What is it that forms the connective tissue between classes that turns those individual instructional modules into a life-changing and empowering whole?
This is what I was thinking about as I was trying to learn the scores of our baseball games against Lane CC, and then again as I was working to buy tickets to the LBCC production of Agamemnon. How do these activities enrich not only their participants’ experiences of LBCC, but all our experiences? Are these activities part of the “connective tissue” and, if so, do we take full advantage of them… for ourselves and for our students?
Of course, when I think about it, I realize that it’s not the activities themselves that form this connective tissue but, instead, it’s the people who are a part of them… the people who, because of them, become a part of a whole.... part of a Community.
Bill Ayres (Co-founder of World Hunger Year) once said, “A man not only needs to know how to fish, he needs to have the freedom to do it and a place to do it. That's where community comes in.”
Perhaps this is what attracts me to things like our Sports Teams, our Choral Groups, our Theatre, our ROV Team, Student Leadership, Active Minds, Poetry Club, Welding Competition, Livestock Judging……. Well, it’s a long list, but it’s all about the same thing: Providing a place where we have not just the opportunity to learn, but the place where we have the opportunity to “do it”... to "try it out." And I think that it's this "doing" - and doing it together - that knits us together into something more that we are in ourselves, forming “community” here at LBCC..... and planting the seeds for “community” out there too.
One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, once wrote “The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”
We are the “connective tissue”…….
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