Your relatives and mine shared a script! So, fearful that many years of nailing my eyelids to the deck would cause permanent damage, I started dissembling about my ultimate goals.

What Ken said. Every word.

No need to apologize, Scribe! I love the humanities as vitamins metaphor.

Scribe — Yes, Freire has been the force animating so many conversations in this class as well as many others throughout your long relationship with the world of teaching and learning. It made my day to read this post because you’ve got it, and because you do believe. You recognize that we are all learners and teachers all the time, and that the structured relationships of the classroom have much richer yields when they are sustained by mutual respect and genuine dialogue. You’re just wrong about one thing: You do indeed have something to contribute. It hasn’t all been said and done before. Freire wants us to reinvent his ideas, not imitate them. Time to get busy reading the world.

I really appreciate this reminder of how much happens behind the scenes, and how full even the “down times” of the semester can be. I think this echoes a reality of our teaching lives as well. We tend to think about teaching (and learning) as activities that take place at scheduled times in particular places, and focus our energies on what happens “in class.” Your post just goes to show that the class session is just one piece of a much larger process.
I hope you did get some much-deserved downtime in over the break (along with the laundry and the syllabus ;-)) See you Wednesday!

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Hi Ben — I’m not going to be able to read up on the feminist you note before class tonight but want to quickly say: 1) I absolutely do not disagree with your lived experience (or anyone else’s for that matter) and 2) completely respect your service in the skeptical / atheist movement and 3) the debate you hosted at UK sounds really cool.

Dear Scribe! I encourage you to review Chapter 9, wherein Steele sets out specific measures we can all take to mitigate identity and stereotype threat: https://scholar.vt.edu/access/content/group/a38399fc-210a-4e17-89d7-ee31836de31e/Week%208%20-%20Inclusive%20Pedagogy%20Pt.%201/Reducing%20Stereotype%20Threat.pdf

Yes yes yes!

Another thought on the pronoun preferences (and I”m sorry to be typing so much here….): This is just my personal perspective, but as a teacher I believe 1) that we have to be authentic – that is, true to ourselves. So I never say that I support or embrace things that I don’t really want to support or embrace; 2) that I should do my very best to make every learner feel included and respected in the community that is the class; 3) that I’m human and therefore make mistakes; 3) that my perceptions of my students are shaped by own preferences, stereotypes,and biases — some of which I hope I have a pretty good handle on, some of which I clearly don’t; 4) that if I know there individuals in the class who will feel more welcome and respected if I explicitly recognize their right to be there, I will definitely do that.

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Thanks so much for this, Milad. While my heart aches for your friend who recognizes that his work is not being evaluated fairly, I’m glad that seeing how this kind of prejudice works has helped you recognize that it is a problem. Awareness is the first, and often most difficult step. I hope we can identify ways in class to help address the problem.