Continuing the timeline of my teaching career

The first three phases I spoke of dealt with a span of time that started , say, in eighth , ninth and tenth standards when I began participating in combined study sessions and ended in 1995 with my last job which lasted only a month or so in another parallel college , called Our College, before I moved on/in to the official space of a Govt.appointed University junior lecturer in a private-Govt.aided UGC approved, NAAC accredited Catholic-run college in Kerala.
I had finshed my research and even as I kept teaching in Arts College for Women I was applying for official jobs. I went for a series of interviews. My results hadn't come out so I was not yet an official Ph.D holder. The moment my viva got over in Madras/Chennai, conducted by one of my thesis-examiners who was now living a retired life as a Professor Emeritus I knew change was coming. I finally got through the first interview I attended after getting my degree officially, in Fatima Mata National College, Quilon. When I got the news I quit my job in Alwaye and went back home to Trivandrum. The job would start in June and it was just March. So in the interim period I taught briefly in Our College,Trivandrum. The class was thatched!The students who came there were those who had failed in the pre-degree exams and the degree exams in the first attempt. Failure had given them a sad look and they were humble and broken. They were also eager to learn. What they wanted was notes. lots of it. I felt sorry for them and wondered why the education system produced so many failures. When I moved out from there after doing my usual stuff of reading texts line by line and annotating it etc. and giving them cyclostyled notes that were given to me free by the tutorial college that weren't of very good standard I noted half humorously and half wryly that my literary guru Nakulan, a great Tamil modernist writer, was indeed right when he wrote this poem:
What is English Literature?
Annotations
Essays
And short questions.

This timeline is personal and also connected to content and context.

In post-modernism , the words content and context are problematised. Context is considered equal or more important than content. The two are separable, inseparable , one and need to be theorised upon. For instance, every lesson has not context but contexts. The jargon includes two other relevant words, frame and background. If content is text , in literary theory, inter-disciplinarity asks what is foregrounded , using the language of painting and structuralism and also what the frame is using the language of art (and; my aside: detective language?!) .The point is there are too many contexts and frames and backgrounds around which text, picture or content can be read,drawn, hung, contoured....
In teaching, for instance, in the four examples I already gave I portrayed four different contexts and I could multiply them indefinitely. The contexts were students teaching, researcher teaching, teaching girls and teaching "failures". That is a very simplistic way of putting it.
Plurality of contexts is inescapable and alters the content into a multi-pronged thing.
How does this reflect on teaching practice? Shall we fall into one of the two extremes of post-modernism which says there is no context(s) or traditional teaching which posits only content. Or is there a third and even a fourth possiblilty. Mahesh's a-contextual learning comes to mind. So too do modern and ancient experiments in pedagogy where the contexts were decidee by various factors and allowed for multiplicity in a limited way so that the educational system wouldn't slip over into anarchy.
I need to give examples. In theIndian context, the post-modern kind of education would be the one enjoyed by intelligent dropouts who come from well to do families. The traditional kind is seen all around in ordinary schools and colleges. Content is all important there. In a school like Rishi Valley or in an experimental university like Vishwa Bharathi that is trying to incorporate modern/ancient Indian methods of pedagogy the contexts are often limited to national,local,regional although this involves a certain amount of broadening to multiple "contexts" without putting too much pressure on the system so that it won't collapse from the burden of one too many contexts.
Schools like MAIS work on a different orientation , because it brings in the international context and foregrounds it above the local and regional contexts, placing it on the same footing as the national context.
The teacher-facilitator who is a cog in all these machines has to reflect on how these shifting contexts impinge on his work. The main thing could be summed up in one or two words : nowadays, he has to be adaptible, highly versatile and flexible - to survive successfully in such environments , especially since technology has come in with an information highway that almost makes him obsolete with the amount of facts it provides. Should we perpetuate the myth that learning is not possible without gurus? Or find alternatives, the things we can now do in the new situation.

As for a-contextual learning I have lots to say about it and I will in one of my next posts.

We live in exciting days as far as teaching as professional practice is concerned.

Time lines.....what?!!

First timeline.....
What happened in the second half of the PPSE course -
We analysed Krishna Kumar's article. We started on the threaded discussion boards
We discussed future assignments. Worked on the second day on our assignment of how to contextualise content that slips away from content and it was an awesome team effort by Bala, Anitha, Raji, Hema and yours truly. We got an A. Yay!!!!

Timeline of teaching-learning practice , as an amateur and professional.

My first amteurish attempt at teaching was explaining to friends the meanings of poems, because of my feel for Literature. We used to call it combined or group study, not "collaborative learning," in those days.

My first interesting teaching assignment was at the Institute of English, Keral Univ., while I was doing my research on Samuel Beckett. I had to teach Waiting for Godot to the post-graduates at the behest of my guide who also happened to be the HOD. It went off well ,to my pleasant surprise! I was teaching my juniors!!!

Then I taught for eleven months in Arts College for Women , Alwaye, a private tutorial(parallel) college. I had to teach general English in pre-degree classes and English literature and language in B.A. and M.A. classes. The context was interesting. My students insisted on speaking Malayalam with a kind of rustic and beautiful twang to it. Many were from the middle, lower middle and poorer classes in terms of economics. Quite a few were Muslims and came to class veiled and sometimes in black. They were all girls., of course :)
Their knowledge of English was suspect.
I had to read texts to them line by line, annotate everything, write the notes myself and make them copy it out by hand as I dictated it in class.
This kind of work ensured I knew the text well, but they "mugged up "everything. They were very respectful and loving but in class they had to be kept totally in control. A must was that they had to somehow pass. Institutions like that depend on results because the next batches come around based on advertisements or word of mouth or hearsay and failure meant closure of the institution. But , in spite of whatever drawbacks were there, I enjoyed my work thoroughly and became very popular with "my" girls. Most of them passed and some of them went on to B.Ed and should be even teaching now. One of them, a very sincere girl called Sindhu, who liked me a lot and did her work with all her heart got in as a teacher there after I left. That, I felt, was a feather in my cap.
At the time I knew nothing about pedagogy, except self-taught thumb rules. I couldn't use my "heavy" knowledge in a place like that but had to keep it simple. That was the main rule , keep it simple, discipline be maintained , content be made clear and keeping the context in mind teach from the exam point of view and encourage rote learning after analysing the question papers for them and trying to predict which questions would come :).
Though I was paid what by my present standards is a pittance , needless to say I was happy in my first teaching job. It was the satisfaction I got from seeing these girls coming from slightly backward areas and backgrounds become interested in studying and literature and beginning to read and write in English somewhat fluently that made me quite happy. Their love and humility also touched me deeply. Even the ones who perhaps failed were not likely to blame the teacher, in places like that. Yes, all in all I still treasure that time lots. Can't measure it's value, it was a very significant time and made a big contribution to me inside.