This semester is the first chance I've had to teach Human Growth and Potential, so I thought I'd take a minute to describe some of what we're doing in the class. First, we're approaching the entire topic in a somewhat unconventional way. Instead of having the course revolve around learning about growth and potential, we're focusing mostly on actually growing toward fulfilling our potential. In other words, the basic point of the course is to change how we're alive, rather than just to increase how much we know. This shift in emphasis is posing several important challenges for me, both personally and in my role as professor. First, this shift requires an inversion of usual, familiar rules of the academic game. In my experience, academic orthodoxy typically demands that we professors convey plenty of knowledge and thinking, but there's very little real emphasis on facilitating our students' growth as human beings. I think that part of my own adventure in Human Growth and Potential this semester has been the chance to see if my students and I can begin to transcend the confines of the typical academic program. In essence, we're making Human Growth and Potential mostly evocative, rather than communicative (since genuine growth is hardly ever simply "communicated"). Correlatively, the texts we discuss don't communicate much factual information at all; rather, they mostly attempt to evoke a sense that life can be about questing for what truly matters about being human. Here are the texts we're using: Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan, Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Hesse's Siddhartha, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Richard Bach's Illusions (yeah, that is over 1000 pages, but it's an easy 1000 pages). For me, part of the personal challenge in this is to see if I can loosen my own investment in requiring difficult, intellectually demanding psychological/philosophical texts just because they seem more "academic."

Another part of our adventure in Human Growth and Potential has to do with our motivation to change and grow in the first place. I remember that for me one of great lessons of graduate school occurred when I found myself doing things less for extrinsic reasons (such as getting grades, credentials, the approval of professors, etc.) and more for intrinsic reasons (such as feeling the poetic pulse of life, burning passionately in the moment, etc.). It seems to me that graduate students often arrive with a strong desire to test themselves against one another -- to compete for grades, assistantships, favorable attention, etc. After all, being successful at academic competition is part of what gets someone into graduate school in the first place. Still, the real test of success in graduate school (especially in a course like Human Growth & Potential) doesn't lie primarily along the axis of measurable competition, but in the more subtle, more nebulous regions of one's becoming. And so, in Human Growth and Potential I've taken some measures to attentuate the usual carrot-and-stick motivations. For one thing, I've made it very easy to get a good grade. My comments on my students' papers are still quite voluminous, but without as much "critical" content. Instead, most of my comments are aimed at dwelling with my students where they are, and intensifying their struggles to become (basically, a Rogerian "Freedom to Learn" tack). My intention is to initiate an even deeper raison d'etre for my students than competing for my favors. By undercutting the element of competition I hope to invite my students to use this course as a chance to amplify their quests for own growth and potential in life. Basically, my hope is that my students will begin to sense and to live out their greater destinies, and to express their struggles powerfully in their papers -- papers written hopefully mostly because they care about expressing what really matters in their lives, and only incidentally because they need to fulfill courese requirements. This why I've been giving some curious non-instructions on writing the papers for the course -- non-instructions like these: "Start writing, as you probably will, because you have an assignment due. Along the way, see if you can cut to the heart of your struggle to grow -- so directly and so powerfully that you begin to feel an immense passion overtake you, and swallow you like a vast tide. Keep writing! Don't stop now! Yeah, throw the floodgates open wide, wider! Let your words pour out of you like a river raging and tearing at its banks. See if you can let your writing matter that much. Stay with what's important... your becoming... your potential burning hot, hot in your writing... feverish... smoldering... relentless. The point is to sound your secret language, maybe for the first time. This is your life, and now is the time to be alive. Well, uh... any questions?"

Of course, as one of my perceptive students pointed out, in taking this approach I'm making myself vulnerable; basically I'm inviting the possibility of an enormous slack-fest, where my students might use their greater latitude to be more disengaged (which would probably indicate a failure of this whole approach). But as we discussed in class earlier in the semester, any genuine adventure entails uncertainty and the distinct possibility of failure. In this sense, Human Growth and Potential is a real adventure (at least for me), and only time will tell what its outcome will be.

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