REPENT

REPENT (turn back, turn back)

As long as I’ve been here there has never been

an effort to repent, which is to say:  turn back

turn back oh you  industrious and conscientious

ones: flip your collective academic attention back

and away from  WHAT we are doing, doing, &

doing to HOW.

Imagine raising high that magnificent shared

intelligence up up and away from its incessant

transitive action  & letting  it loop recursively

& reflectively back on our  collective SELF so

as to consider HOW?  How are we doing?

How are we Doing IT?  How we do what we do.

All these years:  fiddle with recruitment, fiddle

with expansion,  fiddle with new walls and buildings,

dormitive spaces & Glad  modifications, buildings

reconfigured like anything, fiddle with empowerment
and sexual abuse, fiddle with advising and tracking
the unenchanted:   3 different pairs of new horses for
the catalogue as well as  hauling timber out of the forest
with minimum eco-logical damage; new postal address
so as to  capitalize on PLACE recognition, new  majors
& minors & a generalized one size fits all syllabi-driven
algorithms across the curriculum so as to satisfy pre-
requisites and and requisites and be able to  call my
self liberally educed.  A critical thinker.

But no consideration of how.

It’s a terrible word: pedagogy.

I mentioned it in class once and the kids

thought I was perverted.  “We got enough priests in

that field, Sam: don’t need it here. “

Even the word means nothing around here,

except maybe in the Education Department where

it’s probably more a matter of fitting-in with the

impoverished official cover-the-ground, stay-on-

task pedagogies ye have always with you in

preparation for the next  re-accreditation ordeal

and not making  any mess trying to reform,

reformat, reconfigure, re-calibrate the universe

of academic con-verse and be saving the future of

the  world or making  it a better place or just teaching

delight in the Life of the Mind: after all this is SCHOOL

 mode  I’m talking about, Not Church or State & there’s

a difference, yes?

Do I overstate?  It's possible.

I am large. I contain pulchritude.

Improve my terms. We can argue.