Background notes on "Tending The Gate"

by Morgan Hite

This was written after the first Instructors Course I worked, in August of 1991, with Rich Brame and Jim Fergusson.

Reviewing this essay some eight years after it was written, I notice how naïve I was about many aspect of NOLS.

Every SIC instructional team has biases about whom they will pass and whom they will not. The fact that such a team is "respected" does not mean that everyone else agrees with the biases of these particular instructors. But the SIC staff is rotated around sufficiently that all biases get represented. The operative word here is "respected:" another instructor may bring people into the school you would not, but you'll get your turn. An important asset of the NOLS community is that it is not homogenous. The SIC system works well to perpetuate that lack of homogeneity.

In practice instructor teams do not always work well together. Perhaps eight out of every ten teams works together well. I wasn't really aware or willing to acknowledge this in 1991. My statement that " they can be sent to work with any other instructor and they will find themselves to be a compatible team " is essentially a statement of how I wanted it to be.

My description of the ethical angst of passing judgement on the SIC students ("It is a humbling task: to be aware of oneself judging, separating those who might be "one of us" from those who are not," etc.) betrays the level of consciousness I was at in 1991. For me at this time NOLS was a community in the tribalistic sense of a group from which I could not disengage my identity. Performing this kind of deliberate editing on the "community" was almost nauseating to me, like operating on oneself. So I saw it as a temporary hat I wore, to be shed as soon as the unpleasant duty was over.

In retrospect I would have to say that the limitations of being unable to differentiate one's identity from the group are too great to be worthwhile. There is no perspective from which to attempt to change the group - all you can do is make it more like itself. The first step up is to get a perspective on the "community" and feel free to decide who should be in and why, and what the group should stand for. The next step up is to get a perspective on the practical limitations of this community "engineering" and learn not to take it too seriously. The classic error of new NOLS staff is that they think the school can do no wrong; the typical error of senior staff and administrators who have been there a long time is that they take the potential of the school way too seriously.

In this essay I describe a person lacking the "sort of demeanor/behavior the community expects." An example would be a can-do attitude. Someone whose confidence falters when no concrete plan is possible, who figures only someone else who "knows" what to do can figure the situation out, is not likely to be recommended as an instructor. But this attitude can be learned.