking at my hands. Finally, he
cautiously asked me why the pinky on my right hand was "painted" with nail
polish. This week's color was a neat iridescent blue.
I smiled. That was about the fourth time I had been asked that
question at this conference. Still I smiled. I never tire of going back
to that fateful early January day in 1996 and tell that unfolding story
about Kim, a first year developmental studies student, and me. I always
tell people that I share as a storyteller because I fully believe, as Rich
Berrett from Cal State-Fresno, taught us in his stirring workshop, "The
Teacher as Storyteller," that stories communicate profound principles of
education by connecting the mind, body and emotions, and help us take
ourselves down into the enlightening depths of deep learning. For me,
this particular story never lets me forget that the active force in
education is a person; that the beauty of a person lies in seeing him or
her as a whole human being; that compassion for each student rests heavily
on being aware of that wholeness; that we must educationally involved with
emotional development as intensely as we are with intellectual and
physical development; that our educational system has to go beyond
competence and skills, and be designed to create enabling and empowering
conditions that can provide self-respect and self-actualization which will
help each and every person lead the most enriching life possible; that
there is a desperate need to put aside our confining educational dogmas of
information transmissing, planning, organizing and controlling, and
realize the sacredness of a educator's responsibilities for the lives of
so many people.
After I finished my tale, he said, "Things like that don't happen
to me. I wish they did." Then he asked, " How do you get miracles like
that to fall into your lap?"
I thought about for a few seconds. "I have learned over the last
nine years that I 'just' have to struggle to move my lap to where the
miracles fall."
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