23 Aralık 2019, Pazartesi
saat: 22:34
I am frustrated by people – students, staff and administrators – who would rather get through it than learn. And there are a lot of them: time-servers, grade satisficers, incurious. A lot of them..so I’ve had some professional disappointment recently... But today, unbidden and unexpected, one of my former students who went on to travel the Middle East and has had an excellent young career, sent an e-mail and said that one of my classes was the best she had as an undergraduate:
Given your loving encouragement and expectation of verbal audience participation in Politics of the Middle East, you drew out more of my voice. In that class, you also saw/heard how I collaborate with a team of others to ensure our optimized productivity/performance. You’ve seen my desire to nuance responses (and have patiently persisted with me😊) instead of settling for the black and white or predictable arguments/conclusions. Plunging into a world different than my own and raising my voice on behalf of those who don’t feel like they have one is where I’ll be in the near future…and is a space I want to continue to occupy.
One of the weird things about teaching is that it is a very incomplete career: you usually don’t get to see the effects of your work, if there were any. Today, the loop got closed.
Every so often, external validation is really nice.
