UMBWALA, AND OTHER AWKWARD QUESTIONS

Like, who the hell is Sandra Bollocks?

There are many difficult questions addressed to writers, such as: What do you write? Have you written anything I would have heard of? And of course the classic: What’s your email address? I want to send you some of my poems.

But it’s not just writers who have this problem. For all of us, life is full of umbwala¹. What happens to us when we die? How did the universe begin? Have the ‘Queers for Palestine’ people really thought this through? Indeed, you could be forgiven for wondering if life is nothing but one long quiz. (Maybe when you die you get to turn the universe upside-down and read the answers.)

When I was working as a teacher, I naturally got asked a lot of questions by my students. Granted, the vast majority of these questions were to do with when the class would be over, how long it was until the holidays, and whether they could get another copy of the course information booklet which answered all these queries in painstaking detail and which, at the start of the academic year, I’d pressed into their sweaty little student hands, because they’d lost theirs. (Their booklet, that is. Not their hands. We weren’t allowed to cut off students’ hands, even if they were really annoying. (The students, that is. Not their hands. Their hands were rarely the most annoying thing about them.))

I was generally reluctant to answer these questions. I’d be rolling my eyes and muttering about defenestration until they got the message, usually sometime around late November, that while I was smiley and Mum-shaped, I was not actually their Mummy.

But when they asked questions about the subject we were supposed to be studying – ah, well! I usually refused to answer those questions, too.

A typical exchange would go something like this:

“What does ‘Umbwala’ mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there an answer in the text? Or can you work it out from context clues?”

“You’re meant to be the teacher. Can’t you just tell me?”

“Is the teacher supposed to just tell you all the answers?”

[Aggressive silence. I smile like Socrates himself is looking down upon me from heaven and composing a grand panegyric about my superior educational practices.]

Teachers sometimes say they learn just as much from their students as their students learn from them. I’d have to disagree. I spent a lot of my teaching career helping students work out stuff they didn’t know, and only rarely did they return the favour. But then, isn’t that kind of the point of being a teacher? It’s pretty much a one-way deal. And if I’d wanted to spend twenty-five years listening to tiny twerps whose hobbies were collecting Pokemon and bickering about cartoons, surely I would have gone into academia instead.

In fact, for most of my career, I was teaching adults. And the thing that’s challenging about teaching adults is that many of them don’t really want to learn anything. I sympathise with this, because learning sucks. The painful thing you have to do if you’re going to learn something is admit that you didn’t know it in the first place or – even worse – that you thought you knew it, but you were wrong. This demands a degree of humility, resilience, and self-confidence that many people find quite terrifyingly far outside of their comfort zone.

What people find a lot more comfortable is the feeling of certainty. It doesn’t even matter if what they are certain of is an idea that can be blown apart with a simple question, like, “No, but really, what do you mean, ‘Queers for Palestine’?” In fact, the weaker the idea, the greater the amount of certainty that must be summoned in order to defend it. Ideally, you build such conviction around your idea that no one is allowed to so much as raise an eyebrow at it for fear of being put on the naughty list. Then you can call it a fact and never think about it properly ever again.

This, as you can imagine, makes teaching quite hard at the best of times. And these are not the best of times, are they? Nowadays, throwing a question back to a student is tantamount to punching them in the face and calling them a know-nothing moron. You certainly wouldn’t want to risk teaching a student anything that might cause them to question their beliefs about, say, Hamas’s policies on homosexuality. And encouraging them to find stuff out for themselves is going to get on their nerves, because you’re the teacher! You’re supposed to just bloody tell them!

Luckily, it’s now considered a form of hate speech to try to teach a person something they don’t know. Instead we have ‘student-centred learning’ – which means you act as though the student knows everything already and is the arbiter of great wisdom. A sort of ‘noble savage’ character, if you will, with trackies and vape pen in place of loincloth and spear. It would of course be very rude to act like you knew something they didn’t. So instead you just give them all the answers so that they can pass the assessments and eventually become qualified teachers themselves. A process I like to call the fractal growth of fuckwittery.

In my last few years of teaching, it became rare to encounter students who challenged me, stopped me in my tracks and made me think about things in new ways. But it did happen from time to time. For example, a student once asked if anyone had ever told me I looked a bit like Sandra Bollocks. I was speechless for quite a while. When I recovered, I answered that no, this was a first. But that he’d given me inspiration for a whole new career. What that might be was, of course, a completely different umbwala.

He knocked half a star off the rating because he thought Umbwala was a song by Rihanna.

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1. An umbwala is, of course, a wild question that is difficult to answer. Thanks to fellow substacker

Sara

for providing us with this new and wonderful word. And ten points to anyone who figured it out from context clues. Socrates would be well impressed.