I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.
Interpretation
As a teacher, one should prioritize the well-being of students and avoid causing them harm in their learning process.
In this quote, Chang-Rae Lee emphasizes the responsibility of teachers in nurturing students' growth without inflicting harm. Similar to the medical profession's commitment to 'do no harm,' educators should create a supportive and safe environment that fosters learning, creativity, and self-expression, thus highlighting the moral imperative to protect their students emotionally and intellectually.
In practice
During a parent-teacher conference, to explain my approach to fostering positive learning environments.
And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can't help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone's so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.
We read and remember certain writers because they offer distinctive voices and perspectives, because they've given themselves over completely and passionately to their obsessions while vigorously ignoring everything else.
I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.
We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.
For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it’s when we’re closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we’ll tread through any flame.
Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.
all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.
Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.
I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously.
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.
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