Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
What I would submit to you is thinking about how you're gonna define your purpose,
and how you're going to interrogate your purpose
will be an important aspect of the work that you do.
Uhm... and will also then become the thing that you will be the ambassador for.
Right? There's a great book out there called, "The Right Fight".
Uhm... and one of the things that the authors of "The Right Fight" talk about is
that if you're trying to fight for something, and change is a fight,
okay, I don’t want to pretend that it's not going to be.
Uhm... it better be for something material, it better be for something that matters.
Right, and at the end of the day when you're risking burnout... Right, or you're frustrated with your colleagues
or whatever it might be,
I think it would behoove you not to have a noble reason that's behind it that will be the reason you get up the next day.
Right, uhm... and I would submit that for most of you,
it would be around the things that you talked about what your opportunity was,
what you hoped for Pasadena City College, what you dream it will be some day for someone
or the generations of someone's that you envision.
Right, it will be better for first generation college students.
It would be democratize people's lives,
right, whatever the vision is, that noble purpose is critical because without it
it's just all we're really working on is a set of practices.
Okay, and that's scarcely enough when you're fatigued, uhm... and frustrated
One of the things that I heard in that, and in some of the things that this table was saying,
and I think some of the things that this table was saying,
is kind of a renewed sense of responsibility for what happens to the student.
Uhm... and one of the things that, you know, based on what you were saying earlier about resisters,
there's no room for the right to fail in that philosophy.
Right, you're all hearing that, you all understand that?
Uhm... there's no room for, uhm... these students are not college material in that agenda.
There's also no room for, uhm... the idea that basic skill students survive over here and
so called "regular" student resides somewhere else.
Right, uhm... so one of the jobs, if you decide that part of your noble purpose is about
your individual efforts to take responsibility for what happens to students
then one of your jobs as an ambassador of that purpose is to interrogate
those precepts of right to fail, what it means to belong in college,
and what it means for someone who has developed mental leads.