Over my three decades of teaching I've met with students who challenged me in the same way I challenged my teachers and professors. The most recent one was a heavy-set bearded gentleman in my small group communication course. He challenged me for points his team missed on assignments and often asked some sharp, critical questions about the assumptions of the text. He was the sort of student I often want to engage in a dialogue with but a classroom is not an appropriate setting for a dialogue. So, I don't act like MY teachers acted -- or like some of them acted. I did have teachers who were wise enough to stop my challenging because they could see that the rest of the class was not engaged with it.
My small group communication class was my site of my last formal class meeting class meeting EVER! They took their final exam tonight. My challenging student came back to talk to me twice (most students on leaving didn't talk with me at all). He said, "I really did enjoy your class." His tone of voice made the point that he thought much of his arguing might have been interpreted by me as a dislike of the class. But I never saw it that way. He was putting forth arguments that younger me might have made to a teacher. Karma.
I ran across a file with notes I once took on President Bob Barber's two visits to small group communication courses in the 90s. I invited Bob because I knew that he was able to view power with a critical eye, even though he'd been in positions of formal power since his teen years. I always loved talking to Bob at parties about what he was seeing in the personal relationships around us.
These are some of the comments I want to remember from those sets of notes.
"I don't have power -- people give it to me."
"Positions have very little power to coerce. If you are playing by the rules and doing your job, people have very little power over you."
"Once I start exercising my positional power, I'm no longer effective." He added to this that if positional power became coercive people would stop following it or participating willingly."
When you walk into a room, whether or not you think you have power, you "need to know what your personal garbage is . . ." You need to know your family issues. "Get to know yourself as best as you can. . . . What you need to do is find a way to get out of the interpersonal dynamics."
By this he meant that we need to be able to recognize when we are reacting to another person as if he is our parent or sibling or past relationship, rather than who she is right now.
"You need to know what pushes your buttons." [I find this quote on the notes for both visits.] What Bob says here is so important for anyone with position power, like a teacher or president. We need to be aware of where are button are and just stop being aroused. We need to learn to distinguish our reasoning responses from our knee-jerk family or origin responses.
Bob explains what he caries into every meeting: "I'm 6'4", a phD, 50 years old, male, and assertive. Just walking into a room - - I come in with different attributes. Be aware of where the attributes are and what they are.
"Having the power and using the power are two different things."
And he talked about one of his pet peeves in the small group setting. He wanted people to stop wasting each others' time be repeating ideas that have already been stated. "Everytime someone repeats themselves they chip away at their own power." He saw repetition as a form of performed powerlessness. (In other words, if you believe that people heard you the first time and paid attention, you wouldn't repeat yourself.) In every committee meeting, people should only contribute to the discussion if what they have to say is "value added."
Having Bob (college president) in my class talking about the moral nature of power was....powerful.
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