Saturday, January 17, 2004 :::
 
In depressing coonfirmation of a question posed below, this morning's Financial Times carries a quote from a Shi'ite cleric, an assistant to the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, indicating that, ineed, their tradtional "separation of state and religion" does not mean what it means in the US. Yes, we should have known that before we went in.

Correction: In his review of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, A Mind That Suits bemoaned the phrase "I am no man" as being a bow to contemporary sensibilities. And in the way it was altered and in the way it was played--as a declaration of liberation--it was, in keeping with the filimmaker's inability to capture certain of the darker elements of the book. The woman who says "I am no living man" is intoning what Tolkein likes to call a "fell doom," not bragging. But that is like complaining about the color of a button in a Rembrandt portrait: the movie is magnificent.

And unless it is not obvious from last night's post, A Mind That Suits would like to point out that his success as a teacher of boys, in particular, (as opposed to undifferentiated "young people") in part lies in the fact that he thinks their undeniable boneheadedness to be hysterically funny, most of the time. That may in part be why he has a fairly sure hand at discipline--his funny bone prevents him from boiling over. It does make it hard sometimes to yell while suppressing laughter, but that just goes with the territory.

And that may also point to why so much of what passes for pedagogy these days is so anti-boy and so ineffective: if you take everything as a serious problem that needs correction, the boys just turn surly and figure their tearchers are simply against them. And they may be right.

Have a good one.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:23 AM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.