Teachable moments
Feb. 7th, 2011 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sevBeen participating in a comment thread over on shakesville and the comments thread was closed while I was in the process of writing. Since my every word is precious (ahem!) I figured I'd put it here instead. This may turn out to make absolutely no sense out of context; sorry about that.
my snarkiness aside, regarding teachable moments:
It's my experience that when somebody puts their foot in it, it's mostly a teachable moment for the spectators. Many of whom we've seen here in the last two days: multiple commenters have spoken here for the first time & stuck around to learn things in public.
Personally, my own process tends to look like:
At best, I can say that after 17 years of talking about social justice, I'm better about being quiet when I'm feeling defensive. As it turns out, there's a lot of dignity available, there.
my snarkiness aside, regarding teachable moments:
It's my experience that when somebody puts their foot in it, it's mostly a teachable moment for the spectators. Many of whom we've seen here in the last two days: multiple commenters have spoken here for the first time & stuck around to learn things in public.
Personally, my own process tends to look like:
- I screw up publicly
- I get called on it
- I get defensive
- I retreat (or flounce off, if I've gotten *really* defensive)
- I shut up and listen
- I watch somebody else screw up in the same way
- I watch yet somebody else screw up in much a similar way
- eventually when somebody is in the process of screwing up like that, I can see it coming...
- ...and then finally I can claim to have learned something from my initial screw-up.
At best, I can say that after 17 years of talking about social justice, I'm better about being quiet when I'm feeling defensive. As it turns out, there's a lot of dignity available, there.