It’s been on my mind lately how hard it is to take in critical feedback.
I’m posting this now (even though its been on my minda while) because I sent the URL to the entry about the Ukraine interpreter to loads of people but only a few posted. Some of it may be shyness, but I wonder if my last comment rhetorically served to close down communication rather than open it up?
My students had to raise an issue three different times before I “got it”; one of my roomies had to re-state her case about 700x before I understood which part of my response was objectionable; and recent discussions in “A Place in Space” have me thinking about rhetoric’s potential as a feedback mechanism. Some combo of these events has elicited a memory of my daughter telling me once, probably when she was 4 or 5, that I “never let her win” an argument. Hmmmm.