Interesting...
After reading Cathy Benedict's and Patrick Schmidt's article, several things stuck with me. Most of them were good. However, the one thing that I can't seem to get out of my head is a quote that Benedict made on page 6. She wrote "...this possibility of existential crisis hangs over my head and thus consequently over the heads (dunder filled as they may be) of my students." I am sure this was only meant as a joke to help lighten the very heady topic this paper takes on. Nonetheless, it bothered me. I know that if I was a student of Professor Benedict's, I'd be somewhat offended to hear my class spoken about that way in the middle of a conference about social equality. Is it not unfair to assume that her students' minds are filled with garbage (dunder is the lees or dregs of sugar-cane juice and is used in the distillation of rum)? Or am I just being too sensitive about it? I would love to hear your thoughts.
posted by Alex @ 11:10 PM
2 Comments:
My article is covered with exclamation points over that sentence!! I'm glad that someone else pointed out the rather insulting generalization of one's own students whose worlds we are "transforming" as well as our own. Maybe there is no real translation for the dismissive attitude Professor Benedict seems to harbor for her own classroom and it gets swept up in translation. This sentence is the perfect underpinning for the elitism I percieved throughout this article. The generalization of all students as being vapid and herd-like for their fear of being "other" was personally insulting. I do not know if this is a priveledged life I myself have led, but my peers are a diverse, open-minded group of young people ready for action and change. These students do not use labels to seperate themselves. These students do not need to be persuaded and coerced into following some new tradition; they are just as eager to break form and try new things as the philosophers are. Benedict cites Kohl's thoughts of creative maladjustment as it were, "the conscious decision not to learn something you could learn" leads me to think it is not the child who is disengaged, it is the teacher who is disengaged and cannot stimulate thought out of a human being. What planet are we on that human nteraction of the most basic of planes is intrinsically more informative than any lecture?
What planet are we from that we cannot realize that human interation, even on the most basic of forms, is intrinsically more informative than any lecture or lesson could ever be?
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