In Retrospect

With all due respect to my students, I am bemused whenever I receive signs that my teaching was effective...long after the fact (of a particular course/semester). Teachers are not celebrities--we don't crave constant attention and affirmation. It bugs me that South Korean film stars/popular musicians are always thanking their fans for showering them with love and support. As always, I can't speak for my peers in the primary/secondary education sectors, but I am hard pressed to imagine that university faculty seek such adoration (well, some do--they say they feel like rock stars when they are lecturing--will comment on this phenomenon another time).

As mentioned in my previous post on dehumanizing faculty, professors mean well and try very hard to inspire, nurture, and facilitate knowledge transfer into all sorts of student brains. If we share any purpose across the spectrum of disciplines and sub-fields, it is to show our students that accurate, diverse information (AND proper analysis thereof) matters, for the "life of the mind" and for daily life. Of course, not every student likes every faculty member or every course, so a bit of hit-and-miss action is to be expected.

But touchingly, I received a postcard from a student who finished his undergraduate studies this month (one of the last to complete the three-year curriculum, hurray) and is now enjoying a well-deserved vacation abroad. He described his sight-seeing adventures, with a lengthy discourse about antiquarian bookstores, and then...in the last two sentences, expressed his sincere wishes that I would understand his initial distaste for my course (and me) because he didn't like my pedagogical style at all, but upon reflecting on that first-year experience, finally comprehended its "grand design" (more my words than his, but I have tried to capture his tone).

I knew that he was not that motivated while taking the course two years, but upon reading that postcard (at 8am, sitting in my sunny office), I felt enlivened and vindicated. I was happier, more than anything, that our relationship had changed over time, and that he accepted my good intentions.

I presume that parents feel similarly relieved when their children hint that "things were not so bad" (especially when uttered by adolescents who are remorseful about acting irrationally or spitefully).

Professors are People Too

I already worry that I may say this too often, but it crosses my mind at least once a semester that some of my students choose to dehumanize professors because doing so eases their consciences about feeling resentful about completing homework, taking examinations, or otherwise exerting effort to do coursework. At this point in my life, I can only remember what it was like to be eighteen years old vaguely, but I imagine that if I wasn't so terrified about being at the institution that I was, I would have expressed my fair share of discontent.

It's probably not easy to accept that professors have their students' best academic interests in mind, actually care about their well-being, and usually get jaded about any one student's ability to succeed after multiple manifestations of apathy or inability emanate from that person. Otherwise, each semester starts out as a new opportunity to foster as much intellectual development as possible in eleven to fourteen weeks.

So allow me to be trite, and remind readers who are students:
"Appearances may be deceiving (as well as your perceptions) -- your professors do care about you, and they are very human (prone to misjudgment and bias, but generally not in a malicious way"

And a forwarded citation from my sister, an archivist (by profession) who plays many other roles avocationally...

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1585

Surprise Success

I haven't been writing because respiration has been hard...literally and figuratively.
Veteran mothers will nod or shake their heads at my naive assumption that the seventh month of waiting for the big event would be as smooth and uneventful as the sixth one.
Besides chewing my humble pie meekly, I am also trying to express agreement in any way that I can (moving whatever limb isn't tortured by spasms) that now I feel like a beached whale, a trite but true metaphor.

But more than just surviving the rude awakening of being in the third semester, I am grading (or marking, as we say here in Hong Kong) papers and exams.

I presume that some angelic faculty enjoy performing this labor of love.  I wish I were still full of verve and excitement at the end of a long semester to ooh and ah over their magnificent ideas, expressed fluently and vividly in a variety of forms.

But no, I am exhausted and humorless after giving the last exam (before which everyone in the class, including me, has panicked for days if not weeks).

So unfortunately for my students, I usually choose to grin and bear the task, one paper/exam at a time.

I didn't expect this round of grading to be different, except of course, as indicated above, my physical condition makes it hard for me to be as productive as I usually am. Nights are especially difficult because I expand (like an automated balloon) and so breathing, sitting, standing, lying down (virtually any position), and thinking all become very challenging.

I am used to working around the clock, save for the hours that I am sleeping (or am semi-comatose because I should be sleeping but am trying to get a few more things done), but now, I have to endure several hours of semi-productive existence every day.

All in all, it has not been the best of times (inadvertent borrowing from Charles Dickens) but for once in a long while, I have been very happy and daresay, astonished (in a positive way) by how some of my students have performed on their final assignments.

I have gotten to know quite a number of them through their papers in a different way than I did in class, and a few that I worried about throughout the semester seem to have pulled through and absorbed more than I assumed they did.

I may be overgeneralizing when I say that most university faculty are like parents -- they want their students to succeed (contrary to students' beliefs that professors withhold good grades deliberately and want to blight their academic records) and feel terrible (arguably worse than the poorly performing students) when they read sub-par papers and exams -- so it's a huge mood-booster to encounter these instances of "surprise success."