What Goes on in Faculty Meetings?

As a student, I had often wondered whether my teachers talked about me in faculty meetings.

Now as a teacher I know they actually did! Faculty meetings are all about students.

Teaching is serious business. I can never be a Plato to an Aristotle, who journeyed together as teacher/student for 20 years, but I see these men as my benchmarks.

Teachers have a roomful of Aristotles, malleable minds which need extra caring so they can take on different shapes, according to their individual calling. I am not talking about treating students with kid gloves, I speak of a teacher’s commitment to teach which, in my case, begs for daily grace.

And this is what I see as the purpose of such meetings. Our first agendum at the first faculty meet this school year was the mentoring program, which is what charms me, among others, about the university where I teach.

It was my misfortune not to have gone through a formal mentoring program in the schools I attended here and abroad. I would have had less academic and corporate mishaps, which I charged to experience in the absence of a mentor’s wisdom. This unique program is a venue for mentors and mentees to learn from each other and jointly raise the bar.

Other parts of the agenda usually include improving systems, discipline, teaching methodologies, standards of affiliate schools abroad, activities—all focused on the student, with the university vision/mission as guidepost.

Being serious, however, doesn’t mean the absence of fun. Teachers are, fortunately, humans too (perpetual students and children at heart) so we exchange stale jokes and laugh as though we’re hearing them for the first time.

While every teacher has her own teaching style (mine's very interactive), we are of one resolve: To equip each student with the ammo to take on the real world as he leaves the university.

A faculty meeting, in a nutshell, affirms our interdependence on one another.

It also validates a teacher’s independence in bringing his unique career-and-life blessings for the students to learn from—so student and teacher can journey together as Plato and Aristotle did, albeit in fewer years, and a lot of help from the internet!