Thoughts About Teaching

As I mentioned in the last post, I won't be teaching the next academic year. I have a fellowship, which means I have the luxury to sit on my ass for an entire academic year, read, write, improve my French etc. I am thankful,not because I don't like to teach, but because I am not very good in juggling the pressures of teaching along with the pressures of writing. But in the last one year, I had been thinking a lot about teaching and the issues that I had been facing as a teacher. And since they are too many in number, I will try to refrain from making any blanket statements here.

Lately I have been wondering, if I love my students.Yes, I sure have spotted possibilities in many of them, have felt occasional affection for them, felt that they are very nice, cute and sweet. But do I love them in the way I have been loved (and continue to be) by many of my own teachers? I will have to be honest here. The answer is NO.While it might just be my own personal deficiency to be lovey-dovey, I think, the issue at hand is a little bit more complicated. Ordinarily, within the semester system, we teachers get to teach our students for 16 weeks.Out of these 16 weeks, the first two are usually consumed by introductions, handing out and explaining the syllabus, setting down the ground-rules etc. Within the next fourteen weeks, we try to cover at least three large assignments, three smaller ones, numerous housekeeping issues and last but not the least, the academic materials. So, not a whole lot of time is left to get to know each other in a way that will open up spaces for intimate important conversations. I try to have at least three individual conference meetings with my students during any single semester, but they are still circumscribed by the demands of the curricula. The bottom-line is, unless a student decides to write a thesis with a particular teacher, contacts between the teacher and the taught are going to be fairly minimal and formal.Not only that, just when we begin to feel after the fourteenth week or so, that the class is going somewhere, the students are getting comfortable with each other, with me, the semester ends.

So, I am thinking, maybe this is one of the ways in which the corporate university model polices the teacher-student relationship? By keeping it minimal, extremely formal and thus preventing the formation of any long-standing bonds between the teachers and the students?