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Choosing Who We Are

“Choosing Who We Are”
Notes for 3rd in a Series on Choices and Constraints
Anne Dalke & Wil Franklin
Oct. 9, 2008


I. Two weeks ago, Anne told the story of a student who’d said to her, “I don’t know how I’m doing.” We mused together about how we must be failing as teachers, if our students are looking to us to tell them “how they are doing,” and how giving too many instructions/ offering a review of what is "great"/giving grades can contribute to this effect. This is, of course, part of a larger social phenomenon, of asking experts (doctors, esp.) to tell us "how we are doing."

Notes Towards Day 12

Notes Towards Day 12 of Food for Thought

I. Sarah's survey

II. Welcoming Peter's class--

introduce yourself to one person you don't know
tell each other some unlikely fact...
(something interesting you'll do over break....?)

III. Review of upcoming writing/reading assignments:
By this morning: you should have posted your survey questions (in Week 6A)
(missing 3 of you; Sara: LOG ON)
By 5 p.m. tomorrow: e-mail us your self-evals

Paul Grobstein's picture

Conversation, discourse, exchange, open-ended transactional inquiry

The trick is to focus not on what people can't agree on, nor on what they can agree on, but rather on issues/questions/problems that have the potential to generate ways of thinking that no one has thought before. 

More to come on where that thought came from, and what its useful for .... 

Notes Towards Day 13: Licking the Book of Salt

Notes towards Day 13
Critical Feminist Studies

I. welcome back:
remembering one another's names?
relevant gender-bending stories?
feminist tales from your travels?
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