A teacher who needs some help
Hi yall, I am a eleventh grade summer school teacher, and I need someone to answer some questions or make me an answer key to questions of the book tale of two cities. I am too busy at school to do it so I am hoping someone would help..?! If anyone would like to help please let me know and I'll give you the questions.. thanks ahead of time, ~Mr. Anderson
Cheating, Maya and Plato's Noble Lie
I once did an entire Scarlet Letter assignment for one student, using
google.com to find the answers.
I did read the book 40 years ago... but.. that was not much help.
I answered all the questions in about 2 hours, using google and string
search. The student that I helped was full blooded native American
on a reservation. Analyzing the Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne was
something they found alien and daunting. They had grown up in an
environment of material and intellectual poverty. After a few help
sessions, they continued on their own in highschool without asking for
further help.
Even Jesus needed help carrying the cross. We all need help once in a
while. Was Jesus cheating when Simon of Cyrene helped carry the
cross? Sometimes, help means cheating, and sometimes it means
something else.
Is lying always bad? The midwives Shiprah and Puah lied to Pharoah
about the Jewish women being too lively, and giving birth before they
could arrive. These midwives told a "noble lie" to save lives, and it is
said that God rewarded them. When the Nazi officers ask us "have
you any Jews in your basement", do we tell a lie or do the truth?
Once upon a time, a young Buddhist monk had just taken his first
vows, not to lie, and not to cause harm to living beings. He was
walking in the forest, when suddenly a frightened rabbit runs by him
and jumps into the bushes. A moment later, hunters arrive, and ask
the monk "have you seen a rabbit?" If he tells them the truth, then
he breaks his vow not to cause harm to living beings, and if he does
not tell the truth, then he breaks his vow not to lie.
Perhaps the answer is to vow never to vow, and to renounce
renunciation.
Sartre warns us about in the first chapter of "Being and Nothingness" that We are condemned to be free, because the act of renouncing freedom demands and exercise of freedom as a prerequisite.
Many students do not realize how much they can do with search
engines, downloads, and string searches plus, things like Sparknotes.
At my age, it is not really "cheating" for me to read Sparknotes, but
rather a way for me to absorb a lot of knowledge that I could not
otherwise obtain (for lack of time and energy)
Such activity broadens my understanding in a rapid fashion and
broadens my foundation.
Sometimes, something like sparknotes will whet my appetite to read
the book itself.
Sometimes... what looks like cheating.... like when I wrote paper for a
student for whom English is a second language ... is really something
quite different.
They could NEVER have done that paper in the time alloted, and they
would have lost their place in the university, and perhaps been back
in the military or the rice fields,... or something even less desirable in
their totalitarian society.
In reality.... what I did for him was like priming a well with water... it
saved him, and he learned from it.
Last night, he had to write an essay, and I was on line, he said hello,
but did not ask for help.
Some young people just dont have the foggiest idea how to think
abstractly,.... or analyze a poem... or things like that...
Its like training wheels on a bike, thats not cheating... neither are
water wings for a novice swimmer... IF ultimatly they learn to swim
and cycle unaided
It all boils down to something in Socrates, in Plato's Dialogues, now
that I think about it...
Socrates had two very different nicknames.... one was Narke (Greek
for stingray, we get the word narcotic from it)...
Socrates would use refutation to STING people and numb them into
the motionlessness of APORIA (no way out, like checkmate)
whereby, like the slaveboy in the dialogue "Meno", they finally admit,
"Ala ma ton Dion O Sokrates, Egoge ouk oida" (by golly Socrates, I
JUST DONT KNOW)
Diotema, Socrates' female guru, taught him that "the Gods do not love
wisdom, because they possess it."
We only love and strive for that which we do not possess. Hence,
PHILO-Sophia (loving wisdom) becomes a continual process (dialectic)
rather than a final state, an achieved goal or arrived-at destination.
If you THINK you possess knowlege, then you will not seek, enquire....
We do not look for that which we assume that we already possess.
We do not question that which we assume that we thoroughly know
and understand.
Socrates' other nickname is GADFLY (who stings up the lethargic
horse of the state)....
When a student feels hopeless and helpless, THEN, Socrates uses
myth, to give them the illusion that they know something.
This illusion is sort of like the positive function of Maya in Hinduism,
and, this is sort of like the Noble Lie of the Republic.
In some ways,.... doing papers for people can be like the Noble Lie....
IF it ultimately gives them hope, and makes them self-sufficient
So, Socrates, and his dialectic method, was like a piano tuner....
tightening and loosening strings, until they "sound" just right...
which was the great insight of Siddhartha Gautama, leading him to
"the middle way"...
Siddhartha was on a river bank, on the verge of death from extreme
asceticism and fasting. Suddenly a boat floated by, with a master musician instructing his young apprentice on how to string a musical instrument. Siddhartha eavesdropped, and heard "Do not make the string too tight, or it will break. Neither make it too loose and slack, or it shall not sound."
Siddhartha suddenly realized "the middle way."
Sometimes, it is ok to eavesdrop.
By refutation, Socrates numbs those who presume to know...
by myth, Socrates enlivens those dead in dispair, who have lost hope
of learning
Education is a constant process of getting "tune ups" to stay in
harmony, on the middle way of the straight and narrow
Now, all this fits in with Plato's metaphor of Dialectic as a weavers
loom, with warp, woof, and a shuttle with runs back and forth
Which also fits in with the Jewish Talmudic notion of "pilpul", of
wisdom as the product of constant conjoining and separation
http://www.sichosinenglish.org/books...achayim/30.htm
"the goal is the dialectic give and take and the pilpul, to raise a
question and offer a resolution"
(pilpul:. a dialectic method of Talmudic study, consisting of. examining
all of the arguments pro and con )
I am currently helping a student in Bahrain to answer the question of
spiritual development in Silas Marner.
http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page050.htm
Looking at Silas Marner, the first pages stress his LOOM, and stress
that he seems suspicious to others, and , perhaps even seems
demonic. Science and philosophy appear demonic to primitive
Christianity.
Those same first pages of Silas Marner also mention the winnowing
fan and the threshing floor.
The loom and weaving is philosophy, dialectic, connoting the
philosophers on the hill of Mars, while the winnowing fan and the
threshing floor is the Christian image of the New Testament.
George Eliot, prior to writing Silas Marner, had translated Feurbach, a theologian with very Humanist leanings... and she had rejected traditional Christianity
Stop and think. The great opposition between Philosophy and Faith
symbolized by the loom, weaving, for dialect (not to mention
dialectical materialism) vs. the Christian images of winnowing fan,
threshing floor, separating the goats from the lambs, the wheat from
the chaff, wheat from the tares. These are powerful images and
symbols.
The manufacturing and synthesis of science and philosophy is transformational and very different from the winnowing and harvesting of a final judgment.