[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????

Mike Geary wrote:
. . . .What is wanted here is observation without judgment -- an observational, disinterested thingie. A thingie I call: 'how-odd'. I can sit out on my verandah any day of the week and observe behaviors that I react to as how-odd. That would be a legitimate observation considering the source, I believe. Bit I don't stop there. I also make moral judgments and that is my downfall. I know that such judgments are the judgments of a white, working-class, Catholic boy raised in the South in an overwhelmingly Baptist environment in the latter half of the 20th Century by aberrantly liberal parents, the third among 6 children, educated by mediocre teachers with a strong bent towards authoritarian control over exuberance for learning. That's who I am.
So what do I do when a student says to me "I'm sorry, but I just can't get into this "how-odd" approach; it's just not the way I was raised. The way I was raised, as a good "X," is to see everybody from all other "Y's" as evil." If all judgments are equal, his is as good as yours, and there's no point to education; no point in seeing anybody from culture "Y." If we can acknowledge the possibility of "blinders" we must also be able to see beyond them, at least sometimes. 


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"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence and ignorance." ------------------------------------------------- 
John Wager                john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
                                  Lisle, IL, USA


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