The Wily Filipino

Last Semester.

My favorite class last semester -- and in retrospect, probably one of my favorites ever -- was one that I was completely unqualified to teach, had never taught before, and indeed, would probably refuse to teach again. That was my Pilipino Literature class, something of a tall order for a professor with an anthropology degree (though I do have a Communication Arts undergraduate degree from what seems like a lifetime ago).

I don't think my students enjoyed it as much as I did; I think I failed to give the class more structure than I should have, and instead relied on a semi-chronological, semi-thematic approach which probably didn't work under close inspection. I'm not sure that many of the students appreciated the open-ended, freewheeling discussion that occupied much of the three-hour class either. Some, I'm sure, were shy; a good number, I suspect, may have wanted more lectures instead. (I think some people absolutely hated the Joel Tan story I assigned, as seen from their papers. The inevitable discussion question -- if the story were about a man and a woman, would reader's reactions be as extreme? -- did come up, but explicit sex probably wasn't the students' bag.) Inflicting a gradlevel-style seminar on a bunch of undergrads may not have been the greatest idea...

Despite the two novels and a number of short fiction (and theoretical essays, for which the student needed much preparation) I assigned, the majority of class discussion revolved around poetry. This was probably the most revelatory part: I was consistently surprised, then amazed, at the multiple levels of interpretation that the class could come up with -- sometimes only when discussing a couple of lines! (And these were from at least one student who confessed, at the beginning of the class, that they didn't like poetry because they couldn't understand it!)

I wouldn't say that the students were starting to read the poems like they were lit majors (thank goodness, since I wouldn't be able to do that either), but on good days there was a palpable creative energy in the room, when I could imagine hearing the whirring of gears in students' heads. At the beginning of the semester we discussed a poem by my friend Lito, and man, he should have been there; by the end of the semester people were still quoting him in their papers...

I don't think I'd make a class of 40 students do blogs again -- the process was unwieldy, people were frustrated by Blogger's constant outages, and I couldn't keep up with my comments either. What's more, students weren't necessarily writing about other students' comments, and therefore the dialogue I had ideally wanted didn't really occur.

What it did provide, however, was a fairly easy opportunity for students to read each other's work and, most important, for the poets being discussed (at least the ones with blogs) to read what students had to say about their work. (Barb and Eileen, if you're reading this: know that you totally made my students' days. Barb, one of the students did write and say that she was inspired to write more poetry from now on.)

So I don't know what the students thought, or if they learned anything; I'd have to wait when the evaluations come back. Maybe the Filipino students would now have -- I don't know, some sort of pride, perhaps, in Filipino American literature -- but I must confess that that's more of an artifact of ethnic studies rather than a genuine class objective on my part. (Appreciation, yes, but equipping the students with tools for analysis is for me more important.) I would love it if the poems acted as some sort of gateway drug to the wonderful world of lit, but that's wishful thinking. But the overall reaction to Oscar and Barb's poetry reading, for instance -- I can't claim any responsibility, obviously, but for many students it was their first poetry reading ever -- made it seem that there was real interest, if not excitement, in the whole endeavor. (The Q&A portion, for instance, went on and on.)

Oh well. If I get low evaluation ratings, so be it; at least for me, it was just about one of the most pedagogically satisfying classes I've ever taught. Sometimes it's great to be a teacher.

Posted by the wily filipino at January 6, 2005 09:43 PM