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Teaching Machine


Since when was the last time that I opened a book or a pdf file out of free choice to read? Even if I were to read what I want to read, but the wanting was more of coercion of circumstances rather than that volition to actually read. It has all too become forced, routine and a false but practical association to survival. I have become a knowledge processor and just like a machine I need the appropriate inputs in order for me dispense necessary outputs. Consider me a pedagogical machine. Teaching has been one of the jobs that demands to bring home the job itself. I sometimes envy my wife for not bringing any of her job at home. But mine, before I sleep at night and or when I arrive at home I am always thinking of what I am to do tomorrow and what I am to read and what are plans in order to make tomorrow happen. I love the job, but as time went by, it became all too draining as it saps the very luxury there is to reading. Reading and or studying has become a means for survival and here I am alienated from the very passion of reading and studying because of the routine. Even the same pressure existed way back in my college days, but at that time I read not just because I wanted to pass but I find those things interesting without the pressure of having to earn a living out from it. I can say reading and studying is a bourgeoisie activity because the fulfilment of it is in the realm of leisure. And in college, I can also read other things because I had all the time. But now, I am locked into this academic machinery. Although, I find joy in whatever happens in the classroom. To what the students learn, engage and get astonished about, but for me, I need the awe and wonder there is when I am to open a book. The wonder was stripped away and was replaced by the need to earn. All the more, the compounding stress exists thinking about the possibility that students just simply need to satisfy me, what I need to hear or just play along in the name’s sake of passing the subject of which I do not like because when I chose to go to college, I was very hungry of what I can encounter and I did not do things in order to pass subjects, I did those tasks because it sparked curiosity in my part and along the way the unintended result of passing was there.

I have become a teaching machine. With all the books that I have both in paper and virtual copies, I still have to open them all according to my delight. It is a different feel when we get to read and study when we are internally giddy and ready about reading. Knowing and thinking becomes meaningful and satisfying. Although external factors can contribute to one’s reading, but I am that person who reads out of curiosity. Out of the need to grasp something that I want. But again, here I am, a teaching machine. I wonder how long I can still trump this dread with the illusory reasons of service through education?  

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