So while we wait for the thousands of responses to Joyful Tidings #23 to roll in, I thought I would take a moment to highlight two wonderful follow ups to previous conversations from Maria Figueroa and Sunny Cooke:
From Maria Figueroa in response to our conversation about empathy…
So I’ve been reading your emails..well, most of them and I always come back to the Mayan philosophy of InLakEch. InLakEch roughly translates to “tu eres mi otro yo, you are my other self,” following is a poem:
IN LAK’ECH
Tú eres mi otro yo.
You are my other me.
Si te hago daño a ti,
If I do harm to you,
Me hago daño a mi mismo.
I do harm to myself.
Si te amo y respeto,
If I love and respect you,
Me amo y respeto yo.
I love and respect myself.
Like Freire, this native American indigenous philosophy has been the driving force in my teaching and in life. I think that if we walk this world with more mindbodyspirit awareness, we access the more emphatic literacy in our bodies and in turn recognize that in others.
From Sunny Cooke in response to our First Day conversations..
I really enjoyed reading these posts! It was so inspirational and made me very, very nostalgic about my first days of class teaching biology, microbiology or molecular biology! I sure do miss the anxiety of preparing for that first day as a faculty member and wanting to be sure that everyone felt welcome and that while the course would be challenging, we would definitely have some fun! I truly loved visiting with them and getting to know them in the lab while we were incubating things or waiting for reactions – the best part of me.
I think the thing I enjoyed most about a fist day of class was posing as a biology student in a sweatshirt and baseball cap and sitting in a desk waiting for our “professor”. I got to hear their anxieties about the class, their fears, their ultimate goals and what little they may have heard about “the professor”. When a colleague then came in to begin the class and introduced me as the professor, the students were shocked and it drove home the point that things aren’t always what they seem.
I just ran into one of our part-time faculty last week that was going to do that on the first day and she seemed as excited as I used to be.
Thanks to Maria, Sunny, and all who are contributing formally and informally around the campus to conversations about the joys of teaching and learning.
Prepostero