“Fascinating stuff. Super dense, not organized, but worth your time to work through.
My favorites:
It is important for the students to know that our love of contradiction extends even to this: that they are note the work they make. Some who make beautiful things would like to be equated with what they have made, and yet beyond their work they treat people badly, scornfully, and run down everything they see. Others who make flawed and misguided work are pained in their hearts because they think this is a judgment of who they are and who they can be…The moment of making should be our most vulnerable moment. Once we have made a thing we have no real authority over it…Many student have come to me feeling that everything they have made stands as a body of evidence that the jury will pick through, led by brutal lawyers, at the trial of their mind and heart. I this not just a more complex variety of the child’s belief that she will be held to account for everything she thinks?
Imagine a school in which every kind of class is taughtâliterally every possible class, on every subject, taught in every way. If you were to teach at this school would you teach as you do? Would you teach the same materials and in the same way? Or would you teach something else? Thinking of the classes taught at this imaginary school, would you become jealous of some of the classes taught? Would you be aghast that someone is permitted to teach in such a wayâa way that you would love to have taught, if only you had thought of it? It this last is true, then please, by all means, begin tomorrow. Steal the class from its imaginary teacher. Become that person.“