Teaching Something that’s Never Been Taught

What this guest lecturer in a university hope to pass to her students, values of life, the ability, to introspect, translated…

It’d been a month, since I’d set up that workshop at my alma mater. I’d accompanied the students as they rehearsed, and before the class sessions were over, I’d asked them repeatedly, “Can you understand when I’d explained like this?” They looked at me, some tilted their heads, blinking, some nodded with uncertainty, some shifted their gazes to the ceiling, continued in thought. Perhaps, it’s my lack of experience, I constantly worried that the students couldn’t understand what I was teaching them, and worried I may get turned into a nagging older schoolmate. Reason why I’m worried like so, it was because I’d recalled my own schooling career, I couldn’t think of what I’d actually, “understood in learning”.

Say it like this, the professors who’d taught me may be a bit disappointed as they’d heard this, but what I’d wanted to express, was exactly the opposite. I double-majored in Korean and Advertising, language is concrete, whatever you learn, that’s that, you need to put in the time to practice, to learn it well, but advertising, that’s, quite different. Recalling back, a lot of the knowledge they’d passed to us in college from then, no longer fitted to the current conditions of media and society anymore. But, the process of becoming independent thinkers, although it’s quite, abstract, it’d entered into my system, like a virus of sorts, turning me into a carrier, of a sort of a thinking virus. And, I’m unaware of this virus, and perhaps, that is why, I have no recollection of my own learning processes.

And so, I’d expected myself, that rather than giving the students concrete, technical knowledge, I should, instead, pass to them, some sort of a meaningful kind of a virus, perhaps, they’ll find it more useful in the future. And the “virus” I’d wanted to pass the most is about “promises”.

A friend told me, since he was growing up, his mother loved taking him to the night market stands to fish, she loved seeing how happy he looked as he got one, then, taking the bag of goldfish home in a small bag. But every time they arrived home, as his father saw the bag of fish, he’d, started frowning, and blamed his mother for taking him to fish again. The mom said that he was so happy, it’s so wonderful. The dad didn’t say another word, and, quietly, took the bag of fish out, and dumped it into the basin outside, and gave them a change of clean water. In about a week, my friend and his mother had, forgotten about the bag of fish, and only his dad continued, taking care of them, until they’d all died, of natural cause. “Some of those fish really grow to super large sizes, it’s, so amazing!”, my friend told me.

His dad made me think of promises and people’s relationship with them. Back when we were young, we don’t understand anything, the adults gave us the rules, and we can either follow them, or break them, getting the rewards, or the punishments. Then we’d, entered into school, with the clearly written rules, then, into the world, with the written laws, and whenever we’d broken these laws, we need to pay the prices. And yet, the promises, they aren’t, limited, and what you pay when you break your promises, can’t be calculated. The relationship of the promises is not the relationship of humans and laws, but humans with themselves. How do we, face our own weaknesses? Face our own problems, tendencies? How do we respect the self that set up those rules in the first place? So, even if we’d, made a promise to someone else, we still, end up, answering to ourselves. Thinking up to here, it’d suddenly, dawned on me, that the ability to face up to a promise, is almost, controlling one’s own destiny, but we’d never gotten the opportunities, to learn to do it well.

The workshop that I set up was called, “Behaviors and Performances”, each class time, we have homework to turn in, I don’t call the roll, and I don’t give my students a grade, but, with the weeks of classes being held, if my students need to be absent, they’d always come and told me ahead of times, and ask about the homework assignments for the next class, they’d worked hard, asking me if they’d done the assignments right, even for the students who were just, auditing.

Learning is your own business, if these students chose to attend my workshop, they were, unknowingly, fulfilling that “promise” they were making to themselves, and that, was the key of daily living and performance art.

Every time I’d asked my class, “Do you understand when I explained like this?” What I’d longed to see is, perhaps, not those, confident head-nods, but a sort of a “I’m not really sure yet, but I’m still pondering, give me a little extra time to think on it some more.”

As my students set up that promise with themselves, all I can give, is this, “virus” that accompanies close by, to inoculate them, with the antibodies against, their future selves.

And so, this instructor has a very unique way, of measuring what her students learned from her, not with those number two pencils and scantron exams, but, having them ask themselves: what they’d learned from her courses, and that, is more important, because students after they graduate, would need this ability to introspect, in order to become successful in life, and this, is exactly what this instructor was teaching them to do.