Tag: empathy
Full and Reverberating
My room has always been a mess. Today, when I say “mess,” I mean I have a couple piles of books and some empty spaces on a shelf—or, I have a shelf completely filled and an overflow collected on my bedroom floor. There are stacks of papers on my bookshelf, on my nightstand, on my
Things you think about when you’re in the ICU holding your dad’s hand and he’s still under anesthesia from open heart surgery but he opens his eyes for the first time
Note: When I agreed to write for Metathesis this month I planned on starting off with something strident, political, and sharp. I had this series all planned out about football and fascism, “third way” pro-lifers, and Stardew Valley in the age of Trump. Maybe I’ll revisit these before months’ end, but I did not count on
Empathy and the Danger(s) Disengagement
For the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping a list. Admittedly, it’s not an original concept, being a mental exercise adapted from one of many optimistic Pinterest boards encouraging meditative mindfulness and gratitude in the upcoming New Year. Instead of coming up with a soon-to-be neglected resolution, this effort at self-improvement
Empathy and Education: Fight or Flight
“A good teacher will lead the horse to water; an excellent teacher will make the horse thirsty first.” – Mario Cortes Inside the academic classroom, we instructors face a number of pedagogical challenges, ranging from constant apprehension regarding proper time management, to confusion over how to best incorporate new media technologies in diverse lesson plans.
Empathy and Education: The Double Burden (Part II)
In the numerous fields comprising that artistic and cultural field we call “the humanities,” we who self-identify as scholars must constantly be on the defense regarding our own choice of profession. An increasingly corporatized world sees banks encouraging ballerinas and actors to become engineers and botanists instead, and federal agencies such as the CBO actively
Empathy and Education: The Double Burden (Part 1)
A couple of weeks ago, toward the end of our class’s unit on “Thrills, Sensations, and the Ethics of Nonfiction,” I assigned my students the University of Chicago’s Welcome Letter to the Class of 2020 alongside Sara Ahmed’s thought-provoking “Against Students” (June 2015). The former, a document separately decried or praised as patronizing and oppressive