mcfarland (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mcfarland) wrote,@ 2006-01-10 07:21:00 |
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hmmm...philosophy?
Yesterday Mary Sun bombed her lesson, that is, after a month of various holiday and Mom's heart attack postponements it was time for verification-quiz reviews of the material in Chapter 6. Namely, simple past tense irregular verbs and the future.
Out of 42 responses she answered 15 correctly. Uh Oh, but not terribly surprising, she'd bombed last week's exercises quite similarly..
Under NORMAL conditions Mary Sun is quasi always a top knotch student. But life's pressures have been anything but normal for Mary Sun lately. Life and death issues are not easy to give order to in prepubescent adolescence.
I could not understand, despite the miserable results of the attempted verification, why Mary Sun insisted to both her Mom and I that she HAD learned past tense irregular verbs (which unfortunately need to be memorized as they are devoid of any common rule), when according to review, she'd successfully learned less than half of them.
Her plea was that she was doing exactly what her mother had always told her to do which is; Don't give them satisfaction. >"non vi dai soddisfazione".
I asked Mary Sun's Mom to explain to me what that meant.
The Mom has drilled Mary Sun to never voluntarily reveal to people what she understands or doesn't, always leave them with a doubt, she says. The reasoning? (fear/paranoia) behind this idea is that, IF you reveal to people what you don't understand, they will take advantage of you. (because people are evil, of course.)
I explained that as a teacher, it is essential for me to learn what is not clear yet to my students, so that I can attempt to help them learn what they haven't yet. What I DIDN'T say, but felt was; Don't you know that MOST PEOPLE don't take a liking to being fed BULLSHIT? The assumptive defensive proposition that you always understand more than me is offensive. It's not the understanding that's offensive, but the superiority stance. Because you don't want to give me the satisfaction of recognizing there are some things you don't understand--does not acceptably justify LYING to me.
Course, the GOOD teacher- patient and understanding--can't say any such thing.
In a nice twisted paradoxical way the good teacher learned A LOT from this lesson, however..
I've always known that Italians have incredible width and flexibility-- a talent for NOT BECOMING OFFENDED by bullshit, lying, and the corruption it often carries along. They even happily vote convicted corrupters into top offices. Now I understand a bit more--they simply never wanted to give me the satisfaction of knowing something they don't, cause I'm probably evil and want to take advantage of them.
Uh OH, are YOU evil? Have I given you THAT satisfaction?
Yesterday Mary Sun bombed her lesson, that is, after a month of various holiday and Mom's heart attack postponements it was time for verification-quiz reviews of the material in Chapter 6. Namely, simple past tense irregular verbs and the future.
Out of 42 responses she answered 15 correctly. Uh Oh, but not terribly surprising, she'd bombed last week's exercises quite similarly..
Under NORMAL conditions Mary Sun is quasi always a top knotch student. But life's pressures have been anything but normal for Mary Sun lately. Life and death issues are not easy to give order to in prepubescent adolescence.
I could not understand, despite the miserable results of the attempted verification, why Mary Sun insisted to both her Mom and I that she HAD learned past tense irregular verbs (which unfortunately need to be memorized as they are devoid of any common rule), when according to review, she'd successfully learned less than half of them.
Her plea was that she was doing exactly what her mother had always told her to do which is; Don't give them satisfaction. >"non vi dai soddisfazione".
I asked Mary Sun's Mom to explain to me what that meant.
The Mom has drilled Mary Sun to never voluntarily reveal to people what she understands or doesn't, always leave them with a doubt, she says. The reasoning? (fear/paranoia) behind this idea is that, IF you reveal to people what you don't understand, they will take advantage of you. (because people are evil, of course.)
I explained that as a teacher, it is essential for me to learn what is not clear yet to my students, so that I can attempt to help them learn what they haven't yet. What I DIDN'T say, but felt was; Don't you know that MOST PEOPLE don't take a liking to being fed BULLSHIT? The assumptive defensive proposition that you always understand more than me is offensive. It's not the understanding that's offensive, but the superiority stance. Because you don't want to give me the satisfaction of recognizing there are some things you don't understand--does not acceptably justify LYING to me.
Course, the GOOD teacher- patient and understanding--can't say any such thing.
In a nice twisted paradoxical way the good teacher learned A LOT from this lesson, however..
I've always known that Italians have incredible width and flexibility-- a talent for NOT BECOMING OFFENDED by bullshit, lying, and the corruption it often carries along. They even happily vote convicted corrupters into top offices. Now I understand a bit more--they simply never wanted to give me the satisfaction of knowing something they don't, cause I'm probably evil and want to take advantage of them.
Uh OH, are YOU evil? Have I given you THAT satisfaction?
