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."

Burning the Midnight Oil

I won't promise to be creative and original on this blog -- I do that all day with teaching and research, so I feel comfortable about resorting to cliches and other crutches when writing this blog.  After all, I know I can't say anything revolutionary (nothing to match, much less, beat all the professional bloggers and veteran parents' insights), so I'll just be myself and say whatever comes to mind...

That caveat in place, I'm writing at 11:23pm on a Thursday night, nervous about my 95 students who are submitting their final papers by tomorrow at 5pm. In the previous stage of my life, I was the anxious student who had either procrastinated to the point that I was writing my first draft (freshman and sophomore years of college) or revising my n-th draft obsessively (junior and senior years of college). Now I'm still on edge, and I'm grading the darn papers.

The more important thing is that I'm still trying to keep up the blissful schedule of "working all the time" that most academics embrace. People think we have light, easy, flexible schedules when in fact, we are pulling long days and nights like our peers in other professions such as law, investment banking, and government. Our hours may not be fixed to office schedules but we do try to keep churning out quality work for as long as possible each day, so a 10 to 15-hour work period is not that unusual. And things get worse during crunch time (yes, we have crunch time too, not just certified public accountants during tax season or attorneys preparing for court).

So, well-meaning friends and colleagues have been asking me if I plan to "keep it up" once my bundle of joy arrives in July. They don't automatically assume that I'm going to drop everything (although the inquiry about whether my career will proceed post-baby has come up more than once) but the implication is clear that time will be the most constrained resource. Not good when your professional well-being is predicated on squeezing productivity out of every non-essential-for-other-functions hour. [True to stereotype, a lot of academics don't even take time for leisure travel -- attending a conference or doing research in a location other than one's own home base is already considered a luxurious trip -- some "faculty brats" grow up thinking that their vacations were earmarked periods for Mom and/or Dad making breakthroughs in archives]

Hmm, will I be waiting up to see if my students are writing to me late at night, panicking about their assignments? Will I be checking email every few hours to stave the tide of correspondence from colleagues and students, so that they all get a response from me in a timely manner? Will I be telling my daughter that "Ooh, we're so lucky, we're visiting X-country because Mommy needs to do research there" (in fact, she may be going on one or two such trips this very year)?  Perhaps, perhaps.

And if I'm up anyways at some ungodly hour for feeding, soothing, or whatever, I may turn a sideways glance to email to see how my non-blood-related (but nevertheless precious) "kids" are doing.   :)

Patience, Thy Name is Professor

...Or substitute "professor" with "teacher"

Long gone are the days when professors could be moody, make scathing remarks about immature and pathetic their students are, or cast indifferent looks at the adoring (or at least cowering) masses in front of them in the lecture halls.

Now, we are for all intents and purposes, service providers, dishing up knowledge to our students ("consumers," as they are sometimes called in administrative scenarios). We are supposed to be cheerful, altruistic, and ever-understanding of their physical, mental, and emotional needs.  Some students have cultivated serious habits of blaming all the problems in their academic lives on inadequate professors.

What they forget is that we're just as human as they are.

And it's hard being a role model (or a saint) every single day of one's life.

I've had students ask me if I ever leave the office (I want to answer, "No dear, I sleep in a coffin next to my desk"), why I don't answer emails at 3am (I may just be asleep -- at home, in a bed), why I expect them to be in class (why not?), and so on. 

As much as I would like to be accessible to my students and to exercise compassion during the most challenging moments in their lives, I wish that some of them would remember that we have hearts and minds too.  Until someone invents the Perfect Professor (a robot), teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin, and can only be productive with compromise and empathy.

Semi-Loco Parentis

Teaching at the university level is hardly different from doing so at the preschool through secondary phases of education. Many people assume that it's easier to teach undergraduates (graduates, yes, but that's material for another post) than three-year-olds or fifteen-year-olds. I concede that each grade requires specialized expertise, but in all, we share the profound burden of being "semi" in loco parentis, not with legal responsibility but the even greater moral challenges of helping them become better people while preserving their sanity (and ours).

Being female, younger (less than 20 years older than them), and short in stature (height does matter!), I encounter at least one student every semester who insists on criticizing and "re-educating" me. I am still not sure what motivates all of these individuals (all male, to date) to take on the mission of informing me that I am wrong and flawed, but I admire their attention to detail. Sometimes the criticisms occur in face-to-face conversations (ok, bearable and manageable), through email (where we can start really heated textual debates), and now to take the cake, verbal shaming on Facebook (wow, the bar goes up or down, depending on how you choose to think about it).

I wasn't too surprised that my current self-appointed tutor, Student A, has decided to vent his frustration and dislike of me on Facebook. Students do it all the time for all sorts of reasons. Student A may have even learned a lesson because despite getting some support for his vitriol, he has also encountered some pushback, others wondering why he wants to critique me for being a foreigner, for not understanding his language and culture, etc. Being born and growing up as an ethnic minority and then reprising the same role here, I'm used to all of these forms of disparagement, but I'm not 100% prepared to dismiss each and every case as it manifests.

I do wonder if I'm not being empathetic enough -- students may find me an easy target to disrespect (for my gender, my nationality, my ethnicity, my amount of professional experience), they may gain a tremendously fulfilling sense of empowerment by threatening me (despite my attempts to engage them in productive dialogue and to be considerate of their needs). Maybe they will develop into more mature versions of themselves through nit-picking, although I wish that they would cultivate self-confidence and a sense of purpose in other ways. And as my father always reminds me, their hatred is small potatoes as problems go.

But my general conclusion is that I don't understand what causes certain students to revile my teaching methods or to find fault with every little thing that I do. I know that not every teacher suits every student (and vice versa!) but I would prefer indifference to the passionate frenzy that drives them to hate me. I can learn from some of their discontents, and I have definitely tried to be objective about them, but I also wish that they will utilize their youthful energy in other ways that will be more constructive for their education.

All of this relates to parenting because I've heard that children can be the harshest critics of their parents, so I realize I have to brace myself for soul-crushing commentary from my daughter and her siblings, if they come into existence. When I am in (full) loco parentis, will I be able to handle it? That is the question.

Complexes

As evident from the blog title/theme, I teach and conduct research in an university. I started my career as a professional academic five years ago, so I am still a junior member of the trade, but as all of us go through arduous apprenticeships for at least five years (six and a half in my case) before we earn our certification (piled higher and deeper, or whatever you would like to call it), I have been "in the business" for over a decade.

So I feel (smugly) qualified to say that I corrupt (read: nurture) the minds of 17-40 year old persons every day, all the time. I have served as a mentor, substitute parent, elder sister, cheerleader, counselor, and in many other capacities. I am a historian but what I propagate about my discipline is far less significant than what I hope to achieve by guiding and encouraging people to learn all sorts of knowledge and to improve not only the intellectual but also physical and emotional dimensions of their lives.

But like many other professors (I use the term humbly, not to elevate myself as some superior being), I did not learn how to teach systematically, according to theories and frameworks. Unlike educators toiling in the kindergartens through secondary schools, I did not spend years of my life studying child psychology, pedagogical method, and other related subjects. By virtue of spreading knowledge as transmitted to me by my own instructors (with some of my own innovations as garnish), I have been endowed with the privilege of doing "cutting-edge" (as the university administrators would like to believe) research on teaching and learning -- but I never claim to be a "professional educator," but just a "professional researcher who teaches."

So, I have an enduring complex about becoming a parent. I helped my parents raise my younger sister who is seven years younger than me. I have been the mother of two cats for ten years. So perhaps because of the empirical evidence I have collected through those experiences, I am more apprehensive about embarking on the task of being one of two primary "parental units" for a person who will be my responsibility until she reaches legal and social maturity.

This blog will therefore be partly therapeutic, helping me working out a variety of issues, and partly philosophical, contemplating how I can adapt some of what I have learned from teaching to parenting -- two skills which are very different but which share some common aspects.

I hope that my daughter will be forgiving of the many mistakes that I will make, that she will recognize that while I am far from perfect, I am not vainly unaware of my shortcomings, and that she will be a happier child than I was able to be (for many reasons to be explained in future posts).