I'm a bit confused about the idea of triggering readers. Intransitive
triggering? Methinks someone doesn't quite know the meaning of the words
they are using.

But more generally the policy approach gives us no guidance as to what to
do when someone IS inferior in some ways. I'm very happy to believe that
someone who can't learn a particular subject has great potential in other
areas; but the idea that everyone can do everything is clearly untrue. Yet
it seems to underlie much thinking.

I recall taking on to a computer science course, a young man who had taken
a foundation course of some kind in I. T. My advice was that he would not
be able to cope with the depth of the course I was trying to populate. He
said he would  work hard. I said ok but he *had just failed a logic test
which my dept used  to assess people without the formal entry
qualifications.

But I've said that I will work hard, he said. & I said that all the
indications were he would not cope, that his talents lay elsewhere.

One could spend whole afternoons like that so eventually, when he just kept
singing on the same note, I took him on with reservations which I expressed
in writing. Come the end of the first year, he bombed out in exams, with
coursework to justify it - we had been remiss in kindness. I recall that
for one case study he recommended a network with one node on it - lots of
diagrams of this node talking to itself, but none of the analysis of the
business system, a business with a stand alone computer, this being the
very early internet days, which the question had invited him to show off.
Here, we all thought, is someone unready for the fundamental concepts we
are teaching.

I told him he had failed on all modules. He said: but I worked hard.

His father went to the principal saying that we must be a racists because
clearly if we were unprejudiced we would have passed him in recognition of
the hard work he had done. It must be a response to his ethnicity.

Even my principal couldnt swallow that one...

Further back in my life, I recall an admissions tutor smiling at me with
pleasure when I said that I was nowhere near fluent in French, this, we
both assumed, ruling me out of all degree options involving that language,
saving us work during the admission process

Perhaps I should have complained that the French dept discriminated against
me because I couldn't speak or read French

L



















On 18 May 2014 10:19, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html?emc=edit_th_20140518&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=22180501&_r=0
>
> At Oberlin College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that would have
> asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The guide
> said they should flag anything that might "disrupt a student's learning"
> and "cause trauma," including anything that would suggest the inferiority
> of anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism)
> or who uses a wheelchair (or ableism).
>
> "Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism,
> and other issues of privilege and oppression," the guide said. "Realize
> that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives
> before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or
> understand." For example, it said, while "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua
> Achebe -- a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria -- is a "triumph of literature
> that everyone in the world should read," it could "trigger readers who have
> experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide
> and more."
>