I think one of my students might be a Nazi

it's not so much the Mein Kampf mention as it is the fact that he just got up and left that makes me think he doesn't care. Try to engage him on a serious level after class and ask him what's up.

Not saying this is a bad thing, but just that its interesting and worthy of discussion.

"'Cuz the damn Jews kept me out of Harvard!"

What other tendencies is he showing? Not that the swastika and wiseass comment isn't bad enough, but is there anything else about him that concerns you? If so, can you talk to your Principal about him?

(dry tone) With open minds like that, can't imagine why you didn't want to continue teaching, Ned.

A bullet-proof vest would have been on my shopping list from then on.

Thus the involvement of the police. (Short answer -- he was not on any 'wanted' list.)

Believe it or not, this was not as bad as the student who I had to accept due to a specific command about him being on academic probation, him struggling with the course throughout the quarter and doing little work even though I did my best to take a special interest in his case, and finally letting my frustrations loose in a personal conference by flatly telling him that his drafts were nothing but disconnected notes and he was not meeting proper academic standards in order to pass. His response was to quietly hand over a slew of further notes which he said would 'explain his situation' or something like that. I didn't bother looking at them until a couple of days later...only to be confronted with a series of messages from school psychiatrists and dorm managers (to HIM, I should note, not to me -- he was giving me his own personal case file) laden with specific warnings and diagnoses about his fragile mental state and his past attempts at/claims about suicide.

The next 24 hours were somewhat distracting, especially when said dorm manager couldn't find him and didn't know where he was.

Upshot there: he WAS alive, he ended up giving me a formal face to face apology, and I'm guessing had to drop out of school. Hope he found the help he needed, but that was not something which an underpaid TA really needed to deal with.

Today, watching Eyes on the Prize, we were watching Bull Cannon's men fire hose and beat black children and a kid asked, in complete seriousness, "Are those Nazis?"

I couldn't form an answer. . .

my post should have said "'Bull' Connor" duh.

Hey now, Sam, remember I was the one already a bit cynical about teaching when you got the job. ;-)

Unbelievable. In my original x-post I was going to say almost the same thing, but I had to modify it to this post so everyone wouldn't think I was parroting Alex.

I don't think "silencing discourse" was the goal of Achebe.

Mein Kampf was the major literary work of a man many would say was the most evil person of the 20th century, and the politics it espouses (I think, I've not read it) lead to the Nazi party, World War 2, genocide and the death of millions.

Surely that makes it 'important'!

anything. In this week's class we were talking about post-colonialism and the literary canon--In order to get inot a discussion of what the canon is and its importance, I asked the class to name some supposedly "important" works (my point was

(as opposed to the non-indoctrinating teaching of hearth home kinder kuche kirche family values of tradition, right? yeah coz the idea that teaching comes with ideology is totally modern and has nothing to do with say leading kids in the pledge of allegiance to god every day, huh, huh?)

& for fucks sake mei, they were talking about the *literary* canon and i guess maybe the turner diaries count (but they're not canonized yet thank fucking christ) but unless you wanna claim "mein kampf" was a work of speculative fiction you got some 'splainin to do!

anyway cybele i'd try to put him on the spot in future discussions where you suspect that erm, nazism, may lead him to espouse weird viewpoints his fellow students wouldn't cotton to well to and see if you can let his peers take care of him?

"fucking close minded commie liberal pinko reds trying to indoctrinate our kids with a hatred of the holocoust -- whatever happened to the days of free expression i tell you what!"

Is all literature fiction? I honestly didn't know that.
Are things like The Ilyad etc. fiction? Are they literature?

I never said anything of the sort, in fact I said most people would say Hitler was the most evil person of the 20th century!

Pay attention!

do you think he is a nazi or attention seeking? you could shout troll and suggset ilx?

parent-talking - might not be good - because the parents might be nazis?

This is all so weird because I can't imagine some kid really being a nazi, do you think he's just trying to shock? or are there actually neo-nazi groups in the area?

But if you can't imagine some kid really being a nazi then you need to wake up. Neo-nazism is on the rise.

Neo-nazism on the rise? Er.. where do you live? I'm on a left-liberal American university campus in New England, I don't see anything like that happening. Before that I was in Washington DC, not a hotbed either. So it is really hard for me to imagine, I'm not kidding.

That's my point cybele, post-colonialism is definitely about inclusivity but seems to have a knock on effect re certain texts in particular.

(xp actually)

A.R.E. Haitians

Cybele - surely this is the sort of thing you should take up with your superiors (assuming you're not head of faculty or whatever)? I mean, it's an incredibly thorny issue even if you're not professionally involved in it and the last thing you want is a complaint from another student saying you're turning a blind eye to him.

No, mei, you said a man "many would say was the...."

and if you wanna argue for mein kampf (which you haven't read you say anyway) as a literary work, feel free to TRY but good frikin luck. its bad enough when ppl. try to argue for "the fountainhead" as one!

well, yes and no. at the point where 'the canon' gets put into practice, college curricula, this means profs skip over congreve, say, to get to ntozake shange. i don't have a problem with this. if you conceive of the total amount of attention (here i mean everyone everywhere) given to words as a constant, broadening the scope of what gets a look means something that was there gets dropped. there's only so much time.

there's a lot i want to say abt fascism whenever it comes up, incl here, but it would just be me trying to paraphrase hannah arendt. so go read her mei, keith, and cybele's student, asap!

This means that post-colonial discourse is exactly the same as all other academic disputes with the canon. Modernist formalism was primarily interested in language use and emphasises those writers, artists, etc who exhibited these tendencies; changing the canon was a side-effect of that. Feminism questioned the content, form and social relations of literature and art; changing the canon was a side-effect of that. Etc etc.

"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan....

"The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly."

Cybele, in this light it seems that what you are doing already is quite beautiful: you are trying to weigh and ponder the rights of different people.

"Don't be Nazi's everybody, there's Jews around"

I wonder if anything came of this.

hmm

Nobody suggested inviting a holocaust survivor to class to tell his or her tale?

What if you suspect someone you know is a...Parrothead?
-- latebloomer (latebloomer), Monday, March 1, 2004 3:27 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

lol