Meme: Passion Quilt (and merch)

Sat 10 May 2008 09:27 PM

Janet tagged me in another meme.*

THE RULES:

Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."

Link back to this blog entry.

Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

I ruminated on this for a while, but all the cleverness has been squeezed out of me by interminable grading. So I drew this:

[center]

ARE YOU SURE IT'S A BARN?

(and not a cleverly disguised mule?)

[/center]

This, of course, is one of the suggested t-shirts from my epistemology class. The rationale for including it in the passion quilt is this:

Philosophy cannot be an entirely abstract discipline. Its principles must apply to some instances, if it is to teach us anything at all. At the same time, philosophical examples can get out of hand. Carried too far, the obsession with examples is a round about way of being inapplicably abstract. As JL Austin once wrote, "over-simplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repetition of the same small range of jejune 'examples' are... far too common to be dismissed as an occasional weakness of philosophers."

I don't think that this is really what I am most passionate about students learning, but it is one lesson that I hope they do learn.

All well and good, but the clever reader will suspect that the drawing is just an excuse to make t-shirts with the clever motto on them. Indeed, I've made a Mule Barn Country t-shirt at Cafe Press; also a polo and a long-sleeved version.

Similarly, I've made the 'Evil Demons' shirt available in white and colour.

* Janet was flexible with the rules and so I will be, too. I won't tag anybody. As chain letters always say, this will probably have dire consequences.