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 1 June 2010

the future of equality: is respect "inappropriate" . . .?

in studying for family law i came across the exciting fact that until the1950's married women in California surrendered their income to their husbands.  it is so amazing that in my mother's lifetime, marriage meant complete civic inequality and economic tyranny.  the huge pay gap in the united states is a relic of this old way of thinking, that all women must marry, that men were the primary earners, and that men control the family finances.

i take family law with professor vargas.  he is universally loved across the paralegal department for his organization and consistency.  his lectures always include a powerpoint and pdf  summaries of the key points.  i took criminal law and introduction to paralegal studies with him. torts and family law have been great.
so as i prepare for school, school, and more school, i am trying to get a perspective on what has happened here at LACC.  what was good, and what could be better.  i was initially allured by the governor's fee waiver and hope for grants to ease the financial struggle of studying.  i felt inclined toward law, but not enough to take the plunge without some foreknowledge.  i really like how much my knowledge has expanded. 
but some things make me sad about the school.
when vargas told me i was "inappropriate" for tagging the legal association board with my query about the legal association's larger sense of ethics and honor, i felt a bit of disgust at what goes on.  nobody seems to notice or care that the club is a dominatesd by largely inarticulate men, who are rude to people like sheila and i.  after having the ham-fisted slap on my back and orders given, i calmly informed one of their dignitaries, that as a natural-leader, i give orders not receive.

and then darwin asked me to leave his little potluck.  i normally avoid these people anyway, but was having such a blast with the intellectual property law club people, that i lingered on . . .

somehow some people's retro style of bossing people around and booming their big voices gives them some kind of primitive power rush.  vargas never wrote me back about the academic crises or the treatment of paralegal student dharod in the ASO scandal cover-up.  he never really coherently explained why i heard so many sexist things in the paralegal department.  lawyers don't scare easily.  but i could perceptibly see lewis and lanzer cringe in my presence, after realizing their loose-lipped antics might get them called up for questioning.  i don't think they felt any particular remorse, but i did see a marked improvement, at least with lanzer.  by asking a lot of a situation, you actually do honor to those teachers you critique.  of course they are smart and educated.  why not ask them to show it with a little dignity and eloquence?????  it's purely flattering we might hope they are capable of giving a non-sexist lecture.  i spoke with vargas about the linguistic anomolies in the frilly anthropology course, which i confess, i took for fun.  i didn't expect it would be so torturous or degenerate so fast. vargas has a careful way of never saying anything too extreme in any direction.  it's commendable.  if i told him of the silly situation the social sciences people made for themselves, he might look askance.
a little law education goes a long way!!!! 

so as a reminder of the many educations available out there, i love to keep the itunes university podcasts going.  new york law hosted the most amzing conference on the google books settlement, which has huge applications for the future of alternative learning methods for dyslexia and vision impairment.  braille readers and text to speech facilitate a huge increase for the sake of universal human knowledge.  9 million book s that would be unavailable to the blind, will now be able to be converted to braille thanks to google.  or coverted to robot-voiced text to speech.
i use text-to-speech all the time now.  i first used it in 1998 when i was an assistant to estelle condra, a teacher and author who suffered a gradual decline in vision.  she would write, and then have the computer read back to her.
i use it now for everything from emails, to blogging, to wikipedia, and legal research.  i love the feeling of kicking back my feet and letting my weak eyes rest whilst experiencing rapid information uptake.  for the super hard parts of biological anthropology, i tried to absorb as much as possible as quickly as possible by use of my robot voice settings in the system preferences.
i listen to long legal pdf legal documents this way.  sometimeas as i fall asleep i set the computer to read to me a long passage.

but there is something so wonderful about the "human" experience.  and that is part of why we go to school.  to hear a human voice, or have a conversation.  so when the humans at school act like misogynistic robots without a heart or compassion, that is when, the human experience feels a little bizarre.

i read an interesting article last night about transexual academics at MIT and Harvard who experienced a huge shift in their peer-reception, upon completion of the gender change.  the woman who became a man, found an increase in success, earning power, and respect.  the male to female found her income and the academic respect she was used to as a man decline after her gender change.
http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/the-situation-of-sexism/


it really helped me to get a handle on what i experience as the condescending tone i have felt from some of the professors.  is it subtle?
is it a hazing process?
or punishment for  . . .
for kicks, and to keep my mind happy, i love lectures at harvard's berkman center.  the berkman center host's guest speakers from many field's whose work involves the intersection of law and what was lovingly referred to once as "cyberspace."  whether its copyright, social media, statistics, crowdsourcing . . . the lectures are always so fun and always completely cogent and dense.
i love london school of economics, which hosts lectures on international politics, market development, law, and more . . .
lacc, thanks for everything . . . but i want to keep my horizons wide . . .
dan diamond says keep the blog installed.  its important.  as demonstration.  as educational theory.  as a challenge to old ways of thinking.  and as a reminder to any student, that we don't don't have to wait twenty years to discuss sexual harassment on campus like naomi wolf did.  we can start talking right now.  about everything.  and make it a better world.  we are a very bloggy generation. it's hopeful.
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