Thinking about how Little Thinking Goes into Teaching in Higher Ed

It’s Tuesday, and classes for the spring term start tomorrow. I work at an institution where teaching is such an afterthought that I still do not know my schedule. I suppose this should not be connected to such a large claim as “teaching is such an afterthought,” but in honor of rhetoric and the sophistic ethics and values I try to live by, I thought I would try to create this mountain while surrounded by traces of moles.

I think that teaching quality has little to do with the time of day and the classroom you are assigned. But this kind of thinking is dangerous. It permits one to determine what can be tossed aside and what can be centered. This is not only egotistical, but dangerous in terms of the desire of the professor.

“Desire” in this essay will be read by regulars to this blog in the Lacanian sense. This is not what I mean. I am thinking of desire in this essay in Buddhist terms – that which must be eliminated (Buddhism uses the word ‘overcome’ in English for this, but I am not certain of the Pali word). Perhaps it cannot be eliminated but it must be pushed to the back.

The moon is not bothered by the clouds that pass across it. Something like this is from a koan. I have written a couple of essays and tried to write many more about the value of the koan, that puzzle which will shut itself off forever if addressed with western reason (“logic” or “propositional thinking”). This koan encourages us to realize something that can only be spoken about and thought about at the same time.

There is little that is clear about what should go on in a classroom. The desire to have a clear, organized, results-oriented course with measurable outcomes can overdetermine the class. Like so many clouds, they can obscure our attention from the moon. We miss everything if we can only see something, only attend to one thing or the interaction of one thing with what we expect to see or understand.

University administrators, like phrenologists, alchemists, and those who try to create perpetual motion machines, encourage us to miss the point exactly this way. They focus so much on results they would rather there not be a process. So many of them reveal their horrible nature when they express, at the end of a spring term, how wonderful the campus is without the presence of students. “Oh!” they exclaim, “How perfect is the body without all those messy organs!” University administrators prefer the taxidermy museum to the zoo, primarily because it is so still and organized. Whether it offers understanding about animals, well, sure it does! We’ll figure out some way to figure that out. But for now, it’s open, clean, organized, and quiet.

Knowing the time of day, the days, the room – all are part of the larger teaching organism, and of no interest to those who administrate the university. As long as there is an instructor-of-record, who cares? That can be done at any point in the process, including apparently the first day.

Things have never been good where I work, but it’s incredible just how far they continue to tumble. Convinced they can create a perpetual motion machine, university administrators tinker all day and into the night with it while faculty stand by and wonder what the machine is meant to do, other than power itself eternally.

What’s missing is process. A koan, like teaching, is something that is all process, no result. If there is a result, it’s that a process has been indicated, and that process isn’t burdened by desire. All things are valuable to a process orientation. The university results-orientation doesn’t include process at all. Did the course run? Were grades submitted on-time? Everything is fine then.

The afterthought is process and process is really what teaching is. A process of figuring things is my best definition today. We bring in readings, practices, and conversations to the figuring, and then the students are released to continue figuring and improving those methods as they move through life. The afterthought model of teaching – where basics are basics, just show up and give some assignments – is probably the reason higher education is a dead industry that doesn’t realize it has died, wandering and wailing in the places it used to live, occasionally giving someone chills; waking them up wide-eyed.

This post wound up in a very different place than where I started. Perhaps “afterthought” is part of the figuring we should be doing ourselves. Can we do student evaluations a year or two after the class has ended as well?