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Ramblings on teaching and teacher-student relationships
When you get up in the morning and look at the mirror, no matter who you are, what is staring back at you is WYTIWYG! You did not expect this, did you? The first person in life you teach is yourself. The very first day from when you can think for yourself, some say from the very moment you hit the terra firma, you are teaching yourself. Constraints from the people around you and your immediate environment do not stop you from teaching yourself. The process is continuous, variable from person to person, moving towards equally variable ends. Some teach themselves to become scoundrels, some become saints and most of us hang somewhere in between!
It seems you cannot help teaching yourself, but you hate teaching others. Bad news again! Do you have siblings? You taught them and did not even know it. Do you have a spouse, children, friends, partners and pets? You taught them all and what you get back from them is the result of what you teach. Some of us do something worse; we take up teaching as a profession. Some call it a noble profession; provides us with a membership to the revered ivory tower from where you can look down at the lesser mortals. We often forget you are a dispensing machine spewing out the so called knowledge for a price (*1) to those who can afford it. Whatever the level may be, the product is all the same –WYTIWYG!
What is it to do with the present crisis? We lament now that our students have become apathetic to a good cause. The lack of their interest in a cause (not necessarily a good cause since good or bad is in the eye of the beholder) is attributed to the shift from emotional to intellectual paradigms. We as their teachers, even if we knew it not, had some influence over both their emotions and intellect. Did we use that influence, not necessarily by teaching or preaching, but at least by acting? On all counts we are guilty and we have no choice but to accept our partial ineffectiveness as teachers.
Take the case of Dr. Stiff who is very good in his specialization of gas production. When he is let loose on the students, he enters with a lot of gas and ends with even more gas. If he falters one step away from gas, he would be lost and if you nudge him in any other direction he would vaporize. To put it plainly he does not know how to teach outside the circle! If he is asked to make an attempt, he will sweat, swear and climb the wall. During my student days in American College, forty years ago, there was no dearth of professors who taught outside the circle. That did not mean that we were messing around with our objective of getting a degree. Some of us worked very hard and others to a lesser degree, but every science student was aware if something did not work it was physics; if something exploded it was chemistry, if something was stone cold dead it was biology and if it was none of the above it must have been mathematics. You guys in Humanities, I am sure had similar parallels.
Outside the class rooms of AC, there was a steaming cauldron of socialism, other isms, politics, culture, art, music, literature, ethics, religion, humor and whatever else caught your flights of fancy. If none of these were attractive, every shade tree had a gaggle of Maharishis and their disciples in their embroidered jeans(*2) . They might have been a bit of pain in the you know where, but they were free thinkers in their dream world and if they did not go to classes and write tests, they had their good reasons. You had a lot of choice from being a bible freak teaching young innocent freshmen all about how not to commit sin(*3), a good old stick in the mud who did nothing, a studious nerd, a gifted athlete or a rabble rouser with no fear of disciplinary committees. You simply took your pick and ran with it. But the interesting part was that you can always find a professor to spar with. Sometimes the outcomes were not as pleasant as one would have expected, especially if you chose the wrong professor (*4). But I bet you that such students and professors meeting today, after decades are shaking hands and thanking each other, sometimes silently within themselves for those tiny moments they shared in their lives. Some of those professors I knew in my AC days are still alive; they are on TV, cinema, newspapers, magazines and the Internet. Even if they are gone, how on earth can I forget a professor who was ready to teach English in Tamil! Of course, we had our share of morons, but the atmosphere was conducive to think and act outside the circle. While some of the sister institutions were producing many graduates with “First Class Degrees”, AC was producing first class graduates with “Second and even Third Class Degrees”.
Some of you may say –hey wait a minute, I am one of the guys you are talking about and I am here now! Good for you my friend – I will tell you something, you probably have a long history of being suppressed, discouraged and kicked in the ass for stepping outside your circle once too often. To be blunt, what I saw in the last decade as an observer, with the exception of a few, were the run of the mill, stereotypic, subject imprisoned, thought-constipated and verbally diarrheic academics who did not show any interest or inclination to think outside the circle. A professor was introduced to me a few years ago; he was wearing a tee- shirt that said “Dave Crusin(*5) is all I need”. During the unfortunate conversation I had to endure, he was belaboring the point that Indian doctorates are in no way inferior to those obtained in western universities. I agreed with him a hundred percent and asked him “Who is Dave Crusin?” He was thrown off his stride – Dave Crusin? I pointed at his chest and said “Yeah - that Dave Crusin”. He was indignant and told me that he did not have time for the pursuit of trivia like that! I was amused, and being a polite man I am, did not ask the fruitcake why then was Dave Crusin important enough to get on his chest. I did not also tell him who Dave Crusin was and I am not certainly telling you because I am afraid that you will tell me that you do not have the time for trivial pursuits like that! I could reel off half a dozen incidents like this with the present day professors I met in the recent past in AC that had left me pondering whether Perumalsamy wiping tables in the canteen was ………Sorry, that slipped out by accident.
Factionalism among faculty (the issue discussed in my previous post) permeates through to the student community. They become as factional as their teachers and there is no student unity to support any cause, let alone a good cause. You taught them to be factional, so there is no advice worth a damn you can give them – WYTIWYG. Caste and religion oriented factionalism is evil. If we as teachers do not shun it there will never be any hope for us and our students. A few months before I left AC in 1974, I married a wonderful woman who was outside my caste and also outside my religion. One of the senior most professors when invited to the wedding bluntly told me that he will not honor my invitation because he could not condone my rebellious behavior against the social norms. He was perplexed and could not understand how the younger generation can break social codes that had been held up for thousands of years. I told him that if he accepted “Varnasrama”, he would not be a professor and would be doing something completely below his potential like collecting cowpats, very acceptable to the social norms of our day. He angrily argued that it was different, but I could not see how. Obviously he had a defined circle in which he lived and an upstart like me was trying to drag him out of his comfort zone. He appreciated my courage, but was convinced that I was sending a wrong message to my students. I did not agree with the “wrong” part of the message, but certainly hoped that the message was going through. I was by no means a pioneer in the mixed marriage concept and hell - I was not even courageous to fight all the objections made by the society. Many people married outside their castes, but if the religion was the same, their infringement was overlooked easily and religion provided them the cover to hide behind; there was less tolerance to those who violated the codes of both caste and religion. Again the nature of the caste and religion played a part, the wider the chasm lesser the tolerance. But what was a taboo even in the 70s is nearly nothing today, at least in the circle of educated folks. If this is so in matters concerning hearts, why should it be a controlling factor in running a college or even a church or diocese for that matter?
The point I am trying to make is that apart from teaching inside the classroom, the way you live and act teaches your student. Many of my colleagues and I smoked cigarettes in those days, we knew it was injurious to health, but did not advise our students not to smoke. It would have been absurd to do so. On the contrary Dharumi and I (let me also drag him down the drain) offered cigarettes to our students (who smoked) and sat around enjoyed a smoke or two with them. Were we teaching them? I think so – we sent down at least two messages. One, smoking or not smoking in front of your teacher or elder had nothing to do with respect; so we were debunking a stupid myth. Two is on exercising the freedom of choice; smoking is a rotten habit as for as health is concerned, but nicotine was an addictive stimulant and it was a pleasurable habit, but the choice was theirs as much as it was ours. Both Dharumi and I stopped smoking may be for completely different reasons; may be health became a priority issue over pleasure or we simply do not want to die, not yet anyway. I taught and still am teaching scores of students with completely different cultures on three continents; a few of them I still see today in different walks of life and they all remind me of WYTIWYG.
When an institution has the prevalence of teachers who are confined in their thinking, conventional in approach and are strictly syllabi bound, it cannot expect its graduates to be dynamic and enlightened. Program objectives and learning outcomes should include components that would make the students pursue knowledge outside their circle defined for an academic degree. When a student is a prisoner of her/his own emotional and intellectual circle, everything outside it could lead to apathy. This in the context of the present crisis, I am sure made Dharumi write his passionate post dated 19 February 2009. Unfortunately my dear faculty brothers and sisters in arms - what you taught was what you got- still WYTIWYG! American College forty years ago was a hundred years ahead of its sister institutions; to day it is just another college embroiled in its crisis. If you are given back the American College please think about the points raised in these ramblings and try to make a difference by doing your best.
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(1) : Some of my colleagues took exception to this sentence. If I am wrong, stop their salary for a few months and see their spout of knowledge drip and dry up real quick.
(*2) : During my early days as a lecturer, I mentioned to one of the “Maraththadi Maharishis” that his jeans were beautifully embroidered! He told me that he had an “Old lady named Cocaine Katie who embroidered all his jeans”. I gave him a knowing smile and he seemed pleased that I recognized his wit! It took me six years to realize that he was quoting from a song of Dr Hook and his Medicine Men. Lesson learnt – do not underestimate Maharishis under the trees or otherwise!
(*3) : During my days in Zoology as a demonstrator, I observed one evening, a young man with a bible haranguing a fragile innocent looking freshman he had trapped, for quite some time outside the Binghamton Hall. When I came down the steps an hour later, I saw the youngster still sitting there, quite pale and confused. I asked him what the matter was and first he said it was nothing. When I asked him whether I can help him in any way, he was almost in tears and said he had just been instructed on a lot of sins he did not know existed, and he was particularly concerned about the one on how to covet his neighbor’s wife, she seemed such a nice lady after all!
(*4) : A young male student who took his study of sexual selection seriously asked a professor why old goats were randy after young females and the consequences, I was told, were quite painful!
(*5) : Dave Crucin is an alias for Dave Grucin, a well known Academy Award winning jazz musician who made the music scores for popular movies like the Graduate, the Champ, On Golden Pond and several others. For more information see the website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Grusin . Alternatively, go to www.mp3tube.net and type Dave Crusin on the search term on top right to listen to a beautiful piece of music called Mountain Dance.
Have a nice day!
REGINALD VICTOR
Sultanate of Oman
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