|
TIDBITS/ADDENDUM
To let the readers of my Home Page know “where I am coming from” mentally, I want to add closing remarks on how important having good teachers has been to me. The following is a brief essay I submitted when I went back to school and applied for the University of Chicago MA program in liberal arts. The essay traces the influences that have shaped my intellectual development:
My mind moves recursively as I sift through various sources of influence that have helped, and continue to help, to nurture my intellectual development: such an attempt inevitably coalesces into an image of a good teacher in its ever-enriching, multiple origins, manifestations, and meanings. For me who has chosen teaching for my vocation, the good teacher image also carries a natural, stereoscopic benefit, offering a useful turning of the mind to explain why I wish to apply to the University of Chicago’s Master of Liberal Arts Program. To state simply, the good teacher has formed me, and it is the good teacher that I wish to grow into becoming by taking the MLA program.
From the beginning, I was nurtured by the art of possibility – my understanding of the quintessence of good teaching – whose first teacher was my father who held a philosophy that “If you have a good education, no thief can steal it from you.”
 His uniqueness will be better appreciated when I refer to the predominant thinking of Japanese society. Unlike the current, more progressive era, my father’s generation was much more firmly anchored in the ubiquitous sense of patriarchal and hierarchical values and in the traditional notions of females as daughters, wives, and mothers only. Therefore, for a Japanese father to regard his daughter as a mental being and to encourage her to acquire not only a basic education but also a higher education – not an early and suitable marriage – was almost a heretical act. No wonder, then, that his utopian dream for me had planted a seed of possibility for my future in education and, even today, remains in me a ceaselessly prompting spirit steeped in respect for the individual worthiness.
Simultaneously, another equally important influence came into my life in the form of Catholic education for young ladies. While acting as an outpost of Western values and norms fortified by an ideal model of an academic utopia, Catholic education invigorated my father’s philosophy. It was there that I believe I learned specifically the art of possibility as a measure of both spiritual and intellectual excellence. What particularly resonated with my youthful self was the idea of an education elucidating personal possibilities for women. Modeled after
 John Henry Cardinal Newman’s idea of liberal education, my schooling was achieved in the manner where all disciplines would be pursued for their own sake, and students’ studies would be found to balance each other internally. My instructors – who were nuns and priests from Boston and Belgium – provided their versions of the ideal of a Catholic university where the knowledge of liberal arts should be seen as paramount and as a pleasurable end in itself. The harvest of those experiences was my abiding belief in the liberal arts education, especially as blueprints of my literary study and my lasting fidelity to the redemptive promises of the language and literature of the West, as a shaper of knowledge and of personal identity and cohesion.
From my new life in America as a graduate student at Marquette University and Loyola University, one name immediately springs to mind as one whose teaching went beyond the theoretic confines of literary studies. I refer to Anthony LaBranche who incited my interest in the English Renaissance, a historic period which has become my academic home ever since. Professor LaBranche was not a good teacher in the ordinary sense for he liked controversy in the classroom. He upset students’ surface opinions about the statically proper way to study literature; disturbed our placid acceptance of popular critical theories and trends; and, disquieted our comfort zone with his exciting, daring views on Shakespeare,
Tourneur, Chapman, and Ford. Yet, his cumulative impact came to mean our realization that what we did in class with Renaissance writers was not limited in its effects to the literary world; to him, literature was about life itself. More specifically, the literary text for him (and for us students, gradually) became a site of knowledge and freedom where we could invest our world with our own informed meanings. What his philosophy taught me was a persistent cultivation of a noticing mind and an expressive pen as well as a spirited quest for a better way of thinking, all these qualities as a form of critical and creative literacy. His teaching permitted me, as it were, to comprehend and interpret literary texts as my expression of freedom inviting me to see myself and others through an attractive multiplicity of frames of being and thus investing my world with a fluid sense of possibilities and interconnections.
What Henry Adams said of the teacher’s power is so true: “a teacher . . . can never tell where his influence stops.” In my case, built upon the foundation of aforementioned three major influences, I seem to have expanded the idea of teacher, which now includes writers and scholars that appear to embrace the idea of possibility. At one time, they included such writers as Charlotte Bronte, John Ford, James Joyce, and
 Emily
Dickinson; at another, I was drawn to scholars such as Joan Webber, Michael Neill, and John
Huizinga. In recent years, I have discovered Margaret Fuller, Mikhail
Bakhtin, and Stephen Greenblatt for further clarifications of my sense of individuals’ possibilities for and interconnections to a larger society. Fuller’s appeal may be summarized in her utopian vision of gender relations (and by extension, human relations of divers sorts), as she regards the self as the vehicle of a connective power offering a “more permeable sense of ego boundaries.” Beyond her social optimism, Fuller’s mode of discourse based on the
multivoiced, epistemological first person further stirs my interest as she calls attention to various ways in which we construct images of our public and private identities. Fuller in turn acts as a bridge to my understanding of
Bakhtin, especially his ameliorated concept of “outsiders” which reverses its customarily transgressive negative connotation into one of the significant fields of imaginative potentialities. Bakhtin suggests that the foreign “other” person exercises a powerful cognitive sight from the outside through which he, she, or they can see what the insiders cannot, a critical position sympathetically echoed in Greenblatt’s liberating discourse on self and culture in his theory of “self-fashioning.”
In the end, all these influences as my teachers far and near have given me an enduring lesson in the art of possibility – to transcend the given and to open new fields of imaginative knowing. With its ethical and intellectual splendor, the lesson is made even more luminous with its natural affinity to illuminate a potent secret at the heart of good teaching: A good teacher embraces a student’s authentic and unique humanity while privileging and honoring the student’s critical and creative mind.
|
