Currere
Gunita’s currere (2017)
The currere method is “the everyday experience of the individual and his or her capacity to learn from that experience; to reconstruct experience through thought and dialogue to enable understanding. Such understanding, achieved by working through history and lived experience, can help us reconstruct our own subjective and social lives.” William F. Pinar
This piece was written in May of 2017. Ideally, one’s currere is written and re-written over time as time is the instigator of such reflection.
Regressive Phase
24 Sept 1975 – I was born at Vancouver General Hospital, the first generation Canadian baby to immigrant (albeit mostly Westernised) parents from India. My parents lived in residence at UBC at the time and all through my childhood and schooling I felt to go back to UBC was my destiny. As a kid, we lived in Coquitlam and when we would drive by the hospital where I was born, my parents would point it out. All I ever really seemed to see was the old smoke stack and my child’s mind imagined I was dropped down that smoke stack and was burnt along the way. This is why my skin was brown. Even then I knew that was not true but the story remains in my mind to this day.
Sept 1981 – I attended Grade 1 at Ranch Park Elementary school and cried on the first day of school. Mrs. Cowley was my teacher and the first boy I met in class was Mike Barnes. He was wearing a Boston Bruins jacket and told me that it would be ok. Then I coloured a duck. This is all I remember. My mom tells the story of my crying every time I express anxiety about doing something new. She says, “You have always been afraid of change.”…and yet, I make it happen a lot. In grade 1, I also recall getting detention almost everyday for talking. This “trend” would continue throughout my schooling. I was chatty, cheeky, and disruptive. I was also the kid who got her work done early.
1982 – In Grade 2, I was determined by some powers that be (standardized test results, I am sure) to be in need of “Enrichment” classes. The contemporary equivalent would be genius hour or passion project for gifted kids. I remember being in a class with a teacher named Mrs. Zuckerman. I used a computer for the first time.
1984 – Grade 4, my teacher was an Asian woman named Ms. Jang. Later she married and became Mrs. Wong. And then, I think she divorced and remarried and became Mrs. Chan. She taught us music (recorder, ukulele) and I loved her. I wanted her to love me back, like a mom.
1986 – Grade 6, my teacher was Ms. Prior. She was not Asian. She was blond-haired and blue eyed. She wore 80s style and wore her hair short. I remember she wore a white button-up shirt with little men who were painters on it. They were stick men drawn in black and had either yellow hats or yellow buckets of paint. I made her life a living hell. She was the one who called me “cheeky” because I talked back…a LOT. I have students who remind me of me at this time. I liked Ms. Prior so much! I got contact lenses and braces in this year of school. I also went skiing for the first time on a school series of lessons at Seymour Mountain. Ms. Prior taught me how to play the guitar and, along with the recorder and ukulele, that was the bulk of my musical education. I can play music by ear. My mom says I get it from her father.
After I graduated from Elementary school and I would walk to Junior high, I would time it so I could wave at Ms. Prior as she drove by me in her little car. I heard she married and became Mrs. Huxtable. This was strange to me because of the Cosby Show.
1987/88 – In Grade 8, my parents got divorced and my mom moved out. My brother and I initially lived with her, then went back to my dad’s, then eventually settled with her. She bought a brand-new townhouse and none of the rooms had ceiling lights. This made me uncomfortable. To this day, lighting remains an integral part of my comfort in any space. My memories of this first year at this house (called the Atlin townhouse) are uncomfortable and marked with many stomach aches and anxieties. Even now, in February/March, if the light and air is just so, my memories are renewed almost viscerally. It was from this home that I walked to junior high school. We lived here until I graduated.
1988-1991 – Attended junior high school at Charles Best Junior High School and was in a “Gifted Science Program” in Grade 9-10. My teacher was Mr. Hill who is currently the head of the teacher training program at UFV. Of all the teachers I have ever had he was both the strangest and the most memorable—possibly because I had him for 2 years in a row. I didn’t like him. But he made an impact on me. We did inquiry in that program and problem-based, student-centred learning. When teachers talk about how pedagogical techniques seem to enjoy resurgence in cycles, I have to agree. In Mr. Hill’s class I learned the biological explanation of my menstrual cycle. Learning this through the lens of science made the most sense to me and I stopped thinking I was “sick” every time I got my period after that.
1990/91 – Was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and missed a term of Grade 10. During this time, I stayed home and watched daytime TV which included a few local cooking shows (The Urban Peasant, Wok With Yan). I became, ironically, obsessed with food and cooking.
Leaving junior high was not a big deal. In fact, the illness pretty much dominated my life for the next 6 years or so. I suppose in many ways it became a part of my forming identity during adolescence. I was unable to do things other kids did—and, really, I didn’t want to. I was rarely able to keep to plans to be social and I began to draw a lot at this time. I started writing in grade 11.
1991-1993 – Attended high school (grade 11 and 12) at Centennial High School in Coquitlam. My English teacher was a gay man named Ray Redford. He was very thin and always wore khakis and a too large, short-sleeved, white button up shirt, tucked in. It was in his class that I realized that I needed to change the course of my life. I had been conditioned/brain-washed from as far back as I can remember that I would be a doctor when I grew up. I studied the human body voraciously and had an encyclopedia of medicine and nursing that I thumbed through almost daily. I actually diagnosed myself with Inflammatory Bowel Disease before the doctors did but, who listens to a 15 year old anyway? I was headed to pre-med at UBC, this I knew and getting sick only solidified my specialty: Paediatric Gastroenterology. I planned to attend post-secondary school for at least 12 years.
In Mr. Redford’s class, all of this changed. He had sat on a desk and surveyed the class one day. Who is going to be a lawyer when they grow up, he asked. Half the class raised their hands. And who is going to be a doctor? And the rest of us raised our hands. No! He implored, gripping his fists and shaking his thin arms. Why? he said in a pained voice. The world needs poets and philosophers, he said in the same pained voice. And I thought…oh my god. He’s right! The world DOES need poets and philosophers. My medical career was finished before it ever began.
By the 3rd week of grade 12, I had transferred out of all but one of my senior science classes (I still loved Biology) and took, instead, Western Civ, History, and Lit 12. In Lit 12 I met Laura Willett who would be the most influential teacher in my grade school life and who remains a part of my life even now. I loved Laura Willett with the pain of any angsty, alternative, grunge teen in the 90s debating her sexual identity. She was a young teacher in an old department and she taught English and Lit with a passion that ignited my soul. I wanted to be the best in her class because of her. I wanted to do well for her. In retrospect, this was always true. If I didn’t connect with a teacher, I didn’t care if I did well. My internal makeup never allowed me to do poorly, but I put all my effort into the work I did for the teachers (adults) who affected me. This trend continues to this day but in a slightly different way. I am unwilling to give people in authority respect unless it is clear that they deserve it. I have been described as fractious and combative. I am neither. I am born under the sign of the Rabbit. I shy away from conflict and am diplomatic. I am also my father’s daughter and he did not suffer ignorance.
In the end of Lit or English 12, I submitted a paper on John Proctor’s role in “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller. In my paper, I argued that Proctor, long thought as the martyred Jesus figure of the play was not so and re-read the play and Proctor’s character with a feminist deconstructionist lens. At least, thats what the comments written on my perfect paper stated. I didn’t know what these words meant—or that they pointed to a discipline of critical theory—but I was hooked.
1993 – 1999 – I attended UBC and studied English Literature. First year was tough. I was sick and lonely. I ate poorly and felt unprepared for post-secondary school. I had no idea how to read or write, it seemed, and my grades were not great. I felt like all the accolades for scholarship I had received in secondary school (comments on perfect papers, 3rd highest mark on the English 12 provincial exam for my year) had been inaccurate.
By second year I had found some footing, but not a lot. The language of university was different and I had trouble deciphering it. I did ok but not great. I was learning, however. This was the mid-90s and scholars were questioning gender, equality, language, and one another. I soon was able to walk the walk and talk the talk with some of the best Foucauldian-obsessed undergrads. But, I was sick and getting sicker. I found the person to whom I would hitch my scholarly wagon in second year. Her name was Sîan Echard and she taught Chaucer. I applied to do an Honours degree so I could study with her. The next few years of my degree were punctuated by hospitalizations and surgeries—major and minor, planned and emergency. I managed to graduate in 6 years, write a mini-thesis to complete the requirements for the honours degree, and then decided to get the hell out of school. By this time I was so disillusioned with institutionalized education, I no longer wanted to pursue the MA and PhD I had intended to in order to become a professor of Literature. I was done. I was also in Victoria, BC.
When I had initially applied for graduation from UBC, they informed me I lacked the breadth requirements to apply. In short, I had taken too many English courses. Nothing was offered that Summer so I applied for transfer and went to UVIC to finish my degree. Once that was done, I stayed there until 2001.
After graduating I was over-educated with zero work experience. Crohn’s had made it impossible for me to keep a job and go to school at the same time. I went on welfare for a few months after graduating and then, using a program offered to youth on welfare, found a job with the Provincial Government—ironically in recruitment. I did that for a three month term and then recruited myself into a different position with the Ministry of Attorney General. I did this job until July 20, 2001.
20 Dec 2000 – My mother called me during a rerun of Friends to inform me that my father had died. He had had a heart attack in August of that year. Then another in November shortly before my brother had had his head kicked in by rival drug dealers trying to steal his money. On Dec 20th, my dad had succumbed to the third and final heart attack. 10 days later my brother and mother and I were on a plane to India to scatter his ashes in the Ganges as we always said we would but never actually thought would happen. I was in Delhi, India when Y2K happened. I was 25.
Going back to India (I had been there twice before when I was 3 and 5) made me “get” my dad in a way I hadn’t before. Suddenly so much of what he did made sense to me. I realized he had immigrated from a place where one worldview existed to a place where a different one dominated. I began to understand that his life was, in many ways, an attempt to reconcile these two opposing ideals. He began to make sense to me. But, I still didn’t like him very much. I was relieved that he was gone and that I no longer had to endure visits with him or be a liaison between him and my mother or him and my brother. For a while I questioned what proof I had that he had ever existed as I grappled with the reality of the death of a parent. I realized that I was the proof—my genetic data was half his. In the 16 years since his death, I see how I am so much like him the older I get.
Nov 2001 – Shortly after the Twin Towers fell, I moved back to Vancouver to live with my mom on Davie St. in her one bedroom and den apartment. I had collected my inheritance from my father, shared half with my brother, and decided the moratorium on institutionalized education was up. I applied to do an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. I worked on the manuscript for entrance for 6 months. I didn’t get in.
March 2002 – I began working for the Federal Government. This job with Employment Insurance was the longest job I ever kept. I worked in the call centre for EI for 4 years and then transferred to a different office in EI for a fifth and final year. I took leave from this job in Feb 2007 to buy my dog’s daycare in the West End of Vancouver. During this time, I moved in and out of my moms place and occupied a total of 4 different apartments, 3 of which were in my mom’s building. During this time I also did Yoga teacher-training and got a Culinary Arts diploma. I was always looking for something better. Or maybe just something else.
21 Nov 2004 – My first dog, Ira, was born. I got him in March of 2005 and loved him entirely until he died in 2015. He remains my longest long-term relationship and I have never loved anyone or anything more than I loved him. I miss him every day.
2007-2010 – I ran the dog daycare until I sold it in May 2010. It was the fulfillment of a goal to be self-employed but it was one of the most stressful things I have ever done. In these 3 years, I moved again, numerous times. I have lived in no fewer than 6 buildings and 9 apartments in Downtown Vancouver.
Sept 2010 – I moved to Langley. I opened a restaurant after spending way too much money on a piece of trash, demolishing it, rebuilding it, running it, and selling it. Lesson learned. I was open from Dec – May and then sold it. It was also another tick-mark on my list of things I wanted to do in my life. I am glad I did it because it was a dream I had had for a decade. What I failed to realize that my decade-old self had that dream—not my current self. I then took some time “off”. This was probably the best time I have ever spent. There was a lot of dog walking and horse-stall cleaning. I was outside a lot and lived in one of the most beautiful parts of Langley. But I needed a career if only to be able to give people a simple answer at parties when they asked me, “What do you do?”
I considered going into Nursing and took an Anatomy and Physiology course at UBC then applied at Kwantlen Polytechnic. I didn’t get in. I seems that every time I have been at a loss, I turned to my nemesis “post-secondary education”. Even post under-graduation, just prior to my father dying, I had applied to sit the LSAT and to take a visual arts diploma at Camosun College in Victoria. I never did write the LSAT but I did get into the visual arts program. I had put together an impressive portfolio in a single summer of non-stop drawing and painting. I forget about this part of the story often. I deferred that acceptance indefinitely and ended up moving back to Vancouver, instead.
2010 – 2012 – I had a few different jobs at this time but nothing that fed my soul and nothing that inspired. I really just wanted to do nothing. But I didn’t have money and I had a lot of debt. One day, whilst walking my dogs, I ruminated on what to do with my life. I walked by some red flowers growing at the side of the road and they reminded me of a scene in a D.H. Lawrence novel I had read in a 3rd year seminar. I thought to myself, if only I could do something with my (useless) literature degree. By the end of the walk, I had decided to become an English teacher and had convinced myself that teaching would be the best application of my diverse interests and experiences. Besides, adults were so negative and I was tired of interacting with them. Fortunately I was actually in time to submit my application to the TEO at UBC. Higher education to the rescue! Finally I was going to be able to do something that would be personally fulfilling and that nicely straddled the line between self-employment and government pension.
2013-2014 – Began and completed a BEd at UBC. I was highly disappointed with this program but it was a means to an end. Much like I had felt going into UBC right out of high school, once I was released into the profession of teaching from the program at UBC, I felt highly unprepared and not at all set-up for success. A personal intolerance for anything less than excellence has made me the teacher I am today. But I am highly critical of teacher education (and education in general)(and everything in general) and this is part of the reason I am doing a Masters today.
15 Feb 2015 – Ira dies.
Present – My teaching career—much like my life to this point—has been scattered. I have taught in Delta and Langley and in 6 different schools across the Township of Langley and in different socioeconomic communities. I have taught everything from Foods, to Marketing, to Low Incidence, to Resource, to Alternate, to Remedial English 9. Do I love teaching? Maybe. Has it been personally fulfilling? Yes. And no. Have I been happy with my assignments? No. But I wonder if this is more a consequence of who I am than what I do. I get tired of same-ish-ness so quickly. Has teaching been the best application of my diverse interests? Yes. And, I would say that it has allowed me to connect with more kids than I might have, had I not (to my mother’s chagrin) changed my mind every few minutes throughout my life. When I decided to become a teacher, my mother said to me, “You’re not going to change your mind about this too, are you?” Sometimes I think yes. Sometimes I want to quit. Sometimes I hate it with a passion I didn’t know was in me. And sometimes I hit what Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls, flow. Sometimes, in other words, I am happy. But most times, I am not.
Where I’m From (a poem)
I am from 1970s brown painted aluminum pots,
from Tupperware glasses full of warm milk.
I am from the blossoming tree in the back yard
that spilled its petals like
pink snow every April.
I am from the Rainier Cherries,
the walnut tree with its precious fruit encased in
lime green shells
seeping sweet milk on my
already sticky hands.
I’m from Shake’n’Bake chicken
and Hawaiian pancakes that always
gave me a tummy ache.
I am from “You can do anything you put your mind to!”
and “Take what you eat; eat what you take.”
I am from the Punjabi temple with my grandfather
in the huge room with the plush red carpet,
and afterwards, the free food downstairs:
vegetarian, hot, and pungent on a steel tray;
steaming chai in plastic mugs.
I am from Ranch Park Elementary and Centennial High School,
hot dog days and McDonald’s lunches for kids who volunteered;
“veggie burgers” at the cafeteria which were just burgers without
the meat.
I am from Charles Best Junior High,
eating limp oven-baked-from-the-bag french fries and sipping cans of Cokes with my friends
sitting in the hallway by the office until Grade 10
when my love affair with food was kindled
by a chronic inability to eat
without pain.
Me, my stomach, and I on this journey
together.
Progressive Phase
I imagine a future
where each person is intelligent
where each person is personally and civically responsible and accountable
where we create alone and together beautiful pieces of art
where we talk and talk and talk about everything that has been and could be
where school is a place of becoming and teachers are called to their action
where humans think deeply about what they put in their bodies
where questions are asked as a matter of course
where insecurities are short lived and foster change and improvement
where education is created and valued for its contribution to the progress of human civilization and not as a momentary means to a commodified end
where we cease to be individual consumers and become, instead, a community of creators.
Analytic Phase
The Future is Present in the Past
The clearest way I can see the future present in the past is through my interaction with my own teachers throughout my education. I revered them. I wanted them to be excellent, passionate, and experts and I was delighted when they were; profoundly disappointed when they were not. I was affected by them in many ways—not all scholastic. My teachers were probably the most influential adults in my young life and my standards for adults and teachers were always going to be high. My standards for myself were always going to be high as well and this has been realized again and again as I grow/age. At each point in my changing life path, the one thing that always remains is the reaching for excellence. My seeming always love for words, stories, thought, and art has also resurfaced in my future imaginations. They seem to have lain in suspension until observed. I feel in many ways that I am largely unchanged from who I was in the past: As if the future iterations of me have always been. This is fate in the pure sense of the word: that which has been spoken being said aloud with each passing moment.
I am still on my path to becoming that doctor I always wanted to be—I just never knew it would go like this. When I told my father (finally) that I wasn’t going into medicine, I was about to graduate. He had bought me an atlas of the human body for a present. Written inside in his careful, engineers script was “To my future doctor”. When I told him, he responded that there was more than one way to become a doctor.
The Past is Present in the Future
This is apparent in the image(s) I have of my father. The older I become, the more I realize that who I am is him, almost reincarnate. This used to bother me for I did not revere him with the rest of the adults/teachers in my life. However, it is apparent that of the teachers I have had, he has had the most effect. I speak his truths and ideals and values. This simultaneously horrifies and calms me. Like him, I am a study in contrasts—albeit in much different forms. I believe I am an improvement in the design, as well. He will be/would be proud of what change I want to affect and, if I succeed, I will owe much to him.
The Present is in Both Past and Future
I am a teacher.
Contrary to what I thought, I actually don’t believe in love. Instead, I believe in being the best (insert appropriate word here) I can be.
I want things to change. Always.
Synthetic Phase
The writing of a narrative temporalizes lived experience. It is a linear creation that privileges certain moments and imagines correlation and even causation between them. The autobiographical narrative that runs parallel to the one above, is given no space here yet occupies the other part of my attachment to who I am. This parallel narrative is about my personal relationships and exists as the other half of the double helix with the one above. The stories run parallel when considered in three dimensions but intersect when seen in two. The intersections, however, are an illusion.
To render both my narratives together in this space might create for a reader a more complete picture but is unnecessary in the currere method. I know my other narrative. And in intentionally leaving it out, I have discovered something about myself that has only recently come into bloom.
As a part of my Progressive phase there is a very personal imagined possibility not explicitly written above: that I will complete this MA and a PhD and reimagine the course of education in this province; that I will study in Victoria, BC; that I will write and teach and work there to lobby government to make change according to my research and scholarship; that I will leave what I know and love and have chosen in my personal life to accomplish this.
My father always said to me and my brother, “You can do anything you put your mind to.” I have lived by this belief, it seems, my entire life. And I have put my mind to many things. But, to what end? What has been/will be the point? The narrative suggests that it makes me a better teacher. And I often reiterate a similar saying as my father’s to my students to allay their lack of direction. “Do whatever you want,” I say, meaning, “DO SOMETHING! ANYTHING! Just don’t sit there doing NOTHING!” But, what if this advice is wrong?
When my father had his second heart attack I asked him what he thought was going on. His answer was that this was payback for living his life the wrong way. I don’t know what he meant but I am worried that I am traveling a similar wrong path and teaching the same, as a result. I demand excellence of myself and my students. I want for them to be excellent human beings. Implicitly, I am showing them what (I believe) excellence looks like. It is a forward movement of thought and action. It is advancement of knowledge and understanding. It is thinking deeply and often. It is using one’s brain. And it is completely socially responsible. But what of the personal?
Before I became a teacher, ironically, relationships, love, poetry, and connections defined my worldview. While this is still true, in some ways, it is filtered through a sieve of philosophy. By filtering it thus, I fear I am missing the point and (possibly/probably) misrepresenting the point for my students.
Mr. Redford said the world needs more poets and philosophers. Perhaps I don’t need to be both.
References
Pinar, William F. The Character of Curriculum Studies. 2011. eBook.
Pinar, William F. What is Curriculum Theory. 2004. eBook.