Managing to be different

In Scapp's discussion of the "spiritually disconnected" faculty members are living in a culture of fear by Parker Palmer's terms. This discription of leaders disconnected from the people they should be serving reminds me of many teachers on teh k-12 campus. The policies and practices in place to help kids leave the teachers lifeless and disconnected from the kids they are supposed to be serving. I have observed that many teachers who desire to help kids spend much of their time teaching to standards and focusing on the policies and practices rather than the individual students in their classes.

Palmer says, "If we want to develop and deepen the capacity for connectedness at the heart of good teaching, we must understand --and resist-- the perverse but powerful draw of the disconnected life."