I’m coming home, riding backwards on the train, from my second day of class of the spring semester. I'm listening to Alice Coltrane on the harp. I'm sleepy but not asleep.
This past week, I had my students make two HTML documents. One was the full menu of a local restaurant. The other was a piece of writing they’ve done in the past—like an essay or a letter—that they’d feel comfortable sharing with the class. I loved their attention to detail on both pieces—the restaurant because it has so much detail, period (all those items and categories and their overlaps!), and their writings because the material is important to them. The range was inspiring.
Near the end of class, I talked about my teaching philosophy. I expressed that over the past year I've realized my job isn't necessarily to give them the information but moreso to create an ideal environment for them to learn. This coming together of people was very special; it’s not like this can happen online. How could we use the physical proximity with these specific other people to the best of our collective ability? I shared how interested I’d become with group dialogue, mentioning that I had tried a Bohm Dialogue with a group of people late last year. I shared the rules, and suggested that if they’d all be up to it, we should talk about talking (pretty meta, I admitted) next class. I mentioned I wanted to try other structured conversations as well, like those that come from The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair by Christina Baldwin & Ann Linnea and my friend Dan Taeyoung’s zine “Conversation is a cybernetic technology” from very recently.
I told my students I wish my other projects were more like teaching. I like teaching and being a student because it emphasizes process—we meet every week. With other projects, somehow it’s difficult to maintain that type of momentum. Maybe it’s a smaller project or the expectation isn’t clearly set up. I’m not sure.
As a young person, I remember being really into specifics and details. I would become extremely bored by vague blobby feelings and ideas that some of my professors in art school would lecture about. Maybe it was the lecture format, or maybe it was that I genuinely wasn’t sure what they were getting at, and I would rather they hit me over the head a little versus slowly moving in a direction. Were they timid, or was I just the wrong audience? Was I young and not sensitive enough? I’m not sure. And sometimes I worry that I’ve become that vague blobby person. I don’t think it’s true, but I know I’ve certainly been more into allowing students to mess around within open parameters versus my own confines. I used to love exacting rules. Now I’m bored by them. Why is this? I realize I’m bored when they shut off potential. In the beginning, it makes sense to use structure and rules, to gain understanding and momentum. But later on, I think, the structure should be determined by the student.