Teaching

And finally, I've finished marking my last assignment. All that remains is the gradual draw-down of my remaining materials, the returning of the last few assignments, the rounding up of four months of lessons, and a few last words, that have to be chosen well because they are meant to be remembered. Suddenly, my days are dominated by the pleasant and bittersweet housekeeping tasks of handing over responsibility, and my afternoons gape emptily and promisingly free from additional work. I lose my last days of teaching, then, in files and tables, in statistics and lists, and, above all, in enjoying the final lessons that have been made possible by the endless work of the preceding weeks.

I sometimes find myself suddenly stopped in my trains of thought by the enormity of what I have come to find myself in the midst of. I have, over the last few months, thrown myself into a highly complex situation, with no idea of how it will turn out, and, making connection after connection in this morass with eagerness and even recklessness, I have created something here, in my classes and among my people. Or rather, we have created something here. I would not presume to speculate on the lasting effects of these five months, and how they will echo down the ages to come in our disparate lives. I hope it will be a good impact, but I at least can say that there has been a significant impact. It has caused my perspective to grow exponentially in some areas, and it has also afforded me an opportunity to confirm my theories in other areas. It has been a worthwhile run, and I will continue to draw from this long after this Friday.

Once again, I am humbled by the privilege of having taken this journey with these people, a surprising journey that, though by no means smooth, has been pleasant enough to always keep me looking forward. And that is such a precious thing in a self-directed life, isn't it? Something to look forward to, that will give your days their direction and give you a reference point with which to mark your progress. And beyond orientating my life, I have also been given a chance to see tremendous potential, and the opportunity to nurture this potential just a little bit more on its path to full blooming. I am humbled by this - the potential and the power that has been put in my charge. Within them lies great things, and it is the promise of these great things that compels me to put my best into the endeavour of refining them.

And sometimes, I am also incredulous. It strikes me that I am having so much fun that it defies any expectations, even my own. Sometimes, I feel a certain spring in my step, and I look at the things around me from a certain angle, and I marvel at how things have coalesced into this unparalleled situation, and how everything and everyone fits in it with such satisfying symmetry. Here is fulfilment that I had not expected to find; and its surprising appearance makes it all the more precious. I would even go so far as to say, if 2006 and the long wait was the cost of coming to this half of the year, then it was well worth the delay. And for those who have accompanied me remotely or in person through these years, you'll have an idea of the scale suggested by the last statement.

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Incidentally, was also thinking of the material for my last few lessons with my Sec 3s, on the topic of leadership. Two things immediately occur to me: firstly, that the debate on whether leaders are born or bred is stale and long resolved; the very existence of officer cadet courses testifies to the primacy of breeding over birthright. Secondly, it is somewhat distorting to investigate leadership with a view of becoming a leader yourself in the future. We should be investigating leadership as a social phenomenon in itself, rather than mining our case studies for tips and tricks on how to nurture our own leadership potential. The former approach opens up so many more avenues for examination, and enriches and widens the rather blinkered and narrow leader-centric perspective of the latter.

Anyway, I was thinking: nobody really wants to lead, do they? People don't value leadership in and of itself, just like money intrinsically has no value. It is what you can obtain with it that counts. So leaders either lead for themselves, for individual gain, or lead for others, for collective interests. Typically there will be a mixture of the two. But the bottom line is that leaders lead out of necessity rather than volition. Thus the assertion that the best, most dedicated leaders are those who don't want to be leaders (effectiveness is another issue entirely).

This gives rise to another interesting result: that there should be no more leaders than necessary in an organisation. There should be just enough leaders to maximise the gains from specialisation without incurring diminishing returns of overcrowding. Too many cooks, after all. We extend this to government, and find that the principle is also applicable: a government should not have more leaders than necessary. If one's aim is a successful economy, then a strong monarchical CEO makes sense. But if one thinks that representativeness and stable power transfers are also necessary, then one would go for a committee of leaders, or a parliament in other words. But the key is that there should be as few leaders as possible.

Here's another idea: is politics the result of having too many leaders? Focused, effective teams tend not to indulge in politics; there is just too much to do and not enough time to waste on such games. It is clear how too many leaders can impact focus, and having a surfeit of labour creates idle periods in which politics can be carried out. So politics does not just flourish in environments with unequal distributions of power; they also require a surfeit of time or a shortfall of work. Politics is therefore as irrelevant in a dictatorship as it is in a communist system.

Anyway, the task over the next week would then be to try to redefine the leadership issue beyond the narrow scope of wanting to become a future leader. This, I think, is like an intellectual liberation, and may even be more useful in the actual event that one is really called upon to take up a mantle of leadership. If one is able to examine the tightrope from all angles rather than merely staring down it from the starting platform, one is more able to understand the forces at work and the risks at stake.