With Karen Finley, February 12-13, 2012.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Lou Reed at the Writers House
Video now available of Lou Reed at the Writers House the other night: link. You can also download an mp3 audio version of the same program: link.
Friday, February 03, 2012
learning, not teaching
A former student, pondering a teaching career, asks me a few questions, and I offer short answers.
What do you think is the purpose of education?
Not to teach but to enable learning. That will sometimes entail teaching, but mostly will entail other modes.
What do you think is important to teach?
Not important to teach, but important to be part of organizations dedicated to enabling learning. The reasons for that are obvious. Learners often (although not always) benefit from guidance when they deal with materials and with problems new to them. They also benefit from guidance when the environment (outside schools--e.g. family, wartorn or poverty-stricken communities, etc.) is not otherwise conducive to thought.
What strategies or methods do you think are effective?
Leading discussions of problems and materials is effective. Lecturing is not.
What do you think is the purpose of education?
Not to teach but to enable learning. That will sometimes entail teaching, but mostly will entail other modes.
What do you think is important to teach?
Not important to teach, but important to be part of organizations dedicated to enabling learning. The reasons for that are obvious. Learners often (although not always) benefit from guidance when they deal with materials and with problems new to them. They also benefit from guidance when the environment (outside schools--e.g. family, wartorn or poverty-stricken communities, etc.) is not otherwise conducive to thought.
What strategies or methods do you think are effective?
Leading discussions of problems and materials is effective. Lecturing is not.
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"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
