This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. He hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.
I want to share something for those of you who are teaching and want your conservative students to be more open-minded to liberal ideas that you’re presenting.
I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative town, and like most conservative kids, had been told that colleges were hotbeds of liberalism, so I was already defensive politically when I started college. My first semester or two I was really skeptical of everything political that my professors presented me with.
And then I took a women’s studies course (required at my college). And on the first day, the professor said,
“You don’t have to be a feminist. There are days when I’m not a feminist. But we’re going to discuss feminist ideas in this class, and you might find that you agree with some of them and disagree with others, and that’s fine.”
And that took the pressure off. By telling me that I didn’t HAVE to be a feminist, that I didn’t HAVE to agree, that professor started me on the road to becoming a feminist. I particularly remember her giving us information about what a huge percentage of the housework was still done by women, even in [hetero] couples where both the man and woman worked outside the home. And after that I remember saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I can see where they’re coming from.”
Within 5 years, I was claiming the term and coming out to my mom as a feminist.
So when I taught college writing, I assigned politically liberal essays to my students, many of whom came from conservative backgrounds. And before they read the first one, I would say,
“The reading for the next class–I want you to know that you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to agree with anything that your professors teach you in college. But the point of a college education is to have your mind opened to other points of view. So you’re not required to agree, but you are required to approach the reading with an open mind. You might find that you agree with some things the author says and disagree with others. And that’s cool! We WANT you to use your critical thinking and decide for yourself what you think about things! But to do that, you need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be open-minded to what they have to say.”
And I have to say, it worked really well for me! I remember in particular that after I assigned the essay “Black Men and Public Space”, one of my students wrote in her reading reflection,
“I was taught in school that racism in America ended with Martin Luther King. I am appalled to discover that this is not true.”
Priming your students to be open-minded, while also encouraging them to use critical thinking, can help to break down some of the automatic defenses against new ideas that students are often taught. Approaching your students’ comments during discussion with an open-minded view yourself, validating their experiences while also making gentle counterarguments, can do a lot as well.
Trump’s unidentified secret police force was not prepared to meet this guy.
He said in an interview that he shouldn’t have been surprised that they would have no respect for vets when they are gassing moms
Honorary Antifa Supersolider
In case you, a U.S. voter, were feeling iffy about voting for Kamala Harris, here’s a reminder of the shit that went down under Trump…
Yeah, remember when his administration SENT UNMARKED PARAMILITARY FORCES into cities to quell BLM protests? Not “riot police” – tactical, militarized units with identifying tags and numbers deliberately removed or obscured.
Oh shit…. you probably forgot about that, didn’t you? There was so much going on in 2020, it’s natural to block out stuff, but if you have the power and the privilege of voting in this year’s elections don’t you DARE allow this man back in office, especially when he is CURRENTLY saying stuff like this:
In case you were a kid in 2020 and protected from seeing what happened
You need to know what’s at stake here. This stuff? was a TEST RUN. Look up everything that happened those years. Everything you can find from 2016 and Standing Rock to 2020 and Black Lives Matter and the Riots and then look up Jan 6 and the attempted coup on our government.
Trump’s unidentified secret police force was not prepared to meet this guy.
He said in an interview that he shouldn’t have been surprised that they would have no respect for vets when they are gassing moms
Honorary Antifa Supersolider
In case you, a U.S. voter, were feeling iffy about voting for Kamala Harris, here’s a reminder of the shit that went down under Trump…
Yeah, remember when his administration SENT UNMARKED PARAMILITARY FORCES into cities to quell BLM protests? Not “riot police” – tactical, militarized units with identifying tags and numbers deliberately removed or obscured.
Oh shit…. you probably forgot about that, didn’t you? There was so much going on in 2020, it’s natural to block out stuff, but if you have the power and the privilege of voting in this year’s elections don’t you DARE allow this man back in office, especially when he is CURRENTLY saying stuff like this:
In case you were a kid in 2020 and protected from seeing what happened
You need to know what’s at stake here. This stuff? was a TEST RUN. Look up everything that happened those years. Everything you can find from 2016 and Standing Rock to 2020 and Black Lives Matter and the Riots and then look up Jan 6 and the attempted coup on our government.
purity culture ruins people’s ability to engage with works that deal with serious issues and it’s disheartening to see people entirely miss the point of a work because they are guided by a knee jerk reaction towards disgust and I need to ramble
so, I’m reading a book called Jawbone by Monica Ojeda and it’s a very interesting horror novel that centers around puberty and teen girls and their relationships to their mothers. One of the bigger themes in the book is the idea of shame revolving around sexual development. One of the main characters is a young lesbian who is developing feelings for her best friend and has a mother who is incredibly homophobic and disapproving and in part of the book there’s a scene where this character talks about her mother catching her masturbating and the way that she is disgusted by her daughter and kind of this horror around being viewed as having lost your innocence from experiencing something that is common and should be mundane. sexual development is seen as a horrific and sinful action and that causes this character trauma through the rest of the book surrounding the way that her mother looks at her and how her mother is going to react when she finds out that she’s gay it’s a book that deals with a lot of topics around sexual shame. For example, another character is so terrified of the sin of masturbation that she keeps herself from masturbating by imagining being raped by men in her family who she cares about because it disgusts her and keeps her from achieving sexual arousal. the book itself shows that the action of the character masturbating when she’s six years old is an innocent action. It’s one that comes from curiousity and just what happens when you have a body. The book is very clear that the act is being sexualized by the adults around her and their reactions feel violating.
So it is infuriating to then go from reading this book to trying to read reviews of this book and finding that the first review on Goodreads is a one star review that just says “in this book a six-year-old masturbates 🤮” participating in the same disgust with the natural sexual development of young girls that the book itself tries to depict as a horrifying and violating way to view children and puberty
Yet another example of why context and reading comprehension is important. Intention matters
amhrancas 