[NIFL-WOMENLIT:1028] Re: Teach!

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Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 22:53:30 EDT


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Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:1028] Re: Teach!
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OK, Jenny, now I've gone back to your note.  Here is a big generalization, it 
has to do with "normal."  Survivors may not recognize "normal." I know you 
know this, but I wanted to give an example, of course I could give you a 
hundred examples from my own life, I'll just give one to show how out of 
whack we can be sometimes.  Today I was trying on winter coats.  At one 
point, I asked something like, "Can I try this one on?"  And I caught myself 
and thought Holy Toledo, there it is!  Because I was in the store to buy, and 
the saleslady was there to sell, and I was asking if it was all right to try 
on a piece of merchandise.  It was like I was asking an adult if it was all 
right to do something, and I was a kid, and that wasn't the situation at all.

Survivors really need teachers to act "real" with them.  Jenny, you cite an 
incident in your book that is very telling, it is about a group of 
students--maybe yours--who went out together to take pictures of themselves 
in a photo booth in a park, and what fun they had doing something that seemed 
so ordinary.  "Ordinary" to a person who is caught in violence, is more 
violence.  If one of your teaching goals is to integrate students into the 
outside world, then going to the park and taking pictures and writing about 
it may be part of that socialization--how "other people,"  "ordinary" people, 
live.

It's a large topic, and I admire the way you have represented yourself and 
your ideas on the list, and opened up the conversation in a very discursive 
way so as many who wanted to could join in.  Come back soon!

Andrea



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