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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCharles Pierce: Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher
The best teachers are the ones who remain students at heart, the ones who keep learning from their students, and from the world around them, and from their own drive to know even more about even more things, and who then are able to transmit that knowledgeand more important, the drive to know moreto their students. That's how great teachers echo through time. That's how great teachers become immortal.
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You cannot understand how she became a senatorhell, you can't even understand how she became a public personunless you understand the fact that, first and foremost, she is a teacher, having taught at Rutgers, and having been a professor of law at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, and ultimately at Harvard Law School, where she was teaching bankruptcy and contracts in the fall of 2008, just as the global financial system collapsed and threatened the economy of the entire world. Her first great project as a young law professor in Texas had been to learn about how bankruptcy worked in this country, and more important, it was to learn about the people who found themselves in the process. It challenged her assumptions; she had thought she was going out to study the schemers who were working the system and the moochers who were cheating the people to whom they owed money. She learned from the people in the courtrooms that everything she knew about them was wrong, and then she set out to teach the country that everything it thought about those people was wrong. "It was," she tells me later, "so much like being in church, quiet and hushed. They were in little groups, talking among themselves. Nobody wanted to look at anybody else."
That led her to her first book, and thence into the study of how these people came to be in all these courtrooms, the way the great American middle class was being tricked out of its wealth and scammed out of its birthright and crushed by the tectonic forces of underregulated capitalism and money-drenched politics. She saw the dangers of subprime mortgages because she'd seen the damage of what she called the "tricks and traps" of the mortgage lenders, seen what it did to families unaware of the deliberate obfuscation of what they'd signed, only to have the teaser rate of the mortgage run out and find themselves underwater. She inveighed against the fine-print piracy of the credit-card companies; she often said that the conditions on a credit card should be as simple as the instructions on a toaster. She brought these lessons back to Harvard, and she was teaching them to her students in September of 2008, when the roof caved in. And she went right on teaching. She had been warning official Washington for months that disaster was coming.
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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/elizabeth-warren-teacher-0514
mopinko
(70,216 posts)she might be able to teach better from where she is. a much smaller target.
as long as she has a microphone, i am happy.
merrily
(45,251 posts)just teach during her speaking engagements and otherwise, as a private citizen? An even smaller target. Be
mopinko
(70,216 posts)i really hope he runs. he knows how to use the pulpit of a presidential run to stand up for everything that all but the trolls among us hold dear.
he would be great, too.
now hillary,
i'm fine with her. she would have been a great pres in 2008, but she would really make a great one in 2016. her efforts, successes and focus since then would make me a very enthusiastic supporter.
hoping for a lively primary season.
AFTER NOVEMBER!!!!!!!
merrily
(45,251 posts)So, in your mind, the better teaching and smaller target stuff of your other post applies only to Warren?
mopinko
(70,216 posts)and she is not that small of a target, of course.
dennis kucinich should have stayed where he was.
i wish howard dean had never dropped out, but he still speaks for me. i am so happy to have him as a teacher of how the wheels of government and politics grind. he touched the chicago city council in a big way. anywhere dfa goes democracy follows.
i think he is wise to stay out of that ring. he gets to speak in full sentences, and even paragraphs from the pulpit that he has.
i'm not saying she shouldnt run. i would support her most vigorously.
i'm just saying she is great where she is.
merrily
(45,251 posts)i'm not saying she shouldnt run.
Actually, you kind of implied that, saying she might be more effective and better where she is now (not great where she is, but better where she is now than she would be as President).
i would support her most vigorously.Ya, ya, ya, we're all going to support whoever gets the nomination, no matter who we'd prefer him or her to be.
dennis kucinich should have stayed where he was.
What do you mean? That he somehow got the shaft because he had had the nerve to run for President a couple of times? Because he continued in Congress after his runs for the Presidency. In theory, he was forced out of Congress only by re-districting, with a totally even playing field between him and the woman who beat him.
Dean did not have the option of staying in any federal office, as opposed to running for President, so I am not sure how he figures into a discussion about Elizabeth being better where she is.
As to Dean, I don't know that he simply dropped out that early or saw the handwriting on the wall. Besides, I think a deal with Kerry re: heading the DNC if Dean dropped out of the primary fight is a safe assumption.
mopinko
(70,216 posts)as a TEACHER, she might be better where she is .
that's all. we need a good teacher.
dennis kucinich made a joke of himself.
and i didn't know that we were restricting this discussion those 2 chairs for teaching.
i must have missed that part.
merrily
(45,251 posts)I have no idea what that means, and I also have no idea why you seem angry.
I thought you and I were discussing future elections and/or people who might hurt their careers by giving up their current seats to run for President, instead of holding on to their current seat. Kucinich and Dean did not seem to me to fit into either of those categories.
Did anyone put an express limit on our conversation? No. But if you look at the posts between the two of us, I still don't understand why the Presidential runs of Kucinich and Dean were relevant to anything we were already engaging with each other about.
mopinko
(70,216 posts)i'm not mad, just responding to your comments.
we are talking past each other here.
merrily
(45,251 posts)IDemo
(16,926 posts)That's not exactly true, but among elected officials anyway, she is the one gaining the attention of parties on both sides.
democrank
(11,104 posts)Not only a much-needed breath of fresh air, but a leader to be proud of, courageous, truthful and principled....action without first checking with handlers and image-makers.
Response to muriel_volestrangler (Original post)
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NorthCarolina
(11,197 posts)Wall Street connected, professional politicians that we normally are allowed to choose amongst. I would not be surprised to see something truly transformational happen in 2016. Warren fits nicely in that scenario.
madfloridian
(88,117 posts)Actually many remember them with "fondness".
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)were being imparted to me from such a teacher in my seventh and eight grade science classes.
I actually worshiped the ground she walked on and considered her the wisest and most knowledgeable person I had ever met.
She made such an impression on me I attended her funeral some twenty years later, revealing I was not alone as hundreds of former students were in attendance along with me.
I simply do not understand where that posters negativity comes from.
maddiemom
(5,106 posts)on with the least fondness was a middle-aged MALE. But you'd probably consider him "old" if he'd been a woman.
bullwinkle428
(20,630 posts)of my kindergarten teacher, who was old enough to be my grandmother at the time.
ETA: Charlie's paragraph about the "best teachers" is absolutely fucking profound in its brilliance.
ChisolmTrailDem
(9,463 posts)And before she was finished with me, she had shown me what I was capable of and, in doing so, went from the one paddling me as I grabbed my ankles in the corridor to eventually becoming the teacher I now credit with having the most influence on my life to this point.
Unfortunately, she left this world before I matured enough to realize that and could tell her so, and thank her.
merrily
(45,251 posts)During their campaigns, Brown sought to mock Warren with the fact that she was a Harvard professor (as opposed to his dumb ass, too dumb to know that most people in Massachusetts highly respect higher education, especially those qualified to teach at universities as prestigious as Harvard).
As for me, my older female teachers were inspiring.
With the exception of my male trig teacher and one of my male English teachers, I did not respect any of the male teachers in high school, who just did not seem that bright to me.
Even early in elementary school, a pompous male substitute teacher led the spelling bee with this gem: "Spell ---, as in b---with me as I leave the room." Spelling book and homework word was "bare" but the sentence he gave would have been illegal if he really meant that we school kids should get nude with him while he was walkiing out of the classroom.
Some of the older women, on the other hand, made the subjects they taught sing to me; and I never caught a one of them, inspiring or not, in a mistake that any first grader who had done the homework the night before could spot.
Autumn
(45,120 posts)Very good read. Thank you so much for posting it.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1265