Comment by matwood
6 years ago
I appreciate the classics, but I would always get in trouble in school for asking how the teacher knew this is what the author meant. Even before I knew what a skeptic was, I was a skeptic. :)
I also was not being a smart ass. Many authors have additional writings that add color to the writing being studied.
> I also was not being a smart ass.
It really bothers me that you even have to clarify something like this. Students should be skeptical of what they're being told. That doesn't make a student a smart ass - it makes them a critical thinker. Teachers who take offense when their "authority" is innocently questioned are doing a massive disservice to their students.
There's two types of people who ask the questions
1) Those that want a response that they can consider. These are critical thinkers.
2) Those that don't care what the response is. These are smart asses.
In schools the latter are far more common, and far more likely to speak out
Note that the difference is not necessarily obvious. I was once in several classes with a guy who would ask questions that were just slightly off-topic and odd---possibly about differing interpretations, possibly just trying to completely derail the class. I still don't know which of the two cases was right. I do know he managed to drag the class so that we missed rather a lot.
AI classes, by the way.
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To be fair, I have been guilty of being a smart ass, and I can totally imagine other people being one when confronted to bullshit.
It's not a productive reaction, and you grow out of it, but it's not a surprising one.
I agree. Plus the classics are too often talked about like this one homogeneous corpus.
But they span on over 2500 years, with huge objective, quality and target audience differences.
I can appreciate Seneca and at the same time don't give much credit to Kant. You could reflect deep into To kill a Mockingbird and see Flaubert as dry and over hyped. And you should be able to say that in class without being threaten with a bad grade. Even if you were hypothetically wrong, if such an absolute is possible in this field.