LIFE

Context is Everything

Knowing you’ve reached the end and it’s time to go

I was reading a story about a man who fell in love with a banana liquor in the Caribbean and bought the right to sell it in the UK. On returning home with his suitcase full of the stuff, he opened a bottle in the kitchen, hoping to impress his friends with his astute decision. Everyone, including him, found the drink practically vomit-inducing. The liquor had only tasted good when he was in the Caribbean.

A similar experience happened to me. I was at Heathrow airport killing time while waiting for my colleague to refresh herself at the toilet. I walked to a fragrance outlet and came across an eau de parfum I knew from one whiff I had to buy. It was Versace Eros. I made my purchase and sprayed it liberally all over me. Immediately I felt delicious and divine.

The scent transported me to a realm where I saw myself as Aphrodite, standing on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. There I stood on a mass of rock only the brave, ripped and good-looking could scale. A thunderous drum song carried by the wind played in the background as I led armadas filled with gladiators ready for battle. The entire 16-hour journey home, I felt smug in my seat thinking I was doused in the aromas of love, lust, beauty, pleasure and passion. I was not a traveler, I was a goddess. By the time I reached home I was well-blended with Eros.

When I met up with my family, I took out my parfum and sprayed it for them to indulge. I wanted to show off my new find. My mum walked into the living room and immediately commented, why do I smell cat piss in here?

Before I could answer, everyone nodded, looked around the room to see if the bastard cat had indeed pissed in a corner. Crushed in my shattered world, Versace Eros became the piss of the Cyclops.

Turns out the magic was only applicable at Heathrow airport when I was a tired traveler in between destinations, bloated, in need of a shower, and aching to come home.

Truth is, there is no magic. Our very perception of the world is affected by context, which is why the rational attempt to contrive universal, context-free laws for human behavior may be largely doomed. Even our politics is context-dependent. Author and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in his book Skin in the Game, depending on context, he has entirely different political preferences:

“At the state level, I am a Republican. At the town level, I am a Democrat. In my family I am a socialist. And with my dog, I am a Marxist — from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Humans are driven by their love for certainty, but the truth is we cannot shoehorn human behavior into a single, one-size-fits-all straitjacket without flaws from the outset. What we need more of is not be wedded to an overbearing system of thought. But mind you, this can lead you to disappointment.

This fact hit me like a ton of bricks in my final year of teaching. I realized the wheels had turned and my patience as a teacher was depleting. I admire those who can remain a professor for decades in the same faculty. It’s probably why they’re known as fossils, and students snigger behind their backs in lecture halls when they mumble to themselves facing the board. I much rather accept death than to end up like that. I may sound a tad dramatic but, it is what it is.

It wasn’t that I had lost traction with my knowledge. Far from it. But I did feel I was becoming obsolete. I was losing touch with the interests of my students. They and I were living in two separate worlds. Each day, we drifted further apart. I was getting bored. What fascinated them stultified me to death.

Here’s what happened.

My students are engaged citizens of the world. They want to discuss gender, identity, protests, climate change, love, and Taylor Swift. I much prefer to discuss those very same things but packaged in books like The Theory of Sentiments by Adam Smith. What they see as contentious in society I see the same in The Wealth of Nations. How about a dose of that in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion?

“If you don’t use it, you lose it.” I tell them, referring to their brain. They agreed but referred to their virginity.

Instead of books, cover to cover, with pages that can be ripped, they want to bring me down the beaten path of TikTok and Instagram. They want so much for me, their beloved adult, to walk down their digital path, but they grumble and roll like earthworms under the sun when I ask them to challenge themselves with a bit of difficult reading. “Miss, these days you can find it on YouTube.”

Ah, YouTube.

I knew my days as a lecturer were numbered when I found myself measured and competing against the tutorials on YouTube. A YouTube video has every element suited for entertainment. My teaching skills depend on my traditional storytelling skills. What else was I to do? Compete by making music videos? Add cosplay?

I was neither an entertainer nor a performing monkey. If I wanted to entertain and be fancy, instead of wasting mortal time babysitting I’d ship myself to The Crazy Horse in Paris. I’d take the Dita Von Teese scenic route, team up with Jean-Paul Gaultier, wear a feather boa, and be a burlesque performer. Go big or go home.

Like everyone else in a rapidly evolving society, my students became highly contradictory. A classroom was no longer about teaching and learning. They wanted the moon to transcend and the stars to explode within the four walls. My colleagues felt pressured to perform and to be popular in order to stay relevant. A few started taking antidepressants. I wanted none of that.

A teacher is only human. Our expertise and capacities can only stretch so far. You’re either the teacher who builds the roads, or the one that paints the lines on it. There are teachers who build bridges and those who specialize in designing roundabouts.

Teachers are not infotainers. Teachers are logical thinkers, catered to solve logical problems. Teachers are not trained to compete with two-minute short-form videos, between 15 to 60 seconds, fused in entertainment and comedy.

Faced with this reality of great expectations, I knew it was time to take a bow from teaching.

But this is not to say I blame the generational shift. The young is speaking the language of the future. It is their time now. That’s another contextual reality I have to accept. It’s the tragedy of the modern education system. We’re not teaching students why it’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

Recently, I was offered to return to the hallways of academia. “At least do part-time, you’re good at it,” came the voices of persuasion. I not only froze in suspended belief, I was petrified.

In my last seven years in education I developed an insight I found difficult to shake off. It gave me many restless nights. I came to realize that modern education spends most of its time teaching us how to make decisions under conditions of perfect certainty. However, as soon as we leave school or university, the vast majority of decisions we all have to make are not of that kind at all. Most of the decisions we face have something missing — a vital fact or statistic that is unavailable, or else unknowable at the time we make the decision.

We don’t design enough education for them to make sense of their emotions. They can’t math their decision-making. They adulate success only to fear failure. The goal is to be happy, but that means feeling anything but, is for dismissal. They can’t tell a problem from a crisis. They can’t tell the difference between being upset and low grade depression. We have no education at all to hone their intuition to demarcate love from toxic trauma. We erroneously misguide them to think that to pursue success is the race and its peak, not the ascend of defeat and string of misfiring.

We test their skills to calculate how two buses leave the station at noon, one travels west at 300 mph while the other travels north at 40mph. We ask our future leaders, at what time will the buses be 100 miles apart? In reality, a real-life problem would be one of the buses was delayed by a puncture, the other got stuck in heavy traffic. We don’t normalize the fact that life will blow up in your face, eff up your plans, and leave folks disappointed with you. What happens then?

That’s when I knew this was not the language my education system speaks. What they offered was not the context I belong to. Not anymore. The juice has turned sour, it used to be so sweet. I knew when my role had come to its last showcase. Looking back on my last year, I had willingly and happily performed my swan song.

I have nothing but utmost respect for teachers of all levels who continue to commit despite the changing landscapes. But sometimes we have to admit when we’ve passed our prime. I’ve passed mine. It’s not the song of dejection. It’s the voice of grave reality.

But it also signals I can pursue another road less taken. Knowing this allows me to close the door behind me with certainty.

It was good while it lasted. I call it my two decades of Versace Eros. But now, if I ever choose to return, all that I smell is the cat piss in the classroom.