You’re kidding, right? I teach literature at the college level and my students do this all the time. On the off chance you are not being disingenuous, here’s how the process works. Familiarize yourself thoroughly with the tenets of that school of thought, apply those tenets to the work of literature, et voila: an interpretation. You don’t have to believe those principles yourself. I’m not a fan of the psychoanalytical approach to literature but I could produce a psychoanalytical interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov in the blink of an eye.
It’s all part of critical thinking. I don’t have to convert to Christianity to be able to explain how Christians of various traditions interpret the Bible.
I get that you’re angry, Urbanredneck, but so far it seems like what you’re angry about isn’t really occurring. Teaching different perspectives is part of critical thinking, not part of indoctrination. Critical thinking is how kids learn to avoid indoctrination.
No, it was Zardoz and his Atlantean views that were leading the discussion.
What the golly-gee-willigers kind of question is that? Of COURSE I was leading the discussion I was leading!
If you’re asking whether I was telling them to hold my views, though, that’s insulting as a horse’s heiny. No, I wasn’t, and I take great pride in keeping my views apart from my teaching. I remember how frustrating it was to be lectured on the superiority of Christianity when I was a student, and I remember the impotent frustration my gay friends felt when a teacher told them that homosexuals should be imprisoned or my black friends felt when a teacher told them that slavery was the best thing that happened to Africans. I don’t want to repeat those mistakes of indoctrinating kids.
I’m skeptical that you ever actually won an argument. You may have learned the wrong lesson: perhaps you could have learned that hijacking a class discussion to go on a political diatribe would negatively impact your grade. But I wasn’t there, I don’t know. What I do know is that I never encountered the same lesson, and if I had, I’d blame the specific teacher.
This is easy: they don’t just say or write what I want them to say or write. That’s how I know. Was that supposed to be a trick question?
To elaborate: my most political activity of the year is getting kids to write letters to city council. One kid wrote that butterfly knives should be legal. Another advocated the repeal of child labor laws. My work with these kids was on spelling, proper letter organization, and how to marshal detailed reasons to support their proposal. That is, in my view, what a teacher ought to do.
This is a great trick question, because I can’t figure out what the bee’s patootie it’s supposed to mean.
Clearly kids need at least two teachers for every subject! Otherwise that one teacher has a free hand in indoctrinating them into whatever belief system that teacher has. And UR says it’s basically impossible that they’re not doing that, as evidenced by his reaction to LHoD’s example.
Anti-Science liberals pushing anti-GMO/anti-vax/pro-homeopathic rhetoric would not pass muster if critical thinking wasn’t short circuited by a desire to protect beliefs over knowledge.
Absolutely. I think psychoanalytic theory tends toward the rut between insanity and juvenalia, but coming up with interpretations of something through a psychoanalytic lens can be a fun party game with the right group of unsalvageable nerds.
So what the OP was initially bitching about was based on a combination of extremely slanted and inaccurate “reporting”, and his own personal paranoia.
Is that about it?
I would add in the class-ism and perceived moral superiority surrounding urban vs rural economies and knowledge workers vs blue collar workers is another area that would be potentially improved by a more open discussion about class gained through a “Marxist” lens.
This is a very palpable subject where traditionally liberal groups fail, especially with the tenancy to white knighting solutions.
We cannot even begin to discuss the issues surrounding this subject if the educational system hides more explicit forms of bias in order to protect our historical miscarriage of justice.
Ever stop and think that maybe your liberal students didn’t feel so comfortable speaking up around you? Just because you claimed to not grade that way doesn’t mean they believed it. Likewise, just because a professor is liberal doesn’t mean he or she is going to grade according to a students’ views. :rolleyes:
“This is what Group X believes. This is what Group Y believes. How do you think Group X would interpret this story? What about Group Y?”
I spent so much time in college coming up with bullshit psychoanalytic deconstructions of interstitial media that my BS actually means Bullshit.
And to those that don’t think that pays off, I then made a very good living in corporate America doing IT strategy and planning. The IT end of the spectrum was amazed by by ability to write a bullshit proposal, followed by a series of bullshit powerpoints, connecting a series of events, analyzing and thinking “outside the box” - outearning most of the STEM grads.
Reminds me of a training I got in college when I was working as a writing tutor. The prof who headed the program told us of his experience as an English grad student in an exchange program with the engineering department, where they went in and wrote technical papers instead of litcrit papers.
The engineering profs were astonished at the intelligence of these literature study students. How could these new kids already be understanding engineering better than the grad students from the engineering department?
They weren’t understanding it better, of course. But they knew how to write, and elegant writing is such a powerful skill that the engineering profs initially found themselves bamboozled by it until they figured out what was going on.
No, it’s because most of this political indoctrination is coming from the Left. JROTC are not pro-Trump in the way that this teacher is pro-Marxist.
It would be fine if you could come up with the evidence that convinces you that they explicitly praise Trump. Since you are certain, you must have convincing evidence that this happens in the Edina school system.
Of course, if you don’t have any such evidence, then we know how much weight to give your other assertions.
Google, man. I was looking for articles about “JROTC instructor Republican,” but this keeps pulling up articles about instructors being arrested for sex with students or for choking students or for otherwise assaulting students. Maybe we should be so lucky that JROTC instructors would learn to use their words.
“It” being your claim about the instructor’s Marxist leanings? Yeah, I inferred that.
If you mean my assumption about some JROTC instructors? Uh, yeah, it wasn’t based on evidence. I figured that’d be obvious. But sure, take that victory: you could definitely use one right about now.
In fact, I’ll withdraw that claim entirely; I don’t have evidence for it.
There. See how easy it is to admit when you’re wrong?
Are you able to articulate what you think it means to be pro-Marxist, in the context of literary criticism? There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point.
