‘Letter to a young teacher’

This is the title of Fr. Joseph V. Landy’s small and sensible book for those who want to teach. The Jesuit teacher lives up to the subtitle of this book – The Art of Being Interesting.

“Why teach? Many answers are possible, but one spells death to a career in the classroom. If your overriding motive is money, go elsewhere.” How true, how true. When we hold our college reunions, my college classmates at Ateneo would tell me how youthful I still looked, with a full head of black hair and hardly discernible lines on my face. I would cackle with laughter and tell them that, indeed, God is fair. “I may look young, but I rode in my old car coming here. But you? You came here in your new Benzes or SUVs.”

How, then, to stay alive in the classroom and not be like a parrot reading notes from the yellowed papers you have kept in your last 1,000 years?

Fr. Landy, who like all Jesuits have a solid training in Greek and Latin, quotes a line from Latin: “Nemo dat quod non havet, meaning, You cannot give to others what you do not have yourself. Interest passes from person to person the way electricity passes through a wire.”

This means you should constantly update yourself on the subject you teach. Just because you have a college degree, or a master’s degree, or even a PhD, you should not just shut the door and already consider yourself the fountain of wisdom on your subject matter. No, Sir, you just cannot wing it. Having a solid syllabus is fine, but you have to enrich it with contexts, subtexts, stories, why, even jokes and humorous tales about the subject that you teach.

Some teachers could be like the magical bird of the forest in Ibong Adarna. You attend their classes and you promptly fall asleep, grazed by the droppings from their dead branches of knowledge, “because their own interest in their subject has expired. They have lost their appetite for it and no longer believe in its value. They have stopped reading about it, talking about it, caring about it. Once their students sense that a teacher is scraping bottom, is no longer growing in curiosity and knowledge about the subject of instruction, their attention level sinks, too. Stale bread is uninteresting bread.”

If memory is the mother of all writing, then preparation is at the heart of all teaching. Fr. Landy says a teacher should re-read the text at least a day before the class. One should never come to the classroom cold. But preparation is not just an intellectual exercise. Sure, Aristotle defined a person as a “rational animal,” because our reasoning ability separates us from the buffalo and the bee. But the major challenge one faces in the classroom is not intellectual – it is psychological.”

You have to catch the attention of the students – especially in this Age of the Internet. Luckily, there is a whole archive of materials on pedagogy, and Fr. Landy gives us the gist.

One, it is not what one is teaching that captures the attention of the students; rather, it is the way it is taught. The five psychological factors of getting students’ attention include activity, reality, the vital [factor], humor and novelty.

Activity means the teacher should not be like the Sphinx – solid and unmoving behind the desk. The teacher should move. What I do the moment I walk inside the classroom is to make sure it is comfortable: all electric fans and lights are turned on, all windows opened. This is what my teacher, the late Fr. Joseph A. Galdon, S.J., called part of classroom management.

Write on the blackboard, or show them your PowerPoint presentation, walk around the classroom, point out key words. Activity also hums in the classroom when the students are involved in the learning process, what we now call student-centered learning. Lectures are still good, but not all the time. Call the students who nod from time to time. Or better yet, teach the students to ask some questions themselves, with you acting as a moderator, like in a talk show.

Reality means bringing the colorful world outside school right into the classroom. Bring a map, a globe, a stack of postcards or photographs. Lug along a chart, a slide show, a PowerPoint presentation. Imitate characters in the fiction that you teach. In my Poetry classes, I ask the students to go to the Ateneo Art Gallery, and ask them to describe the images in a painting. And in fiction class, I ask them to go to the same gallery, and retell the story found in the painting.

The vital [factor] means emphasizing the importance of the course. In our History class, my professor, Fr. Leonard, stressed the strategic value of the blitzkrieg during World War II, a strategy that one can use in life after college. Or the ability to ask difficult questions as well.

Humor, of course, is the tonic that makes a teacher sparkle. The great teacher Gilbert Highet said that “I consider a day’s teaching wasted if we do not all have one hearty laugh.” The atmosphere in the classroom should be friendly and not threatening. If your teachers are Nazis, you learn to fear them, but did you ever learn anything at all from them, except to poke fun at them behind their backs?

Novelty means varying your teaching strategies, doing something new each time. And voice – ahh, that is the prime apparatus of a good teacher. Short pauses are also like the silences in a conversation – just enough time to let an important insight sink in. The power of one’s voice should reach the person sitting in the last row. Vary also the loudness of your voice, like a theater actor using his voice like an accordion of ideas.

I still teach part-time now that I am between 50 and death. I am working on TV and radio and works as a media manager, but still I find the time to teach. There is nothing like that eureka moment when the students’ eyes light up because of the arrival of an insight, suddenly aflame in their minds.

And speaking of training, I would like to congratulate my friends in Alliance in Motion Global Inc., for their 10th year in the marketing industry. Their three-day convention began with the launching of AIMcademy, where training on product awareness and presentations were held.

Speakers included Dr. Ed Cabantog, the visionary president and CEO; Engineer Francis Miguel, the mentor par excellance and CFO; and Mr. John Asperin, who is filled with excitement when he speaks, the CMO.

Other speakers included the two vice presidents Arnel Limpin and Jurgen Gonzales, as well as Dr. Butch Villena (medical consultant) and famous marketing whiz Art Jonak.

What I like most about organizations is their corporate social responsibility. A check for $30,000 was presented to ALIVE Foundation,  a social-development institution chaired by Dr. Connie Cabantog.

This institution has given financial assistance and medical help to more than 30,000 families since it began serving the nation in 2008. The check came from Nature’s Way and Natura Life Asia. Another check for $10,000 was added to the donation for ALIVE Foundation, with funds coming from Weider Global Nutrition.

Now, if only all our marketing groups have CSRs like AIM Global, then the world would be a better one for less fortunate Filipinos.