Students who considered themselves socialists were not so much interested in the poor as they were desirous of leading the poor, of being their guides and saviors. It was just this paternalism toward the poor that the vision of solidarity I had learned in religious settings was meant to challenge. From a spiritual perspective, the poor were there to guide and lead the rest of us by example if not by outright action and testimony. As a student I read Marx, Gramsci, and a host of other male thinkers on the subject of class. These works provided theoretical paradigms but rarely offered tools for confronting the complexity of class in daily life.
[…]
[W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it.
— bell hooks, where we stand: Class Matters, chapter 4 (via snailfan)
Whimsy is not a quality we usually associate with computer programs.
—
Jacob Harris, describing the Haiku NY Times Tumblr (via derekg)
One last note on this: I’m entirely unsurprised that a description of whimsical software comes from New York, not San Francisco. The other place I’ve seen people talking about whimsy is London, usually from people connected to the BERG/RIG axis.
SF needs to be more whimsical.
(via blech)
On the one hand, this is more or less why I had to get out of SF in 1997. On the other, Jacob lives in DC these days.Notational: Design Thinking for Educators
What kind of changes can happen in schools
when teachers realize they’re designers?Last summer Design Thinking for Educators, a collaboration between IDEO, Edutopia, and New York’s Riverdale Country Day School, offered a free toolkit and online class to teach…
Looks interesting, though lately I’m incredibly suspicious of almost any resources for teachers that don’t acknowledge that most classrooms have an NCLB iron chained to their legs and no amount of awesome curriculum material will free class time for much more than test prep.
Grateful
for fear and fearlessness, Baila and Gina (who are right with me), Emani (who will get there) and Vena (who doesn’t mean to hold me accountable, but does)
Big little changes coming to one little corner(stone) of my world; thinking about how to approach them with equanimity and selfishness. Learning to do what is best for me. Practice.
