Just Another Brick in the Wall
I’ve now had a full week of classes under by belt (I’d rather have a 25-year old under my belt, but whaddyagonnado?). The students seem bland enough. I love the blank stares, the drool dribbling down the sides of their mouths, the quiet gnawing of the textbooks. For some reason my class last Thursday was obsessed about hand preference. I told them SOME left-handed people are right-brain dominant, and thus left-handed people are overly represented among highly gifted mathematicians. So the pregnant woman on the front row says “I know a lot of left handed people, and none of them have good math skills.” I replied, “because math geniuses are disproportionately left handed doesn’t mean that left-handed people are all math geniuses.” She looked at me like I had just uttered Swahili. It’s gonna be a long semester.
My student is clearly a concrete thinker. It’s surprising to me just how many adult concrete thinkers I have to deal with as students in college. Perhaps even more surprising is how many concrete thinkers I have to deal with as teaching colleagues. In a conversation with a colleague a little while ago, he commented that all the soldiers who fought for the Confederate cause in the Civil War were traitors. This is an idea that he borrowed from Al Franken in Franken’s book, Lies, and the Lying Liars that Tell Them. My colleague is not prone to new ideas of his own, so he has a tendency to “borrow” ideas from books he reads.
I asked him if the Confederates were traitors in the same way that Jefferson, Washington, and Adams were traitors.
“Oh, no! Those men weren’t traitors.”
“What’s the difference between the founding fathers and the Confederates?” I asked.
“The founding fathers were on the winning side,” he replied.
“So,” I said, “if the Nazis had won the Second World War, the Holocaust would be morally acceptable?”
“Oh, yes! The Germans would have written all the history books.”
That, of course, doesn’t mean that we who read them would have to agree. The white man won the Indian wars, but there are some of us, textbooks or no, who still think the treatment of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century was immoral. American historians, being on the winning side, have written justifications for dropping A-bombs on Japan, but there are many Americans who still question the morality of that decision.
My colleague, however, only knows what he reads, and apparently is incapable of independent thought. What amazes is that he’s a college teacher with an advanced degree. Sad.
My student is clearly a concrete thinker. It’s surprising to me just how many adult concrete thinkers I have to deal with as students in college. Perhaps even more surprising is how many concrete thinkers I have to deal with as teaching colleagues. In a conversation with a colleague a little while ago, he commented that all the soldiers who fought for the Confederate cause in the Civil War were traitors. This is an idea that he borrowed from Al Franken in Franken’s book, Lies, and the Lying Liars that Tell Them. My colleague is not prone to new ideas of his own, so he has a tendency to “borrow” ideas from books he reads.
I asked him if the Confederates were traitors in the same way that Jefferson, Washington, and Adams were traitors.
“Oh, no! Those men weren’t traitors.”
“What’s the difference between the founding fathers and the Confederates?” I asked.
“The founding fathers were on the winning side,” he replied.
“So,” I said, “if the Nazis had won the Second World War, the Holocaust would be morally acceptable?”
“Oh, yes! The Germans would have written all the history books.”
That, of course, doesn’t mean that we who read them would have to agree. The white man won the Indian wars, but there are some of us, textbooks or no, who still think the treatment of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century was immoral. American historians, being on the winning side, have written justifications for dropping A-bombs on Japan, but there are many Americans who still question the morality of that decision.
My colleague, however, only knows what he reads, and apparently is incapable of independent thought. What amazes is that he’s a college teacher with an advanced degree. Sad.
posted by Satterwhite | 6:26 AM
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