Pedagogy as transparent encounter

Don’t mean to throw three curve balls by the title of this piece, but I figured, it you’re still reading, it is either you are curious of what this is all about, or you might have a suspicion of what it’s going to be and want to check on your notion. Either way, we move on.

I was in fourth grade when I realized I had not learned to read or write. Sure, I could recite the content of my books, but I was by nature more auditory than visual. My school practiced repetitive group recitations, so I just memorized the lessons by the sequence of sounds I heard from the teacher and my classmates. I learned to mimic the right sounds without comprehension.

My elderly fourth grade teacher was a World War II veteran who loved math and enjoyed teaching it. I must have given enough correct answers to the problems he posed for the class because one day, I found myself sitting on a chair atop the teacher’s table while the whole class gave me a military hand salute. That was my teacher’s student recognition tactic.

Anyway, I was a runt in all the classes I was in, being two years younger than anyone in my class, so to be saluted by my older classmates in Grade Four was a great treat and boost to my runty self-esteem. It also provided the occasion for an awakening, the occurrence of the big pedagogical AHA!, a Eureka!, for this then budding self-conscious ego.

From then on, I got on board the learning wagon and was off to a journey of discovery of myself as a complex body (health), an interactive heart (language and arts), an inquisitive and ordering mind (math and science), and a socially engaged will (social studies).

What triggered the shift in consciousness was the elderly soldier who somehow, by his presence and facilitating tactics, managed to be a transparent entity by which I encountered myself. It was not principles, ideas, facts, or admonitions that did the trick. It was just an affirming and accepting presence who manifested his own quiet passion for his subject and his craft who managed to point me in the right direction. The teacher did not point to himself, nor did he parade competence and proficiency. I did not see the teacher. Rather, through him, the student just came on its own. Pedagogy happened.

Ironically, it would take another math teacher in seventh grade who, in her overzealous desire to have me memorize data and theories, charts and tables, managed to quench whatever awakened interest I might have had in the field of mathematics and science.

In mass education, we have been following the model-T Ford factory method of production. Raw materials come in on one end, graded steps follow a production line, and at the termination of various phases, tests are administered to ensure quality control. This is teaching by standards and benchmarks, addressing the normative and the mean. With social pressure, many places follow social promotion for the struggling marginal and peripheral students. (This year, Mayor Bloomberg of New York threatens to have all third graders repeat grade if they fail to read and write.) Then the product is moved on until it reaches the completion line when a certificate is issued. The car is rolled out of the factory into the dealers’ showroom, or, in this case, the student is graduated and moved on to the higher levels of education, or into the job market.

The expected attrition rate using this method is at least 20 percent. Ten percent is doomed to fail and is either left to the vagaries of fate, or anticipated and provided for in legislated social nets. The other 10 percent are usually bored to death and unless a creative teacher can find a way of individualizing their educational plan, and miraculously monitor their progress, they manage to find ingenious—though often destructive and unhelpful—ways to channel their inventiveness. Happily adjusted talented and gifted ones go on to pursue brilliant careers; misfits get advanced reservations to penal colonies, or worse, somehow make it into politics. The rest of the targeted middle make up the expendable peons that service the requirements of the illusive yet much heralded Pleasantville, USA.

Private schools have long ago discovered that the ratio of 8 to10 students per teacher is just about the right formula for the possible authentic encounter between a learner and a teacher. Public education aims for a 20-22 students to a teacher ratio. CNMI schools are slightly overcrowded by this standard. Nevertheless, the authentic and effective encounter between student and teacher does happen, though they tend to be more of a hit or miss proposition, rather than the result of carefully crafted pedagogical designs.

Obviously, we need to abandon the factory line method of mass education, for we are not producing identical cars. We meet even at the earliest age unique individuals in their own inherited as well as chosen paths of learning journeys, yet we treat them like they were items in the production of identical paper clips. With the overcrowding of classrooms, the chance of teachers occasioning a transparent encounter with their students, the likelihood of real pedagogy happening where an individual child finds within himself and herself the gumption to embark in a self-propelled journey of learning discoveries, is close to nil.

On Saipan, we’ve expanded our incarceration capacities. And we are always trying to find another slot to employ or elect a friend and/or kin into government. That takes care of the 10 percent. Any brilliant ideas on what we do with the rest?

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(Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.)