Reconstructing Lives: Taking the Mystery out of Success

By Ph. D. W McJamerson

Are you a “Success Seeker” or a “Success Builder” or both? The overall purpose of this book is to take the mystery out of success so that more persons can seek it and find it. It is not only designed for the general life success of anyone but also for use in school achievement. Current classroom educators call the work in Reconstructing Lives “a dynamic package deal” for implementing rigorous and relevant curriculum. The project offers proof of the effectiveness of an organic, time-tested project that can meet the national demand for preparing college and career ready students through Common Core State Standards (CCSS). From Reconstructing Lives, a student workbook was created titled Re-Make an Icon So You Can Become One. If you are already or want to become a Success Builder then this book will provide focus and strategies in six specific areas: Did you identify, cultivate or enhance a talent or skill in someone’s life today? Did you help someone see new possibilities or set and strive to reach goals today? Did you make someone feel important, special or loved today? Did you teach someone to perform at a level of excellence today? Did you help someone gain deeper intellectual, spiritual, or emotional understanding today? Did you provide an opportunity for or destroy an obstacle to someone’s progress today?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781682138502

Book preview

RECONSTRUCTING LIVES

Taking the Mystery Out of Success

NANTHALIA W. McJAMERSON, PH. D.

Copyright © 2015 Nanthalia W. McJamerson Ph. D.

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2015

ISBN 978-1-68213-849-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-68213-850-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Mary Scott Hobdy, a success builder of university presidents and, thereby, a success builder of thousands of professionals; to Earline Simms, a success builder of teachers and, thereby, an enhancer of a profession; to Harold Berlak, a success builder of critical consciousness raisers and, thereby, an advancer of the world; to the late Marian Elizabeth Washington, whose success building is shown in this poem written to her:

Contents

Chapter 1

Building Achievers Despite the Odds

Chapter 2

New Approach for Success Builders and Success Seekers

Chapter 3

Literature for Life Success Using Critical Autobiography in Counselor Training

Chapter 4

Creative Use of Autobiography to Enhance Knowledge and Dispositions in Teacher Training

Chapter 5

From Ann Richards to Maya Angelou: Studying Achievers as Success Support

Chapter 6

Changing the Trajectory of a Life: Lessons from the Life of Quincy Jones

Chapter 7

Conquering Test Stress through Reconstruction of Role Models

Chapter 8

Threads of Strength, Color, and Distinction: Lessons from Ben Carson’s Life

Chapter 9

Reconstructing the Life of Albert Einstein

Chapter 10

Ambition Ignition: Motivating Students from Middle through High School

Chapter 11

The Research Base for Critical Success-Building

Chapter 12

Contrary to Rumor, I’m Wonderfully Made Reconstructing the Author’s Life

Appendix A

The Reader’s Reflection Journal

Appendix B

Common Core Alignment Chart

Blessed Sister

A wellspring of comfort and solace

an onyx pebble thrown across the waters

by the hand of the Creator Himself,

creating ripples, changing courses

reinventing lives.

A veneer of flesh and bones

covering a spiritual allure,

enticing us to believe in the unbelievable.

Sister, daughter, niece, artist, advocate, advisor,

giving and living without pause.

Holding you in my arms

feeling a strength and steadiness that erodes my faith

in a proclamation of dissolution.

Embracing instead the intensity of your convictions

the passion of your words

the simplicity of your voice.

I am leaving you better than when I came.

Wanting you to rest

Knowing you will live on.

©Gwendolyn M. Duhon

Preface

Bob D. Smith, graphic illustrator, designer, CEO

Founder, Blacksmiths Cards & Prints, Inc.

Without Saying a Word: Autobiography of a Visual Artist

While reading this work, I was reminded how important it is for teachers, parents, and children to come together early in order to implant responsible steps toward keeping alive the barely visible—but blossoming—promise of a small child’s gift. I’ve known many earnest young men and women who came to the window of success, college-trained yet not truly prepared. Without adult insight and investment, they brought great ideas, great intentions, and great willingness to sacrifice whatever they had and still failed, underexposed and unrecognized, because of making the journey to an ill-defined destination. This book on taking the mystery out of success goes to the heart of that crisis and could easily give life and sustenance to those young citizens by virtue of Dr. McJamerson’s insightful strategy. It has been used with groups ranging from youth to adult professionals.

In this book, six ingredients are outlined in the Success Building Despite the Odds (SBDO) model, three of which my grandparents instilled in me when I was around the age of two. Those three critical pieces introduced to me seventy-five years ago were—in McJamerson’s terms—ability nurture, ambition ignition, and cardiac reserve. It may seem that I was too young, but even then, I understood being recognized. My grandparents’ insight about what appeared to most people to be idleness bore an understanding of the pursuit of inward self-expression through the art of drawing, which flowered in me. Mere recognition of my effort gave my scribbling value without presuming to require my actions have external meaning. Such support produced added determination, which ultimately resulted in the SBDO principle of excellence training. Surely, my grandparents, growing up in an 1890s South—battered by Jim Crow and racial discrimination—did not have this book for guidance, yet they intuitively put together three of the six components from the SBDO Model and firmly implanted them within me. Because I was invested with enough reserves of warmth and worth, I was able to confront a towering, exotic, and monolithic culture and to find the fifth and sixth principles of the SBDO model: insight dividends and opportunity ramrods. Ultimately, I felt my mission and practiced the sum total of the concept to implement success-building despite the odds.

Foreword

Dr. Jean Kerney, founder

K & C Educational Consultants

Chillicothe, OH

Author, Thawing Frozen Dreams

Kudos to Dr. McJamerson for combining literature, counseling, teacher education, and critical thinking into a process that moves individuals to examine how we got to be who we are and how we can construct our own success. The center of these issues is Why do we believe what we believe, and why do we respond the way we do when confronted with various situations? When I initially received a copy of the manuscript, I read fifty-eight pages within the first twenty minutes. It was so exciting I could not stop reading. The philosophy is great and inspirational. This author is on to something groundbreaking.

As I carefully read Dr. McJamerson’s book, I thought about the value of this process to institutions which have as their mission building and reconstructing lives. Immediately, I thought of the education system. There is a great deal in the reconstructing lives approach that can help teacher educators train candidates to become successful teachers. This process can assist them not only in learning how to be more successful themselves but also in learning how to help their students become successful. In addition, it could be beneficial for students who have been placed in special-challenge or alternative categories. Those students can be engaged in such processes that will place them on or return them to successful tracks.

Although there is great potential use for the reconstructing lives process in education, the education system is not what I want to emphasize in this foreword. Rather, I will focus on another institution that has as its mission to build and reconstruct lives—the justice system. Many penal institutions are looking for programs beyond drug and alcohol counseling to help prepare inmates to reenter society. The prison system is lacking in the provision of programs that afford inmates an opportunity to think critically about who they are and how they got to where they are. There seems to be very little research regarding cognitive programs that may be used to help inmates rebuild their lives. The current project, which is based on the model for success building despite the odds (McJamerson 1998), would serve as a great mechanism to help inmates develop multiple life perspectives by examining their lives while critically studying the lives of outstanding achievers. My vision of the value of this model is based on my professional experiences with a project to rebuild lives for reentry into society.

Several of my staff members and I spent six weeks working with twenty-five men incarcerated in the state of Ohio. These men ranged in ages from twenty-one to sixty, and their backgrounds ranged from high school dropouts to professionals with master’s degrees to medical doctors. Through much discussion, we came to the conclusion that these men had built a personal interpretation of the world from their own experiences. We settled upon using a constructivist approach that has its roots in classical philosophy as well as in the educational theories of Montessori, Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, and others.

We then developed a program around the theme Incarcerated Men Rebuilding Relationships through Poetry and Prose. This theme set us on an unbelievable path that will always be a part of my spiritual journey. There were questions, brainstorming, debates, essays, drama, reflections, and poems. Two examples of the poems follow:

Who Am I?

by K. M.

I am what I am but most of all

I am the proud creation of a wise

And just Creator…

I am the product of NEW-ARK, New Jersey,

Eleventh Street projects,

The body where thorns and thistles

Have been placed in my belt to prevent my rest,

Broken glass in my path to impede,

Even stop, my progress.

But broken in spirit I am not;

For right is on my side!

Reflections

by D. L.

I stare at my own face in the pool of the past

Watching it change from fears to tears to laughs.

What I see is at times horrifying for me to see,

Yet I watch intensely in disbelief.

For what I see are my own actions,

Not script nor story.

Now, as I peer into my past

I am filled with worry…

Yet, when it seems like it’ll never get better

A good time shines through.

It pierces sharply in contrast

With all that I knew…

Now the hardest part of looking into this looking glass

Is not looking at me but forgetting the past,

Trying to change ways

That were destructive and childish

So as to make tomorrow

More pleasant and filled with bliss.

When the program was completed, the men did not want the sessions to end. The results were tremendous—releases, graduations, weddings, and other success stories. For the past six years, letters and phone calls never stopped coming. The success of that interactive poetry and prose project and the scarcity of such programs lead me to believe that the Reconstructing Lives project can have a significant and constructive impact on any system or person whose goal is success.

Chapter 1

Building Achievers Despite the Odds

Nanthalia W. McJamerson, PhD

Grambling State University

Grambling, LA

Mark Dean, MEd

Thomas Lawrence, MEd

Aprile McCullough, MEd

Claudine Williams, MEd

South Carolina State University

Orangeburg, SC

When I was a child, I had 21 mothers, and I needed every one of them. Each time I fell through a different crack, a different mother would catch me.

—Bishop John Hurst Adams, from a speech in South Carolina

No! That cannot be true! Repeatedly, and loudly, I made that statement while grading papers from an assignment I used in a human growth and development course at Grambling State University. In 1987, I revised an assignment focused on the summary of autobiographies of outstanding achievers. The astonishment expressed above stemmed from the fact that all the outstanding achievers had experienced tremendous—sometimes ironic—obstacles and challenges, especially during the early stages of their lives. For example, Olympic Champion Wilma Rudolph had suffered from polio when she was a child.

We often see a list on which a few outstanding achievers overcame tremendous odds, but it does not seem to be common knowledge that many (if not most) people achieve greatness despite daunting challenges and that they do so without money, magic, or miracles. Questions flooded my mind at that point: Why are such facts a mystery? Why do we use terms such as secrets of success? Are we hypocrites who claim that we want people to become successful and yet we hide the tools, strategies, or pathways from them, either knowingly or unwittingly? Although I had been trained in educational psychology and counseling, my inquiring mind was dissatisfied. I needed to have my consciousness raised and revive some of the insights gained from Harold and Ann Berlak (1981) and the work of Ira Shor (1980). I was puzzled, inspired, and motivated to engage myself and my students in a deeper and more critical study of individual lives as well as a general study of human development theories. That was the day, the beginning of the reconstructing lives project.

Humans are marvelous creatures with enormous potential for success. Extraordinary achievements can be accomplished when there is aware of that potential and knowledge of the blueprint for realizing it. However, where there is enormous potential for success, failure is too often the outcome. Many educators, parents, and humanitarians who claim they are dedicated to helping people become successful often feel puzzled about and powerless to solve the wasted-potential problem. One of the arguments in this work is that we will not find enough effective solutions to the problem of wasted potential until we stop overemphasizing failure and oversimplifying success. The promises of this work are that success will be emphasized and some of the mystery surrounding success will be removed.

Research studies of failure abound. An emphasis on failure has negative labels (disadvantaged, at risk) attached and valuable lessons (resilience, empowerment) detached. Likewise, oversimplifications of success abound and produce some of the following popular and often ineffective (maybe