One of my students, and one who thought she might not be advanced enough for the course, por más señas, has written this:
In both films, and in the novel, the ‘natives’ are characterized by the Western narrators as convicts, enemies, or workers. When they cannot be fit into one of these categories, they are opaque – an undifferentiated, vaguely threatening mass. What the narrators cannot see is that they have their own definitions, their own boundaries.
And on the weblogs and in life, professors discuss the putative dichotomy between research and teaching. Should one be a devoted instructor, or move to an R-1? When I see paragraphs like the one my student has written, however, I come once again to the conclusion that the R-1 advantage is most precisely the time one has to create and teach with impunity, i.e. without heavy costs to one’s own research agenda, courses which move even students new to the discipline and the topic to write paragraphs like this. And I think anyone can produce a first-tier article, or put a student through the requisite paces of their program. But to have a random passer-by, as it were, come up with the paragraph quoted, and sit in class with a marked-up theoretical essay in hand, saying, “Now, this writer makes a key point on page 7…”, you must enter an uncharted scholarly borderland and engage in high art.
*
I have figured out, though, why it is that I get so tired of teaching – the issue is the constant redesign of courses and materials at basic and intermediate levels to Engage Today’s Students. I feel like a slacker, and notice my poor attitude, when I see others discussing strategies for this with such great enthusiasm. But these enthusiasts are usually doing it in only one field, I suddenly realized.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It’s a good paragraph.
It makes me wonder, at the same time, how often the perceptions of the enemy (in this case the Western perspective) can be — and have been — turned against them.
We know that in the martial art of Capoeira, the joyful idiocy of the happy slave is used as a mask for martial training. But how often has the Western perception of amorphousness been used to mask an underlying deadly structure?
A literary motif that comes to mind is the part in the novelette, The House of Hunger, when the students are pelting the racist, condescending missionary with lumps of sadza.
Sadza is a white, amorphous food substance, of playdough consistency. It is made out of white corn. It is almost as if the priest is being pelted with a material refutation regarding the indefinite consistency of life in response to his staunch assertations about God’s plan.
Yes. It’s one of the reasons why that undifferentiated mass is threatening – although vaguely so, since the Westerner cannot (yet) imagine that they can be not just rebellious / resentful, but also smart.
From Marechera’s THE CONCENTRATION CAMP — an unfinished novel in several parts.
This section is from “the city of anarchists”
“You’re a smart girl, Cora, you know.”
“You make me smart,” she replied, not intending the pun.
Outside in the street, Otto slowly pushed his dust cart to stop in front of the hotel. He swept, and swept; then he slowly moved away from the cart. He was seemingly concentrating on spearing up garbage and discarded cartons. Finally he turned the corner, leaned his lancer against a wall and elaborately began to eat his lunch while hurrying away without any appearance of doing so. Soon he found the bicycle Jimmy the Dwarf had left for him. He did not look back as he weave in and out of traffic. The explosion would come any second, any micro second…
Cora looked at her watch, then at Jim, with dismay.
“What is it, darling?” Jim asked, complacent but concerned.
She shook her head ruefully. Muttered something.
“What?”
“Well, I can’t say…It’s something I forgot.”
“Just say the word and it’s done.”
Cora blushed, stammered. “It’s…well…one of those women’s things. I’d forgotten.” She rose to her feet.
Jim, his mind filled with images of blood and soggy tampax things, said hastily: “Of course, Cora, go and fix yourself up.”
She rushed to the outer door. Jim sighed. Bloody biology. What on earth was God thinking making them like that?
As her car hummed into life, Cora bit her lip. The traffic! Finally she could inch her way out into the metallic stream. But she could not afford to draw any attention to herself; she must not drive too fast or too slowly. The tension transformed itself into a myriad beads of sweat. Her knuckles were ivory hard on the steering wheel. She was three blocks from the hotel when the whole world erupted inside out of itself.
I think we bear equal responsibility: we are responsible for continuing to develop materials and strategies that are engaging, but they are responsible for willing to be engaged. We both have to come half way. The problem at the moment is that the insistence from the pedagogical professionals that we go all the way has meant a refusal to move even a little on their part, which makes us tend to be reluctant to move, either. Student evaluations also play a disastrous role in this, insofar as, in their current form, they rob many young professors of the authority to insist that there are some things they know about better than their students.
The students who most irritate me are the ones who have discovered they are “visual learners” and try to insist that I lecture with PowerPoint and pie charts, and in the case of foreign language classes, think they should be exempt from listening and speaking because they are “visual.”
Our student evaluation form has a question on whether the professor “cared about you.” I have a colleague who lectures them on the silliness of this, asking, “Do you care about ME?”
Our student evaluation form has a question on whether the professor “cared about you.”
You can surely assure yourself the highest rating on this one by assuming the mickey mouse voice and uttering, at the end of the lecture, “Have a nice day!!”
😉
Aha – here’s what I mean: I mean that the fun parts of teaching are also parts of research. I don’t like teaching per se, as in, non research based teaching. That is why I’m happy to teach at actual university level, but do not think of myself as a “teacher” and would never consider teaching in a school. And that I think is or was the true meaning of research-1 (before the corporate model and the ‘academic-industrial complex’ took over, of course).
It should be the true meaning, too.