GRADUATIONS always make me wistful and to be honest, a little bit guilty. As a teacher, it is once again an occasion to stock of the work that has been done and I can’t help but feel, based on self-assessment, that I have been found wanting. Did I do justice to my students with my efforts? Often times, as my age progresses, I actually prefer asking the other question. Are the students making the proper effort commensurate to my precious time? Over time, I note that I am becoming the grumpy professor every one avoided in college.
The wistfulness during graduations, however, I believe has to do with the difficult work that we do as teachers. Unlike other professions who can see the tangible results of their efforts such as when lawyers win cases, or when jeepney drivers end another day of bringing employees and students to their places of work and study, teachers shape instead nebulous and intangible matters such as young hearts and minds.
In sociology, the profession of teaching is engaged in what we call as “people work.” We work on people and our results are also people themselves. There are grades that we use to assess the learning of our students, but these are not our ultimate products. The totality of the person is the end result of our efforts, actually, but we are not alone in the shaping of personalities and identities. We share this most important task with other social institutions such as the family, the church, and others. There is, therefore, that difficulty in isolating the impact of a particular teacher to a singular student given that there are other sources of influence that define the person.
Compared to the minimal influence of a single teacher to a class that she only meets twice a week for three hours, the deeper impact of society-at-large to a person should be recognized. There is a tendency for university officialdom and other sectors to bloat the impact of teachers to their students when in fact there are far larger and more powerful institutions that actually hold sway such as popular culture and religion.
Teachers only effect change to a limited degree to a few select students. In fact, given my decades of teaching experience, my impression is that it has been a hit and miss affair. One stands in front class making an effort to elucidate on topics or concepts to the best of one’s ability with the awareness that only one or two or, if lucky, a handful, actually appreciate and learn from the process. Most students merely wing it most of the time. They pretend that they have learned something when they obviously have not. Many of them have mastered the appearances of a studious and interested student but come oral recitations or answering essay questions, all the play acting is revealed.
It can be said, therefore, that teachers are somewhat alienated from their work because of its very nature as a profession that deals with people as both raw material and product. I feel this alienation during classes and the culmination of classes for the semester, during graduations. Of course, it is too late to change careers at this point now that the decades in the profession have left me, apparently jaded. Is it just a case of teachers needing to plod on despite the very low, as others would say, return-of-investment? And yet, despite all these, why do we remain in this profession?
Graduations as social occasions also provide the remedy to the alienating nature of teaching as a profession. It is actually an opportunity to reassess and recharge from a semester of often a tiring and thankless act of teaching. What inspires me during graduations is the inherent optimism of the young about the future that is beckoning them. They speak about their personal struggles and sacrifices of their families, in order to attain their degrees. In the same breathe, they also speak about how they will make a dent or impact on the larger world outside the university. The protests in the UP commencement exercises that have been integrated into the programs are a case in point.
These are occasions that inspire me and remind me of why I am in this profession. We do not stand in front of the classroom for the instant gratification of seeing our students acquire knowledge because this is simply not possible. The process of learning while one is teaching cannot be observed and is intangible, even mysterious. We go in the classroom day in and day out as some sort of a constant and silent prayer - that out of the many students that pass through our mentoring, there will be a few who will become agents of change.