With love to the future...

The letters to future self were part of our ongoing training in working with groups, and using a strengths perspective, and understanding growth and development, with the second year students.  Today's class was the first year students, and it is their first semester.  It is daunting.  I well recall my first year in my MSW program, while working full-time and commuting 6 hours round trip, spending 8-10 hours at the university on top of that commute time.

There were many outcomes in class today that I believe reflected their learning, and their desire to learn.  I continue to attempt to understand how to be a more effective educator in what I believe is the most important thing I can do: prepare students to practice social work.  Sometimes, I wish I could take all that I have learned in my life, my practice, my education, my experience, and just capsule it so they could see what I see.  And then, I remind myself of what a limited view that would be if that was all that they had.

We had 15 minutes left, which is 12 minutes longer than Elizabeth Kubler Ross would give people to draw her a picture of what they thought, but it was just about right from my perspective.  I still had the materials from our class last week so I laid them out on the table and offered the first year students the same opportunity...sort of.  The goal last week was in recognizing and understanding where they were at this moment in time compared with where they were a year ago when they began, what would they say to their future selves?

Today, the option was what do you want to say to your future self to help you to achieve the goal you have set?  Today, we are doing visionary work: what will enable you to get there?

What are the important "take-aways" from the message above, from the student last week?

• You are not alone; we are all in this experience called surviving.  In the big 'ole lifeboat off the shipwreck, how much you have or do not have is not the issue.  What can you bring to the solution of the problem?
•  It is okay to make mistakes while learning; we are always learning.  If we are learning, we learn not to keep making the same mistakes.  We want to learn how not to make those mistakes again.  Not knowing is okay; not learning what you do not know might create some problems.
• "You are not your grades."  Let me repeat that: You are not your grades.  We have so conditioned our students to believe that their learning lies within the numerical score that they do not see other possibilities.  I have had students who were D and C students who demonstrated more learning than their B and A counterparts.  Why?  They learned something; they wanted to learn something; they put the hard work into learning something, even when the numerical score would seem to indicate that they did not.
• Trust yourself
• Trusting yourself is not the same thing as ignoring anything else.  It does mean listening to your own voice.
• Trust the feedback
• Who can tell you what to do?  From whom will you accept help?
•  Trust the process 
• Life is developmental. 

Love letters to future self

Your Perspective Matters

 Have I said before how much I love this class?  How much I love these second year students?  There is a saying When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  These students became the teacher and I, the teacher/student, was ready to learn.  The circle has opened and closed and opened.

 Together, we co-created a journey that has unfolded and evolved over the course of the weeks through a parallel process.  It feels a little bit like being in a parallel dimension and looking at your self from both within and outside of yourself.

The topic was later stages of development in the group: endings and transitions.  Transition is exciting: walking where a path does not yet exist.

The Bank of Hickory Flat

When things are not very clear

 You know how we all have those times when things are just not very clear.  There is too much "noise in our head" as one of my friends puts it. 

 Although there have been many times in my life when my vision lacked clarity, I think perhaps the most useful fog was my experience on St. Paul's Island, in the Bering Sea--literally and figuratively.  Due to the frequency of the fog, mist, rain, cloud cover, if one did not know what was in the immediate distance, one would not know what was in the immediate distance.  But somehow, even while the reality often was veiled in the fog, I would find clarity.  I believe it came from seeking, earnestly, to understand and to know and to use that understanding and knowing to be a more effective human being at that point in my life.

Sometimes, perhaps closer to 'home' both of those are more difficult for us to achieve.  Do you ever feel like you are warring factions of self?  That one part of you earnestly seeks to understand and know and use, in order to become a more effective human being in the only thing that matters: relationship with others.  And at the same time, one part of you just wants to raise your hands in surrender and kneel down with your hands behind your back, waiting for the handcuffs and unjust arrest and subsequent unjust punishment.

When those moments occur, my desire is to focus on not what is the lack of clarity, but what is clear.  When a student took the above photograph a few years ago, she labeled it "scary."  I do not know why she thought so when she sent it to me, but I think about it now in the midst of all that is transpiring, and agree.

Scary.  Things are obscured behind me, to the side of me, below me, above me.  I am on the edge with little separating me from the abyss.  I am not even looking where I am going.  And yet, there is a peace, a serenity.  It will be okay.  Others do not define my reality.  That is up to me.

Little River at Elkmont

 Little River at Elkmont, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The bridge was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, completed 1936-1937.  You can read more about the Elkmont Bridge at Suzassippi: Red Shutters.

Twelve Years of Therapy

Last night, I had the thought that living in Mississippi has been like 12 years of therapy.  Neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, but a lot of work and hard work and discovery and challenge and understanding and self-awareness and other-awareness and realization and new questions.  That slowly emerged into my consciousness as I sat on the porch, thinking about the conversation I had with a new member in the department.  It is the time of year for advising for registration for the upcoming semester, and checking the status of where students are in their degree plan.  We were the only two working yesterday, and though it was really busy, during a couple of lags, we had been talking about current issues in academia, and specifically, in this state.  Education and practice and academic preparedness and race and inequity and the difficulty in seeing white privilege and the difficulty in having these conversations with our students and the importance of having these conversations with our students.  Endlessly.

I was reminded of the workshop from a few years ago where I pondered that same question, and how I have continued to seek to understand it, learn from it, and move the conversation forward in helpful ways.  It is not comfortable for any of us, but then, life and learning is not about comfort all the time.  If one is desirous of becoming a more effective human being in relationship with others, it is not about what is comfortable, but rather, what will deepen the relationship and help us to become more fully human with each other.  

That is part of the difficulty: as long as we sit very still on the cactus and do not jiggle around, we learn to develop a certain level of comfort with the thorns in life (Mayadas, 1986).  Start moving and questioning and looking, and they begin to prick you and jab you.  No one likes pain, nor is quite sure what to do or how to do it when that begins to occur.  Either one makes the choice to climb down from the cactus, move past the pain and difficulty, and reach for another way of being, or one decides to just stay very very still and wait for the discomfort to go away.

As I listened to him grappling with issues he was beginning to see after a short while in Mississippi, I was reminded of my own similar struggles at first arrival, and how they have continued.  I wanted to be able to tell him it would get better, but I don't know that it will.  I shared that it had been the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, and at times, the most painful, to learn how to work here.  That is not to suggest that I am wallowing in my own discomfort--I embraced it.  It is rather that to have to continue to grapple with and figure out how to address the inequities and lack of awareness and acceptance of other cultures and experiences is painful.  It is painful to see the dissonance in students, the outright rejection of some of them of the importance of even considering issues of race and culture and privilege in our work.
It is like having to look always ahead, to the distance and see the long slog in between.  In Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe said, "We did not see the need to demonize white people.  We just wanted out from under their rule."  The world has made it clear that inter-ethnic conflict is not always black and white, as illustrated by the ethnic conflict in Nigeria post colonial "independence" between the Yoruba and Igbo peoples--both Nigerian--that resulted in the slaughter of thousands and thousands of Igbo.  Recognition of that fact does not change that the issue is about dominant majority, however it plays out in a nation, a country, a state. 

In Mississippi, it has become a conflict between those who see the symbols of the Confederacy as heritage, and those who see them as emblems of white supremacy that fully denied human rights during and after the enslavement of Africans, and as representative of a desire to maintain and even celebrate that white supremacy in the form of the norms of culture--the "rule" if you will.  However, one feels about it, their really is no way to deny what the Confederate flag symbolized and that the heritage behind it is a heritage that harmed people, and a nation.  It reminds many of us of that harm on a daily basis when we see it flying over the symbols of government, education, and institutions that are supposed to be for all of us.  The fact that some people cannot grasp that reality and examine the "traditions" that have become dear to them does not disconnect the symbols from the origins.  The greater harm is perhaps from those who do understand the origins and still see that white culture as right and desired.

 My next student arrived and we had to cut the conversation off mid-sentence, without closure, let alone resolution.  It is a metaphor for the larger conversation--we never seem to reach closure, let alone resolution.  It left me feeling unsettled, and a need for a conclusion.  Like therapy, sometimes, that does not occur, but rather, we take the unsettling feelings and thoughts with us throughout the week, and hopefully grapple with them, reflect on them, and that is part of the learning for the next session.  I like the way Anna Blake put it this week in her post What to do when your horse falls in a hole--go in the hole with him; you were part of the reason he got in this mess.  I am learning that with my students--to go in the hole with them--not to stay in the hole, but to acknowledge the reasons they are in the hole and to help us both get out of the hole together.  No matter who we are, we are all in this hole, even when we can not see it.