meme: passion quilt

Aspazia tagged me for this one, and I'm doing in part to welcome her back to the blogosphere.  (Welcome back, Aspazia!)

The rules . . .

• Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
• Give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."
• Link back to this blog entry.

 

Tolerate the mess.

My experience of teaching -- and of life, frankly, but that's another story -- is that things become not only easier but at once clearer and smarter if I tolerate the messiness that is real complexity.  Complex ideas, full engagement with the ideas of others, a genuine willingness to revisit your own ideas and change them -- these are the things that I try to teach in my classes, to my children, and perhaps most of all to myself.  I don't quite know if it's my passion as an educator, but it is, without question, what I think is most important and also my greatest challenge.  Students often enter college wanting answers; I do my best to teach them how to ask questions whose answers produce more questions.

I've chosen this image because it isn't, in fact, messy.  Crossed letters were standard for a long time, and people knew how to read them.  I learned, one summer while working on my dissertation, while reading the endless letters home of British women in South Asia in the early nineteenth century -- endless, obsessive accounts of children's health and illness, all too often ending with the child's death.  What you learn when you read such letters is that you have to focus properly, and one only one direction of writing at a time.  Then, the writing at 90 deg. becomes background; when you turn the paper 90 deg., background becomes figure and figure, ground.  That's what I can offer as a way to tolerate the mess: focus.

As for tagging some educators, how about Oonae, jo(e), What Now?,  Tenured Radical, and New Kid?

Comments

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[(un)relaxeddad]

I've got to confess that I've never actually heard of the practice. Amazing picture.