TIGblogs TIG | TIGblogs GROUP TIGBLOGS LOGIN SIGNUP
Reason and Rhyme
Reason and Rhyme


A Man Rode A Train
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

The feeling of standing in a train during rush hour, with one’s body pressed tightly against strangers—a sardine amongst many sardines—cannot be a pleasant one. One fidgets uncomfortably, resisting the urge to throw an elbow to the person on your right, simply because personal space is being violated. When the train shudders to a halt, its passengers pour out hastily and silently. Eyes never meet. The train is a mere tool used to fulfill a certain purpose: to get to where one must go. One cannot find joy in it—no passion; rather, it is a routine that one has to follow in order to get to school, to the office, or to the mall. This travel is work-related. It is not done for enjoyment, but is instead done as a stepping stone. The reason for such travel is not within itself. Tiresome and repetitive, it is done because it must be done.

But others may spend thousands for that experience. Imagine a prosperous tourist from another country riding that same train. His curiosity radiates from the top of his carefully styled hair to the toes of his polished shoes. The feeling of being cloistered by strangers is not claustrophobic—instead, it is a unique and memorable sensation—one that ought to be recalled for future value. He has no purpose in riding the train except for the experience of doing so. Unlike the others who were traveling for work, this passenger is traveling for fulfillment.

There are distinct differences between these two types of travelers: the first travels for necessity, the latter travels for satisfaction. But where does this fulfillment come from? What is it about travel that compels a person to slave away at a job for an entire year, for a mere week-long trip in another country? Why work so hard when the end result is just a train ride—a train ride that some people may even despise? What causes this mystification of travel?

Market value.
John Berger, in his book “Ways of Seeing,” recognizes how people mystify the things they see in life—whether it be art, relic or an idea. “The art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the roles of the ruling classes,” Berger claims. If Berger were to interpret the excited (perhaps spiritual?) gaze of that man who found a sense of satisfaction in riding the train, he would have scoffed at the “bogus religiosity” that the man exhibited. By being on the train, the man was confirming his wealth and proving his superiority over those in a lower social class than he. “Mystification!” Berger would have yelled. To him, the man’s view of the ride’s impressiveness—its sanctity—sprouted from its market value. How much did that man spend for that experience? After all, he could have easily bought a cheap book on that country or that railway and soaked up the culture from there, but he chose to fly to a foreign land to view it firsthand—for a very simple experience like riding a train. What else could possibly motivate him?

This man, Berger would have said, is explaining away what is evident. It was a train ride. Why make it into a somewhat religious experience? The other passengers certainly didn’t. To Berger, that man’s presence in that train was political. The man viewed his ride as an impressive and mysterious accomplishment, which would be a particular form of snobbery considering that such an attitude would be a way of considering one’s mind more “cultured” than ordinary people.

But the fact that the train ride cost a lot of money, did that raise the significance of his experience? Being on that train pleased him. But was it merely because the market price of his journey was a reflection of its spiritual value? Personally, as a fairly wealthy traveler, was he different from the other passengers, with their blank or irritated expressions, because he set himself above others, or because he saw travel in a different way?

Prestige.
Juliet Schor in “The Culture of Consumerism” implies that people purchase things and desire things because they want to project an image of success. Just like a man who buys a Ferrari in a traffic congested country, what we buy or achieve is done for the sake of those watching. We keep on raising our standards because we compare ourselves to people with more and wish to be praised as such. Then, what we want suddenly becomes what we need.

Travel, if viewed from this circumstance, is done because that man wants to be able to say, “Oh? That train in London? The one that passes through that famous Paddington station? I’ve ridden in that,” in order to see the captivated, envious faces of those listening. That man may have enjoyed the train ride because it confirmed his impressive status in the eyes of others. Underneath the veil of mystification, the reason one travels might not be found internally, but externally. If a person travels for prestige, the opinion of others may be more important and changing than the experience itself.

Did that man simply want to go home and oh-so-casually say to his friends that he was able to experience a train ride in a European country? Was it for bragging rights—or something else?

Control.
According to Susan Bordo in “Hunger as Ideology,” we humans desire control over our lives. In this world, we are struggling for freedom from that which may have power over us—whether it be our bosses, our parents or our teachers. It seems that whatever we do, we still have to suffer from the mandates of those in authority. We desire the independence to shape our lives. Controlling our destiny is linked to our happiness.

When we travel for pleasure, we are showing control over our lives in the purest sense. In the short time that one travels, duty is halted. Because there is a conscious choice to put responsibilities aside, one feels in control. What tasks lay heavily on one’s mind are unburdened by the decision to leave—as if one were shedding duties as one sheds a bathrobe. A man can dance on the tabletops of a bar in Saigon, then return to his wife in Minnesota without any permanent effect on the flow of his life. When one travels, freedom can be exercised, maybe even abused, since travel is a heightened suspension of reality.

The rules of conduct become more flexible when one is not rooted in a country. Certainly the laws of that land must be followed, but other than that, what one does in another country is characterized by impermanence. Tourists and visitors do not have that tiresome chore of needing to merge into society. Much of what they do will not be remembered. Travel represents not being weighed down—being immersed in a culture you will eventually abandon. Perhaps we mystify travel because it represents liberty.

The man wasn’t forced to ride on the train, unlike those unfortunate passengers surrounding him. His act of riding the train was done because he had taken command of his life. Perhaps he even rode a train to work in his homeland—but what separated the two acts was the fact that he was willing to ride a train on foreign soil.

So what was it? What made him smile contentedly from a mere train ride? What made him take a plane or boat to another country so he could do a seemingly mundane act? Perhaps it is all three factors: the market value of the experience, the prestige in being there and the high he received from being able to have some control over his life.

But there remains one more question. What if that man had been scruffily dressed, with moths in his wallet and only a full passport to his name? What if he was backpacking through the country, content to sleep on park benches as he traveled, purely for enjoyment? How could one explain his mystification then?

Could he (maybe possibly probably) like the act of traveling—for itself?

September 25, 2009 | 7:22 AM Comments  0 comments
Tags:


The Anatomy of a Teacher’s Mind
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Turning the pages of old yearbooks revives forgotten memories. The faces of the people you used to pass in between classes are forever captured within glossy papers. Your high school sweetheart remains in the photograph, staring at the camera with the same intensity you once wished would be directed towards you. The image of the school bully still makes you snort with contempt. Yet in every single class photo, a face, older than the cluster of surrounding students, remains the most prominent. It is the face of your teacher—the face of the person whose responsibility was to enforce discipline, compute your grades, and most importantly, to guide the flow of your learning. A teacher, more so than an image of a blackboard or a graduation cap, symbolizes formal education. Yet despite the fact that each of us goes through school, the concept of a teacher remains impersonal and unfathomable. In our society, the idea of a “teacher” is still mystified.

There are four fundamental components, bound together, that contain the essence of education—and all of these are found within the mind of a teacher. Since a teacher, by demonstration, lives out his or her personal philosophy for learning, these inseparable aspects may also be revealed through unconscious mannerisms. It could just be a mild way of turning the topic away from a train of thought or a seemingly innocent foreshadowing of an idea, but eventually, a teacher’s distinct perspective on education manifests itself. The key to demystifying a teacher lies within the understanding of this. So what makes up this educational philosophy?

An aim.
Schools are intended to be places where knowledge is grown and nurtured. A child enters a classroom and continues entering it for many years. Suddenly, he or she leaves the classroom setting and is thrust into a world where the distinctions between learning and living blur. The fresh graduate feels like he or she is a tabula rasa, a blank slate of a life badly in need of direction. What is the duty of an educational system? Is its only purpose the development of skills needed for such a graduate to get a job? Do students go to school simply for the diploma and an impressive-looking resume?

According to the essay “What’s Education For?” by Conrado de Quiros, the role of the student and the teacher is more complex than that. Education is supposed to impart vision and intellectual curiosity. This is not an idle desire. The completion of such a task is difficult, for it involves the shaping of ambition and awareness. But upon achievement, the ramifications are extraordinary—an individual’s intellect has flourished.

An educator’s purpose in teaching is apparent in the way he or she views the subject matter and the students. A teacher passionate about the subject being taught resonates with the desire to make a student understand the ideas being presented. He or she opens up the world views of those being taught. An indifferent teacher merely lectures, and it is clear that his or her purpose in teaching is something other than honing student minds.

A relationship.
Yes, every teacher has a reason for teaching. Likewise, every student has a reason for learning. Sometimes the two are able to jive, and a mutualistic rapport develops between the two, in which the teacher is able to gain new insights or at least question previous assumptions. In many cases, however, the students are merely the recipients of the information the teacher is giving them. Like a computer being typed into, the student becomes a receptacle of the teacher’s lessons. Only syntax, in the most basic programming sense, is needed to succeed under such tuition. Semantics, the study of meaning, is not. One only needs to know what the appropriate answer is, not why it is.

The radical essay, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” written by Paulo Freire, criticizes this manner of teaching. Using potent and aggressive language, Freire attacks this educational philosophy by saying it is a form of oppression. Friere, heavily influenced by the existentialist and democratic viewpoints, goes as far as to say that it dehumanizes the student. His solution to the problem, in the manner of Hegelian dialectics, was to synthesize both teacher and student into a teacher-student or student-teacher. This, called the “problem posing” method, found interaction one of the most crucial aspects of learning.

Putting Friere’s suggestion aside, the way a teacher interacts with a student is an indication of how much he or she respects those who are not as learned. For example, if the “banking concept” is the chosen method a teacher uses, it can be assumed that he or she is neither curious about student opinion or response, nor willing to relinquish authority in class.

But why are teachers and their personal philosophies of teaching so essential to an individual?

Importance of the individual.
There are millions and millions of students worldwide. An impersonal teacher could merely call them “students” and make a hasty generalization. It is an easy error to make, since the number of students per teacher, especially in high schools and colleges, are far from balanced. A single teacher can handle over a hundred pupils, so the faces of students tend to blur into an indistinct mass.

The danger in this is that teachers begin to treat their students as a herd rather than a group of individuals. William Zinsser, in his essay “College Pressures,” recognizes the anxiety an individual student battles through every time he or she enters the classroom. They have to deal with Peer Pressure, Economic and Parental Pressures, and Self-Induced Pressure. Because of their very purpose for being in a classroom, namely education, they cannot be allowed to be perceived as a blurred congregation sitting silently in wooden armrests.

The way a teacher perceives a student reflects greatly on his or her educational philosophy. If a teacher forgets the value of the individual student, he or she has forgotten the goal of education—to make a student grow. Teaching cannot be approached from a utilitarian standpoint—the greater amount of students taught, the greater good. It simply doesn’t work that way. It is the amount of influence that a teacher imparts on each individual that ought to be the indication of quality.

The big picture.
These individuals being influenced by teachers eventually move on. They get promoted to the next grade and, in due course, they graduate from school. Life moves on. But does the weight of an offered idea ever lose its clout? Do those teachers who really, really made you think ever stop being authority figures? Amidst this change, the effects of good education remain stamped on the way one thinks and acts.

We look around us and realize that the world is moving at breakneck speed. With advances in technology and cheaper travel, the world is progressing towards what we call globalization. Yet teachers now remain as influential as the time when Socrates challenged the Greeks, or perhaps even more, due to the broad influence of communications technology. Their profession alone is one that makes it their business to cause ripples.

The teachers being described in Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Visigoths in Tweed” are revolutionaries. They are the ripple-makers—those men and women who dropped their stone of influence and brought change to the minds of the youth. For better or for worse, they influenced the academe into focusing on multiculturalism and diversity. D’Souza, in his essay, cited the dangers of such a transformation, but the main point is that educators are capable of swaying the opinions of others. They are authority figures, and thus there is a moral obligation tied to such responsibility. How a teacher reconciles a classroom setting and the big picture reveals a teacher’s educational philosophy.

The images of those teachers in the yearbook, with their steady, solemn gazes, are silent. But you’ve listened to them once—spoken to them, laughed with them (or perhaps at them), but most importantly—you learned from them. Each of these teachers, perpetually frozen in a photograph, held in their heads a personal philosophy about the job they chose. Each of these teachers has wrestled with low grades, finicky students and the spoken word. Each of these teachers, whether worthy of the career or not, chose a path meant to change lives.

Can you say the same thing about yourself?

September 24, 2009 | 2:40 AM Comments  0 comments




Patricia Lalisan's Profile


Latest Posts
A Man Rode A Train
The Anatomy of a...

Monthly Archive
September 2009

Change Language


Tags Archive
education teachers travel

Filter By Type
Topics


2935 views
Important Disclaimer