[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 08:07:00 -0500
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.
--
-------------------------------------------------
"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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