Goodreads |2008 week 19 number 2 (Teacher vs Student)
Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment | Joseph Rago http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120995103004666569.html
“The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their ‘anti-intellectualism’ violated her civil rights. Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expose, which she promises will ‘name names.’ […] Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is ‘science studies,’ which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, ‘teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.’ She continues: ‘Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.’ The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to ‘problematize’ technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the ‘problems’ owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was ‘intolerant of ideas’ and ‘questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.’ Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.”
Socrates in the classroom develops students’ thinking and changes the distribution of power http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/src-sit050708.php
“When students have the opportunity to participate in “Socratic seminars” on a regular basis, a different classroom culture evolves. The students collaborate more and more voices are heard. The students develop their thinking skills in a cooperative and investigative atmosphere. This is shown in a new dissertation in Pedagogy by Ann S Pihlgren at the Stockholm University in Sweden. The Socratic dialogue is a particular way of developing children’s, as well as adults’, thinking skills through cooperative dialogue where significant human ideas and values are discussed. By participating in Socratic seminars regularly every other week, preschool children and older students develop their thinking skills. The seminars address literature and art work, with questions such as these: is Pippi Longstocking is a good friend, is Jack is stupid or smart when he sells his mother’s cow for some beans or are we born good or evil. In the beginning the students have difficulty expressing their thoughts, but with time their ability to express themselves and to examine ideas critically and logically develops.”
Goodreads |2008 week 18 number 3 (What the Old Farts Don’t Get About the Economy)
Young earn less than parents did: Census | Tobi Cohen http://www.thestar.com/article/420331
“Young people entering the job market today may be better educated, but they’re earning less money than their parents did a generation ago, according to new census data released Thursday by Statistics Canada.”
Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.
This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the Obamasignsjeffhaynesafpgetty forces arrayed against him are too strong — just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo — then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.
The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.
What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.
Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset. It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society. If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. […] Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement. […] So I tell her [a TV producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story [about Pluto’s talk page on Wikipedia] and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
Goodreads |2008 week 17 number 2 (Artist Statement of the Year)
Found it yesterday via Andrew Sullivan (who’ I’m loving for Obama-mania analysis). Sullivan linked to the Perez Hilton site, which in itself is a gold mine for the comments, such as:
Disgusting! says: Stupid stupid attention seeking bitch! This made me feel sick to my stomach reading about her yesterday. Regardless of whether its real of fake, shes put the whole thing out there. You art school bitch, next time you go for your 5 mins, have a think about what your stupid actions could do. I know a couple of women who went through heart breaking miscarraiges and it has scarred them for life. Hope you get lynched, you cold blooded witch.
Buffy says: What a complete and utter sociopath
cambel says: I weep at the complete intellectual vacuum this shows in our elite universities. Not only did what she said dance around subjects like Michael Flatley, the fact is she could have said the same thing in 2 paragraphs. What you see with her is somebody who is used to having teachers say “Please turn in a 15 page paper by Friday” She only has 9 pages of info but she inflates, repeats, and mixes the wording and language to produce the extra 6 pages. Unfortunatly, after years of doing so she no longer has the ability to express herself any other way. It’s sad, I almost feel like I’m reading something written by somebody with Downs Syndrome and a spell checker.
wow says: First of all Gere, that’s getting extremely annoying.. stop promoting your crap site here.
second, what was this biyatch blabbing about? im sorry i didn’t have my dictionary handy… was she explaining herself or trying to cram as many SAT words in one essay as possible?
devan in canada says: SHE’S AN IDIOT….half of what she is saying is lifted directly out of feminist theory textbooks and great lecturers on the ideas of bodily ownership, expression and freedom.
i’ve heard all of this stuff before, but with more meaning and sincerity behind it. not just from some girl in leopard shorts and fringy boots trying to be radically female.
she’s just another hack, trying to be original and thought provoking, but instead she has ended up looking like another silly art student with a outrageous idea and no strength to hold it up
Stupid Bitch says: She could have gotten her point across simply by stating “I was bored and lonely. Not all this bullshit trying-to-impress-the-reader jargon.
adriana banana says: HOW FUCKING SAD… This bitch is sick, first of all I don’t understand all of the long ass words she is using, but I’m not dumb enough to realize that even though she comes around as really smart, she is the MOST ignorant person I’ve heard of… I can’t believe this bitch, I never damn anyone, but this person deserves to die. Ew, She makes me so fucking sick
Aliza Shvarts’ Artist Statement | Perez Hilton & Friends http://perezhilton.com/2008-04-18-she-attempts-to-explain-herself
“Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “‘meant’ for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not ‘meant’ for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are ‘meant’ to birth a child. When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.”
