When the underdog wins and Slumdog gets the Oscar(s)

February 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I was happily surprised by Sunday’s Oscars ceremony: I did not expect Slumdog Millionaire to gather so many awards. I liked the movie a lot, but I did not think it was going to turn out such a winner. I guess had I not seen Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! before and had it not broken my heart, Slumdog would have done it instead. Given that I saw the Mira Nair production, and was instantly taken by it, I watched Slumdog with a sense of seeing a remake of an unforgettable original. Yet, Slumdog featured my favorite Indian actor, Irfan Khan (The Namesake), and those street urchins of Mumbai, and I was hooked.

In addition, I went to watch the movie with a former student of mine who took my Multicultural American Literature course at Hunter. T. comes from Kenya, via London, but her family is originally from India, and she speaks with a lovely accent. She knows way more about South Asian literature than I do,  I am about four years older than she is, and we connected instantly. Meeting her in a different context, outside the classroom, however, made communication a bit awkward at first. We were no longer following the teacher-student scenario, yet the overtones of this relationship lingered enough to give a perceptible tint to our conversation. At least, at the beginning. At the end, I went home with a feeling of gratitude and a reminder of the deeply humbling quality of teaching: you don’t even realize it, but you touch people’s lives in the process, and they touch yours. If there is cross-cultural communication and there are cross-cultural encounters, then they should mark turning points in your life where you set out to measure the weight of your full-blown humanity.

Filed Under: To Ponder Tagged With:

“I am a camera….”

December 6, 2008 By 4 Comments

(I believe this is the first line in a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, the title of which escapes me, though I am pretty sure it is not the start of The Remains of the Day, a remarkable book turned into an even more remarkable movie.)

I am going to keep this short and sweet since it is mainly my personal recollection at the end of the my first semester at BLS. I mean to say that it has been real fun, that standing behind the camera and recording all those student-presentations have been truly rewarding experiences. It is not just that I have learned how to actually set up for a recording and come across as “almost” professional, but I have also enjoyed interacting with students in a context different from actual teaching. All of the students I worked with, without exception, seemed to take both the situation and myself seriously, and they were all eager to improve their presentations as much as possible.

I have just responded to an email setting up my last rehearsal for the semester, and I was struck by its courteous tone: “Thank You in advance,” or “Thank you for taking time off your busy schedule.” And this tone has been pretty consistent throughout the semester. So, I do feel warm and happy sitting here and writing this blog. I also have to admit that the fact that I have recently become an ABD makes me feel additionally grateful for my Writing Fellowship that allowed me to indeed write more and not spend most of my time on prep-work for teaching.

Wishing you all a rewarding end of the semester! :)

Filed Under: Uncategorized

You know, it’s cultural….

October 23, 2008 By 2 Comments

I am not saying this just to make Mikhail happy about assigning me the Accounting Department in my first year at Schwartz, but I really am enjoying working there. I had my misgivings early on, especially about the students treating me as a second-class citizen, a “fellow” who apparently has no clue about accounting, thus no need to pay attention to her. What I have been experiencing, however, is a great deal of gratitude on their part and a sense of appreciation that, at times, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, I tell them, I am only doing my job helping them with their presentations.

Maybe it is because of their responsiveness to me that I become a softee when it comes to the evaluation of their performance. Luckily I do not have to grade them, but I talk with their professor about how they did, and, more often than not, I find myself taking their side. I want the professor to be more generous, more understanding of how nerve-wracking a presentation can be, more embracing of the students’ individual skills and needs, etc, etc. On the professor’s side, I am facing a set of extremely well organized grading scale that breaks down final grades to the smallest percentage. This is how grading should really look like, I tell myself, envying the social sciences for their apparent efficieny that messy humanities people, let alone literature buffs like me, tend to miss. Yet, I feel like a coward when the professor mentions a student’s way of being too “soft-spoken” and I let it go saying only that her “softness” comes from her cultural training as a Japanese woman. (Apologies if this comes across as relying, yet again, on stereotypes about Asian women. Obviously not all Japanese women are low-key, but I just finished reading Kyoko Mori’s memoir, Polite Lies, and I think I got at least a better appreciation of Japanese cultural normativity than I had before reading the book.) Evidently, the professor, who has earned all my respect for his superbly organized way of doing his job, cannot let himself bogged down by my remark since he has to evaluate the final product, but I am left with a sense of failure.  I wish I had a way of giving more time and space to the process, of being able to assist each student individually while I do not run around myself trying to finish up my dissertation. In my dream-world, I use a grading rubric that includes “cultural baggage” as a big bonus point because I know how heavy it gets at times and how important it is to keep carrying it on in spite of all.

Filed Under: Assessment, Baruch College, Cross-Cultural Communication, Interpersonal Communication

With Flamenco on my mind

October 3, 2008 By 3 Comments

Flamenco is on my mind a whole lot, actually, increasingly so. As with most things significant in my life, Flamenco was an accident, unforeseen and unplanned; I did not know much about the dance when I began learning it about five years ago. Since then, it has become my main way for taking trips outside the academic bubble.

Besides functioning as my escape-mechanism, however, Flamenco serves me as metaphor for pedagogical praxis as well. My students tend to get a kick out of the fact that their “professor” is dancing away in her time off. (Is it just me, or our students really seem to lack imagination when it comes to their instructors?) So, I talk to them about it, not just in order to lighten up our conversations from time to time, but, also, to point out the importance of communication as a holistic, if you want, mind-body experience.

One of my favorite tricks is to shock them into awareness by interrupting the class at a given moment and asking them to hold, either sitting or standing up, a “Flamenco posture”: chest up, chin high, shoulders pushed back and down. (Depending upon the degree of intimacy with a given group of students, I risk one of my favorite quotes from my Spanish dance instructor, delivered with inimitable flair and seriousness: “Ladies and gentlemen, nipples to the sky!”) It always works and makes even the most sour and “I’m so bored!” face in the room crack a smile. I then tell them to internalize what their body communicates at that moment and to hold on to that sense of confidence and determination their posture projects. To think and write with originality and daring is like holding, both figuratively and literally, a beautiful Flamenco posture. The point is to make it real, real and lasting: live your ideas, live your writing, and live the dance that ensues!

I emphasized the importance of a good Flamenco posture when I gave a workshop on oral communication in an Accounting class the other day as well. I am not sure the professor in charge of the course was particularly convinced of the effectiveness of my dance-metaphor: it might have come across as a touch too flippant given the serious business of things under discussion like probability and interest-rates. (I asked him too, to hold the posture, but I do not think he followed my directions.) What told me, however, that I was making sense was the thing I have come to appreciate more and more in the course of my own teaching career: the students’ reactions.

The best performances I have ever had as a teacher, since teaching is a major act of performance, were those when I managed to pull in the students and let them take over. I have learned to really listen to those human beings masquerading as my students for a semester; their faces are the barometers that make me feel at the instinctive level of a gut reaction whether I am an effective communicator as an instructor. The magic of the classroom, when it happens, is like the perfect execution of a Flamenco move, showing you that what you rarely achieve and you are endlessly looking for is worth the trouble. It is, after all, art.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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