"My students had such a fierce passion and thirst for learning the material. The continuous stream of questions during classes was a testament to their refusal to be satisfied by mere knowledge and to their incomparable commitment to achieve true understanding."
Should be everyone's default position.
"If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become
scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change
whom we want to see out in our society."
Bernard Stiegler's story has always fascinated me [1]:
"In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)."
So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2])
Before all of that:
"Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1]
Note: The article is about the high-school math ("College Algebra" and "Finite Math", material covered in "Algebra II" and "Precalculus" in high school) that is taught in remedial classes in community colleges.
From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian, another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers.
"Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful to these students.
Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder courses.
It's probably the thinking in your antepenultimate paragraph reinforcing itself. Instead, abstract skills can offer a gateway to the application of more rigid rules, so to speak, because it shows that they are strong, but the applicability is flexible.
Would make sense to teach also the probability theory and, maybe, Python coding basics. To give them tools they can use after or even in the prison itself (in some cases).
I kind of understand it. From my experiences growing up around relatively hard stuff (first saw guns for sale in a backpack in 9th grade science class. This was my closest friend at the time, and didn't seem weird to me at all.)
Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister.
It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face.
So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.
Not to be even more pessimistic but you will find this happen everywhere you give humans authority over each other without full oversight.
I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis").
In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).
You could imagine circumstances where the officers outlook was justified or not justified. I think judging them based on only this off hand remark about someone's perception of them is not merited.
For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored.
In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
read "deserve" in any sense that is active in more than the grammatic sense. Maybe they thought the inmates didn't want to, or weren't able to learn. More likely, we think the wardens thought the inmates were criminals.
[+] [-] gigama|6 years ago|reply
Should be everyone's default position.
"If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often they will surprise you and even become scholars. They will become inspiring agents of change whom we want to see out in our society."
An A+ for Annie Raymond.
[+] [-] globuous|6 years ago|reply
"In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)."
So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2])
Before all of that:
"Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1]
I find this so inspiring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM
[+] [-] DMac87|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply
From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian, another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers.
"Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful to these students.
Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder courses.
[+] [-] posterboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
What a depressing outlook to have for someone who has authority over these people.
[+] [-] flattone|6 years ago|reply
Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister.
It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face.
So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.
[+] [-] hogFeast|6 years ago|reply
I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis").
In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).
[+] [-] ALittleLight|6 years ago|reply
For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored.
In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?
[+] [-] posterboy|6 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I deserve to know the difference.
[+] [-] domnomnom|6 years ago|reply
¯\_(ツ)_/¯