Finals
It is the first day of classes here at the Shenyang Aerospace
University in China. It is my final week
here 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), two
things I learned as a necessary skill: how to finger type on a QWERTY Smith
Corona that my Dad sent from graduate school, and how to ride a bicycle. The typing took almost daily summer lessons
on clunky Underwoods at the local YMCA; the bike riding cost my 2-year old
sister a bloody heel caught in the wheel spokes while I was showing off as she
rode 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 learning
English the same way they did Math and Science: memorize many things in order
to pass a standard exam. This involved
rote memory of vocabulary and rules of grammar on the assumption that in the
process, some may manage to learn how to think, or, at least, how to spot the
two blatantly wrong answers in a multiple choice of four, to improve odds when
they guess on the remaining two.
One of my teaching colleagues, a Chinese Canadian who attended a Tar
Heel school, once asked when we partnered for a faculty colloquy: “You want us
to get them to talk but what would they talk about?” I answered that question with my subsequent
classes by getting my students to talk about something they do not need to read
a book about: themselves!
I have thus taken it my role to facilitate a process of encounters
where students discover and articulate who they are and what they intend to do
about it, expressed not in wishful thinking of abstractions, but in the
facticity of real time and in actual anticipation of days to come. In the process, they also encounter their
classmates, and a crazy (shen jing ping, aka,
nut case) teacher who paints with
them 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 semester
once a week. Students, if they have to learn, have to learn how to learn on
their own initiative and motivation.
Our foray into what started as a weekly contribution to the Opinion
page of this paper did not come from academic training in either journalism or
literary art and discipline, as it was a discovery that we had opinions on
methods and was ready to write it down on a regular basis. It helped that the late ST publisher JP
became a friend who kept us focused when we wandered too far from our task, and
the rest is history.
As it is in our pedagogy, our task for the last four decades has been
on contextual education. Knowledge is
not a piece of property to be owned.
Knowing is rather a process of playing attention to one’s being – sense
experience, emotional state, intellectual cognition, and the free exercise of
the will to act, and then learn to artfully embody the expressions of all, or each
part, kinesthetically, audio-visually, and literarily.
To borrow computer analogy, every human operates out of the Language
OS, appropriates its own social language and number application. Chinese learners’ difficulty so far has been
the 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 separate
language applications in our minds atop one Language OS. The use of a language as a communication tool
is 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 specific
thing, or follow a particular practice.
They do provide a canopy, a green house, where readers as independent organisms
respond in their own terms. Some ignore
our 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 it
seeing print in this page. Our outputs
are time sensitive so we won’t comb through the record and see whether we have
enough to compile a book, and make it to Amazon.com.
Our task at contextual education is a lifelong career, a vocation
that has taken many professional forms.
Its current incarnation will be in a university setting of students
awakening to their own potential even as they navigate through a world looking
favorably at their destiny. China has
found itself second in the world’s economic heap, fortunately gained through productivity
rather than from military might. While
we have no illusion that our efforts has any consequence one way or the other
to effect future course, we do think that a few more heads playfully paying
attention to their own affairs can only be an asset to any country in the
planet.
We are not on a crusade, on a critical mission, nor are we in pursuit
of a vision. We are just on our final
sprint, and as Nike succinctly puts it, we just do it!
Jaime Vergara
pinoypanda2031@aol.com
yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!