kulturbrille:amanuensis

It turns out that writing pages and pages about my students have done me a world of good; I cannot help but slip a sentence or two of personal narrative into all that discourse about lives and potential. And every line is an inadvertent, subconscious exclamation on my part, at times a cry for help, at others a wry observation, a sarcastic jibe at my apathy and indeterminate, manic efforts at nothing. But above all, it reminds me of the importance of narrative and why I treasure it above all else.

Evolutionary biologists might seek to elucidate some adaptive advantage in understanding narratives, and more often than not we take it to its extreme and are exceedingly thrilled by poesy or alliteration produced in conjunction with some withering insight into the human condition, a mish-mash of aesthetics and Darwinian selection, or we guiltily hoard puns and allusions, the thrill of insight obscuring the superficiality of our thinking. I am tempted, like Dawkins, to step up and launch into a tirade against thinking and intelligence as we apply it in schools, a useless amalgam of ranking, pragmatic affirmation and pseudo-meritocracy that works all too well. Of course, I will not; knowing all too well that if I am not willing to offer up a name, I have no right of comment. Even thinking out loud has a price.

But no, there is nothing here, except the vague, semi-autobiographical thoughts of one who has no other outlet; there are not even revelations or facts, except those which can be read between the lines, made or unmade with a careless phrase, or look. One imagines that my gratuitous use of personal observations and anecdotes will bemuse more than convince; that admissions tutors all over the world will fleetingly think, well, here’s a teacher that hasn’t yet lost the plot, and what else is there to know about this…candidate? Next!

It serves me right, I suppose, to be an afterthought, after all, I would rather be a coward than a hypocrite, as I am, without hope or confidence in a future which defies my touch. After all, are we not all navel-gazing big babies, smaller than we think we are, insignificant, only drifting consciously through time because we make the effort to think so? What more would one need besides breakfast, children, a million narratives to vicariously live in, and the occasional excursion to the park, and the guilty pleasure of a double entendre when evenings are slow? At my age, in my place, dare I think that I would come home to secretly stashed Eric Rohmer boxsets and walls splashed with red paint, and shredded novels floating in the bathtub?

No, of course not. When I moved earlier this year, I found myself picking out a place for an armchair even before I knew how many rooms I had; old habits die hard, and I have spent too long out in the cold, dabbling and visiting, but never staying long enough to understand how one could live absolutely. A dastardly pragmatist, able to fly but unable to hope. And so I continue, this year, like the next, the winter months filled with stacks of books, narratives, discourses and soon, brilliant boxsets and Korean dramas, all in strident resonance with the tragedy of my life. If I must close doors and tighten hatches, it is only because I cannot being myself to destroy another life, while mine lies in shreds. Coward!

Writing nothing is easy; one sits and blanks one’s mind, responding to the familiarity of one’s keyboard (or moleskine) and lets loose a stream of calamitous utterances directed at some half-imagined sentient being sitting not too far away. Sometimes the avatar takes the form of a vile enemy, at others it is a lover, imaginary, unrequited or otherwise, but mostly it is what one imagines is oneself, guiltily dressed in one’s favourite clothes, that one might or might not own. Then one conjures up catharsis in the chronological recounting of one’s day, frequently breaking up into rants and impressionistic phrases thrown together and garnished with expletives and onomatopoeic wails, and borrowed emoticons as a final flourish. Occasionally, when one is smitten or harried, it becomes violent, or wet, or jittery, and so on, and so forth.

Writing for a reason, however, is probably easier. One sits, galvanised by some life-changing cause or another, hopeful and eager to shout to the world your very message of change, hope, and perhaps revolution, or worse, salvation. Or you want to uncover some (inexplicably) hitherto hidden truth about our existence, truth or some other absolute construct that you discovered over coffee while sleepily memorising Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Or you just want to be heard, so that you feel somewhat important, for a moment. In a darkly undefined mix of the above and a (foolish) love for the sound of my own voice, I continue to write, here. All the words I cannot say, all the ideas I cannot have, all here, in a sickly miasma of references and weak intertextuality, right at home in the internet. Except, of course, that I’m always too lazy to do hyperlinks and graphics, and I’d rather be glib than precise, and I’m already halfway to my next drink, so it’s always unfinished and incomplete, exactly the way I am.

Being (hardly) anonymous allows me some freedom. I can declare trivial loves; I love it how Vanity Fair sends me overflowing magazines even though I cannot afford a subscription, I love it how my brother has slipped away to Oxford and is now two hundred years in the past, huddled in a small room held together by faith and duct tape, etc. I can ignore reality and pretend that tomorrow, I am flying to New York to have poppy-seed bagels with cream cheese and chives for breakfast, and that my days are driven with idealism and youthful passion, hoping for everything and wanting for nothing, even if the candle spits and sputters and rats scurry in the rafters. And I can declare secret, half-known desires, pretend or otherwise; the universal desire for freedom, emancipation, vicarious existence in the idolised lives of others, or others that strike closer to home, like coffee that isn’t sour or tepid, or someone to talk to that won’t become a stranger. Somehow they all do.

Ironically, it is reality, truth and facts that are forbidden. I can mention no names, no events, except those that revolve solely around me, and make only references to ideas, concepts and thoughts not rooted in familiar time or space. Like a marvelous game of Taboo, I greedily pounce on every morsel I can play with, which has regrettably become a habit. I teach a natural science, as fact, unchanging in the timeframes we are allowed to grasp, but in every aspect of what I know and seek to know, I see only uncertainty and a depth and range of possibility that calls me. Depth is what I seek first! To immerse and forget myself in an ocean of ideas. Perhaps I am selfish; I seek only to know, an end unto itself, which I might, in my weaker moments, pretend to disavow. Even if I am all too familiar with the power of familiarity and routine to numb emotions and desire, the hunger remains. And one important element of this hunger is dialogue. Not with you, faceless, nameless, alien reader, but with my doppelgänger, here beside me. Hello.

可不可以不勇敢 - 范玮琪

你用浓浓的鼻音说一点也没事
反正又美又痛才是爱的本质
一个人旅行也许更有意思
和他真正结束才能重新开始
几年贴心的日子换分手两个字
你却严格只准自己哭一下子
看着你努力想微笑的样子
我的心像大雨将至那么潮湿
我们可不可以不勇敢?
当伤太重心太酸无力承担
就算现在女人很流行释然
好像什么困境都知道该怎么办
我们可不可以不勇敢?
当爱太累梦太乱没有答案
难道不能坦白的放声哭喊?
要从心底拿走一个人很痛很难

Good advice always takes the wind out from one’s sails, and if used with a liberal dose of common sense and awareness, situational or otherwise, one can almost never put one’s foot wrong, instead of hurtling to one’s doom.

My tongue remains curled around all manner of positivity, exhorting admission tutors around the world to accept my bright young things, and an uncertain rhythm has thankfully taken over my life. Not a moment to dwell on impossibilities, and fragments of ideas linger on, waiting to be embellished and made whole; the juxtaposition of curriculum theories, stretching into the distance, vaguely fatuous stories about life and how we should accept who we are and what we have, storms in many coffee mugs and assorted teacups, and I have finally, admittedly, been proven utterly, completely and irrevocably wrong. But it is too late.

Last week I delivered my lectures on Intelligent Design, and this week the God Delusion finally sees the light of day, and already the fallout has begun. The holidays beckon (I am already far away), and I remember vaguely who I used to be, rolling all over the place and never quite knowing what tomorrow held for me, reality held at arm’s length. If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine what it feels like.

Instead, I step blindly all over the place, smashing lives and plugging leaks. What a mess.

Parts of a disagreeable, hastily-written essay of mine:

Theories of curriculum and of teaching and learning cannot, alone, tell us what and how to teach, because questions of what and how to teach arise in concrete situations loaded with concrete particulars of time, place, person and circumstance. Theory, on the other hand, contains little of such concrete particulars. Theory achieves its theoretical character, its order, system, economy, and, above all, its very generality only by abstraction from such particulars, by omitting much of them.

- Joseph J. Schwab

Perhaps as a way to summarily conclude, I shall suggest a way out of this paradox. There is no need to demolish the current system or indoctrinate vast numbers of teachers so that they might become reflective; it is, by its nature, impossible! All of us, as Macdonald says, are critical realists in our sanest moments. The first step is to recognise the teachers as individuals and allow them to freely interpret the curriculum. This, to me, is the most glaring omission in the system. Each of us grapples with reality and knowledge in a way so as to extract meaning and comprehension, and this is our greatest resource as educators. I find that, in my most difficult moments as a teacher, I always return to personal narratives to illustrate my point. I return to the roots of my logical, rational conclusions, and construct an elaborate perspective from scratch that my students are able to understand, and usually after I demolish it all so that they might see that there is more than one way of understanding even the most basic of scientific propositions. I give them context, because, just as in a literary text, even in science, context is everything, and show them that context is not just the anatomy of a heart, but also the history of its discovery, the social implications of this knowledge, and much, much more.

The system demands that we trivialise our personal journeys and deliver curriculum using chosen tools and techniques. We should select teachers not for what they know but how they know it; their ability to apply knowledge critically and expound on their chosen field. It still perplexes me how, for all subjects, we regularly invite professionals and experts to come in and speak to students, and we place them on pedestals. The teacher is relegated to being a conduit because of his or her lack of knowledge. The reality is, I think, that it is acceptable to have a teacher who is bad at speaking in public, but not to have one who does not have his facts right. Teachers should be given the confidence and critical awareness of their own learning and thinking, and to use their own narratives to teach, in their own fields. They should be able to combine universal narratives with their own histories and insights to deliver curriculum.

The difficulty then lies in recruitment and human resource management, not in impossibly abstract theories to be forced down the throats of hapless educators as paradigms or initiatives. This, I think, is possible, and we would then have a nation of hermeutically-emancipated, liberated, people.

Barely two years ago, I was free to say and write what I wished. I was a student of pedagogy and education, and it was imperative that I constructed my own approach and philosophy of teaching, before I was unleashed (or booted out) into the real world. After a frantically insipid year, alas, it was not to be. I have learnt far more in the last few months as I study curriculum theory, and one of my first lessons was that my opinions now matter more than ever before, but I am unable to speak them.

Opinions count for much more than we are willing to admit. So much is unsaid in this country that we suffer from a stifling, pregnant silence everywhere we go, and as we become entrenched in our thinking and roles, we find ourselves unable to speak. Acquaintances becomes friends, colleagues, new individuals, students become graduates, family structures evolve. Each new role that we take on is another albatross around one’s neck, delineating in a single label all that we can and cannot say, and consequently, what we can and cannot do.

Such a deadening miasma cannot be healthy; I write here anonymously, but you know who I am, so why can one not sign off with a flourish after every incomplete thought? Are we so naive to take everything we hear or read at face value? Should I be so cruel as to give an answer? So much time is spent decoding oblique statements and references, reading subtle gestures and discovering context that our very mundane lives become artifically difficult narratives, painful to bear and hardly worth the effort. In the movie ‘Liar Liar’, Jim Carrey’s character can do nothing but speak the truth. However, it is impossible to imagine what it would be like if we had to tell the truth for a day, for in the first place, most would have very little to say. And then entire lives would crumble and falter as we come to terms with all the newfound colour that would spill out of our atrophied minds; there would be love, hate, admiration, liberation, realisation, fear, the entire gamut of human experience that we are constantly suppressing and pretending to experience. It would then not be our thoughts and narratives that would be found lacking, but our very own unequal natures, this in itself an unbearable idea.

And so on. There is nothing wrong with oppression, as the thought goes, as long as you are not the oppressed, nothing wrong with silence, as long as you have nothing to say. Several weeks ago, my lecturer exhorted us to speak our minds and ask all the frivolous, unanswered questions on our minds as she spoke. It was impossible, of course; in that class, as in many others, many are quietly answering their questions, or judging them, even as they emerge from the gloom of their thoughts. Their constructed paradigms endure for as long as their intellect and stamina can support them, before they silently crumble and fade away. I must slave within the system, and then be old, decrepit, of no consequence, before I can speak my mind.

‘All teachers should be critical!’, goes the new rallying cry in class, and at the back of our minds we are thinking, well, everyone should be critical about everything, but it would be fatuous to say that out loud. We squirm when someone quotes Socrates about the unexamined life, not because we disagree, but because it strikes a (quickly ignored) chord, because most are unable to begin. Or even speak.

I’m going to let this simmer until I know how to begin. Again. You know who I am, of course, but there shall be no names, no accounts of things, but only ideas, narratives, and declarations.

Asymmetry is here, broken links, images and all, for nostagia and embarassment.