Yesterday as I read kos's front page piece DK4 open beta just days away, and why we did it I was surprised to find myself mentioned:
. . .you may follow Teacherken, but without the one-a-day limit, you may find that his interests run much further than education and he might introduce you to random stuff you might've never seen otherwise.
I was honored, and also pleased that he acknowledged how broad my interests are - I do write about music, politics, the environment, human rights, and whatever might capture my fancy. In the past when kos solicited nominations for the front page I remember that some would criticize nominations of me on the grounds I was too narrow, that I only wrote about education.
Also yesterday, I discovered that several people had nominated me for the Edublogs 2010 Awards, which surprised me and delighted me because among educational bloggers, while I am respected for what I write, I am not really considered an educational blogger because of the breath of the topics on which I write.
The combination of these contrasting mentions got me thinking about our perceptions and assumptions.
As a teacher I know how important it is not judge or pigeonhole the students who appear in my class. Some my dress like thugs but think and write like philosophers. Others may not speak in complete sentences but when given paper and pen can be very expressive. Or the converse - those who talk up a storm can struggle to put thoughts on paper. I cannot assume either by appearance or by background or by how I first encounter them that I properly understand my students. It is my responsibility to get to know them as they truly are, so that I can help them learn from where they are to where they can go.
At the same time, I hope I am helping them to learn about their own perceptions and assumptions. About adults, me in particular, but also others. I may at times be a demanding teacher, but it is because I care deeply about what happens to them, and I am not always that good in normal interchanges in letting them know how deeply I care. Understanding this, it is also incumbent upon me when I realize that their assumptions are forming in an inaccurate fashion to make the adjustments necessary to help them correct those inaccuracies - about me, to be sure, but also to gently prod them about how they perceive and assume about others, and often even about themselves.
But this needs to be something far broader than what I do in a classroom. If that were the only thing I could offer, while it might make sense as a posting on a educational blog, one might well question why I am posting it here, and quite conceivably wonder if this were merely an excuse to call attention to myself - after all, I have at times in the past acknowledged my own insecurity.
If you are still reading, you may have an idea of where I am going, perhaps because you have read others of my diaries in which I try to take something from my own life or experience and see the lessons I can draw - for myself to be sure, but perhaps for others. It is not that I am preaching, except to myself. Rather it is in the process of the self-reflection that is involved I might perhaps open a window that allows one or more readers to reflect upon themselves in a new light that enhances their own understanding?
This is a time both for nominations here and for consideration of the shape and nature of our interactions with one another. For nominations, it is that time of the year, with Laughing Planet having informed us yesterday kOscars™ 2010 voting has begun. With the announcement by kos of the open beta of DK4 it is also an appropriate time to examine our perceptions and assumptions about the community, about our roles in it, about each other.
Let me start with our perceptions and assumptions about each other. Periodically this place gets quite heated. Having been here for about 7 years, I have seen it through two heated rounds of primary battles. More recently we have seen it in the increasingly harsh rhetoric between those who feel any criticism of Obama undercuts him and those who think some are blind adherents unwilling to recognize that there might be a problem. If our goal is to advance a more progressive government, we will be confronted with an apparent paradox, that to insist on a purely progressive approach may be to gain little, while to be willing to compromise might give up too much too quickly.
Please note that I described that as a paradox. I did so deliberately, because I was thinking of an expression by Niels Bohr that I recently encountered while reading Parker Palmer. The form in which I encountered it (remembering that he probably first offered it in Danish) is like this:
The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
While far from a Talmudic scholar, I also know that sometimes the rabbis who created that massive collection could only approach the truth by simultaneously attempting to hold two true but apparently contradictory statements.
For me politics has always been the art of the possible. Perhaps it is somewhat like being a teacher. Let me explain. As a teacher I can perhaps gain the appearance of order in my classroom by imposing strict rules with even stricter enforcement, but what I am obtaining is sullen compliance, not a willing adherence to the idea of a common order and way of doing things. Similarly, an individual or political party with a sufficient majority can - at least temporarily - impose their will without regard to the concerns of others. But that will result in sullen compliance, even if enforced by the force of the government and its police or military power. But that too may be temporary, and when that ability to impose disappears the backlash can be quite severe, even destructive of the goals one had sought to achieve.
It is rare in human dynamics to see a willingness to forgive and move on. To me the example to which I often turn is the process of truth and reconciliation in South Africa, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. It is hard to believe that South Africa could have come as far as it has - even as it still has far to go - had the new Black leadership insisted upon payback for all the transgressions perpetrated against them and theirs by the previous Apartheid regime.
It is a very human tendency when one is doing the best one thinks one can to lash out at those who are critical, as the President did in his remarks earlier this week. Human, understandable, but also not particularly constructive. He vented. So have many here, who have been critical of how he negotiated. And not just critical of him now, but of the overall leadership going back months to the debates over health care, as we were also critical of how the Senate in particularly mishandled the power they had and helped create the firestorm that led to the Tea Party uprising and the resulting loss not only of the House of Representatives, but also of state legislatures and Governors' offices, as well as some truly outstanding Senators and senatorial candidates, starting with Russ Feingold. It is tempting for those of us who warned about what we saw happening to want to say "I told you so."
As I age (I will be 65 in May) I come more and more to believe that too often we operate with unrealistic expectations. We are close to paralyzed by fear or overly exuberant with hope. We can swing far too quickly between these two poles. Which reminds me of something I learned when I first considered getting a pilot's license (which I never pursued), and that is the idea of yaw. If a plane is tilted with the right wing too far down, one cannot merely pull the stick completely to the left. If we hold it there until the plane is level and move the stick back to the center, the plane will tilt further to the left than it was to the right. Keep going through iterations of this process and we can put the plane into a spin, and/or rip off a wing.
That image is one that has often served me well to remember, especially in moments of extreme emotion.
We do not have one purpose here, because this is a community, with a diverse group of people. Some come here to advocate for one particular cause, and they can get frustrated when others do not respond with the same single-minded focus as they bring to that issue. They need to remember that while we may well strongly support their issues, we may perceive them in a different context and therefore perhaps offer a different way of achieving the goals they seek. Similarly, those of us who might be annoyed at what we see as someone we might describe as a "Johnny one note" need to remember that for some a single issue can have an impact on their entire life that we cannot imagine, and be willing to cut them some slack. That does not mean that in their single-mindedness they are blind to other issues; it may mean that for them, at that time, until the issue is resolved, everything else is subsumed and/or ignored because of the transcending importance for them of that issue.
We tend to perceive from our own experience. That is normal. We sometimes assume that someone who lacks some aspect of our experience cannot understand, to the point that we may assert they have no right to speak on the issue. That may be a normal reaction, but that is also wrong, and destructive of support. Remember, some have worked hard at broadening their own perceptions, of attempting to learn to see through the eyes and experience of others.
I was in my teens when I first truly encountered what this meant. A man name John Howard Griffen published a book in 1961, when I was in high school, titled Black Like Me. A White native of Texas, he managed to sufficiently darken his skin to "pass" as a black man, then traveled by bus through the South to experience life at least partially in a way he could not otherwise understand. He kept a diary, which was originally published in Sepia magazine, then republished separately as a book. While I had had some experience of the differences between N and S with respect to race beginning with a winter trip to Miami in December of 1956, while I had paid close attention to the events of the civil rights era beginning with Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, Griffen's book helped me understand the importance of getting outside my own perceptions and experience.
Helping me understand certainly does not mean I was successful in achieving. Even today I too often find myself failing in that important task. My perceptions are too narrow, I make assumptions, and I thereby limit my understanding and my experience.
For me what has saved me from total disaster is that I am at least by long experience if not by nature fairly reflective. I will look back and consider both the good and the bad. I also am more than a bit of a day-dreamer: I will run "what-if" scenarios that often help me understand the limits of my own knowledge and experience, which therefore also limit my ability to understand, to even know HOW to perceive.
I have one final thought to offer in this meditation: it comes in the form of another paradox. It is important to be fierce with ourselves. It is simultaneously important to be gentle with ourselves.
We must be fierce in confronting our own limitations, our own failings, our own fears.
We cannot be condemning of ourselves, or we cannot move beyond those limitations, failings, fears, and we will use them as a convenient excuse to stay mired in the non-constructive patterns of perceptions and assumptions.
Does any of this make sense? I hope so.
Right now, next to me on my sofa, is the latest of our rescued cats. Cielito grew up in an environment where he was the only cat, where there were no other humans. He came into a household where there were already four rescued cats, who had worked out their own relationships, all having by then had long experience of being around both cats and humans. Cielito is used to undivided attention from humans, and only knows how to react by instinct with other cats. One could observe his behavior towards the other cats and think he is mean, a bully, but he is actually very sweet. Yet his behavior IS destructive of the harmony among the five, and while we can understand it, we also have to work hard to ensure that he does not totally disrupt the lives of the others. At times he will not understand why we treat him the way we do.
We and our fellow humans should be capable of greater understanding than is a feline. I'm not sure we are necessarily more loving, for all the criticism some may offer about the independence of cats. Still, we are capable of meta-cognition - we can examine our own thinking, the perceptions upon which we base that thinking, and the assumptions we thereby make. We can therefore also adjust them.
Will we?
That's up to us, is it not?
Peace.