I have been tagged again for the Passion Quilt meme, for which I thank WoC PhD. I am honored because I do not think of myself as passionate about teaching – I was not brought up to think of that as safe, say you are interested in it and you will not get a tenure track job or make tenure. Neither do I identify easily as a “teacher.” I am not Mr. Chips; I am interested in school for what one can learn, not for what one can teach; I may teach well but then I am also good at service and administration; I came here for study and research, not to be a “teacher.” That is why this meme has now put me at a loss twice.
I try to impart to students that in terms of choosing majors and careers, they should orient themselves towards their true interests and not just to lo que está bien. Most of my students’ parents want them to major in something which will lead directly to a job, either with putative security and a “good schedule” (K-12 teaching, nursing, speech therapy, IT) or which makes a great deal of money (business, engineering, law, medicine). I am not opposed to this – practical skills and professional licenses give freedom. But more majors are practical than many people realize, or are practical in more ways than people realize. And I try to encourage women to consider as well the “practical” majors normally advised for men, and vice versa for men who have interests in the more “feminine” careers.
Mostly, though, I work hard and often successfully at finding ways for students whose interests are less obviously “practical” to combine these interests with practical plans. This takes some time and thought. It also takes some investigation and a fair amount of listening. It amazes me how much people spout at students, or “listen” but refuse to respond.
I was not sure what sort of picture to use for this post, so I thought a menu would be as good since I have written about choices. Now I am to name five others and ask them to participate, but all memes on this site are self-tagging.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I have nothing to add about teaching. However, I went out to a restaurant last night to celebrate my birthday and my mother’s combined. Here is the menu. I particularly enjoyed the Amarula Cream.
That´s a really interesting menu. So is this an outright South African restaurant, or a generally Southern African … or what?
I´m in a weird hostel in the department of Ancash, by the way, and there are Johannesburghers here. They are bemused by the prevalence of strawberry jam in Peru, and point out that in South Africa the hegemonic jam is apricot.
Yeah generally south african.
hm. These days I am trying to apply for grants but there are so many and there are orders that they need to be applied for in, and I am quite confused.
This is really an excellent post. You say you were not a born a teacher, but I beg to differ. If you are doing career counseling, you have some inborn gifts, I fear.
Gracias, Servetus. An excellent post, really?! It was hard to write because I had to excise all of this pain and bile which the original version exuded.
Part of my resistance to all of this is that the people I have met who “love teaching” are almost to a person supercilious, superficial, poorly informed, oppressive and power hungry. I *refuse* to associate or to be associated with anything like that. They like to teach because they like to pontificate. I hate them.
Eureka! Perhaps this is where I *am* passionate about teaching! I hate bad and insincere teaching passing for good, but then that is just one more way I hate duplicity and stuffed shirt authority.
But seriously, I am *not* cut out for teaching, because what most people want, and think teaching is, is that you spoon feed them some basic skills, confirm their convictions, do not tell them anything that might make them uncomfortable, do not ask them to think about anything, and give them a gold star.
I disapprove of this and it is why I hate to teach and am very uncomfortable around people who say they like it – because they tend to be people who do this sort of thing and think it’s good. I do not want to be associated in any way with these revolting enterprises.
Now that I have discovered what I really want to say “passionately” about teaching, I should probably do a third Passion Quilt meme, this time of my own accord, and talk about *that.* The third time’s a charm, it is said…
Jennifer – grants, I know, they are very picky things to write. In general – look really closely at the mission of the award and be sure to show exactly how you fit it; follow instructions exactly; keep in mind that if evaluators aren’t in field you need to figure out how to speak at a high level to a general (yet educated and also very bureaucratic) audience… but I think you already know these things.
I went off to process the menu image as a metaphor for teaching and came back to your last comment . . . I love teaching and I have often been judged for it b/c I do think teaching is about helping people “find and free your righteous mind” and not about creating “mini-mes” Usually my experience has been that if you express any love for teaching, for ideas and the exchange of them with students, you are disparaged for not being evolved enough to know “research is what matters” and networking is more important than what students learn “they are short timers here. don’t forget that.”
So I’m sorry if nominating you brought up a lot of bile. I got the sense that you did care about teaching and I wanted to hear from all the people I got that sense from, what it meant to them, b/c I hear more than enough from the people who don’t care all day long. Hopefully, thinking about your passion, just yours, and not vis-a-vis the politics of the regime, will make this fruitful. When I did it, I thought of my answer not just as a reflection of why I teach but also a plea.
Part of the problem is the insistence by the pedagogy scholars that there are only a few right ways to teach–often it is presented at one, if you attend a seminar on college teaching presented by either your writing center or your teaching center professionals. Behold, there are as many “right” ways to teach as there are teacher-student pairings. The word educate is derived from educare–in its most basic connotation, “to draw or lead out of”–I take this to mean helping the student to find what is in her and bring it out most effectively.
thank goodness I skipped those things.
Educare, yes, find and free your righteous mind, yes … I don´t mind doing these things at all, and I think it´s what the university should do … I´m just anti teaching because it appears to me that for most people teaching is not at all those things. Thanks for your responses everyone … I´ll process this …