Because I have not written any coherently academic or politically interesting thinkpiece these past couple of months now – blame the convenience of unstructured, sometimes, not even well-thought of thought bursts easily posted on Facebook’s status updates and a lot of other unproductive, output-less wanderings of the mind (and of the senses) – I thought, why not resurrect my old college blogging style here, which a number of my friends (in Friendster of the olden days) actually and really read before I started thinking, out of vainglory, that I actually have some intellectually provoking thoughts worth any reader’s time or attention for that matter? So here it goes – just plain and simple rundowns of my day, mundane musings, tales, peppered with digestible ounces of political theory or religion – gasp! – (just can’t avoid it, I suppose) for the curious reader – student, friend, relative, acquaintance, dating prospects (!), and the police state apparatuses.
Besides, I feel and fear that increasingly my narratives and story-telling (and perhaps even arguments and hypotheses) in the academic pieces I’ve been trying to finish are sounding dryer, more monotonous, desperately repetitive not to mention, pathetically predictable by the sentence already. Same goes with my class lectures. In fact, I’m beginning to think that self-clarity and self-certainty about one’s arguments may not necessarily be good at all. My experience these past couple of semesters – when I have finally realized what my “intellectual project” is (that is, when I finally have complete understanding of what I want my students to learn from the readings I have assigned, in contrast to my previous semesters, when I grope for this meaning at the same pace as my students do) and have located my proposed way of looking at the realities I teach in the specific epistemic traditions I wish to engage – seem to suggest that parsimony on the part of the teacher and openness and receptivity to learn on the part of the student may be diametrically opposed. If my student evaluations are to be believed, rather than seeing the value of a carefully laid-out argument to be presented for the entire semester, my students have found my pedagogical style severely constraining: “he is ideologically indoctrinating us”, “he is pushing his ideology down our throats”, “he is close minded”, “he refutes every counter-argument we raise” – to specify a few of how some students have characterized my classes.
I couldn’t help but wonder – is effective teaching really more about raising questions and struggling with one’s class in understanding one’s questions (as well as questions from other class participants) rather than expecting members of the class to provide the answers one wanted and indicated as the proper answers outlined in the objectives section of the course syllabus? Where should teachers draw the line between evaluating students based on methodological class objectives (how to understand the texts or the problems) and more substantive, teleological ones (what precisely should have been understood)? For post-positivist educators in the social sciences and the humanities, can such line be even drawn, that is, can the methodological concerns and the substantive argumentative concerns even be distinguished so as to make it possible to draw a line in between them? Should teachers abandon the habit of identifying and qualitatively indicating “learning outcomes” and “evaluation rubrics” in favor of a more nebulous and imprecise pedagogical instrument?
Yet wouldn’t the latter be even more tyrannical precisely because it is arbitrary? Wouldn’t the latter be even scarier precisely because the evaluation strategies are not properly disclosed?
Take for instance my political theory classes. Ever since I started teaching PoS60 (History of Political Theory) and PoS61 (Contemporary Political Theories), I have designed my courses around the pursuit of a critical engagement with Enlightenment rationality and liberal political theory and an endorsement of a post-secular, post-Marxist hermeneutics to reflect my own research interests and subjective reading of political realities. In a way, to “think properly” in these classes, my students at the end of the semester, must have been able to think in the way that I do – which may not necessarily be parallel to the outcome of their own self-thinking. While some find this rather dictatorial, I’ve always thought of it as a model of learning through apprenticeship.
But where have the apprentices gone? Why are my students unable to appreciate this teaching strategy? I suppose all these “self-help kits” and “do-it-yourself” guides proliferating in many bookstore shelves and reproduced in popular mentalities are to blame. The fact that the more popular and widely sought after teachers in my university are those who are perceived to possess no agenda – political or not – and are more sincerely interested in aiding their students to learn on their own is testament enough to the ascendancy of the “do-it-yourself” teaching paradigm. Yet, the truth is, even “student centered” learning is some kind of an agenda, is it not? Only that the appearance of abandoning any explicit agenda on the part of the teacher enabling the teacher to present himself/herself as providing a wider space for freedom effectively conceals a more implicit (and *gasps* universalized, generalized) agenda – the so-called autonomy of the student learner.
Or maybe because my first teachers – my parents – did not really teach me any method of learning at all! Instead, they showed me what they thought I had to learn! Yes, I was brought up in a completely Aristotelian household where telos was something that can be demonstrated. They showed me and did it themselves. From Kinder up until Grade Six. From elementary arithmetic to intermediate algebra and geometry – my father would first compute, then I would copy and follow. From penmanship to intermediate and competitive essay writing. From the required clay-formations in kindergarten to the home economics cooking classes. Yes, my parents did these things for me, or at least, part of these projects. When I started singing for the choir and performing in grade school, my mother would sing the song first – enunciating the words and the melody and only after she has instructed me on the proper stresses would she allow me to sing on my own. My God, even art competitions – my mother would draw first and then I would copy. So sometimes, I think, if my students hate me, they should hate my parents first for rearing such a monster who demands that they learn exactly what their teacher does or thinks.
Or maybe, just maybe, our contemporary aversion to “pointing fingers” (holding others accountable) is reflective of a deeper aversion: that of being on the receiving end of pointed fingers, of being accountable for how others act, think and feel? In a fast-paced world confronting all sorts of pressures where the task and demand of “showing” or “demonstrating” what should, or what is, or what one could be, becomes very arduous, I wonder, might not supposed autonomy of the self-learner be an excuse for our gross refusal to be responsible for each other?
