Life a la Mode
In my spare time When the emperor gives me an occasional afternoon off, I moonlight as a professor for Spring Arbor University. It’s the least I can do for the college that gave me my first undergraduate degree, one husband and two sister-in-laws.
The college calls people like me who pick up classes here and there “adjuncts”.
I call it professoring “a la mode”. Like ice cream. On the side. (Way cooler than “adjuncts”, don’t you think?)
During one class exercise, my students take part in an online discussion board in which each of them is assigned a new identity. Over the course of seven days, they must speak from their perspective soap boxes, respond to heated debate and even attempt to joke around without ever breaking character.
(In case you’re wondering, I assign myself the role of ruling tyrant who exists just to stir controversy among my subjects.)
( Some of you think I’m joking.)
What always amazes me is not how great the students do at playing someone unlike themselves, but how many times they (or I) accidentally slip and weigh in as ourselves.
I’ll catch myself complimenting a student’s creativity or effort, and then realize, slowly…after it’s already posting to internet-land, that I just reverted from Supreme Dictator to measely professor (a la mode) again.
The students inadvertently flip back to themselves here and there too, which usually plays out in their ninety year old characters from developing countries LOL-ing or ROTFL-ing.
Our difficulty with the assignment always underlines to me how hard it is to break away from our own two eyes and see the world “a la mode” (on the side) from someone else’s point of view. And it reminds me how much we’re (me too) missing when we fail to do so.
How would our lives, be enriched, for example, if we could see our current situation from the point of view of…
- a baby (directed by a sense of curiosity and wonder)?
- an elderly resident at an assisted living center (looking at life and priorities with crystal clarity)?
- a 5 year old boy (moved by fearlessness and lack of doubt)?
- a person who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from?
- a person with a terminal disease whose first prayer this morning was Thank God I woke up again?
You can think of others.
How would we live our lives differently if we could hear their perspectives in our heads? How would our lives be bolder, brighter, more connected if when we preached our sermons or wrote our blogs or selected a passage to read, we tried to imagine them as listeners and considered what they could bring to the conversation?