I will be posting tidbits from my grad school reading here. Much of the recent stuff doesn't relate directly to teaching; it relates to humanity and learning. The chapter mentioned below by Curran was particularly good.
The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become - and such lucidity is a form of joy.
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
The preservation of the self-image is the first law of psychological survival. Therefore, in any social encounter each person exposes for public scrutiny and public testing - and possibly for intolerable undermining - the one thing he needs most, which is the self-perception that he has so laboriously fashioned. This mean that the stakes in any social encounter are incredibly high. No such encounter, therefore, can be merely routine.
- Earl Stevick, "A View of the Learner" (emphasis added)
This is a common major or minor tragedy of the human condition: two people meet each other, both seeking to be understood, and neither of them are able or willing to make the effort to understand. This could be like two performers in a circus trapeze act - both expecting to be caught and no one catching. One can almost feel the pain as they crash into one another after both have leaped off the trapeze.
(...)
Consequently understanding between people cannot be presumed, even though it is a basic need of us all. That is why it is necessarily an acquired skill. To assume it, as many do, is to mislead oneself. In the assumption, one can be in the narcissistic bind of presuming one is a very "understanding" person when one has, in reality, never left oneself and one's own world. Others seldom tell us this even when everyone around us knows it. We can therefore remain in a self-deception trap.
- Charles Curran, Understanding: An Essential Ingredient in Human Belonging (emphasis added)
