I don't know why I was thinking of this quote by a well-known Spanish scholar, one José-Carlos Mainer; probably because I was just in Spain, and was discussing with my students about how instruction in literature has to be dialogic. Critical thinking only develops through dialogue, never just through a one-sided format:
"Mire: el saber es jerárquico; sencillamente, yo sé más que mis alumnos, ¿por qué debo discutir el temario con ellos?"
[Look: knowledge is hierarchical; simply put, I know more than my students. Why should I discuss / debate the material with them?].
I remembered enough of the quote to be able to find it on google, because when I first read it it made my heart sink. I didn't remember the word "temario." But anyone who thinks of his subject matter as a "temario" is a cretin.
Do I know more than my students? Yes. But how can they ever learn to think if I have that attitude? Teaching is about catching them in the act of generating an idea and then pointing out to them that they are thinking.
3 comments:
Fascinating. I took a class from him once and he didn't seem like this. We read Facundo, La voragine, Residencia en la tierra and El reino de este mundo. Maybe it was that these weren't things he wrote on. The books were wild and nutty and made a major impression on me.
Maybe his actual practice is different from what he says he does. That is good to know. I still find the attitude expressed repugnant.
Yes, the attitude is ridiculous. It's hard to tell, he was an old-fashioned kind of guy and as I remember it was the books that carried the course. It's interesting to think back on. We also read Darío and a bunch of other modernistas, that were cool and weird.
At the time I was interested that someone of his aspecto had come up with this list. I was very caught up in this Salvador Espriu project that I was writing in Catalan and Mainer's course was what I was doing on the side, relaxing and reading in a language I actually knew and could see intertexts in.
(Gosh. I had just turned 19, but am just realizing now how much I had already read. And I was paying more attention to the books than to him, so didn't realize he probably did think of the course as a temario. But man, I really need to channel the person I was becoming then, I didn't know it but I see I was unusual and cool, and perhaps therefore escaped whatever weird categorizations he might have otherwise put on students.)
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