On her book “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College
Cover Interview of September 04, 2017
A close-up
I have to confess that I like this book. I poured my heart
and soul into each page. I lived with the ideas and the sentences and the
chunks for years. But some of my children are more beloved than others. (And
yes, like all writers, I’ve learned to “kill my darlings.” There
is a lot that has been excised.) But if you want to poke around, here are a few
places to amble:
The Introduction, especially pages 1-6, 15-16.
The strangeness of higher education, pages 86-88 and 113.
Chapter 5 on grades, which is something I’ve become entirely
obsessed about.
Pages 181-189 on the nature of the human animal.
About riding a bicycle, pages 209-210, because I remember
writing this passage in one burst.
Chapter 9 on motivation, especially Table 9.1 on page 222.
The Conclusion, especially pages 270-274.
I tried to tell the story of my journey: I had been one kind
of person and teacher, had a crisis of understanding, did research, changed my
mind, and became a different kind of person and teacher. If you flip through
those pages, you’ll get the gist of the story.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
I have to confess that I like this book. I poured my heart and soul into each page. I lived with the ideas and the sentences and the chunks for years. But some of my children are more beloved than others. (And yes, like all writers, I’ve learned to “kill my darlings.” There is a lot that has been excised.) But if you want to poke around, here are a few places to amble:
The Introduction, especially pages 1-6, 15-16.
The strangeness of higher education, pages 86-88 and 113.
Chapter 5 on grades, which is something I’ve become entirely obsessed about.
Pages 181-189 on the nature of the human animal.
About riding a bicycle, pages 209-210, because I remember writing this passage in one burst.
Chapter 9 on motivation, especially Table 9.1 on page 222.
The Conclusion, especially pages 270-274.
I tried to tell the story of my journey: I had been one kind of person and teacher, had a crisis of understanding, did research, changed my mind, and became a different kind of person and teacher. If you flip through those pages, you’ll get the gist of the story.