The web page of UMD's
Instructional Development Service comes with an epigraph:
The teacher said to the students, "Come to the edge." They replied, "We might fall." The teacher said again, "Come to the edge." And they responded, "It's too high." "Come to the edge" the teacher demanded. And they came and the teacher pushed them, and they flew.
-- Christopher Logue
I just have to smile here at the familiar mix of drama and good intentions. But what made the students fly? (And without whatever it was, wouldn't the teacher have just committed a heinous crime? Those poor students, all fallen, most dead, others, mangled, gasping their last breaths as we watch....oh the horror!)
The "Early Career Faculty Series on Teaching and Learning" was recommended to me as a great series. This semester there will be talks on managing the classroom, "active learning," and "assessment," but they all take place on Thursdays during my scheduled class time, so I can't attend any of them.
C'est la semestre.
UPDATE. Christopher Logue (b. 1926) has a poem called "Come to Edge" in his collection
New Numbers (Jonathan Cape, 1969).
Wikiquote,
Poemhunter and many more sites give the text as:
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew.
What the UMD IDS did to this poem on their webpage deserves a name. Perhaps "institutional misprisonment?"
"misprisonment" means "translation I don't like," right?
ReplyDeleteI think Duluth imagines wings stitched of knowledge, but it's hard to fight the "let's push students off a cliff" metaphor.
Have a great day!