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

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; 

Tell him the only thing you can tell him -- that he fails.



If all judgments are equal, his is as good as yours,



Exactly.



and there's no point to education;
Oh, but there is. What we want is observation, not judgment. When one observes without judging one comes to realize that there are many ways of living and that one's own is as odd to others as theirs to you. Then one can begin to question which beliefs and behaviors seem to work best in a given situation. Or one might not. That one gets an F. That'll teach him. 

Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Wager" <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 6:29 AM
Subject: [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. 


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." 
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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