This is the teaching expected of me now: Check students’ attendance without fail; ban trips to bathrooms lasting up to 20 minutes that, in effect, let students partly skip class; confiscate mobile gadgets when used in class; brace myself for random disruption of classroom activities by intruders; prepare weekly lesson plans; give students practice tests designed to achieve set learning outcomes; project an I’m-in-control-here stance; mark papers adhering strictly to rubrics; speak slowly and demonstrate my acting prowess to achieve a little communication; and be extra-patient.
On top of these, I make sure I add some “spices” in my lessons to make them more exciting!
Suddenly, I am becoming this new college teacher. I am reminded of the late Frank McCourt who struggled to earn some respect as a teacher from distracted students in New York City public schools.
I have to put on brand-new lenses to see clearly what teaching means to me—now.
That word—now—is critical in the semantic of the teaching I now do. Now I am maneuvering across a terrain totally alien to me.
In the classrooms, I have 25 (or fewer) Omani students. I have to use tools and provide scaffolding they need to build text structures called classic essays, despite their inability to spell the word “Saturday” or “black.”
In the conference room, I am informed many things are done top-down and, sadly for now, there is not much opportunity for negotiation.
Along the corridors and inside waiting rooms, students give me surprised looks; some compliment my “emo” hair; others ask, “Yu nyu ticher?” laughing uproariously when I reply, “Yes”.
In the office, my Filipino English is distinctive among other “Englishes” spoken across cubicles. I see teachers juggling multiple tasks to beat deadlines. When the wall clock strikes 3 p.m., the offices and parking lots empty rather quickly.
I am shoveling into my mouth spoonfuls of discourse about teaching—essentially, do your best so students get stuffed with well-thought-out measurable learning outcomes, which they would spit out during exit examinations.
I hear “voices” in my head: “Oh, forget about your invitations to critical pedagogy, your dreams about polyvocality in the classrooms, your cries for alternative modes of learning and your hopes for multiple spaces for literacy! You’re in the Gulf. Quit ranting!”
I respond: “I know.”
Again I hear: “What matters most is what appears in print.”
There is no evading the all-seeing gaze of people at the top.
But it does not mean I have to jettison my beliefs and embrace a whole new paradigm of doing things and “right” trajectory to good teaching.
Always there exists some tension within. Beneath my now-disciplined self lies a malleable, fluid and shifting subject: A pedagogue molded by a nexus of distant discourses from the past and the future.
To grasp my fluctuating self requires looking back, looking around now and looking to the future. To try to pin down the meaning/s of my pedagogical practices now is to listen to discursive echoes and feel the textures of both the central and peripheral spaces I dwell in through time.
From within me is emerging a new consciousness of what it means to teach.
What many preach as good teaching, is not gospel truth. Good teaching—if there is such a thing—is deeply personal. Good teachers, however, are not sheltered from scrutiny by outsiders so they should find ways to deal with it!
McCourt once remarked, “If you’re teaching and you’re not learning then you’re not teaching.”
So much to learn—and unlearn again—and plenty of reasons to rise early on Saturday mornings.
The author describes himself as a nomadic teacher. Born and raised in the Philippines, he backpacks, runs and treks mountains. He is now based in Ibra, Oman, doing his first love—teaching.