Teacher is sick

It’s Thursday and I’ve been sick since Sunday — sick, as in feverish, sweaty, wobbly-kneed sick, courtesy of some vengeful variety of the flu. I’d been flu-free for a year, thanks to a flu shot, but I missed my anniversary shot last April and now I’m paying for it.

Fifty years ago it was fun to be sick and housebound for a week; it meant a pass from school and all things official and mandatory. Today, in the Age of the BlackBerry and WiFi, it just means working in bed in pajamas between cups of lugaw and doses of paracetamol. (I even did my civic duty and snuck out of my sickbed to join the 2010 Star Lifestyle Journalism Awards at the Ayala Museum last Tuesday — only to be tortured by a tantalizing lunch buffet spread, one morsel of which didn’t get through my gullet.)

I’m worried that the semester’s barely a month old and I’ve already missed at least two of my biweekly class days. I’m sure that most of my students aren’t exactly in mourning about the lost class time, but it bothers me that they can’t or won’t expect to me to be there, like clockwork, every Wednesday and Friday afternoon. I’ve been teaching for nearly 26 years now, and I’m coming to the odd realization that, the older I get, the more my classes mean to me than they might to my students.

Because I have some administrative duties as director of the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing, I get to teach only two classes a semester instead of the usual load of four. It’s a privilege — I almost want to say a luxury — I appreciate, knowing how many of my colleagues especially in the downtown universities have to carry as many as 40 units or even more (that’s eight hours a day, five days a week) to make ends meet.

Of course, you can argue that 40 units is what everyone else puts in, in a sense, from factory workers to bank employees. Teaching, however, is a huge psychic drain. As I’ve written here before, every class is a performance, and no matter how well you know the subject and no matter how many times you’ve taught it before, each class is new and different, and deserves the full intensity and freshness of your material and your approach to it. All this means that lecturing for just an hour leaves me exhausted (and, I’m sure, my students as well), and I feel like a wet noodle afterwards, although my students don’t see it, because I believe that teachers should do their best to communicate enthusiasm and not weariness to their students.

So I try to make my six hours of teaching a week worth my students’ time and mine. This semester, in a break from the usual, I’m teaching two undergraduate courses instead of doing at least one graduate workshop in fiction or nonfiction. It’s something I don’t mind and in fact strongly support. I don’t know when and how I became a senior professor when it seems just like yesterday when I was a beanpole of an instructor, but I also believe that senior faculty should teach undergraduate classes now and then, if not regularly, both to keep abreast of what the kids are thinking and to have them benefit from your presumptive experience early on.

It was my own encounters with such senior figures that made me feel good about returning to the university as an English major (and a technical freshman) at age 27 in 1981 after having dropped out for 10 years. They were called “terror” professors in those days, and I quickly found out why. These big-haired ladies had all the charms of Medusa; they smiled at me, perhaps amused to find in their classroom such a big, cocky fellow who already had a string of Palancas and other prizes to his name — but they absolutely cut me no slack, and indeed held me up to a higher standard than my younger classmates (who included, among others, a fellow named Francis Pangilinan). In two diagnostic quizzes, I got a “4.0” in Greek and Roman literature, and an even more embarrassing “5.0” in early Philippine literature. It was a great start, really — I got shocked out of my wits well enough to take my return to school more seriously.

Almost 30 years later and standing on the other side of the classroom, I sometimes find myself wishing that I had a little more Gorgon in me. The fact is, I’m a lot like my marmalade friend Chippy — a fat, grumpy, but basically non-menacing pussycat. Oh, I’ve given out some 4.0’s and 5.0’s and made three or four students cry, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let me tell you something: you won’t flunk in my class unless you’re hopelessly stupid or incorrigibly irresponsible. Since you probably wouldn’t have gotten past the UPCAT if you were anything close to stupid (although some days I wonder), these historic few whom I flunked very likely belonged to the second category.

The pattern was almost always the same: the students would appear for one or two meetings, then vanish wordlessly for the rest of the semester, only to reappear for the final exam, hoping to be allowed to take it. Now, these kids may actually have been smart enough to have learned and done the coursework all by themselves, but they were also dumb enough not to have told me first. I took it as a personal affront for them to have imagined that they could have sailed through a semester’s readings in, say, American or Philippine Literature without the benefit of my runaway reflections.

I don’t call the roll religiously, but I do expect people to be in class — and to speak up when I ask them to. I don’t mark down people for wrong or bad answers — that’ll only shut them up even more — but I do give the best classroom performers a slight nudge in their final grade. I’ve always believed that people — myself included — should have the right, the opportunity, and the responsibility to make fools of themselves, if that’s what they want. Sometimes it’s even fun; often it’s even educational.

This semester, my two courses are Comparative Literature 111, “The Short Story,” and Creative Writing 198 (Special Topics, “Professional Writing”). It’s an interesting shift from the art and craft of what we’ve taken to looking at as “highbrow” literature to the art and craft of writing for a living. I bridge that gap by reminding my CL111 students that Poe didn’t write “The Cask of Amontillado” to win prizes or to provide scholars a century hence with dissertation material; he wrote it to make money and to keep himself alive. I also remind my CL198 students that writing for others doesn’t mean lowering one’s standards and thinking like a hack, and that corporate brochures and AVP scripts — whatever produces the paycheck — deserve as much of their creativity and attention as their novels and epics-in-progress.

Teaching’s a tough job, but there surely are far worse fates for both teacher and student. Tomorrow I’m going to try and teach. Vacation time’s over, folks!

* * *

E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.