do no harm:


idit dobb-weinstein: "teaching is action and thinking at once. What I try to guard against most when I teach is not speaking as if my answer were conclusive, so as to avoid (to the extent possible) any kind of dogmatic appropriation. It is understandable why students might wish to imitate their teachers, but there are different modes of imitation. I try very hard to avoid the mimetic appropriation that is immediate, passive, and occludes thinking. One other reason is that if I made clear what my views were, and my views appeared as if they were final, it would preclude the possibility of first, students challenging me and second, learning from my students. The relation between the student and teacher is, to me, a dynamic relationship . . . Teaching and learning is a movement that occurs between. In other words, we are at once both agent and patient, both teacher and learner. If we are not very careful, we can do a great deal of harm. And that, too, I have learned from my teachers, Maimonides especially.

I believe my task is to provoke students to think and to engage them in genuine dialogue and questioning. To paraphrase a rabbinic saying, 'I have learned from my teachers, and I have learned from my peers, but I have learned most from my students.' And that is a continuous process of learning."

Tuesday 25 May 2010

jump in a pool of water: teacher to lawyer advice

can you imagine a head of an academic department telling a lawyer representing a student
to "jump in a pool of water." i think that is a polite way to say, go drown yourself, or go for a swim.

then if the head of the department said he would "hang up on your dumb ass," wow . . . well it happened.

i was hoping fink could help sort out whether or not i was in a coercive little meeting today designed to intimidate me out of my "free speech" "rights" with a threat of suspension from class.

fink mentioned i should check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_MacKinnon

wow.
fink was so nice and complimentary and said i was so bright and had a great vocab. i really needed some support bc i have been so down lately.

so as i attempted to conform to the censorship order earlier i began to copy/paste [1984] in place of names and * in place of foul words i hear at school.

and so i am interested at the typography. it looks cool and surrealist and futuristic and firewallish.

fink said why not let them suspend me and then see what's next. or delete it, or censor.
i don't think we're sure what's going on here.

why do the teachers get unlimited speech, and i get none, none in school and none on the blogosphere.

as to accusation of libel or defamation, sadly truth is a defense to libel.
and as i am not a liar, and i use the subjectivity of my personal journalistic first person, i believe no libel has occurred.

interestingly, teacher was willing to lie on the anorexia bulimia no sympathy statement, and change it to corn syrup. interesting.

so i can't decide what to do, but feel that a censored blog is better than no blog and no grade and a suspension.

yet i resist the muffling of speech.

so how about i tell you guys, that eckford defends the use of "bitching" and "tits and ass" and "asshole" and "shitty" in class and told the lawyer calling on my behalf to "jump in a pool" and that he would "hang up on your dumb ass."

i think the suspension threat might be an idle one.
eckford said if it were he profiled in my blog, he would sue me for professional damage to his career incurred.  even though the words did occur in class.

when the dumb ass mis-statement occurred
i think fink got what i was saying, that there is a serious lack of professionalism at LACC.

gloria allred's office told me to call the ACLU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Allred

i got wind of that teacher was consulting attorneys and he said he would sue me and that my blog was "illegal."

once again, i'd like to offer the apology, sorry about the internet.

so if you see 1984, 1984=censored to protect the identity of the professor and department, and *=censored & so trashy that even if they said it it looks more aesthetically appealing as an asterix.

i really want women to be respected in the future. fink was so cool to me today. i got a one-on-one tutorial with an amazing sexual harassment educator. he's not easy either. he sees grey zones, and free speech issues at play.

so this blog is more like a bizarre art project. for equality.
i think i want to write lawrence lessig and jonathan zittrain and cool internet lawyers who get what's up here on the blogosphere: POWER.

and plus they are super-smart and articulate and lawyers and techies.

and as for the accusation of a good old "cyberstalk" concept, i'd like to remind the teachers and administration that the emotional distress experienced in result of the epithets and classes could just might cause me to off myself.

so in that case, like the UCLA suicide case wayback, would the administrators be liable for missing the warning signs? protecting a hostile atmosphere? just wondering.

so: unequal treatment of women causes stress, anxiety, depression, depression, drop-outs, and class absence, if not directly, then indirectly coping mechanisms like chemical substance abuse, anorexia, bulimia and the like.

so yeah.
eckford said if we took away bitch and tits and ass and asshole there would be only three words left with which to teach . . . dig it?


~if "bitching" and "asshole" and "tits and ass" were forbidden, that there would only be three words left, (in the english language, i wonder?????)  so that brings their vocab options up to at least 10 words plus or minus some conjunctions.~

and so fink totally is not into holocaust denial. he sees the hate speech significance and so do i boy let me tell you! i'm obsessed.

but so why is the denial of the holocaust of domestic violence, rape, pay inequity, war rape, work harassment, school harassment, church-supported discrimination okay?

i mean when you say "bitch" is it really divorced from the legacy of cruelty to women?

i told eckford i saw a direct linguistic lineage linking this to the civic denials of suffrage and education and property rights to women.

so . . . more later sorry for the typos,
i heart
ORWELLIAN BLACK HOLES FOREVER
lol
[1984] forever

maybe i will recensor this and censor it better later
xoxoxo

plus oh yeah what about the indexability of the people who plagarized my blog in indonesia and sent it through online translators and added internet adverts.

i can't delete their plagiarism. so if it gets indexed, that's just the nature of the internet.
that's why my marketing advice is to flood the internet with good press, or the bad press will be the only press to float to the top.

spamdex yourself!!!!! dah!

and what i still don't get is that, if the facts of what have happened in the class are so perfectly legal and okay, why am i being asked to participate in the cover-up?

what's there to hide if everything was a-okay?

if it is that embarrassing, why say it to begin with? its the internet age. if the 1984 department is such a crusader for free speech rights and academic freedom why do they want to censor my factual anecdotes about the words used in the class.
boring.

plus: fink scoped me out for being a james joyce reader.  isn't that nice.  some of us love chaos.  i told him i try not to read james joyce anymore.  law and wikipedia are just so entertaining.

next step:  start blogging in other languages.
maybe swedish????  oh that would be sooo hard . . .

3 comments:

Unknown said...

That is too crazy and I am real surprised that Eckford would do something like that,when another student's rude behavior was interrupting my speaking in class, he stood up for me. And he knew I was a conservative! Not like those ASO dipwads!

mary rose lenore eng (please) said...

well see, i think he realized that it would be better to have an attorney speak to an attorney and trying to get me to censor my blog under threat of academic suspension might be a constitutional law issue.
fink wrote me to get a word-for word recollection as i was in the room taking notes. i hoped the phone call would yield more positive results regarding the issue of whether it was okay for me to blog or be threatened with suspension from a class in punishment for writing about what goes on in the class. instead the conversation degenerated really fast.
here is my recollection as i typed it fresh from memory at 5:09pm. the phone call happened at 2:10 or so. fink wrote me to ask if i remembered what was said in addition to "jump in the pool." with the threat of taking me to court over this blog, i think its a little off that a department chair would speak this way in a professional context of what could have been a very diplomatic phone call. fink totally saw what i meant about the verbally degenerate atmosphere. the recorded version of this coercive censorship meeting had some funny moments. the fact that i allowed them to record, made way for me to record. and while it was rather unideal that i "allowed" them to corner me in this "mandatory" meeting, and that eckford told fink i am disrupting class (a total lie) is telling.

here is what i remember as written to fink (who is famous for suing the american apparel):

he called you "tough guy"

he said he wasn't even sure if he should be talking to you. then you said maybe you should call general counsel.


that's when it got nasty.

and then said jump in a pool of water

you said you could write a letter, or maybe you said would he put that in writing.

you are trying to scare him

and you said, i'm not trying to scare you i'm trying to talk about the situation.

he said he didn't want to talk to you a third party with who he had no relation.

that he had a relationship with me and teacher bartelt, but not you.

he said that i am disrupting class (which is untrue) and that he is not responsible for the class requirements


then he said he would "hang up on your dumb ass"

Anonymous said...

I am a concerned LACC student who happened to come across your blog.

I'm glad you are doing something about this department. In March I asked Eckford for applications for the Social Science department scholarships. He told me and other students that there would be no scholarships this year due to funding issues.

Oh, turns out, there were scholarships awarded. Perhaps he only gave applications to people he personally knows?

He also hasn't given out any information about the Social Science honors society, which gives out awards/inducts students every May. It's almost June and the LACC social science department website hasn't been updated to reflect anything about this. What the hell is going on here....?

I hope this whole department goes down.

-Anonymous.