I guess I will join the ‘I am not much of a blogger’ community along with my fellow cohorts. As much as I like reading blogs for their sheer informality of style and diction, I find it hard to introduce those elements in my writing. And with that caveat, I begin.
I do not have much to share by way of my teaching experience. I taught a few language classes and unlike Niloofar, I had a bad time. And as Robin will attest, I did have some serious apprehensions about my own competence as a teacher. But being Robin’s Teaching Assistant the previous term was quite an enriching experience indeed. The sheer size of the class was in itself daunting. That said, what was actually more curious was that the students’ desire for power point slides teaching them all they had to know. Since we all believed in the maxim that ‘power corrupts, power point corrupts absolutely!’ we resisted the easy definitions. And the results were surprising. Robin’s example of the ‘Romantic structure of feeling’ blog is one such curious case. The need and the desire to integrate some understanding of the critical concepts with the lived experiences was missing in most cases. Also, narratives tended not to go beyond the mere anecdotal. The missing element in the students’ attitude was, to borrow Freire’s phrase, an ‘epistemological curiosity’. Personally, for me the biggest challenge is to introduce this interest in students. And the razor’s edge balance of authority and freedom in class makes all this, at least now, seem equal to the seven labors of Hercules.
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