By Biodun Jeyifo
Since it is only four months since my voluntary retirement from the teaching profession took effect, this piece has to be regarded as a provisional report. Perhaps in six months, a year, five years, I will feel differently. This is unlikely, but you never know. At any rate, at this point in time, and on the things that I write about in this piece, I am fairly sure that I am unlikely to feel or think differently in the months and years ahead. I say this with a particular group of readers of this column in mind, this being young women and men new to the teaching profession, especially at the tertiary level. I have the general public in mind also, but my primary addressees are new and potential entrants to the noble profession of teaching.
Starting first with the things that I will not miss at all, let me draw the attention of the reader to one very important aspect of teaching that is barely or hardly ever talked about, an aspect that for want of a better term I will call the “admin” aspects of teaching. “Admin” here of course stands for administration. So how do teachers “administer” what and how they teach? There are many ways, even though the term “admin’ is never formally applied to them. Perhaps the most important of them and incidentally the least talked about or even recognized as such pertains to what you have to do to successfully “administer” the courses that you teach. Permit me to go over this carefully, glad to do so now that retirement has finally relieved me of its burdensomeness.
When you teach an entirely new course – which happens about every three to four years – you don’t have to order the books you will be teaching in the course yourself. A teaching assistant, one of the departmental secretaries, perhaps even a student volunteer does it for you. But you have to choose the books and draw up a list of such books by yourself. Nobody can do it for you. Now, you would think that this should be an exciting and perhaps even pleasurable exercise in which you are made to read widely and discover all the new books in your field. But that is not how it works, at least these days. Yes, you do get to read books that you enjoy reading and encounter some new and talented authors. But for every such author, there are many others whom it is a waste of your time to have to read. Most of these are authors whose writings their publishers are aggressively pushing, with their sales representatives relentlessly pushing their products on you because to adopt a book in your new course might become a windfall for the publisher.
That axiom which states that you cannot tell a book by its cover is also, alas, applicable to publishers. You might think that the biggest and most prestigious publishers produce the best new books in the field. But that is often not the case; small, struggling publishing outfits sometimes do much better than the big legacy publishers in discovering new talent in the field. How can you discover such books and their talented authors if you don’t venture far from the beaten paths of the publishing world? But think, dear reader, how many struggling new authors and their publishers you have to encounter before discovering the gems from the surfeit of counterfeit products. My estimate, while I was still teaching, was that for every single book of merit that you discovered while drawing up the list of books for a new course, you had to plough through ten books you didn’t have to read. No, I will not miss this particular aspect of the teaching “admin” at all!
To the newcomer to the profession, you have my sincere sympathy: you cannot avoid this experience which, for more than forty years, I could do nothing but endure. Let me correct that observation. In the beginning of my career in the profession, I actually enjoyed this aspect of teaching. Why? Well, because it provided the possibility of changing the curriculum of your field or, if you are courageous and lucky, of actually changing what books are taught and how the discipline, the profession in general deals with changes in the direction of knowledge. An example here is when, during the long reign of military autocracy in our country, the despots in uniform and their civilian agents in the universities tried to exclude “subversive” books from the curriculum. It was through insisting on our responsibility for drawing up the list of books taught in our courses that some of us successfully persisted in teaching relevant and progressive texts from our continent and other parts of the world. Thus saying that I shall not miss is should not have the same meaning for those who are just about to begin a career in the profession.
Another aspect of teaching, of the pedagogical vocation that I shall not miss in my retirement pertains to a whole group of mandatory duties and obligations central to the profession – the grading of students’ papers, with extended commentaries; the writing of reports on their progress or lack thereof; the constant reviews, written or verbal, of statements toward the completion of Master’s or doctoral projects; and the recommendations that must accompany applications for fellowships and bursaries. As we have to execute these tasks and cannot do otherwise, we put up with them, even sometimes convincing ourselves that we love doing the tasks involved. But that is not the case!
Sometimes, you may have a class made up almost entirely of very bright and eager students. Then you do enjoy grading papers and writing long commentaries on what students submit as papers for courses they take. But typically, every class has its share of students who plod through the course and this group of students are no less desirous of getting excellent grades than the bright and hardworking students. Infamously, we once had a serious problem at Harvard with grade inflation in which, merely for being at Harvard, every student not only expected to get an “A” in every course but successfully brought pressure on many professors to give everyone in their classes an “A”. Just imagine what it must have been like to have to write lengthy comments on the papers of students in such courses or classes!
Ha, the confessions of a retired teacher! I never particularly liked the fact that year-round, whether in session or on short and long breaks, like all other professors, I had to make myself available to graduate students I was supervising. The rule is you MUST make yourself available to your graduate students, your mentees, all the time. In my time as a grad student in the early 1970s, we were more independent of our supervisors, we were more self-reliant. But in these times, the students in general are more needy, less inclined to find their own paths to the completion of their projects. In case the reader here might think this is impossible, please know that I tell all my students of this change in the culture of learning in our research universities and they agree with me. I tell them that in my four years at New York University, only twice did I meet with my supervisor. I tell them that this was not unusual in the period. They shake their heads and agree with me that things have indeed changed a lot since they cannot imagine meeting with members of their committee only twice in a semester, not to talk of the entirety of their program!
Dear reader, at this point in the discussion I can feel you wondering if there are things in teaching that I will miss in my retirement. Of course, there are! There are two separate and yet closely connected moments in the pedagogical encounter between students and teachers that are so fulfilling, so priceless as to serve as a redemption for all the hardships in the profession. I miss, deeply miss these two moments of what I can only call epiphany. One is when you, the teacher, succeeds in making your students finally achieve a grasp, an understanding of a text or an author that they had thought themselves incapable of understanding. The other is when they, the students, enable the teacher to achieve a deeper understanding of a text or an author through their brilliant and inspired use of the clues provided by the teacher. These two moments collectively constitute the moment of glory, of triumph in the teaching profession – if it does not seem too inflated to give it such a designation.
Ignorance and philistinism are powerful forces; when they show up in the classroom, they are almost invincible. In my experience as a teacher, it was one of the great challenges I faced to convince students that some texts and authors that some leading lights in the teaching profession had declared “difficult”, “obscure” or “impenetrable” were wrongly or even ignorantly convicted on the basis of ignorance and philistinism. As unbelievable as it may seem now, I and others encountered at the highest levels of academia the expectation, the belief that any knowledge that is not easily transparent and not immediately understandable is suspect! I shall miss the many instances in the classroom when this belief was soundly defeated, especially where the agents of illumination were the students themselves inspired by the teacher.
Teaching, at its best, can cause life-changing encounters between student and teacher. And what is truly amazing is when this becomes repeatable without becoming routinized. How is this possible? Well, the human mind is forever open to new discoveries, new acts of self-replenishment through learning. In practical terms, all great works of the imagination in the arts, the humanities and the sciences are open to reinterpretation beyond the first estimates made of their significance. This is an experience that the luckiest teachers repeatedly have and there is no location that makes this more possible than the classroom. When you have this experience often, it means that you have a calling for the profession. And if, truly, you felt that you had a calling for the profession, how could you retire from it without missing it greatly? Which is why, in my retirement, I sometimes find myself back in the classroom teaching. In my dreams…
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