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."

Saturday, 10 July 2010

can i please have more curse words, slurs, and epithets in my lecture???????

to spice it up . . . not! blah!!!!!!!

hello everyone!!!  if there is anyone out there!!!!  i just wanted to remind you to keep your head in the clouds and expect wonderful things, and demand wonderful things.  get to higher ground and keep your eyes on the stars!

sexism and crudity in the classroom are not necessary.  the internet
http://videos.wittysparks.com/id/3689087750/

is a wonderful fractalian replicating behemoth.

look at the way someone is smart enough to adsense up the content i put out for free on the youtube and the real lacc!!!!!

corruption and harassing of a minor are commodifiable entertainment!  isn't that nice???????

and when freedom of speech means freedom to be homophobic?
well . . .
http://www.examiner.com/x-/x-7814-LA-Church--State-Examiner~y2009m7d15-Judge-rules-in-favor-of-LACC-student-defending-traditional-marriage

at least when its a student the student is presumed less "learned."

but when teachers use the same lame free speech rhetoric to prop up their lack of imagination and personal lack of dignity, in spewing crudities on students . . . well . . . it might be time . . . to realize there is something better out there . . .

and guess what!? . . . my amazing teacher this summer has failed to be crude or offensive for hours and hours of economics lecture, and amazingly, he has not once said something off-color or rude or offensive!!!!!!!  i think that's just world-class!!!!!  it restores my faith in humanity, and after semesters of slovenly sexism at LACC, my standards became so low that i feel truly shocked at my teacher's dignity and professionalism!!!!!!!

like hey, isn't it time to get verbally abusive here??  talk about prostitutes, hookers (lewis) or slut (lanzer) or cheesecake (duffy) or tits and ass (bartelt) or "shitty" this and "bitching" that . . . .

oh but wait a minute, i'm not at potty mouth city college anymore!!!!!! haha!!!!!!!!!

out of the pig sty----->

as in like, can you please return this to the chef?????

i think there is a hair in it?!

are you sure you actually meant for everyone on the internet to know how you talk??????  did you hear about the internet---it's like, totally awesome!!!!!

like, citizen democracy!!!!!

like, intellectuals on the web . . .

so life is wonderful, and without any kind of verbal abuse in my life right now . . . maybe i will need to  come back to LACC for a good dose . . . nah!!!  maybe not!!!!!  and if you are a mother or father out there about to send your darling bright-eyed 18 year old to LACC, i'd say, watch out!!!!!   check around!!!  do you want your kids around this bad energy?????  do you want someone you love to be surrounded by trash-talkers who tell a free speech lawyer to "jump in a stream" or that they will hang up on his "dumb-ass"? and tell a woman she can't complain about teachers excessive and unfair linguistic objectification of woman . . .

who tell a woman if there is no more "tits and ass" then there will only be like three words left!!!!!! in the whole english language?????? i am not kidding, this is what eckford told me, and i have a recording of it, sadly!!!!!!!!!!

just say NO!
that's sexist!!!!

so get inspired, the world has brighter things out there!!!!!!  bright minds!!!  inspiring people!!!!!

and so here is a reference to the brilliant letters of one of my favorite professors when i was a youngling back in 1995. he writes abstruse things in many languages about dante and virgil etc, the illustrious william franke, who never cursed or uttered banal crudities, but was more likely to quote something in Italian, or Latin or greek or german.  get a load of a smattering of his writings:


34. “Virgil , History, and Prophecy”
                Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 73-88

33. “Damascius. Of the Ineffable:  Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle”
                Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics  12/1 (2004): 111-31.
                     (Introduction with original translation from the Greek of De principiis, Part I, cc 3-8)

32. “A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Apophasis and the Experience of Truth and Totality.”
In Imaginatio Creatrix, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana LXXXIII (2004): 65-83.

31. “Truth and Interpretation in the Divine Comedy”
                In Dante  Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2004), pp. 287-305.
                     (excerpt reprinted from Dante’s Interpretive Journey, pp. 5-23)

30. “The Dialectical Logic of Yeats’s Byzantium Poems”
                In Poetry Criticism,  vol. 51, ed. Carol Ullman (Kennedale, TX: Gale Group, 2004)
                     [Reprinted from Yeats-Eliot Review 15, no. 3:  23-32]

29. “The Exodus Epic: Universalization of History Through Ritual”
                In Universality and History: The Foundations of Core, ed. Don Thompson, Darrel Colson, and J.
     Scott Lee (Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), pp. 59-70

28. “The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading:  Introduction to the Inferno as a Humanities
Text,” in Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context, ed. Bainard Cowen and J. Scott Lee
     (Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), pp 75-82

27. “Literature as Liturgy and the Interpretive Revolution of Literary Criticism”
                Preface to Gian Balsamo, Scriptural Poetics in Finnegans Wake 
 (Lewisburg, New York: Edwin Mellin Press, 2002), pp. v-xiii


 my current amazing  (non-cursey) prof:
Volkhart Vincentz until the end of November 2009 managing director of the Institute for Eastern European Studies. He studied economics at the Universities of Mainz and Munich. After having graduated as "Diplom-Volkswirt" (advanced degree in economics) at the University of Munich, he was awarded a PhD at Boston University, USA. He wrote his thesis on the topic: "On the Stability of a Soviet Type Economy with Endogenous Plans".
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