The Heartbeat of Team Landolph
Fifteen years ago I wrote an Essay of Intent to gain entrance into the Masters in the Art of Teaching program at the University of South Carolina. After gaining entrance into the program, I filed the essay away in a plastic file box and completely forgot about it.
Today, I wiped off the fifteen-years of accumulated dust and what I found in that box was way more than just my Essay of Intent written in 2008. As I read the words I typed all those years ago, I could feel and hear the faint beginnings of a heartbeat. The beliefs and goals that have driven me now to step away from the classroom in order to create the nonprofit: Team Landolph. Below are excerpts from that essay:
The heartbeat begins…
“The improvement of society as a whole begins with education, therefore, I feel education is the most important thing I may dedicate my life to. I will commit myself to a life-time career in education in order to inspire and motivate students as well as others around me; in doing so, I will spur community involvement in order to improve the world we live in.”
The heartbeat continues…
“I desire to teach so I may work directly with children to elicit a genuine interest in learning as well as to encourage them to take charge of their own education thereby overcoming apathy in the classroom.”
The heartbeat gains strength…
“Involving the students in the greater community will create a sense of belonging and pride that will help their education take on greater meaning while improving the area where they live. Through…service-learning programs students will come to understand the power of knowledge. Equating lessons with real, meaningful experiences helps students to retain knowledge by making it part of something they care about in addition to [increasing] their feeling of belonging to the community in which they live.”
The heartbeat becomes collective…
“Inspiration and motivation will help children question and make sense of the world they are living in and promote their desire to contribute to the society in which they belong. Together, with the cooperation of students, teachers, administration, and parents I believe we can make South Carolina’s public school system one of the best in the nation and provide a model for the rest of the world.”
Currently, The U.S. News and World Report ranks South Carolina #42 in education.
The heartbeat of my essay is only one of many with the same beat in our state, and the more I have grown and collaborated with other educators and community members I realize how important it is that we sync our heartbeats as one to change that statistic.
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Physiology and Behavior showed that trust between people can actually sync heartbeats. The study tasked total strangers to work together building Lego cars, then tasked them to play a trust game. In the trust game, each participant was given money that they would confidentially decide whether to invest in a common purse to be split among participants, or to keep for themselves. Participants would do well if others invested, but if others didn’t, they would lose their money to the non-investors.
What the study found was that those who invested their money held a common heartbeat with the other participant at least 85% of the time during the previous Lego building. Their heartbeats were not only synched up for most of the time, but the heartbeat also increased along with their partners. The study illuminates that even without physical touch, trust causes our heartbeats to sync. A physiological indicator that trust connects us.
Team Landolph’s goal is to connect us in order to build the heartbeat of our communities. By creating networks that support our teachers, we increase their ability to create educational spaces that provide opportunities that connect students, parents, and community members to work together to solve local and global challenges. We also build trust in one another that will strengthen our heartbeat so that South Carolina’s education system rises to the top.
