Bird Droppings April 25, 2025

Going to school again for the first time

So often, as I start my writings each morning, there has been an experience recently to build upon. It is utilizing these previous experiences to provide windows and doors for future experiences. I was driving through our town, and a shop I had seen numerous times caught my eye. It is a store that caters to cooks, selling fancy cheese, wines, and utensils. I stopped in. I needed a good knife to cut and chop herbs as I cook. As I walked in, a wonderful lady greeted me, and we talked for nearly an hour about education and cooking. It turns out she was also, prior to retirement, a teacher of Emotional and Behavior Disorders. A small world, or is it synchronicity? I think I know what Dr. Carl G. Jung would say. My major for my master’s in graduate school is always confusing, as most teacher graduate students go for that Leadership degree required for administrative positions, and mine was in Emotional Behavior Disorders.

It has been nearly twenty years since I started my doctoral studies at Georgia Southern University. My major may be a bit obscure to some. Still, being in curriculum theory with an emphasis on teaching and instruction, it is a relatively new endeavor, entitled to Curriculum Studies in the course catalog. One of the first pieces that caught my attention in my early readings was “The autobiographical method of currere, a method focused on self-understanding” by William Pinar in his book What is Curriculum Theory.  As I discussed with this retired teacher and now shop owner and purveyor of fine cheese, wines, and meats, we talked of education, along with various cuts of meat, and where my livestock background came out.

I have been listening as I read, write, and study for a number of years now to R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo-Ute from Arizona. Nakai is a classically trained cornet and trumpet player who, thirty years ago, took up the Native American seven-note flute. He actually carves his own flutes from cedar, and his haunting melodies stir the soul and calm the wild beast. I play his music in my room at school. As I was thinking of Pinar’s thoughts on the autobiographical method, I recalled a note from one of Carlos Nakai’s CDs.

“A lot of what I’ve been taught culturally comes from an awareness of the environment. …How I feel is based on my impressions of being in certain spaces at certain times. Thinking back…on personal tribal stories and the history of my culture figures into how I organize my music.” R. Carlos Nakai

One of the founders of pragmatism in philosophy is John Dewey, who is also well known for his contributions to education and progressivism. Many of his ideas are from the early 1900s. Dewey based his thinking on our experience.

“Every experience lives on in further experiences. Hence, the central problem of an education based on experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and create subsequent experiences.” John Dewey

Dewey is a hard read, and since I was only looking for a quote, he is back on the shelf for now, but only for a minute or two, as I am using several Dewey books in papers I am currently working on. As I switched CDs to a Hawaiian-themed CD where Nakai and Keola Beamer, a Hawaiian slap guitar master, combine for “Our Beloved Land,” another jacket note caught my eye.

“We were put on the earth to experience life in its totality. And if you’re not doing that, you’re essentially wasting your time.” R. Carlos Nakai

I thought of my professor in that first doctoral class as I read a comment she made about how many of the courses are online and the evaluations that follow online of professors. She said she always gets better reviews with the online courses than in person. On one of the first days in class, she wore a black suit and a starched white shirt with long sleeves, dark shoes, and argyle socks. She had one pirate-type earring in one ear, and after removing her jacket and rolling up her sleeves, tattoos on her wrists covered her arms, which was interesting, especially to someone such as me who is constantly observing human nature. When she offered that she was in counseling and on meds for psychosis, things made better sense.

As I watched my class watch her as she came in, who were mostly conservative Southern teachers, the reactions were interesting. However, as I thought about my professor’s comment about why she did not understand why she always gets better reviews online, I thought as I listened to her lecture as a recognized scholar in curriculum theory. Maybe the biases of the masses of people in the world really are insignificant. You need to live life, and if you are not doing that, you are wasting time.

Within a few minutes, I got the impression that my professor is not wasting anyone’s time. She is who she is and is comfortable with that, as maybe we all should try to be. Who knows what might happen with self-understanding and experiences? It comes down to all the pieces of our life’s puzzle falling into place one by one. As always, please keep all who are in harm’s way on your mind and your hearts and, most of all, always give thanks.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

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