Serendipity: One Sentence Statement on Teaching

From the Professional & Organization Development Network in Higher Education [POD@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] distribution list: There are moments when serendipity reigns and you don't ask questions. This morning, getting myself deeper into the groove for the Lilly-South conference on teaching in higher education in Greensboro this weekend, sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee, I opened my e-mail box. As I scrolled down and exercised my forefinger on the delete key, I came to a message. Its subject heading caught my eye, "Be Short." Intrigued, I opened it. It was from a university professor. She didn't tell me anything about herself. I'm not sure if the question she threw at me in her short message was hurled as a snide challenge or offered as a prayerful plea. Anyway, she tersely wrote, "I don't have time to read your lengthy epistles however I enjoy the very few I do copy and later read. I just want you to give me one sentence that sums up your attitude about teaching. That's all the time I have for." One sentence! A few words! A couple seconds read! Interesting.

Challenging! That beats in spades the five minute soliloquy my dear friend Todd Zakrajsek of my beloved UNC gives some of us at the Lilly-North conference. Well, to paraphrase the Bard, all things are ready if our hearts, soul, and mind be so. I guess mine had been readied for this as I've been reading myself mentally and spiritually to mix with and learn from some very neat people at the Lilly-South conference.

As it turned out, and here is where serendipity poked its nose into my affairs, before I had turned on my computer, before I had brewed a pot of coffee, I had, as I do every morning, blindly put my hand into my cat-in-the-hat hat and pulled out a word from the heap of what I call "resilient word for the day" that lay hidden at the bottom. Each morning, I go through this ritual to get the word that I plan and struggle to embody that day. Today, as serendipity would have it, the word I had selected was "amazed." Amazing!

Again, sometimes you just don't ask.

So, I read the message again, slowly; took another sip of coffee, slowly; looked at my word, slowly; and, my fingers started dancing on the keyboard, quickly: "Don't be afraid to be amazed by each student and don't be afraid to be amazing." One sentence. A reduction, as my son, Robby, the chef, would say, intensifying the flavor! How about that! I'll let her think about this one. I'll let me think about this one. Now, I'm off to live my own word all this weekend: to be fearlessly and unabashedly both amazed and amazing at Lilly-South.

Make it a good day.

Louis Schmier, Department of History, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia 31698, http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org .