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09-08-2015, 07:29 PM
Teaching is tough work. This is both a truism and a cliche, I suppose.
Setting aside the mechanical issues (the preparation, the grading, the course design), the act of teaching is, for me at least, a process of opening up the self. Teaching is about being vulnerable. About standing before a group of strangers, holding out my hands (and sometimes my heart) and asking them to come along with me. And it is my vulnerability, my willingness to be human at the lectern in a way that so many professors will (or can) not, that makes me a good teacher. Accompanying this vulnerability comes other things that I use to engage students: passion, humor, play. But for me, teaching is always, at its core, about being vulnerable with another human being.
Vulnerability is hard.
Vulnerability is about investment. About allowing oneself to be judged. In teaching, it's hard not to take things personally. Attendance, absence, assignment submission; while you know on one level these are factors outside of your control, they can also be felt as small slights, degradations, rejections. The silence on the other end of a misunderstood or misphrased question can be deafening. And it can make you feel like a failure.
Before this trip, I'd only ever taught inside the US. Natch, I'd only ever taught inside of California, and the Bay Area, if we are going to get specific. My students were mostly middle-class, often white, and they grew up knowing college was an inevitability. I usually had an audience who thought, outside of whatever general education credit my course might satisfy, that the class was going to be a bore. Most people don't care about Shakespeare the way that I do. Most people don't spend their evenings scouring books and posting other people's witty lines on twitter. Most people have other, more interesting lives, and want to spend them in other, more interesting places than a stuffy classroom on a sunny afternoon.
Classes are ephemeral objects. They come and go with such speed, leaving a few traces behind, if the teacher is lucky. Teaching, for me, is always a performance. A one-woman show, propelled forward by enthusiasm, awkwardness and passion. That last word, passion, is key. Passion is about being invested, but etymologically, passion is linked to the Latin verb "pati," to suffer. This is also the word from which patience is derived. Teaching, especially teaching from a position of vulnerability, is all about suffering. About putting oneself on display to be judged, evaluated, picked apart.
Even as they are ephemeral, classes are also painfully tangible. You are reminded at every moment of your failures and your success; the blank stare of someone who isn't getting "it" is the ultimate real-time feedback. On the quarter system, there was always too much time and never enough. The same proved true for a class on a two-week schedule. We meet, we talk, perhaps the students take away a "nugget of truth, " perhaps not. At least over the quarter there is time to relax. In two-weeks, the first day is so close to the end, the pressure to finish and not fall behind is relentless. There is no room to have an "off day" in this scenario.
India is a space bursting with hospitality in a decidedly inhospitable environment. The people are kind, genuine and uncynical, and the employees at Zoho are tirelessly compassionate. The climate is warmer than the people, to a fault. The sun, the heat and the humidity, the mosquitoes that swarmed me every time I stepped outside for more than five minutes, the relentless press of traffic and horns, the aromas of food so acrid my eyes felt like they were on fire...these forces combine to make India a hard place, despite the endless kindness of strangers. The distance from family and friends, both temporal and geographic, can also feel daunting; India is, quite literally, as far away from my home as I can get before I start coming back around the globe again.
Being unable to speak the primary language (be it Tamil, Hindi or Engineer) of most of your students adds another challenge to the job of teacher. They are thinking in multiple languages, while I am stuck operating in one. I'm used to "owning" the classroom in some sense, but I was acutely aware of my alterity, my foreignness, in this space. Setting aside the question of race (if one ever can), my approach to thinking about words, to education, and on how to engage with students, is radically different than what the participants in my class had been conditioned to expect. There was culture shock the first few days, on both sides. But it wore off. Maybe it was the chocolate. Maybe people just started to believe that I actually wanted to hear what they had to say rather than listen to myself blather on. Maybe it was the texts themselves; Martin Luther King and Shakespeare keep getting discussed for a reason. Eventually (around day 3), something clicked, and people started to talk. And once they got started they didn't seem to want to stop. (My money is still on the chocolate.)
Ultimately, what I found out about teaching in India is that it isn't that different than teaching in the US. Students want to feel valued, and to feel like they have a place in the classroom. That the space is theirs as much as mine, and that we are all in this together. And perhaps this goes back to vulnerability, and to what characterizes my teaching style. No one wants to be talked down to, and I see my role as a teacher to be one of facilitating a discussion more than anything else. About holding out a net and saying, "It's okay to jump. I'm jumping too."
I cried on the last day of class (true of almost every class I have taught). And I found myself crying on my last day in India, sobbing into the phone to my mother on the other side of the world about all the ways I had failed. About how my students deserve so much better than me, and anything I could possibly offer. About how their enthusiasm, their willingness to take the leap, and their patience with me was impossible to fathom and impossible to repay. She had no reply, save that this is probably exactly what makes me so well-equipped (and ill-equipped, in my mind) for this job.
But I'll keep coming back, and I'll keep trying. And if I'm lucky (and if I keep bringing the right kind of chocolate), maybe the students will keep coming back, and keep trying, too. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. (http://start.westnet.ca/newstempch.php?article=terms.html/) It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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Setting aside the mechanical issues (the preparation, the grading, the course design), the act of teaching is, for me at least, a process of opening up the self. Teaching is about being vulnerable. About standing before a group of strangers, holding out my hands (and sometimes my heart) and asking them to come along with me. And it is my vulnerability, my willingness to be human at the lectern in a way that so many professors will (or can) not, that makes me a good teacher. Accompanying this vulnerability comes other things that I use to engage students: passion, humor, play. But for me, teaching is always, at its core, about being vulnerable with another human being.
Vulnerability is hard.
Vulnerability is about investment. About allowing oneself to be judged. In teaching, it's hard not to take things personally. Attendance, absence, assignment submission; while you know on one level these are factors outside of your control, they can also be felt as small slights, degradations, rejections. The silence on the other end of a misunderstood or misphrased question can be deafening. And it can make you feel like a failure.
Before this trip, I'd only ever taught inside the US. Natch, I'd only ever taught inside of California, and the Bay Area, if we are going to get specific. My students were mostly middle-class, often white, and they grew up knowing college was an inevitability. I usually had an audience who thought, outside of whatever general education credit my course might satisfy, that the class was going to be a bore. Most people don't care about Shakespeare the way that I do. Most people don't spend their evenings scouring books and posting other people's witty lines on twitter. Most people have other, more interesting lives, and want to spend them in other, more interesting places than a stuffy classroom on a sunny afternoon.
Classes are ephemeral objects. They come and go with such speed, leaving a few traces behind, if the teacher is lucky. Teaching, for me, is always a performance. A one-woman show, propelled forward by enthusiasm, awkwardness and passion. That last word, passion, is key. Passion is about being invested, but etymologically, passion is linked to the Latin verb "pati," to suffer. This is also the word from which patience is derived. Teaching, especially teaching from a position of vulnerability, is all about suffering. About putting oneself on display to be judged, evaluated, picked apart.
Even as they are ephemeral, classes are also painfully tangible. You are reminded at every moment of your failures and your success; the blank stare of someone who isn't getting "it" is the ultimate real-time feedback. On the quarter system, there was always too much time and never enough. The same proved true for a class on a two-week schedule. We meet, we talk, perhaps the students take away a "nugget of truth, " perhaps not. At least over the quarter there is time to relax. In two-weeks, the first day is so close to the end, the pressure to finish and not fall behind is relentless. There is no room to have an "off day" in this scenario.
India is a space bursting with hospitality in a decidedly inhospitable environment. The people are kind, genuine and uncynical, and the employees at Zoho are tirelessly compassionate. The climate is warmer than the people, to a fault. The sun, the heat and the humidity, the mosquitoes that swarmed me every time I stepped outside for more than five minutes, the relentless press of traffic and horns, the aromas of food so acrid my eyes felt like they were on fire...these forces combine to make India a hard place, despite the endless kindness of strangers. The distance from family and friends, both temporal and geographic, can also feel daunting; India is, quite literally, as far away from my home as I can get before I start coming back around the globe again.
Being unable to speak the primary language (be it Tamil, Hindi or Engineer) of most of your students adds another challenge to the job of teacher. They are thinking in multiple languages, while I am stuck operating in one. I'm used to "owning" the classroom in some sense, but I was acutely aware of my alterity, my foreignness, in this space. Setting aside the question of race (if one ever can), my approach to thinking about words, to education, and on how to engage with students, is radically different than what the participants in my class had been conditioned to expect. There was culture shock the first few days, on both sides. But it wore off. Maybe it was the chocolate. Maybe people just started to believe that I actually wanted to hear what they had to say rather than listen to myself blather on. Maybe it was the texts themselves; Martin Luther King and Shakespeare keep getting discussed for a reason. Eventually (around day 3), something clicked, and people started to talk. And once they got started they didn't seem to want to stop. (My money is still on the chocolate.)
Ultimately, what I found out about teaching in India is that it isn't that different than teaching in the US. Students want to feel valued, and to feel like they have a place in the classroom. That the space is theirs as much as mine, and that we are all in this together. And perhaps this goes back to vulnerability, and to what characterizes my teaching style. No one wants to be talked down to, and I see my role as a teacher to be one of facilitating a discussion more than anything else. About holding out a net and saying, "It's okay to jump. I'm jumping too."
I cried on the last day of class (true of almost every class I have taught). And I found myself crying on my last day in India, sobbing into the phone to my mother on the other side of the world about all the ways I had failed. About how my students deserve so much better than me, and anything I could possibly offer. About how their enthusiasm, their willingness to take the leap, and their patience with me was impossible to fathom and impossible to repay. She had no reply, save that this is probably exactly what makes me so well-equipped (and ill-equipped, in my mind) for this job.
But I'll keep coming back, and I'll keep trying. And if I'm lucky (and if I keep bringing the right kind of chocolate), maybe the students will keep coming back, and keep trying, too. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. (http://start.westnet.ca/newstempch.php?article=terms.html/) It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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