Skip to main content

Teaching Moment

One night, walking with Gabriella and Cathy from the seminary to the Casa Valdese, the talk turned to the relationship of the students to the teachers of the class. Gabriella had heard through the grapevine that some of the students were complaining about the accents of some of the guest and Italian teachers, and that the lectures were hard to understand and follow.

At the time, this seemed incredibly ungracious and insensitive, and Gabriella was understandably upset. "I wish that they had the courage to say that to my face. I would have something to say to them!" she said.

At the end of the class, one of the students raised exactly this point during our group evaluation session. We were all sitting in a large circle in the Facolta's common room, having just filled out written evaluations. We were taking some time before the closing banquet to reflect and share thoughts, feedback, and experiences, and one of the students in the course raised up that it had been a challenge for her to understand the accented English in which some of our professors lectured to us.

I was expecting ...fireworks? Anger? Bottled frustration to be vented? I couldn't have been further off the mark. Gabriella hadn't been looking for a confrontation in our earlier conversation, but rather for an opening into dialogue with that student or other students that were having the same thoughts.

This was a powerful lesson for me. Where I had anticipated outrage, there was understanding. Where I had expected upset, there was love. There was no anger in Gabriella's voice, no frustration, only a calm dialogue about the importance of being flexible in terms of the professors and gracious in light of the gift they were giving us by speaking in our native tongue instead of theirs.

The moment quickly ended, and the conversation moved on to other matters. But that brief window of time stuck with me as a powerful example of how to interrupt a conversation in a positive and constructive way. This was one of my most profound learning experiences on the trip.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...
13 comments
Read more

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suspicious? What month is it?

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government . The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish , and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency . One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby , late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins ) "As the pattern becomes more complex , it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe, ...
4 comments
Read more