Bird Droppings December 26, 2024
Reading your view sometimes offers a clue

After forty-six years of marriage, it seems almost like day one. Every day and each day keeps getting better. Periodically, over the past years, I received at some odd hour of the night and or morning a paper to review for my youngest son and or a student from the high school or college where I was teaching. There is always a very narrow window of time between when I see it and when it is due. Recently, one caught my attention as the individual that was being referenced was one I had read about and had some interest in as well. I will borrow a few bits and pieces of paper from my son. It was to see in what ways people come up with their impressions of other people. The idea behind the experiment was to gauge people’s ability to judge someone’s personality based on their environment.

“I found reciprocal determinism to be quite interesting in how it added free will to the idea in contradiction to most previous behaviorist theories, where people are completely determined by their environment. What opened this concept to me was the office study because it explained the concept of how people affect their environment?” Matt Bird

“People not only gain understanding through reflection, but they also evaluate and alter their own thinking.” Dr. Albert Bandera

As I read my son’s words and recalled many readings of Bandera, I found myself intrigued reading my son’s view of me and my room at the high school. As I read, I realized how much I had impacted my environment through my room and my interactions with people who came within it. On Friday after school, I ran into a student who, only a few years ago, came to my room daily and was never one of my students. She manages a pizza franchise now and is doing very well. Today, while grocery shopping, I ran into a former secret senior again. I never had her as a student, but she would come by my room nearly daily to talk or discuss ideas.

“I often see offices and bedrooms that truly embody peoples’ personalities. For instance, in my dad’s school room at my high school back in the day, a person could easily determine that he has a high level of extraversion; you could grade his level of agreeableness, conscientiousness, high level of emotional stability, and openness to experience. My father’s school room has walls covered with pictures of current and past students, various exploits and accomplishments, and there are animals throughout the room in various aquariums. Naturally, students clamor to my father’s room and love to be around the man. Throughout my life, I have not seen experience affect my dad’s personality. Still, I have seen my father’s personality drastically take control over his environment and the situations he has been placed into.” Matt Bird

As I do every day, I sit down and write, thinking and reflecting as I go. As I read my son’s words, so many thoughts came to me. Former students and teachers, I have met along the way. Photos on my wall go back thirteen years to when I started back to teaching, and today, it seems so long ago. My thoughts range from recent papers I am working on dealing with community and learning. I always somehow end up thinking of Foxfire, John Dewey, and experiential learning methods.

“In this world, in order to enable society to develop, all its members have to assume responsibilities and make their contribution. If we do not make collective contributions, then there will be no development. The Dalai Lama, speaking to the Tibetan National Assembly in Dharamsala, May 1989

Each of us lives in a society, a community, and we all share that aspect. As much as we choose so often to be individuals, we are members of and interact within that group. The vitality of that group, its development and growth, is so intertwined with the contributions physically, mentally, and spiritually of the members. Society exists because of those interactions and relationships.

“Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves or in pulling in different directions.” Henry George

We have to work together to move forward, and as humans, we often waste a lot of time-fighting and arguing among ourselves, which limits our motion and/or growth.

“The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.” Roy L. Smith

“Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.” Dr. Albert Bandera, From Self-efficacy: The exercise of control, 1997

Watching high school students form clicks and groups, and while adults have clubs and social groups, we tend to be somewhat selfish animals. We look so at ourselves, and what benefits us is limiting friends and such to a degree we box ourselves in. Sharing a simple task is so often a distant thought, if even a thought. TV humor even plays on this subject several times, as in the old Seinfeld and Will and Grace sitcoms where giving is a chore, a burden, and the characters are literally parasitic instead of symbiotic. As I was reading and looking for quotes and thoughts, this one seemed to pop out at me.

“Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.” Ronald Wright

Wright was speaking literally, yet we are part of modern society. While we do not literally eat people, we still do psychologically destroy them. As I look at how we respond to others so often, it is how we see ourselves indirectly. I find sarcasm is often a reflection of how we see ourselves.

“The most difficult thing is we do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.” Mark Twain

“We are more heavily invested in the theories of failure than we are in the theories of success.” Dr. Albert Bandera, from APA address, 1998

Several students ” completed it ” in a recent project assignment. They did not finish the task but answered what they thought was the question because they just wanted it done. Whether it was right or wrong, good or bad, was not the issue. It was over with. I am sitting here now working on reviewing a similar situation with a one-hundred-question test that most of my students want done, and the grade is of no significance.

“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” M. Scott Peck

“By sticking it out through tough times, people emerge from adversity with a stronger sense of efficacy.” Dr. Albert Bandera

“We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.” John Holt

I read these quotes and saw an answer: if you truly do not appreciate yourself, your time has little, if any, value. Even when you are self-absorbed in using it frivolously, you simply are taking up time not using it. Guessing answers to a test to get done or rushing through just to be over, still waiting just as the rest do so, is their benefit. A favorite catchphrase of high school students is “I don’t care,” which should read “I really do not care about myself” if we look back at Bandera’s thoughts and others. As we enter a new week, especially after the latest school shooting in the past few weeks, it saddens me how our world is troubled and sore, so please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and always give thanks namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
bird