¡Es posible!
My youngest brother – on the left, in the striped shirt and the glasses – and some friends from here went to San Francisco! Here they are in the airport.
I always try to teach my students that it is possible to do things. I was tagged for this teaching meme by Lumpenprofessoriat and these are the rules:
+Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
+Give your picture a short title.
+Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”
+Link back to this blog entry.
I am honored to have been tagged, and I am supposed to tag five more people, but with me all memes are self-tagging – although I’d be curious to hear from Amorphous Funk. I think I’ll tag Momo, too, and AROOO even though she does not yet teach.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I put mine up, and found the Flickr pool and Google search string, if you want to browse.
Oh, this will be fun! Thanks for this challenge at a time when I definitely need it (I’m not being sarcastic 🙂
Now we just have to get AROOO to do it!
http://amfunknola.blogspot.com/2008/05/meme-passion-quilt.html
Professor Zero, look for mine on Tuesday!
Peace,
Geoffrey
O good! And: hi Geoffrey!
I will have to think about what picture represents what I would want students to learn. I’m not sure myself. I do not after working with a few GED women, that many worry about outside variables, real and perceived too much. To the point of distraction. I do not speak of the type like worrying about safety or security but the other crap. I guess one could say categories, stereotyping, etc. I look at my brothers and my mother and my sister and several of my nieces and nephews and other people I know I think if I worried about the boxes that people tried to put me I would have never finished college. The box construction does not just come from one direction. I don’t know what course, what moment in life that I said no more boxes but I know it happened, somewhere. Of course I still studies boxes as a collective and I think I have perfected compartmentalisation and I do in fact utilise it when needed, however, to be trapped, to use the box as a guide as something that limits my personal power just baffles me. I was talking to a woman studying for her GED so she can go into a nursing program. She told me that when she made good grades in school she had to make bad grades in school because of the following pressure she received after making a good grade. It became so severe and confusing that it was easier to drop out of school. Then I talked to another woman, a little older, late twenties who is doing very well, she will get her GED once the scores come back (she took it today as matter of fact) and she tells me how she gets hung up on other people and what they are doing and cannot understand why they are not in school. Saying it is privilege or a luxury is not quite the concept, but I don’t know what word to apply to it. I’ve never known this distraction in the name of distraction. I’ve known distraction from school because I did not have the money, or did not have a place to live, etc, but being distracted because of others is something I have not grasped. It’s like who is they? Tell they to STFU!
“…many worry about outside variables, real and perceived too much. To the point of distraction. I do not speak of the type like worrying about safety or security but the other crap. I guess one could say categories, stereotyping, etc. I look at my brothers and my mother and my sister and several of my nieces and nephews and other people I know I think if I worried about the boxes that people tried to put me I would have never finished college.”
THIS is f***ing brilliant – it is what stops my post GED students, many of whom are perfectly smart and all, but who basically insist on failing for this reason. Now I understand it. You should write about this.
I’ve got the 1980’s privileged class version of this, I think. Namely: know what sexist things they will do to you and learn to defend against them, but lose sight of the fact that these are sexist things you should not have to put up with … that your actual self is not these projections. Now, at this moment, I understand it.
I was always envious of Black faculty who came from families with strong churches and things like that because they, despite having to deal with all the stress of discrimination and so on, at least saw it for what it was and did not accept the version of them that was being mirrored at them by the institution. How do they do that, I wondered … how can I learn to do it? The problem was that I was not sure what it was, but it was these ‘boxes’, as you say.
I was carefully warned and trained to defend against the boxes – too much, I think, because I always took the boxes so seriously. It was implied, but not really emphasized, that the boxes themselves were wrong.
Anyway that’s my story but the story of many of my students is that of your GED women. I’ve learned a lot from this comment already and I am sure I’ll learn more from whatever you decide to post, if you do…
LOL! My last two long comments on your blog have been horrific. I really need to edit. I’m always in such a hurry, afraid that my thoughts will escape before I get them down in black and white. Sorry.
“afraid that my thoughts will escape before I get them down in black and white”
Always better to write fast so that this doesn’t happen, rather than write slowly and perfectly. Those comments weren’t horrific – they were great!
I love looking at the faces in the “¡Es posible!” photo–and I love that, through you, I got tagged by Joanna–so thanks for both those things.
Your photo reminds me of the best part of a movie I didn’t much care for, “Love, Actually”: at the end came a whole wonderful collage of real videos of people greeting each other at an airport–Heathrow, I think.
The director said they hid with the camera, and when they got something they liked, they popped out and asked for permission to use it.
I would have preferred to see 90 minutes of that rather than their actual story, which offered very sanitized and limited examples of “love.”