etherfarm

Lectures, departures

Later

01:09 on Wednesday, December 17, 2003 • 3 responses

Earlier

My last day here in Bicol will forever be remembered, by me and sixty or so students at the university in Iriga alike—as the day I gave a lecture that flopped. Actually, saying it flopped would imply the lecture had some life, which quite frankly, it didn’t.

Let me start, however, by saying that though it’s hard to believe—it could have sucked more had I not asked a pre-emptive question. This morning I thought it would be a good idea to ask how many people would be attending my lecture. My aunt said they had a small auditorium which would hold about 300 people.

You know, I don’t have any problems giving talks to 300 people. Unless I have nothing to say, in which case 300 people is 299.5 people too many.

I was also told that the audience would mostly be economics and accounting students. I have about as much in common with economics and accounting students as I have in common with lesbian Hungarian bakers (which, in case you’re wondering, is nothing).

So I set down some rules: I would speak to no more than 30 people in the field of literature or English or something even vaguely related to the Humanities, and my presentation should be referred to as a “discussion”, not a “lecture”.

While my aunt was off trying to wrangle some poor students into a classroom to talk to me, I sauntered up to the ice plant, where I found out how ice is made (a process, quite honestly, that I’ve never questioned). This plant churns out a lot of ice, most of which gets trucked to the coast for use by fisherman and fish processing plants. I told my uncle that I hadn’t noticed any refrigerated trucks at the plant and he said they didn’t have any. They had one, but it was captured by the NPA, and when he refused to pay the ransom they demanded, the truck was torched. So the NPA has resorted to trucknapping. Wily bastards. Anyway, I found the iceplant a rather beautifully organic kind of industrial place, and snapped lots of photos. I’ll explain the process if anyone’s interested. Yes, the light goes off when you close the door.

Drove a little more around town, taking a little sidetrip just so I could take a picture of the sign above, which I saw yesterday, then I went off to the university to talk to the kids. On the way, I thought a suitable topic for presentation would be a brief discussion on how it is that my students can take an “Intro to Horror Film” class. Every mention of this class since my arrival in the Philippines has been met with complete astonishment over the fact that such classes can exist anywhere, so I figure go with “shock and awe” and use horror to my advantage. My ill-conceived plan had me talking a little bit about horror film and its social and cultural role in the US and using that to segue into a spiel on how new media can and should be integrated into high school and college curriculums as a form of cultural, historical, and literary study.

Well, I entered the room and sure enough, it was an auditorium which held 300 people. Luckily, there were only 60 or so people there, but none of them were sitting at the front of the room. In fact, because the room was dark, I couldn’t make out their faces—I could only see the white shirts of their school uniforms.

So after asking a few questions which no one responded to, I had the lights in the room turned on and I moved closer to the students. I think this scared them. If I asked any questions—even something as tame as “anyone here watch a lot of movies?” yielded complete silence. If I looked directly at anyone they’d look at the floor. They clearly understood me—everyone would laugh when I told a joke or made some sarcastic remarks.

After about twenty minutes of this I told them that I had wanted to have a discussion with them and that if there weren’t any questions, they could leave. They all stayed, though, and a few adventurous souls asked me questions. And here’s the tragic part—all of their questions were about how things were in the U.S. “What’s a class like in the U.S.?” “I hear there is a teacher shortage in the U.S. How difficult is it for a Filipino to get a job in the U.S.?” “What TV programs do you watch in the U.S.?” “Are there a lot of Filipinos in the U.S.?”

About twenty minutes later I dismissed everyone and was then given a tour of the university by an administrator, who was in the room while I gave the presentation. I asked her why the students were so shy and she said that most of them were probably embarrassed to speak English to an American. I wish I had known! They could have spoken in Tagalog and if I hadn’t understood them, surely someone could have translated for me. Argh.

Then I was told that all of the students in the room were economics students. Double argh.

She also told me that students at that university, and at most universities in the Philippines, aren’t used to talking to their teachers during class. Most of the education, she explained, was really centered on memorization and testing, not discussion or creative thinking. I spent the rest of the daylight hours watching people playing tennis at the university tennis courts. I was told that one of the gentlemen playing was a doctor—a full-blooded M.D.-certified, has his own private practice doctor—who was retraining as a nurse so that he could immigrate to the U.S.

I know that popular American opinion on immigration, particularly among people who feel they have something to lose to immigrants, differs widely from my own opinon, and I don’t want to open that can of worms here. Let’s just say that this man’s story—shared, I’m told, by legions of doctors-turning-into-nurses all over the Philippines—is an incredibly sad one to me. Both because this kind of mass migration will result in a brain drain in the Philippines and because of the idea that simply being in the U.S. can somehow be worth throwing away half a lifetime’s worth of training and experience as a medical doctor.

The college administrator and I talked at some length about the current political, social, and cultural realities in the Philippines—a conversation I’ve been trying to have with as many people as possible. I’ll address these conversations in a later post.

Anyway, I’m heading back to Manila tomorrow. A cousin of mine who lives only two hours away from me in California will be in Manila (her mom is the aunt with whom I’m staying). I haven’t seen her or her family for years and I’m looking forward to spending some time with them.