Thoughts on Teaching

Making the transition from student to teacher is not something one hears a lot about. Indeed, it is one of the many silences upon which academia thrives. One obvious reason is that most professors at top research universities do not care about teaching. The other is the notion that teaching skills develop with experience, so there's not a great deal that can be shared or taught to those teaching in their early years. To top it off, we often hear that it's all a matter of style and taste anyway. 

At Yale, much like at other universities, all three reasons justify the deafening silence over teaching. It is true that mandatory workshops facilitate conversations among teaching assistants of varying levels of seniority. But in these workshops and outside, a revealing dynamic of "us" versus "them" becomes most apparent. Ph.D students frequently speak of undergraduates as if they are an inferior species, a protected one though. Mostly, the problem here is jealousy. Why do they get so much attention here? How can they, unlike us, have so much fun? And when it's not jealousy, it's sheer pedantry. How could they not know about that article that my adviser asked me to read last week? Why am I teaching kids who don't know Derrida by heart? For these reasons, most graduate student conversations about teaching are, to my mind, damningly unhelpful. 

At a recent workshop organized by the Graduate Writing Center, I repeatedly heard about the need to "manage one's relationship with undergraduate students." A curious phrase, I wondered. Do the speakers "manage" all of their relationships? What would such a social world look like? Pretty dismal, I imagine. That's because all relationships, I think, rest on a two-way street on which trust and empathy ply. In the typical student-teacher relationship, there's something beyond a contractual bond (or a fellowship requirement). It is far easier to engage ideas and hone critical intellectual skills in an atmosphere of friendliness, trust, and empathy than in a stultified professional one.  Minimally, such an atmosphere goes beyond the classroom. It means getting to know students as individuals with distinct likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses that reveal themselves in class and on assignments. It also means getting them to know your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. You cannot just "manage" your way through teaching as if you were a professional zombie. 

But there is more. Students value teachers who are in total command over the course material and can communicate it in the simplest manner possible. It is, after all, a hierarchical relationship, not one between equals. At the very least, students expect someone who demonstrates thorough knowledge over the teaching material. I cannot see this as an unfair expectation. If I paid 40,000 dollars per year to go to college, each course costs me roughly 5,000 dollars. Besides this solid economic reason, there's also the small matter of college being a place of learning. And students want to not just try out new ideas, subjects, and skills, but want to be free to make mistakes along the way. Learning is an interactive process. We can all remember our favorite teachers who made it worth going to class every time. Why don't we try to emulate what they did right then? 

The answer, I'd like to suggest, has to do almost entirely with the professionalizing tendencies in academic life today. By professionalization, I mean a form of commodification of academic labor, which can be ranked hierarchically according to where one's Ph.D granting institution, place of work, citation index ranking, and number of publications. As graduate students are groomed to take their place in professional academia, they naturally imbibe the bad habits of their professors. At least one professor in my department has been known to say that it pays to be a bad teacher. This is careerism, that classic bourgeois malaise we once assumed lay outside the groves of academia. 

For graduate students, the obvious implication of careerism is to "know the relevant literature" than know about a particular subject. Jargon-free communication of one's ideas and insights is besides the point. It's hardly surprising that, anyone buying into the dominant ideology of graduate school today is a pretty miserable human being. The poor graduate student, walled up in the ivory tower, lacks any meaningful sense what's going on outside. A needless cynicism takes root and is the necessary companion of the professional-in-the-making. 

I once assumed anthropologists were among the few academics who ventured out of campus sufficiently often to acquire a deeper understanding of the world we live in. Alas, now I find that they are prone to bouts of messianism, in which old prophets such as Foucault and Deleuze are replaced by the likes of Agamben and Zizek. Immersion in lifeworlds other than one's own is unfashionable. One can "explain" anecdotes collected from the "field" with one's favorite theorist in hand. This is divination, the misguided idea that a prophet or his teachings can show us the true way. Faced with such humbug, the joy of learning dies an unnatural death. What can one teach others if one's own learning is restricted to imbibing the ideas of the latest prophet on the block? 

The graduate student thus emerges as a beleaguered being, alienated from the world of which the undergraduate is very much a part. Teaching is no more than a chore. One can never approach it enthusiastically. Or engage with students without "managing" one's relationship with them. Undergraduates are there to be looked down upon contemptuously. This entire attitude, I think, short-circuits the college education process. Furthermore, it impoverishes graduate student life even further. 

Instead of ending on a dire note, let me do so with an email sent by a student of mine at the end of the fall semester. It encapsulates all the points I've made thus far. And more crucially, it gives us every reason to take teaching seriously:

On 14 December 2010 02:07, (name and email address omitted) wrote:

Uday,

As I began to express to you as I was leaving the exam today, there is no way for me to accurately articulate my gratitude to you for your devotion and patience with me this semester. I read over my first and last papers after the test, and I have to say, the missing link between the two is the endless help and guidance that you have given me throughout the semester. From the beginning of the semester when I got that first paper back, I told myself that Political Philosophy was going to be the class that I spend the most time on, because writing has historically been my weakness. Having now achieved this goal, I can say confidently that you were the best teacher that I could had had to help me with my aspiration. You challenged me to participate in class, make thoughtful comments, and ultimately translate those thoughts onto paper. For me, what separated this class from all the others is that when I would get a paper assignment, I wouldn’t bemoan the task ahead of me, but rather I would get excited at the notion of having another opportunity to have my writing critiqued, edited and improved.

The single-handed most impressive and important part of my working with you this semester was that you were seemingly just as committed as I was to improving me as a writer. In the past, when I have met with my teachers with writers block or other problems, they would take five to ten minutes and try to point me in a direction that they thought would be helpful. However, when I wouldn’t understand something, the response that I commonly received was, “That’s for you to figure out,” leaving me somewhat unsatisfied with our time spent. With you, however, our meetings lasted sometimes an hour a half. You struck the balance of making me understand exactly what I needed to do to be successful, but at the same time leaving enough room for me to be creative with my thinking. This method was instrumental to my truly enjoying writing. For the first time in my academic career, I really felt that I was able to master the analytical and writing skills that are required for writing a paper.

Regardless of my grade on the final or in the class, I know that I am walking away from this class a better writer, thinking, and analyst. Whereas most classes hope to provide you with some knowledge to take with you into the future, I have gained not only the knowledge of political philosophy, but also the understanding a confidence to write and analyze.

Like I said, there is absolutely no way for me to do justice to express my gratitude to you, so I figured that a letter would be the best alternative.

Have a safe flight and a good break, and hopefully see you next semester.

(Name omitted to ensure confidentiality)

The Ugliness of the Indian Cricket Fan

Consider the following excerpt from the chat client of an online cricket streaming website:

Desi_dude: INDIA WILL WIN TODAY!!!
Maakichoot: Sachin n Sewag will score century
ABC: bharat mata ki jai...angrezon ki gaand maro!
PakiBoy: Losers...totally overrated team.
Maakichoot: ur country is a loser...fuck off pig
Desi_dude: I WILL FUCK U SISTER PAKIBOY!!!

This exchange will sound typical for anyone who follows live cricket online. Now and then, the moderator intervenes to kick out someone from the chat room. But more often than not, such exchanges continue unabated on one side of your screen until you turn off the chat client. I certainly turn it off whenever I watch cricket. But that does not shut me out from the wider set of exchanges among Indian cricket fans that circulate in the virtual and real worlds. It must be admitted that I take a perverse interest in these exchanges, but only because they regularly demonstrate to me the ugliness of the modern Indian cricket fan, and more generally, the depressingly disgusting nature of metropolitan Indian life today.

After all these years of watching cricket, it is clear to me that most online viewers are males between 18 and 35. They watch mainly the games that India play. Usually, they cheer for boundaries and sixers. Occasionally, the bowlers receive praise, though they usually cop as much abuse as the opposition. Statistics offer solace and a sense of community: how else would you know that Virender Sehwag missed Gary Kirsten's record for the highest score by a batsman in a World Cup by fourteen runs? The slightest provocation, real or imagined, invites a torrent of four-letter words directed at Pakistan. English or Australian or South African teams fare slightly better for these young male viewers, partly because they offer alluring models of sporting success and partly because most of these viewers live in one of these countries or the US/Canada. Abuse invariably takes traditional North Indian forms of expression: mothers and sisters feature prominently, of course. Graphic descriptions of the female sexual anatomy, similarly, become the canvass for projecting fantasies of rape. Sexual aggression is closely allied to fervent nationalism: to win is to rape one's opponent's mothers and sisters. To win repeatedly implies total domination of others. This is, therefore, the goal of the typical online cricket viewer.

It seems easy to diagnose what's wrong here. These kids, some would say, need to be taught some manners. But I have no doubt that these viewers are lovely, well-mannered middle-class youth studying or working to further their mundane ambitions. And by their own admission, they eat and breathe cricket. Moreover, they view themselves as patriots defending the nation's pride at every opportunity. Their parents and families are surely proud of them. And they will grow up to be successful at work and financially. So what's wrong then? Am I just being curmudgeonly? Perhaps, but I'd argue that jingoistic nationalism stands for a wider malaise in modern India, and its implications for sports and life are equally pernicious.

Jingoistic nationalism is arguably the bane of modern sport. Orwell wrote of "war minus the shooting." But a tough sporting contest does resemble a war to its participants and a gladiatorial battle for spectators. It is only when politics that matter little to the sporting contest enter the fray that things get ugly. It is purely a matter of historical contingency that nation-states exist and that too in their present forms. The West Indies are not even a nation-state. England competes on its own instead of calling itself Great Britain. Both India and Pakistan have split into separate nations and cricket teams. Where is the need to get so riled up over national identities and rivalries? The IPL T20 tournament, modeled on the English Premier League, is divided into ten franchises, each associated with an Indian city. Supporting one's favorite cricketers across cities is commonplace there. Yet the Indian cricket team is the object of endless praise and ridicule, agony and ecstasy.

This paradoxical state of affairs is understandable only if we see the wider context for nationalist assertion over the past decade or so. The idea that India is a global superpower-in-the-making haunts the urban imagination. There is a restlessness, bordering on insanity, that desires a never-ending stream of glory and wealth. The metropolitan Indian obsession with the national GDP and its growth rate are worth noting in this regard. There are global cricket rankings, much like there are global GDP rankings, and success is defined narrowly as rising up the rankings. The anxieties and insecurities of the rising middle classes in urban India thus get projected onto sport. Personal anxieties intertwine with national ones, and a toxic mix is produced indeed.  For those living outside India, the problem is even more acute: the louder and more brashly one expresses one's love for one's country/culture/civilization, the more nationalistic one imagines oneself to be. A seamless garment knits together personal aspirations and anxieties with the desire to assert civilizational pride and national success. Do not be surprised to hear about "black Madrasis," "Habshis," or "Aussie convicts" when watching cricket. They are part and parcel of the new Indian identity: vulgar, insecure, and rotten to the core.

The wider post-liberalization context of jingoistic nationalism in India today goes far beyond Orwell's notion of sports as a kind of war between nations. This is because it rests fundamentally on the sexual insecurities of young men who band together to participate in exhibitions of hyper-masculinity. Try watching a cricket match with a bunch of men in their 20s, and you'll know what I mean. "Mardangi" (masculinist assertion) holds the key to understanding the cricket fan's love of the motherland. For, in this view of nationalism, fighting for the nation means fighting for one's mother and land simultaneously. Logically, this kind of nationalism means destroying others' mothers and lands. Cricket victories are analogous to rapes and imperial conquests. All three terms (victory, rape, conquest) are used interchangeably in popular parlance. Asserting national pride goes hand in hand with a deep fear of what might happen if one were to lose a cricket match. Effigies are burned, cricketers are stoned, and their parents' homes vandalized or burned. Losing a match is akin to betraying one's nation and mother. The traitors must be punished for their crimes.

These extreme responses suggest deep-seated and unresolved sexual tensions in the minds of the male cricket fan. The graphic descriptions of the female body and violent sexual activity suggest more than a passing familiarity with the standard modes of pornographic representation of women. They represent a deep personal sense of sexual frustration/persecution or a thwarted desire to master the female body. The chasm between unsatiated lust and boundless desire accounts largely for the sexual politics of the jingoistic cricket fan. Winning is experienced as a bodily pleasure that partially offsets the frustrations of everyday life. The self and nation thus get braided together, and the desire for sexual recognition gets caught up with the quest for national glory in cricket and much else. The basic dictum for the Indian cricket fan thus appears to be "do unto others before they do unto you." In short, let's conquer the opponent on and off the field before they do the same to us.

When cricket or any sport is reduced to a mere assertion of jingoistic nationalism, does it really matter intrinsically? Can one really be so intent on personal/national conquest and yet admire a freakish leg-break or a sumptuous cover drive? I doubt it. The modern fan's experience of cricket is mediated more by statistics than ever before. This is obviously so for those who follow cricket in the form of text commentary on Cricinfo or the BBC. But even for those who watch on television, stats are constantly shoved down one's throat, but the viewers demand even more. Sehwag's average or Harbhajan's strike-rate have now become common knowledge. In an age of player auctions, these statistics are also an "objective" basis for evaluating cricketers. When I cast my mind back a couple of decades ago to the days of Mohinder Amarnath and Sunil Gavaskar, I shudder to think what might have occurred if those players were judged solely by their batting strike-rates or averages. Or if Ian Chappell's captaincy could be compared decisively to Clive Lloyd's after reducing both of them to a set of "objective" numbers. Statistics have always mattered in cricket, even in the nineteenth century, but they did not serve until recently as the principal basis for evaluating cricketers or experiencing the sport. And woebetide us all for the blight that rots our imaginations and blinds us to the many pleasures of the game.

All sport is, ultimately, a metaphor for life. It is meaningful only within the context of rules that seem entirely arbitrary and nonsensical to those who do not follow the sport. The virtues of fair play, courage, concentration, cunning, skill, athleticism, and leadership, to name only a few, are inextricably tied to sports. Cricket has arguably been an exemplar of sporting virtues insofar as its Victorian origins and colonial provenance made it a model of moral conduct long ago. As Thomas Arnold, the schoolmaster at Rugby told Tom Brown a century and a half ago, cricket is more than a sport, it's an institution. Cricket is a demanding game for a viewer. There are many moving parts, so to speak, and for the most part, the movement is rather slow. The extraordinary feat or heroic performance is the exception to the humdrum rhythms of bat and ball. Cricket's rules, too, are perhaps more complex than any other sport. Try teaching cricket to an American, and you will realize soon that the game is meant for men and women of higher intellectual qualities. This does not, of course, make it a patrician affair, since the plebs have always taken a keen interest in outdoing their social superiors at batting and bowling alike. As one social historian put it, had the French noblesse played cricket with their serfs, they would not have had their chateaux burnt. If sport is a metaphor for life, then cricket is a most intricate metaphor to unravel.

Still, millions have unravelled the metaphor of cricket. The English aristocracy has always had a tender spot for the underdog, so it is hardly surprising that cricket has never been an exclusively bourgeois sport. Working-class Englishmen, and later, colonials in the Caribbean, Australia, and the Indian subcontinent partook of the myriad joys of the game. To deceive one's colonial masters with a well-bowled googly or to impress the patricians at Lord's with a century has always been a key part of the game. It is wrong to believe that the spread of the game to the postcolonial world has rid cricket of its peculiar virtues. It has only broadened the range of skills and talents exhibited on the cricket field. It is hard to imagine cricket today, for instance, without the definitive contributions of the West Indian teams of the 1970s and 1980s. In India, the spread of the game beyond a small princely elite have given us the likes of Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble, and Mohammed Azharuddin. Most of our cricketers today come from fairly humble backgrounds, outside the big metropolitan cities, and work hard to hone their cricketing skills and achieve fame for their exploits on the field.

My own introduction to cricket came from a man born and raised in Bankura in West Bengal, who came to work in Calcutta, as it was called then, and kept alive his passion for the game by transmitting it to others such as myself. Joydeb knew the value of Dean Jones' quick singles, David Gower's stylish on-drives or Inzamam's towering sixes. He knew the personal idiosyncrasies of every player even before he had set eyes on them on television. Radio commentary had told him all he needed to do about Richards' imperious manner or Srikkanth's twitchy nose. Once, on a trip to Eden Gardens, he had found himself surrounded by nearly a hundred thousand  Bengalis cheering wildly for Kapil and Azhar. He couldn't make out most of what happened on the field, but he remembered Chris Lewis, the forgotten English all-rounder outdo the much-touted Pringle and Botham with a century and a bagful of wickets. It reminded him, he said, of the manner in which he had imagined Alvin Kallicharan sent the hapless Indian bowlers on a leather hunt all those years ago. On another occasion, Joydeb despaired that the rain-rule in one-day games needed to be revised drastically so that it could be a fairer contest for the team batting second. He rued the 1992 World Cup semi-final between South Africa and England as a classic example of justice denied. And he despaired that Kapil Dev had prolonged his career needlessly to overtake Richard Hadlee's bowling record.

Richie Benaud or Neville Cardus could not have understood the game better. Joydeb knew and loved the game without malice or contempt for anyone. I sometimes wonder nowadays what he might have made of the IPL or T20 cricket more generally. I cannot tell, to be honest. But I do know that he'd have detested the ugly jingoism that the Indian fan brings to the game today. It is true that he enjoyed an Indian victory on the back of some fine performances by his favorite players, Kapil and Azhar. But it did not happen often, less so outside India. To see, however, Viv Richards or Shane Warne in action was, for him, a marvel to behold. That men could push the frontiers of possibility by batting or bowling the way Richards or Warne did, seemed to him to be the primary reason for following the sport. No matter what we do or how much we earn, there is an unspeakable sense of exhilaration every time one's hero comes to bat or bowl. Words cannot capture what the mind and heart do instinctively. In those brief, flickering moments, the world comes alive with wondrous possibilities, and all else is forgotten. But when the hero is caught at slip or smashed for six, you sigh and realize they -- and you -- are mortal, after all. Therein lies the magic of sport. I can only feel sorry for those who can never experience it.