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."

Thursday, 10 February 2011

humans communicating: prisons of the mind: men who hate women

File:Castro-Beauvoir-Sartre-Che Guevara.jpg

as i was reading the wiki on simone de beauvoir, this picture caused me to flashback to a funny moment in time, when i found myself in a similar setting.

an office, speaking with humans.
i read simone de beauvoir's the second sex when i was eighteen.

i personally feel genderless, free of any such thing.  i feel myself to be pure intellect.
i do not want to express sexism or hatred of any kind.
i do not find it to be beneficial to my mind.

at 33 years of age,
i was sitting in LACC sociology chair's wendel eckford's new office in one of the nice new buildings at LACC, listening to grown men curse at me.  my blog was printed out and held by a cursing anthropologist.

as a writer, it is a great feeling to know someone is reading your work.

a huge red che guevera flag was on the wall.

eckford was explaining why i would be kicked out of bartelt's anthro class if i continued to blog the language used in the classroom.
eckford repeated all the language.

freedom of speech sometimes includes freedom to be creepy, lame, gross.

i am such a connoisseur of the elegant, eloquent type.  they are hard to find.  they are all dead perhaps, like my grandfather.

as wendell recited his litany of epithets to me, in the most bizarre moment of cinematic misogyny, he added "vagina" to the already nagging "bitching" "tits and ass" and "show your tits" "asshole" etc. which he vigorously defended.

i am in sweden now.  
via a friend
i found out about a swedish poet
sonja akesson, who wrote about marriage as being the slave of a white man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonja_Åkesson

i am extremely creeped out by swedish xenophobia, racism, eugenics.
but gosh, they sure do love equality for women.
that's nice.
but things aren't perfect here.

pop american misogyny is exported just like mcdonalds.
women here still get raped and beaten and trafficked and sold.
even occasionally cursed at/about, i've sadly found out.
but i do think i went several weeks without hearing a single curse word.

men who hate women is stieg larsson was writing about.
women here make 82% of what a man makes.
which far exceeds america's dismal pay gap stats: 58% for a latina woman, 70% for white women to the american male 100% dollar.


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