learning by teaching

I read in an ad for a volunteers' teaching center some years ago that you learn 90% of what you teach. Whether this is true or not, I've never been bothered to confirm, though it must be true if teachers generally subscribe to it. Why else would they assign reports as part of a standard curriculum then? Granted, it could also be because: (1) they can't think of new ways to grade their students; (2) they want the rest of the class to learn from kids their age; or, (3) they enjoy making students' lives hell. Whichever.

Since high school, I've been convinced that I am a curse when it comes to group reporting. I don't recall a single report I did with groupmates where everything went perfectly - although maybe this is only due to my propensity to remember the worst of the worst. I remember this particular report for Comm3 about ethos, pathos and logos - and, big surprise, I can't even recall exactly what they're supposed to be - where my part of the report dragged on FOREVER, leaving very little time for the rest of my groupmates to do their part. And Sir Dave... well, he's nice, but he can't exactly go around giving time extensions to students who can't use their reporting time wisely.

If I relayed to you, dear nonexistent reader, a comprehensive account of my encounters with the horrors of group reporting, this entry would span the length of an entire FB homepage - and note that this blog's font is tiny. So to save time and effort, why don't we zone in on a particular event that will serve both as evidence for my argument, and as an interesting conversation piece for parties when drunk people decide to play the let's-embarrass-each-other game.

I promised myself that I wouldn't blog about this, as it's too irritating to think about without resorting to hair-pulling antics. But anyway.

Psych108 (Filipino Psychology) is a fairly lax subject. Requirements: the one thing our readings have been focused on for most of the semester, the concept of kapwa. Apparently, it's the Filipino core value that every nationalist scholar has been trying to unearth beneath all those other qualities the Americans tried to inculcate in us. So shrewdly, our teacher made sure kapwa was the center of everything we did in class: group activities, team building disguised as pakontest, questions on readings disguised as group performances, a group paper, a group performance...

The day of our performance, most of my groupmates - who are a batch younger, although we all belong to the School of Econ - had exams in some of the most horrible subjects I've ever had to go through in all my four years at SE. Naturally, given my thick-faced nature, I volunteered to do the powerpoint for the performance - we had settled on doing a skit inspired by Hiraya Manawari and revolving around the idea that the Americans tried to instill 'unnatural' values in us through the textbooks they made our kids read during the early 1900's. It took me SEVEN HOURS to finish that powerpoint; I am honestly very proud of it, because almost each slide has a video or SFX, and I gathered all the pictures despite my crappy Internet connection.

Given I spent seven hours on that thing, and I started working on it late at night, and I had to wake up at six the next morning to get to the seven AM class that I could not afford to miss, I SLEPT FOR JUST ONE HOUR. Normal to others, yes, but a highly disturbing thought for me, a girl who reverts to zombie mode if forced to function with less than six hours of snoring. Surprisingly, though, I held up pretty well, even given my poor experience with lack of sleep. Until the report proper, that is.

The man who set up the LCD projector had told me NOT to step on any of the wires he had laid out on the floor near my feet. He had told me that if I put a single toe on that extension wire near my left foot, the LCD would die, and so would our group report. I told him I understood his instructions perfectly; I had spent SEVEN HOURS on this one twenty-slide strong ppt - I was not going to put all that hard work to waste. And so the play began. The speakers weren't working so well - tough luck, but we tarried on. Our lead actress didn't seem to have internalized her role properly - heck, at least she's trying. And now, now, it's my part -

Oops. Did I step on the wire? Why is the wall suddenly a spotless black?

You get the idea. Surely. Another mishap care of yours truly. The good news is that none of them felt like I was at fault for our disastrous performance - and to be honest, even I don't think it was all my fault. The bad news is that things would have gone a lot better if the ppt had worked; after all, things we work SEVEN HOURS on can't be all that worthless when applied, can they?

This whole thing has unleashed in me a fresh fear that I'll bungle up my next group report, in Geog105 (Economic Geography) this time. I mean, how good can your report be if you're tasked to answer the question: What is the role of economic geography in the development of different countries? Attempting to answer that would be a lot like attempting to answer the question Why do birds have wings? only to find out you weren't supposed to research on the topic - you were expected to say, Because they were destined to fly. Or something as in-your-face as that.