The role of the teacher

Scottie,

In questions such as these, I am quite happy not be known as a "great
simplifier," especially when that is used as a reason not to read the texts.
If people here were actually reading the texts, and then approaching me for
comments about passages or for explanations about pages or to go over their
specific readings with them, I would be quite happy to try and make things
simpler for them, or try and clarify their own readings with my own.

But that's not what's happening here. NO one is reading and, in fact, I am
being told people won't have the time to, so please just tell us what is
looks like so we can recognize it and thereby save us the trouble of reading
"long and difficult books."

That is not teaching. That is not even a responsible request. And it is
certainly not one I am going to fulfill in a forum such as this (which, by
the way, actually lends itself to replacing thought with slogans and
single-sentence definitions and reductivist catch-phrases anyway).

When and if people want actually to encounter the texts, whether they are by
Kafka or Derrida or Salinger or Hegel or anyone, then the time will come for
working with them and for trying to simplify in order to aid understanding as
we read together. But there is certainly no reason to do that in place of
reading and to allow others not to read. That's not only misleading; that's
just plain wrong, if you ask me.

And I suspect most of those teachers you mention would feel exactly the same
way.

Thanks, anyway.

All the best,

--John

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Received on Sun Mar 9 07:01:04 2003