teachers' day

The one aspect of teaching that scares me the most is that fact that you have almost no idea what your students will do with your words in future.

The pedagogic higher-ups like to think of learning outcomes. The truth is, you can determine the teaching guidelines and materials; but you cannot determine how a student will relate to your theories and lesson plans later. What scares me, really, is that I could tell/teach/impart/share with them something, and at any one point, I may be challenged by my student. (The most famous being Einstein's answer to his professor about the existence of God.) This really leads me to question the role of a teacher - is she or he really in the position to teach this student? After all, a mere degree only suggests that you have survived (or excelled) in the system.

Students are not wrong. They are just caught up in the moment when they have to listen to someone more senior or supposedly more learned than them, by virtue of succession, roles and...well we are just configured in that order of things. If teachers are right, it's only as right as what the students want to believe so. Definitely, it is a teacher's responsibility to teach to the best of one's knowledge and capacity. But the truth is, some lessons can never be taught. And some mistakes unpreventable. Some outright wrong lessons cannot be untaught. I, for example, certainly cannot teach them what and how to react when faced with an artistic dilemma - your audience members hate your show, but you want to be honest to your vision.

So as I relate my dilemma and fear in class to you, I am equally mindful that I cannot control what sense you make of my words, and how you will quote or misquote, read or misread these otherwise sincere words of concern.

Once, we could only think of the world as flat.
And the disciple then realised it is round, and is persecuted for that discovery.

I don't dare to say: "No, that's WRONG!" to my students.

I'm afraid that one day I will eat my own words.
I am also afraid to one day discover that my students have been completely misled.
I have been misled.

Mentor/Disciple is an extremely terrible dialectic. One ceases to be a mentor, if there is no disciple to teach. Even if the self can be Mentor/Disciple simultaneously, it must constantly fear that 'I' knows nothing; What is there to be taught/learnt?

- perhaps, the one lesson we all should learn (and hence, the irony) is the lesson of that there is nothing to teach.

It is not only a student's desire to say something smart and when it fails to sound smart, you roll your eyes; it is the fear that that something not smart may just turn out to be the closest to truth - by which I mean the love for wisdom.

"Never cease to learn - that you know nothing."


My students are my mentors.