On Plurk these last few days the class has been complaining about the student who joined us out of the blue on Friday, May 1st. Her name is Eli and just like Shane, I went to High School with her. She is a different kind of person, very intelligent and bright, but I will admit that she interrupts a lot and it gets her on peoples nerves most of the time. The conversation about her on Plurk makes me angry because none of you, with the acceptation of Shane, have ever met Eli. You don’t know the type of person she is. She is a very intellegent person but none of that matters because you are pissed at her for interrupting you once, maybe twice during our class.
As a class, we should NOT be calling her a bitch here on Plurk. I mean how old are you guys? As far as I know we have all graduated from high school and as far as I am concerned the name-calling should have been left behind in the halls of our high schools. We are in college now, it is time to grow up and start using more mature language. Otherwise you just look like dumb high schoolers.
She interrupted many of us when we were still talking and that gets annoying, she was questioning many of the things we were saying and that made us very uncomfortable. But that is no reason to start calling her a bitch. Part of the reason that you got so frustrated with her is simply because she was from outside the classroom, looking in on the very different style of learning we have in Nanotexts and she was questioning us. She didn’t understand why so many people had their heads buried in their laptops while we were watching the various films. She has some very different ideas than many of us because she is very much in to science. I for one think it might be cool to have her back in class again. (Maybe after someone tells her about our not interrupting each other rule so as to not have a repeat of last Friday.) It is always nice to get a different perspective every once in a while.
I couldn't agree with you more on this--the name calling is nonsesical.
ReplyDeleteHowever if people are going to come into the class they should be at least familiar with the material underdiscussion so that the sorts of points that we are making.
Additionally if anyone comes into class and wants to be a participant they need to contextualize themselves or even introduce themselves--we are working as parts of a larger community--superorganism even. So if some behave like warrior ants to what they percieve as an intruder there are reasons--this does not make these actions acceptable but perhaps allows for a larger context for us to understand why they happened so that we can prevent them from happening in the future.
Informing guests of the rules of the classroom are the responsibilities of whomever invited her to visit the class. This is I feel a universal understanding.
So I would say & I feel that I am within my rights in making this claim that much of the blame for what happened lies not with her but with whoever invited her into the classroom.
ReplyDeleteIf we're going to compare the class to a sort of organism, why not go with the metaphor of an immune response. Sure, it may have been rude of Eli to interrupt and not be completely in terms with the way the class is run, but I personally found her input stimulating.
ReplyDeleteIf you completely isolate a biological system, say our class, and then randomly introduce foreign bodies, you kind of have to expect a certain level of chaos to accompany that introduction. Exactly like what happens when those little black critters get in through the little boy's nose (mouth? I don't remember).
My point here is that I don't think Eli served so much as an invader as she did a vaccine. You can't expect the incoming bodies to follow the same routine and must adapt accordingly until they are gone.