After tonight, I will begin on my final week in Elon.
The weekend has been mundane, there were many things going on in and around campus, but I had work to do, and the lack of available transport is a bitch.
I caught the dance concert ‘Reflections’ put up by the dance majors. My first full-concert at Elon, I was pretty impressed by it. Vastly different from the dance thesis concert I caught at Wesleyan, this was choreographed by full-time choreographers, all either dancing full time or teaching full time somewhere on this continent.
‘A Teacher’s Inner Child’ was a poetry-dance piece, where the teacher figure related the innermost thoughts of a teacher in the form of poetry, juxtaposed by childlike movements from the schoolchildren. One particular line that caught me was:
“Students depend on teachers for grades, but what do teachers depend on students for? The community of interdependence can only exist when teachers find a reason for dependence on students that is as real as grades are to students.”
Ok, i don’t think i quoted it verbatim, but that’s as much as i could remember.
Well I never thought of it that way. I mean, as a student and as a noob teacher (for a short while), I have always looked to teaching as a one-way process: Someone teach, others listen. The satisfaction that teachers receive will be when the students graduate, and move on in life, learning lessons beyond the textbook – in short, everything intangible. Is there hope that teachers can actually achieve something, learn something, from the students that are as tangible and important as grades are to student? Do students actually hold something for their teachers? Perhaps they do.
Just a thing that I can’t comprehend in dance. Circles seem to be a popular shape in choreography for some unknown reason. Almost every single piece (out of the eight that evening) had some point in time where you see a circle (or two) forming, and you see the dancers either closing in and expanding the circle, or dance around the circle. By the fifth or sixth piece that happened, I was like trying to stifle my giggles, because it looked remotely like some ritualistic dance of some tribe somewhere. But okay, in the end I reasoned with myself, “give it to them la.” It’s probably as common as the typical G-Em-C-D chord progression that songwriters use.
I have Pendulum to layout tomorrow, a radio and tv ad script to write up tomorrow. Pray that I’ll live. =)
