The history of teaching and education, my journey. I’ve just graduated again. This time, an advanced graduate certificate in mental health counseling. I don’t need all the formal education any more. Now? I want it because ‘love of learning’ is my top strength in the Character Strengths and Virtues instrument and always has been.
The real stuff? The parts that matter? The lived experience of what it is to be a student or teacher are not found in the certificates, or college degrees, or even in the brag worthy universities.
This is the MOST important part of education. One cannot put a price tag on this. REAL learning and teaching begins and ends with
being, doing, knowing, feeling.
Education
- Clock hours can’t compare to conscious awareness
- One meaningful interaction with a great teacher can undo all the damage a gaggle of bad teachers
- The gesture of kindness for the sake of kindness outweighs an entire village of mean-spirited gossips
- Watching the faces of tiny humans as they sit in rapture of you reading a book with full attention flowing between you.
- The love and respect between two people who fully trust each other
- Tears in a mother’s eyes because her child is doing something so incredibly good, she can’t hold back her joy
- Sitting in a shared space with people who are smarter than you, but they see you as their equal
- All of the senseless years in a classroom, then you step out of the safety of what you know into the murky waters of doing; then … someone thanks you for helping them.
- Offering a random act of kindness to a total stranger you know you’ll never see again. Not to take their picture to show off that you were kind (that is not selfie, it’s selfish); but because it’s the right thing to do.
- Accepting a random act of kindness from someone.
The art and science of being a good human has zero to do with our clocked hours or our price-tagged education.
The art of knowing that our lives have absolutely nothing to do with the life of anyone else. Our lives are our own. This is our soul journey. They are living in their soul journey.
I wish everyone would understand that anything that we do is a reflection of us, not them. We are here for the life lessons. Not social comparison.
Be
To become, we have to unbecome.
To be, we have to stop wanting to be someone we are not.
We learn from our life experiences. Some are brag worthy. Most are mundane, seemingly unnoticeable little moments which in truth, are small miracles unto themselves. A gesture. A nod. An exchange of the Duchenne smile between strangers. These are the small unmeasured nuances of our lives that make up the most important education we can gift ourselves.
What is it to be human? What is it not!
We all love to brag about what we know, who we know and where we obtained our knowledge and yet, the world stops to watch a cat frown. We pause our lives to bear witness to an unfair death of a boy. We share in the love of healing from a collective effort of healing. We become the best version of ourselves by ourselves.
Peace & Health!
Karen
Author: Karen E. M. Henry, MA, CRM, AGC-MHCr, PhD(c) President, Owner/Practitioner. Blogger for Indelible Women: The OM [Original Me] https://indeliblewomen.