The View From Here:
Lynne Fukuda

The Techno Corner:
      Susan L. Jones
(stay tuned to next issue)

QUIBILS AND QUIRKS
(the original text as serialized in The Cariboo Observer)

Dan Lukiv, M.Ed.
English and Creative Writing
McNaughton Centre, Quesnel, BC, Canada
E-mail: lukivdan@shaw.ca

LAST EPISODE/CHAPTER 96: Betsy, standing in her living-room, began to scold her brother, Professor Hamburger: “How many years ago did you leave? Five! No note for us. We thought you were dead!”

CHAPTER 97: DOROTHY NEVER GAVE UP HOPE

           Betsy had wanted to throw a book at her brother during the meeting at the library. But she’d waited to deal with him privately. “Look at you. You never could look after yourself.” She pulled a twig from his beard. “You thoughtless brute.”
            “Betsy, please,” the professor said.
            Dorothy sprang into the living-room. Her pink nighty jumped up and down. She clutched the teddy bear her uncle had given her years ago. “All this time,” she said, “I kept teddy safe. Mum said you couldn’t still be alive. But I dreamed of you returning.” She hugged her uncle and cried.
            “You should have told us where you were going,” Betsy said. “You put us through a lot of pain.”
            “Would you have believed me?” the professor asked.
            The mayor lay on the floor. He propped his fat, bare legs on the armchair. He cuddled a stuffed toy—a hippopotamus—and crooned.
            Arthur, in his wheelchair, said, “You were selfish, Thomas. We were worried sick. We figured you got lost hiking and fell into a ravine.”
            “Selfish,” Betsy said.
            “You’re a bad uncle,” Dorothy said. “But I’m glad you’re alive.” She hugged him again.
            “Heads,” the mayor said.

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Representing Ourselves Through Syllabi: Do We Say What We Mean?

Kathleen Maloney, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Literature and Composition
St. Mary’s University
E-mail:  kmaloney@stmarytx.edu

When I think back to my favorite classes as a student, I rarely remember the course syllabi.  Instead, I remember favorite readings, challenging tasks, important lessons, professors’ personas, or fellow classmates.  Still, the syllabus is a valued artifact of what we do as college professors.  What do our class syllabi say about our selves, our classes, our expectations of our students, and our idea of the university? How is it that this one document comes to speak for us in so many ways, and should it?  As professors, our role within the university community is both that of object and subject.  We are quite literally one of the things that our universities sell to prospective students.  At the same time, we are individuals who have to consider our own subject positions in order to make decisions about who we are as people and as professors.  Often, students sign up for and sometimes drop our classes without knowing us or only knowing us by reputation, which is frequently the same as not knowing us at all.  Sometimes students make this decision after the first day of class, after having seen us or, perhaps more realistically, after having seen our syllabus.  In addition to defining our teaching philosophies, our syllabi define our role within the university, our university, and our students.

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Essence of True Learning

Neerja Arun, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
English Department
Bhavan’s Arts and Commerce College,
affiliated with Gujarat University, India.
E-mail:  aayusharun@yahoo.co.in

Preamble

Learning is an inner function, and though the sources of information may lie outside ourselves, the way these sources are processed and observed depends on what is within. This truth was well understood in the Upanishads, which are dialogues between a teacher and a student or between a questioner seeking knowledge and a sear. The Upanishads are regarded as part of the Vedas and, as such, form part of the oldest Hindu scriptures. They primarily discuss philosophy, meditation, and the nature of God; they form the core spiritual thought of Vedantic Hinduism. Considered as mystic or spiritual contemplations of the Vedas, their putative end and essence, the Upanishads are known as Vedānta (“the end/culmination of the Vedas”).The word “Upanishad” means to sit by the side and, hence, all Upanishads are the teachers’ attempts to bring out the knowledge from within the student by creating awareness and then building on it to carry the student forward:

A householder asked the Sage, “What is it that, when known, makes us know everything in the World?”

The Sage replied, “Those who know Spirit say that there are two kinds of knowledge, a lower and a higher. The lower is the knowledge of four Vedas and such things as pronunciation, ceremonials, grammar, etymology, poetry, astronomy. . . The higher knowledge is the knowledge of the Everlasting.” (Purohit 8)

The system of learning, of education, today is so preoccupied with its rationalistic analytical processes and has such faith in them that it governs the choice of subjects and pedagogies and the evaluative methods of what is taught; it seeks nothing more. It does not even stop to ask what the real aim of education is. Only when there is some clarity about this aim can the processes of learning be examined and geared towards the faculties that need development.

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