Perhaps the best thing about being on sabbatical (apart from being able to delete work emails en masse) is that it’s reminding me of what it’s like to be a student, which is, I think, a lesson all teachers need to be reminded of on a regular basis.
I’m taking a number of different classes while I’m here in India, including Sanskrit, Ashtanga yoga, Hindustani flute, and Vedic chanting, and I’m also trying to teach myself enough Indian philosophy and religion to be able to include it as part of a course I’ve developed for my college. It’s reminiscent of the life of a graduate student, although minus the angst associated with constantly feeling as if your professors are judging you as something they would like to scrape off of their shoes.
Consequently, I’m consistently finding myself trying to grasp something new, something that someone instructing me knows a lot more about than I do, and about which I often feel inadequate when it comes my abilities or level of understanding. It can be somewhat mortifying, but it’s also exciting and fascinating and even a little bit scary, as well.
As a teacher, I sometimes forget that last part; because I’m relatively comfortable in the classroom, and reasonably familiar with my subject matter, I rarely experience that feeling in the pit of your stomach that results from feeling like the material being presented is way over your head, that you’ll never really get it, and that you may as well just drop out and get a job as a roofer or whatever.
Here, though, as I try with mixed success to acquire another yoga pose, or learn a new fingering on the flute, or figure out how a vowel symbol is supposed connect to a consonant character, that feeling comes flooding back and there I am, back in Bill Talbott’s Philosophy of Social Science seminar, or David Keyt’s Advanced Logic class, or for that matter, Sister Theresa’s 10th grade trigonometry course, wondering how I’ll ever make sense of the material and why it is that everyone else around me seems to get this shit so easily.
It makes me want to be a better, more compassionate teacher, one who remembers what it’s like to be on the other side of the podium.
It also makes me want to buckle down with my Sanskrit homework, of which I’ve got plenty.
DO you think the teacher-student relationship in India is different than in the US? Maybe in India there a tighter "guru-student" relationship than professors in the US are accustomed to.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely different here; in the US, there's sort of a consumer model; the student, at least in higher ed, sees him or herself as a customer; the teacher serves the student; here, I think, it's much more that the student serves the teacher. In Ashtanga yoga practice, for instance, we're taught that you should only have one teacher; in the US, the more teachers, the better!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. Was also reading in AG Mohan's book about Krishnacharya that when the student paid the guru, the guru's hands were never supposed to be lower than the student's, for the very reasons that the teacher was NOT serving the student.
ReplyDeleteAs a student there, do you feel a pull towards the US model (you mention the number of teachers you have there).
Not really pulled toward the us model here in Mysore; I like having just one yoga guru; there's plenty to learn from the source.
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