Skip to main content

Note to Self

Must remember... I teach for critical thinking... critical thinking...

I've always known that this was what my teaching was supposed to be about, but I think it's taken me close to a year to come close to understanding what this means. What I'm trying to say is that so far, I have been nothing but an entertainer.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My questions of the summer

Here are some questions I have personally or I have come across and have been unable to answer very well: Why am I having such a hard time identifying new people who are open to fighting for real change? Why is it so hard for me to plan ahead? Why does it feel like I'm just living day by day? And some BIG questions: - How do we know that what we are doing is fundamentally changing the system or is it just reform? - How do I know if I am going in the right direction? - Why is it every time I find myself doing things by myself; how can I change this concretely?
1 comment
Read more

my mission from cswa

I'm not sure exactly what went down, but a couple of days before I was supposed to leave Tokyo for DC, I got an email from CSWA folks about some Chinese women who had been hired through a subcontracting firm to work for a medical laundry in Japan. They eventually came out in mid-September against their company, technoclean, for stealing their wages and for exposing them to long hours of hard labor with no protection against the toxic waste resulting from the laundry. My mission was to go out and meet the women, but all I had was a Chinese article and the name of the journalist who wrote it up. For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigr...
2 comments
Read more

A few new thoughts on LE

R and I were talking about Louise Erdrich, one of my literary heroes, and her character Fleur Pillager. R raised the issue of self-exotification, a problem I had been thinking about specifically with respect to Erdrich's work ever since I finished reading Four Souls and moved on to Tracks . N and I had talked about the voyeuristic relationship of the reader to the text, something that is not necessarily exoticist but it's certainly a trope that encourages exoticism, I think. We also talked about how the stories Erdrich relates are not living stories - they are often of the past, and thus it is easy to remove one's responsibility and relation to the text. In any case, I feel that the intimacy of the stories penned by Erdrich are a result of her own upbringing as a writer and as a person, and I don't want her to write differently, but I have to acknowledge this trap of self-exotification... I guess my argument though with that assessment is that Erdrich doesn't just p...
Post a Comment
Read more