Assessing myself: My strengths, my many weaknesses and my estimated scorecard

“Babble” and “bubble” are two English words that our East African pronunciation may tempt us to confuse. Last week I was bubbling, like a boiling pot, with the excitement of the wonderful love with which my teachers, students, colleagues and other friends had showered me as we shared precious memories of the many decades we have lived and worked together.

Looking over what I wrote in trying to tell you about the occasion, I realise that I probably tended towards babbling, chattering rather excessively and incoherently, as excited children do.

In my babbling, I barely hinted at the serious thoughts that our recollections and celebrations raised and left in my mind.

So, by way of compensation, I will tell you about myself.

Now, that is a tall order. How does one talk about oneself without either boring us with smug boastfulness or scandalising us with grovelling self-exposure? But we should not worry. I will do neither of the above. Rather, I will just put myself on the scales, and let us share, as objectively as possible, my performance on just one of the 10 criteria that I believe make an effective teacher.

OPERATIVE WORD

Sharing is, indeed, the operative word here. The purpose of the exercise is to suggest to the readers a kind of self-evaluation model that might contribute to their own performance and happiness levels, especially if they are going to hang around as long as I have. But before we zero in on the one crucial criterion for today, I should briefly remind you of all the 10 criteria for good teaching, or doing any other decent job for that matter.

The first three, as we said, are that you should love yourself, love your students and love what you do (the job). To these we may add the trio of informing yourself, being organised and networking with others. Another clutch of three is that you should always be improving or upgrading yourself, live actively instead of merely “existing” and have faith.

The tenth criterion, on which we are going to focus today, is self-evaluation. This means that we should always be pausing and taking a realistic look at ourselves and our performance and trying to account for our successes and our shortcomings. Basically, we need to identify our strengths and our weaknesses. Thus, we try to make the most of our strengths and struggle to remedy our weaknesses as best we can.

Let us, then, go to Mwalimu’s scorecard, armed with these demands of self-evaluation. Does he have any strengths? This reminds me that he wrote a play, ‘A Hole in the Sky,’ with a character called Nguvu Kikongwe (suggesting “strength of the ancient one”). But strength need not mean simply the muscles and the sinews, the brawn, as the English call it.

POSITIVE TRAITS

Rather, we are looking at the positive traits that enable a character to contribute constructively to the business of living.

Our character seems to have capitalised on five gifts, or positive traits, in his nature in the pursuit of his life and career. These are: a fairly good memory, a reasonable linguistic fluency, an eagerness to communicate, an insatiable curiosity, and trust, or what you might call a generous expectation of the best of everyone he meets.

 I believe that a retentive memory, whether of places, events, languages or texts, has played a crucial role in my dealings with life. I particularly value the ability to recall and connect names with faces. It endears one to one’s acquaintances. This is why I pray, and ask you to pray for me, that my memory, if it is to go, should be the last faculty to abandon me this side of Paradise.

My other “positives” are, I suppose, pretty obvious. If I pretend to a “gift of the gab” (an aggressive tendency to use language) and an eagerness to communicate, that is just what I am doing now.

It is not only out of the irresistible urge to share with you, but also an obvious means of earning my living. The inquisitiveness or curiosity runs in tandem with my writing and talking compulsion, as one cannot usefully communicate without constantly informing oneself.

But my “trust” deserves a comment. I have learnt that believing in people and expecting the best of them actually brings the best out of them. It is not easy to be always positive about human beings, as some of them, indeed, let us down and even harm us. I have been mugged viciously a couple of times, in Nairobi and in Kampala. My homes have been burgled in Uganda and in Scotland. The list is long. Still, I believe that faith and trust in the goodness of human beings is the best way forward in life.

But let us talk about Mwalimu’s weaknesses. These are legion. But we will just mention those that seem to have most vitiated his life and career. These are: procrastination, lack of organisation, indifference to material wellbeing, and a fear of controversy and confrontation. I eventually do a few things, when I have to. But it is always at the last minute, if ever. I need a voice constantly yelling into my ear: “Procrastination is the thief of time.”

YELLOW NOTES

Regarding my lack of organisation, I boast that I have never taught from any “yellow notes”, as some of our colleagues are rumoured to do. But the reason behind this is just that I routinely and regularly lose my sets of notes immediately after each class or lecture.

So, I have to make fresh notes for each lecture, even on topics which I have covered for decades. But it is not only lecture notes that I lose. In my chaotic and disorderly life, I keep misplacing and losing everything, including my identity documents and even little handfuls of cash.

If I could only get a volunteer to get me organised, I am sure I would be an achiever of sorts. Are there any offers?

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and Literature. abubwase@yahoo.