A former student recently asked what it was like teaching...
I remember reading somewhere (Foucault?) that prisons, schools, and factories all shared the same architectural structure. But I wouldn't know, never been to a factory...which is, I guess, quite revealing. We talk about 'the theory of the firm' and all sorts of things (such as credit markets, labour markets etc) but have little idea of how they actually work. Well, yeah, you could perhaps get away with that by saying you're a "theorist" but why do you want to get away and shouldn't theory have some relation to reality?
Discipline. Input-output. Quantification, grades. Hierarchical structures. Stifling monotony.
The options: the high road of academia, lofty detachment, research for the sake of research, contributing to the production of knowledge, belonging to a community of enlightened, noble individuals, participating in informed conversation, the 'higher' things in life, far, far from the madding crowd with their cheap, easy and unrefined pleasures and simple happiness... the life of the mind, sifting through the facts, unrestrained, unqualified scepticism (that never morphs into mere worldly cynicism); subject something to the rigour of the mind, scientific assessment, analysis, break it down, think on the margin, contextualize...and other such buzzwords, jargon, and wooliness that is often pulled over the eyes of the gullible.
The low road of instrumentality, preparing people for the "real world": work, following the set pattern, increasing productivity; or a higher degree where you can fill your head with even more theories, learn some tricks-techniques, if you want to be fancy. Stuff the heads of the hollow boys and girls, the blank slates, get them used to long hours of hard work, get the consultancies going (get your hands dirty so that you can finance the loftier ideals). Don't waste the university's funds on teaching useless subjects like literature, or medieval history. hiedbiz. Bring on the hard stuff, the cash-generating, golden-egg-laying, cutting edge research work. And damn that old elitism of the toffs and the monks before them to hell. Meritocracy, democracy, any -ocracy, as long as it brings the dosh in, and gives you the veneer of being half-civilised at the same time. Specialization, not roundedness. Multi-disciplinary stuff is good. Always sells. Get bums on seats, to put it crudely, Mr. Mir.
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15 comments:
Thanks billoo.
my friend feels easy now. he feels that kashmir has never had a voice in the 'literature' field, though i am aware of two .....recently....agha shahid ali and a book called curfewed night. shahid ali was from kashmir.
bolano? yes, read his 2666. another bolano is coming out soon....called skating rink. i think his shorter fiction is better.
movies.....not many apart from the usual things....fassbinder etc etc. reading more these days, i am but listlessly. i find there is a dearth of good books once you have read russian literature. have you read lev shestov?
most of philosophy these days and literature too is really kitsch. people who dont read talk of ' A thousand splendid suns' and i find that shmucky, very much what Said would despise. perhaps. same too with movies.
then there are the ones who everyone reads, even in philosophy say....and they have just repeated the same things again all over. true originality is much missed, i think. in the blogging world too, there is a monopoly, reviews etc etc. i felt i was gravitating towards that though that had not been my intention when i had started. besides the few i knew have lost interest and a few have vanished. then there is face book and twitter and new philosophers in france are part of that game too.
i think one should only read ONE writer and leave it at that. but then again one does not. one wants more. i was reading Sloterdijk on the middle east and the same hackneyed views....alas like Zizek.
for justice's sake, give the palestinians their land back, that is all.
re your new post, isn't Israel a construct? and pakistan too? with their own fabricated mythologies, nationhoods etc etc.
any way, take care. everything is boring including really good books and good movies.
PS
on a lighter note....
I am moving over to a more working class environment, having become a season ticket holder at the" Arsenal". however, i am aware of the corporate nature of the clubs these days. but North London beckons as it always has, for me. there is an air of rebellion apart from the leafy parts, inside a besieged football club like the arsenal, surrounded by the billions of abramovitch. i know the songs too and so long as 'we' have arshavin and fabregas, we should be ok. watching a footie match makes my presence in england less gratuitous, so i think. and less patronised, so i feel. and then Arsenal are a foreign club on english soil, so that makes philosophy easy. and the club boss is le prof wenger, so all the more better.
i hope this does not bore you.
http://poemsandtheirmusic.blogspot.com/2008/03/lecture.html
there's also joy in teaching, and moments of grace, but i so hear you in this what you write, b.
one class a while back i got completely overwhelmed by teaching about empowerment and marginalization to a class of white anglo saxon middle class living in a major city in north america group of people, me included. i could see no way out of it. hence the poem.
hello, Kubla! Yes, agree with you..much of what is said seems to be just repetition or variations on a theme. I guess with the explosion in the numbers of intellectuals/people with degrees this is to be expected. But so, perhaps, is the incessant desire for originality (and perhaps these two things are not unrelated..bourgeois conformity also needs a 'risk society', thrills, escapes to the exotic.
Yes, the Palestinian case is quite simple-though some will say that it's terribly complex. It isn't complex if you have the right intentions or can see and think like a human.
no. Can you recommend a good one (i.e Shestov)?
yeah, splendid suns and kite runner are very popular here as well...I can't bring myself to touching such stuff..if I do, I might as well go for Dan Brown! Like a lot of the new Pakistani writers one feels that he's writing for a particular type of audience-and I don't care much for that audience.
oh yes, Pakistan is definitely a construct..every nation is. but what's interesting here is that the mythology has moved away from evil Hindu, safe home for the muslims to the new : the meaning of Pakistan is Islam.
So, instead of being a country that is open to other people/religious and ethnic minorities/women/ it has just taken over the established hierarchies and perpetuated them.
In some sense, the parallels with Israel are intriguing; one might have hoped something beautiful to come out of it (though maybe not really , in a land grab) ..in the sense that there would have been a heightened awareness, acknowledgement of other people; instead, it seems quite the opposite (I mean, I was reading an interview with Levinas and he's always harping on about 'the other' and ethics but when asked about Shatilla he engages in intellectual gymnastics).
Glad you support Arsenal. So do I!
but football, too, has become a game (in the sense you were talking about)..a type of porn.
Take care,
K.
Kubla, do you now feel somewhat settled in England? It would be very interesting to read your thoughts on your experiences there (I'm not trying to entice you back to blogging....just wondering if you have any posts on this topic?)
thanks, mai!
I can't open this at the moment but yeah, I didn't want to give the impression that there isn't lots of fun in teaching (personally speaking, i love it, and love the subject I'm teaching). But what I don't like is all this feigned seriousness and superiority..lack of genuine openness. Education, schooling, university is also another 'game ' (to sue Kubla's words..perhaps I'm misrepresenting him).. amore sophisticated game, for sure, but a game nevertheless.
I mean, look at this obsession with publishing. Nabs, if you're reading this, do you want to write a guest piece here on research? Could you also please explain the ham sandwich theorem again?
sorry, that should have been mani, not mai!
i just want to say i am grateful for being able to read this interesting dialogue here (yes, b, people love your comment section as well, no matter how stormy it gets sometimes :-P) -
oh, and hi, m and kubla :-)
for kubla: i have always loved Shestov, from the moment i discovered him (but i was young then, i think about 15). yes, i think i understand why you would like him as well.
http://poemsandtheirmusic.blogspot.com/search?q=lecture
dear b.,
yes, please, not mai, i don't like that one...
the feigned seriousness and the obsession with publishing were major contributors to my decision to leave academia - though i know there are many academics around this blog community, can i just say, phew! :) the people i met and liked, we'll keep in touch - teaching will be the only thing i'll miss
One of the things that puzzles and disappoints me no end in academia, at least in America, is the snob value of writing a new paper compared to teaching a class well. I understand fully that good research brings new ideas to the table, and is arguably harder to do, etc. However, it doesn't have the direct satisfaction of exchanging ideas with a real, live person. I don't understand why they're not treated as equal.
I suppose we all aspire to what you call the high road, but there is the danger of eventually becoming irrelevant to all but a tiny cohort of similarly read peers. Conversely, (from my brilliant and comprehensive experience of teaching two classes ;) ) the low road can be quite satisfying in its own right, if garnished with a well-placed deeper question here and a debate beyond the immediate subject there.
I think it was Hazrat Ali who said: 'Only applied knowledge is power', and while we're not always studying for instrumental reasons, such study has its place.
To me, studying medieval history or literature is certainly worth doing, if the end-of-term paper asks us to make comparisons with current affairs. It might be worth studying without such questions too, if the student learns to think more maturely, or because they might learn lessons for life etc. But to my mind, it is made better if the student is forced to actively think about their new knowledge.
Thanks Ali, you raise lots of interesting points.Will try and address them in a proper way but right now we're baking here and no a.c. so I can't think straight (not that I could before, but khair..)
What did you teach? Was it a good experience?
Hope all is well.
best wishes,
K.
Hmm, I left you a complete comment a couple of hours ago. Don't know where it went...
Ali, just to say, that deleted comment was not your s but mine (because it came out twice). I don't know where it's gone.
I like what you say about exchanging ideas with a live person (beats those with dead people!) ..like it a lot since it really does capture something fundamental about learning, openness, humility, and sharpness.
And yes, of course, I should have been clearer and less dogmatic: instrumental education is important; I just think the balance isn't right.
thanks again. Need to mull over the other things you wrote.
Take care,
K.
Oh I know, the deleted comment was already there when I was typing my original reply.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute and say that education should be entirely instrumental, in the sense that even the study of history and philosophy et.al. is important in forming how we think and therefore act in the future. Study that doesn't change, or at least doesn't have the potential to change, our future actions should merely be bedtime reading.
Is that a faulty/dishonorable way to think about it? I'm unsure, but I'd like to hear what you think.
As for my teaching, I taught two semesters of the undergraduate Law and Economics course here at Mason. It was challenging (and I thought unfair to students that a graduate lecturer was teaching a senior-level course), and I now have newfound respect for all my teachers (including the ones I didn't really think much of at the time). Teaching is fun, but it's hard!
I had a lot of fun when I was on firmer ground: the Coase Theorem was very rewarding to teach, and the Ah Ha! moment when they understood it was nice. Also, reading through actual cases and demonstrating the evolution of law through this was nice also.
The least enjoyable was the more speculative stuff, where we listed a few positives and negatives of alternative laws on each side, and then concluded that the optimal law was determined by the relative tradeoffs. It was probably useful for them to realize how things usually have tradeoffs, but I could see their eyes glaze over with that material sometimes...
The second semester I taught was very different from the first, in that teaching the same course again right after completing the first was a little monotonous. It's probably a good idea to teach a course only once a year.
Grading was the least rewarding part of the whole experience: I insisted on giving them more essay-type/qualitative questions, and just grading 40-50 papers at a time was tiring. No sooner did I finish returning quiz 1 that it was time for quiz 2, and then the midterm, quiz 3 and the final. I thought I was always grading!
Finally, I felt my age was an encumbrance to getting their attention: my oldest students were probably 10-15 years older to me, and the youngest were probably only 3-4 years younger, so they were slightly incredulous of my command on the subject until we were 3-4 lectures into the course.
The best part? Teaching a weaker student one on one during office hours and walking away knowing they understood something they hadn't grasped until two hours ago.
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