no man is an island: NO! man IS an Island

Non-Lunchroom On-Line Faculty L
    Learning & Teaching Styles Forum
 
My approach to teaching all these years comes out  of
weakness, cowardice, inadequacy, a sense of over
whelming limitation surrounded by competency, clarity,
the goals and  purposes of my colleagues and of students
themselves who individually and collectively have always
impressed me with the variety of their intelligence, interests.
academic and extra-curricular abilities: a resource blocked
by the necessary but insufficient black-plastic sheets we toss
over every class to suppress the weedy greenness.  .
 
Not being humble here.  O contrary. Merely  describing.
Arrogance possibly—because this sense has always made
me feel the limits of institutionalized educating and an ongoing
haughty & naughty desire to make edicating make my sense.
 
“How can he remember well his  ignorance which his growth
requires, who has always to be using his knowledge.”   
 
Thoreau said this. It’s a mantra for me.  Ignorance and stunned
stupidity, confusion, doubt, ambiguity, inarticulateness, mess &
guess, margins and rooms for error: what it takes to get better
and good.
 
A Goodie is a Wannabe-Good so bad he can’t afford the
bad it takes to get good.  I’m surrounded by goodies on
both sides of the desk. Just sayin'. Just describing here.
Not a judgment or condemnation which merely genereate
defense and defensiveness, know what I mean.
 
Does this sound humble?  
 
The agenda of institutionalized education  is essentially vocational: 
teaching a discipline, the information and the methods appropriate
to established bodies of knowledge. How to be a chemist, not how
to invent, innovate, generate chemistry.  And the same with all the
disciplines.  A consuming agenda.
 
A composing agenda: making, inventing, generating, and all the
fooling around it takes (I omit the word  “creating” because it’s
almost as useless as ‘love.”) does not enjoy favored nation status
with clarity, consistency, coherence, predictability, regularity and
control.
 
Blah blah blah : I get tired of my own life-long whine.
 
        Here’s really what I want to try to say.
 
                 The Two Economies
 
It is something like a Mission Impossible and yet a necessity
I believe to build an institutional environment where the values
of  both RIGOR  and INNOVATION are cherished equally.
 
The value-sets are radically opposed, hostile, threatening and
incommensurate  to each other.  Imagine me and Dr. Bradshaw
(bless his heart) in the same room  on a committee  together. We
happen to love each other after all these years so we while we
can hate each other's priorities,  it’s merely business and
excruciating but not crucial.
 
And that’s my point.
 
How is an environment for study and learning built that can
embrace the radically hostile opposing values of  composing
and consuming, innovation and  rigor, mess & guess and
clarity & coherence without doing disservice or injustice to each?
 
I sometimes describe it as building an Ice Cream Parlor in HELL,
with nothing but appreciation for HOT and COLD.
 
This is not easy to bring about—or even frame conceptually: the
bias for clarity, consistency, and coherence is so strong.
 
We’re all GOODIES: wannabe-good so bad  we can’t afford the
bad-it-takes to get there. (Just sayin'. Not a judgement, heavens
no.)
 
I have had to learn to speak out of 3 sides of  my mouth more and
less at once (so to speak) in order to try to do justice to  the opposition
of values without falling into the good-guy / bad-guy  habit on either side
of the coin.
 
It makes for tom-foolery and idiocy,   contra diction and paradoxologic
and that-in-itself demands building up some frame of tolerance in order
to get away with it with the listeners and potential players..
 
An environmental issue.

xxxooo,  Sam   (Push Reply to All if there is any non-lunchroom-constrained
desire in improving my terms and point of view and maybe sustaining
some converse action along these lines in these days preoccupied
by turmoil and turbulence.) turbulence and preoccupation.)