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."

Monday, 5 April 2010

letter to district counsel eric kim:


more blogs

two more class blogs for educational purposes---are you anti-education or anti-functionality of internet web notetaking?

do you realize i am volunteering as an innovator for the tech pilot program which will catch lacc up to date with tech streaming etc?
i have the support of several professors and susan matranga in OSS (for disabilities).

are you aware of the digital components of all the best schools, stanford, harvard, LSE etc?
do you realize i am doing this for free bc i really care about education and learning and disability rights?

this is for our extracurricular IP club that deals with paralegal club dept deficits.
why is LACC anti-tech?

why is the IT signal so slow and blocked against streaming classes?
do you realize how beneficial open content will be for tutors for the blind and dyslexic, everyone?

do you realize this could be a paid IT job of the future---to build archives of the teachers who are actually good?
duffy in law and bartelt in anthropology have such worthwhile classes, and they are both supportive and intrigued.

i really appreciate your attention, and think it is very important for you to make such requests, for your records, visavis old fashioned IP norms.

i however do not politically believe in censorship and restriction of information on IP or any other grounds, as i similarly, and yet seemingly contradictorily do not want to be around crass proffs who fill their own mouths with expletives and spew them on us.

if they want to be crass and foul and sexist, maybe they need a blog, and then someone with some skill and decency could have a job, and we could retire the offending profs and their enabling admin protectors.


gene little was really nice today on the phone.  
i added a disclaimer to the real lacc.
you know i publish and delete things all the time on a whim.  but you know it is admin's province to head off PR nightmares in the digital age.

if they adequately trained professors and dealt with the epidemic of incompetence, their would be no blogs decrying them.

so why don't you send christie passman a takedown notice too, and tell her to clean up the sloppy lazy misogynistic and racist language and harassment that permeates many departments.
why don't you guys get proactive?
to protect the taxpayer, protect the students, and to protect yourselves.

the blogosphere should be the least of your worries.  it is the real incompetence and failure for educational equity that is the real problem.
real human beings are walking out of class because of sexism, islamophobia, denigration of mexicans, sterotyping african-americans, sexual harassment by gym teachers, law proffs obsessed by the words slut whore hooker prostitute and a homophobic obsession over whether or not tom cruise is gay.
this is total BS and not academic.
it is not equal and not fair.
i'm giving you a heads up to be nice.
same for the kids.
mary eng
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