Higher Education Observer

As mentioned here or elsewhere, I am working through Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.  It is a must read, but I don't think it would speak to young teachers, someone in their twenties.  It is for people who have taught at least a decade and have enough life experience for what he writes to resonate with them.  It is both a wise and spiritual book.  I hope to write half so good something about teaching  in the future, and I plan to use the book as a basis for a learning community in the fall, related to my dissertation. The chapter on fear and the Student from Hell so resonated with me that I am still in awe.  My students are fearful, and sometimes they hide it with bravado, rudeness, seclusion, avoidance.  I am fearful, too, stupidly of student evaluations.  So much is put on those that we good teachers are afraid to challenge.  I don't mean like the colleague who told his students to get their heads out of the a---. I mean to avoid p...

Parker Palmer writes:  We collaborate with the structures of separation because they promise to protect us against one of the deepest fears at the heart of being human--the fear of having a living encounter with alien "otherness," whether the other is a student, a colleague, a subject, or a self-dissenting voice within.  We fear encounters in which the others is free to be itself, to speak its own truth, to tell us what we may not wish to hear.  We want those encounters on or own terms, so that we can control their outcomes, so that they will not threaten our view of world and self."  (p. 37) This is a big answer to the previous post.

I have been enrolled in a doctoral program in adult education for almost two years now.  My gpa is 3.96 or so and I am ahead of all my cohort on the dissertation, which we are supposed to write during the classwork, a difficult process.  I am taking a day off today having spent the last two days at class and struggling with something. I did not expect this doctoral experience to change me as much as it has.  I have been in the classroom 35 years and have been taught to examine a lot of my assumptions.  I was always rather self-critical, so examining and questioning my professional practice is a good and welcome and rather natural thing.  However, there is only so much self-criticism one can endure until one feels like her self or his self is being sucked away.  So I end up backing off, being angry that I am expected to change, especially when the person asking me to change is hardly in a position to do so. One issue that has hit me this semester is the ...