[Oe List ...] Fwd: Jaime for the last week: August 26

[Jaime R Vergara]

OE folks -  I am forwarding my last five submissions for Saipan Tribune this week.  Will most likely to off line for six months after.  The usual caveat: curious, welcome; not, see you at the bend.


j'aime la vie


Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!



-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime Vergara <pinoypanda2031 at aol.com>
To: editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Sat, Aug 24, 2013 5:31 pm
Subject: Jaime for the last week: August 26


Serendipidously, my first class is not till Wednesday so here comes the submission for the final week:



Finals
 
It is the first day of classes here at the Shenyang AerospaceUniversity in China.  It is my final weekhere on this page.  Not bad timing for a transition.  
 
I will deal with my academic class first.
 
When I was growing up as a tweener (‘tween childhood and teen), twothings I learned as a necessary skill: how to finger type on a QWERTY SmithCorona that my Dad sent from graduate school, and how to ride a bicycle.  The typing took almost daily summer lessonson clunky Underwoods at the local YMCA; the bike riding cost my 2-year oldsister a bloody heel caught in the wheel spokes while I was showing off as sherode the back seat.  These were “doing”types of activities but the typing did wonders to the discipline of my “knowing”,and the riding, to my sense of balance. Not bad for a boy at the time.
 
I teach my students a skill, the use of a language tool.  They have reached the university learningEnglish the same way they did Math and Science: memorize many things in orderto pass a standard exam.  This involvedrote memory of vocabulary and rules of grammar on the assumption that in theprocess, some may manage to learn how to think, or, at least, how to spot thetwo blatantly wrong answers in a multiple choice of four, to improve odds whenthey guess on the remaining two.
 
One of my teaching colleagues, a Chinese Canadian who attended a TarHeel school, once asked when we partnered for a faculty colloquy: “You want usto get them to talk but what would they talk about?”  I answered that question with my subsequentclasses by getting my students to talk about something they do not need to reada book about: themselves!
 
I have thus taken it my role to facilitate a process of encounterswhere students discover and articulate who they are and what they intend to doabout it, expressed not in wishful thinking of abstractions, but in thefacticity of real time and in actual anticipation of days to come.  In the process, they also encounter theirclassmates, and a crazy (shen jing ping, aka,nut case) teacher who paints withthem verifiable images of China and the world. It is a tall order but doable.  
 
We start classes this week with a minimum of 12 lessons per semesteronce a week. Students, if they have to learn, have to learn how to learn ontheir own initiative and motivation.
 
Our foray into what started as a weekly contribution to the Opinionpage of this paper did not come from academic training in either journalism orliterary art and discipline, as it was a discovery that we had opinions onmethods and was ready to write it down on a regular basis.  It helped that the late ST publisher JPbecame a friend who kept us focused when we wandered too far from our task, andthe rest is history.
 
As it is in our pedagogy, our task for the last four decades has beenon contextual education.  Knowledge isnot a piece of property to be owned. Knowing is rather a process of playing attention to one’s being – senseexperience, emotional state, intellectual cognition, and the free exercise ofthe will to act, and then learn to artfully embody the expressions of all, or eachpart, kinesthetically, audio-visually, and literarily.  
 
To borrow computer analogy, every human operates out of the LanguageOS, appropriates its own social language and number application.  Chinese learners’ difficulty so far has beenthe haste by which they scamper for Chinese meanings of English terms, thus,remember the Chinese word rather than the English.  As any multilingual speaker knows, we keep separatelanguage applications in our minds atop one Language OS.  The use of a language as a communication toolis ultimately what is important; listening to the EnglisCh of Singapore, KL, Jakarta,HK, and Shanghai is evidently not very rule compliant.
 
Our pieces, at least in intent, are primarily contextual.  They do not directly intend to inform,cajole, encourage, affect readers to sense, feel, think, and do any specificthing, or follow a particular practice. They do provide a canopy, a green house, where readers as independent organismsrespond in their own terms.  Some ignoreour prodding and plodding but as has been our expressed caveat to readers:curious, welcome; not, meet you at the bend!
 
We are closing out a decade-long literary scratching, most of itseeing print in this page.  Our outputsare time sensitive so we won’t comb through the record and see whether we haveenough to compile a book, and make it to Amazon.com. 
 
Our task at contextual education is a lifelong career, a vocationthat has taken many professional forms. Its current incarnation will be in a university setting of studentsawakening to their own potential even as they navigate through a world lookingfavorably at their destiny.  China hasfound itself second in the world’s economic heap, fortunately gained through productivityrather than from military might.  Whilewe have no illusion that our efforts has any consequence one way or the otherto effect future course, we do think that a few more heads playfully payingattention to their own affairs can only be an asset to any country in theplanet.
 
We are not on a crusade, on a critical mission, nor are we in pursuitof a vision.  We are just on our finalsprint, and as Nike succinctly puts it, we just do it!


Jaime Vergara
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!


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