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Copyright © Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
Date: Sun 6/12/2005 4:49 AM
Random Thought: Real Life
"Congratulations! Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and
away." It's that time of the year. It's Commencement time and people--academics,
parents, relatives, friends, and students--across the land, at collegiate graduations are
acting out in one way or another those opening words from Dr. Seuss' OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL
GO. People are thinking about and talking about students who are about to be on their own
as they take their commencing steps out from the structured and controlled world of the
classroom into the maze of life. Last week it was a column by David Brooks; this week it
was one by Tom Friedman. They were like day and night. The former faulted academia, the
latter extolled the unique teacher.
David Brooks was talking about the plight of graduates who have spent their short
lives engaged in obeying the commands of taskmastering teachers, getting grades, getting
into college, as he put it, "manipulating the world of the classroom," getting out of
college, and getting that career going. But, when these student are spit out into the
vast, disordered, almost lawless, career world of adulthood so many don't have a clue how
to travel through it or what they'll go through as they do. They've gone to school, but
they haven't gone to the school of hard-knocks. They've walked the hallowed halls of
higher education, but don't know how to walk the high wire and balance life's ups and
downs. They haven't been taught how to really address the serious life issues posed in
Dr. Suess' humorous verse. Suddenly, young people who were adored BMOCs and admired honor
students and acknowledged recipients of this or that recognition, are now reduced to
scrambling rodents in the competitive rat race. They don't have the feet-on-the-ground
know-how of what to do when they find that "Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you," and
"you'll be left in a Lurch. You'll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And
chances are, then, that you'll be in a Slump."
"Failure seems but a step away. Loneliness hovers." Brooks wrote about the funk
Seuss mentions that so many graduates so quickly find themselves in. "They often feel
stunted and restless (I haven't moved up in six months!), so they adopt a conversational
mode - ironic, self-deprecatory, postpubescent fatalism - that masks their anxiety about
falling behind."
Simplistic? Hyperboly? Maybe. But, something to think about. Brooks is
accusing us in the ivied academic world of the Ivory Tower of not really preparing
students for the unsheltered "real world" that lies beyond the secluding walls, defensive
moat, and protective drawbridge. In other words, Brooks is rightly raising the question
whether the sheltered and organized life on campus and especially in the classroom really
prepares students for the unstructured and often anarchic life where they can so easily
get stuck, in Dr. Seuss' words, on a "prickle-ly perch" or in a "waiting place," and don't
have the skills for the difficult task of "un-slumping" themselves. I assume Brooks
means that while we may introduce students to the knowledge of a discipline and the skills
of a livlihood, we may not be teaching them critical life skills.
Is he right? Do dismiss him out of hand? Again, it's something to think long and
hard about, however such reflection may be uncomfortable. Do far too many of us act as if
our purpose is limited to and thus concentrate on improving student performance in the
classroom, but not in life beyond? Do far too many of us focus on what students need and
will do "in here" in marked buildings and classrooms, and ignore what students will need
to fend for themselves "out there" on life's unmarked streets? Do far too many of us have
students learn by the book and not prepare them for a "textbookless" life where more often
than not the book is thrown away or quickly becomes obsolete? Do far too many of us
presume and assume that student performance in the present classroom predicts how a
student will do in the off-campus future? Do far too many of us not consider the
addressing of social skills, communication skills, people skills, and life skills in
general to be within their bailiwick? To find the answers, all we academics have to do is
read Dr. Seuss' "Oh, The Places You'll Go" and then ask and answer one more little
question: What is the ultimate meaning and purpose of what we do?
I posed these questions to an e-colleague. Her answer was quick and short. "Our
purpose is to prepare students for the future." True enough. But, I then asked, "The
future of what?" and "How far into the future?" Too often when far too many of us talk of
the future we talk of "mastery of the subject" in a class or major curriculum, not of
life; we so often limit ourselves to the limited future of classroom lessons rather than
life lessons; we so often concentrate on preparing students for the next class quiz, the
mid-term exam, final exam, and final grade of the class at hand, rather than for life to
come. Teaching for performance in a single class during a single term is vastly different
from teaching for use of skills when students are no longer students and are not in
school, when they have to decide on their own what to do and where to go, when they are
their own "mind-maker-upper."
Far too many of us teach students how to hit the fast ball without thinking how
hapless they will stand as life throws them curve ball after curve ball. So many of us so
often forget that we are teaching for the unpredictable future, preparing students not for
a classroom test or midterm and final exams, but for unpredictable real world of "tests"
when we're not present to be asked "will this be on the test" or "is this important."
That is, it's one thing to write an assigned research paper, cram and memorize to take a
test on a set of information and skills. It's another thing to help all students arm
themselves with life skills they need as they head into and live in an age in which jobs
are likely to be invented and become obsolescent at an increasingly blurring pace. The
chances of today's students staying in the same positions working for the same companies
for their whole careers are about zilch.
Enter Tom Friedman. In such a swirling age, Tom Friedman reminded his readers,
the greatest skill for success, much less survival, in life's great balancing act that
anyone can have, again in Dr. Seuss' words, is "just never forget to be dexterous and
deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left." That is, it is not so much
information as an agile and sure-footed suppleness, that ability to learn how to learn,
and that fearlessness and willingness to learn. Paraphrasing what Friedman rightly said,
the best way to be flexible and adaptable is to be fearlessly adventurous, and the best
way to be fearlessly adventurous is to learn to have the courage to take risks and risk
failure, and the best way to learn to have the courage to take risks and risk failure is
to learn how to learn, and the best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the
best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who themselves are fearless,
imaginative, creative adventurers, explorers, risk-takers, and learners. Those kinds of
teachers dance, smile, love, delight, believe, rejoice, understand, listen, see. They
help students learn to win the "lonely games" that they play against themselves, get past
places that "scare you right out of your pants," get through the "Hakken-Kraks howl," and
successfully paddle "many a frightening creek." These teachers themselves are always on
the move, love to learn, promote in students' inventiveness and creativity and
imagination, help strengthen students with a fearlessness for change, endow students with
individuality and independence, give control over to the students, encourage
decision-making and risk-taking, with endless support and unconditional encouragement
instill a self-esteem and self-confidence in each student, model and demand of students
authenticity and integrity and respect, love each student, rejoice in each student's
unique potential, and work tirelessly not merely to transmit information and knowledge and
skill, but to skillfully instill that love and faith in students for themselves, for
others, for learning, and for life.
When you take Brooks and Friedman together, you can't help but know that behind
every graduate is a teacher, and what kind of graduate enters life and the places that
graduate will go is so largely determined by the kind of teachers under whose influence
that graduate came.
Literally, a week doesn't go by that I don't go through the joyous and rollicking
pages of OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO to remind me of my purpose and meaning. So you know,
coming to think about it, and thinking how Dr. Seuss was quoted at my son's graduation
from Stanford's School of Business, every incoming first year student should be read and
read throughout his or her collegiate career and throughout his or her life, "OH, THE
PLACES YOU'LL GO." So should each of us.
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