Educational Lineage

Please consider this a rough sketch of the educational genealogy image I want to create.  Since we will be developing this image throughout the semester, and I am a really slow working artist, I just wanted to get the concept across to everyone and have a way to share what I was thinking as I approached this task.

As I reflected on the most influential teachers and mentors of my past, I realized that they all sort of built on top of one another with increasing levels of sophistication.  It made sense to me to depict this as a row of "chakras", starting at the base with intuition, love, and security, and working their way up to a transcendent, metacognitive, philosophical way of thinking and being.

Representing the root chakra is my Granny.  I guess she was my first real teacher, right along side my parents even.  Since both of my parents worked, I spent my early childhood days with her.  An Appalachian mountain granny by definition, she had an 8th grade education, survival skills I now wish I'd paid more attention to, an unparalleled patience, a tireless work ethic, and a soft, simple presence that can only be described as zen, though I'm sure she'd never heard of such a concept.  Having never attended pre-school, I had somehow learned to read and write with Granny before even entering Kindergarten.  She never would have labeled herself as a teacher, or anything other than "Granny" for that matter (as she was known more widely by this title than by her first name), but her undivided attention and palpable love and security made it possible for her to teach and for me to learn without knowing it.

Moving on up the scale, I've skipped a couple of the traditional chakras.  Perhaps they'll make sense to add in later, or perhaps I'll invent a few new ones of my own.  The heart chakra is represented by my high school psychology teacher, Mr Haas.  A deeply compassionate individual, he embraced stillness and thoughtful silence in his classroom to such great effect...I can still picture him perched against his desk, head cocked toward the upper corner of room in a far off gaze as he pondered what was just said or a question that was asked as we all hung on every saturated second of that silence, giggling to ourselves a little at his peculiar demeanor, but utterly captivated all the same.

Another high school teacher, of history, represents the throat chakra and the power of expression.  Mr Parsons was an eccentric, erratic, animated lecturer, who to this day, I swear, knows absolutely everything. He was wildly unpredictable, known to incite heated debates which involved standing on desks and grandiose speech-making simply by writing a controversial phrase on the board and saying "discuss", then retiring to his desk, propping up his feet and enjoying the show.  It was in this room that I became formidable in debate and known for my strong opinions.

The third eye goes to Doc Wooly, my community college biology teacher.  Another sage who probably knows everything, he taught me how to look...I mean really look and observe the world.  Almost weekly, he took us by bus out to some remote location that represented a different ecological environment.  Some days he just turned us loose by a creek with nets and buckets and asked us to catch whatever wiggled, look at it a bit, and then put it back.  We often wondered what the point of these exercises was, but I realize now that the world was coming alive around us.  Having Doc along was like having a sixth sense.  Every rock, every moss, every bird, every lizard...he could name it and tell you what it was doing there, why it was brown this time of year, why the trees are all bent like that...everything.  And we learned to ask questions and wonder why and how.  I often find myself wishing that I had a miniature pocket version of him along on my hikes.

Lastly, at the crown, I included my many teachers and peers in this program.  They (you) have all elevated my thinking to heights I never imagined and the lotus is still opening.  Who knows what comes next.