Text 11711, 99 rader
Skriven 2014-04-02 22:10:30 av Nancy Backus (1:261/1381.0)
  Kommentar till text 11571 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Re: different standards 401
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-=> Quoting MICHAEL LOO to NANCY BACKUS on 31 Mar 14  06:00:00 <=-

 ML>> So he got bounced altogether, but nobody would have stirred
 ML>> up the mess if he hadn't refused to do the scut work that
 ML>> his coworkers sucked it up and did.
 NB>> He was too full of himself for his own good...
 ML> Still is. Sad thing is what he really wanted to be was a
 ML> musician, but I guess he was told he should be a professor
 ML> (by whom I don't know). And he's a pretty good musician -

Probably some well-meaning family member or counselor... someone whose
opinion could be construed to have some weight, but who actually was
probably missing some of the pieces for a proper determination... 
(Richard and I both ran afoul of that, during our college days... but
fortunately were able to get past it...)

 ML> but full of himself? Put it this way. I knew him both in
 ML> the context of his teaching...and through his music
   (snippage)
 ML> purpose, I often became part of it. One day, the orchestra
 ML> he was conducting couldn't figure out his beat and sort of
 ML> fell all over itself, and he fumed, "I'm the best musician
 ML> in this room." The point being that if that were really
 ML> true, he wouldn't have felt the need to say it.

Quite.  

 ML> Another time, at dress rehearsal, in front of early arriving
 ML> audience members, he lost his beat with the usual effect,
 ML> so he slammed down his baton and screamed "you're a bunch
 ML> of f---ing idiots!" A moment that will live in infamy and
 ML> associated mirth for many years.

Not exactly a wise move for his reputation, either with musicians or
with audience...  the term popinjay comes to mind... ;)

Recalls to mind an incident at an RPO concert when the conductor lost
the beat and the orchestra got lost... except that conductor wasn't
too full of himself to take the lion's share of the blame upon himself,
and apologized to the orchestra and the audience, and then said, we'll
try that again, and did, to a much better conclusion, and to great
applause at the end thereof... :)  Not apochryphal, I was there... :)

 NB>> And teaching freshmen isn't necessarily scut work anyway
 ML> In fact should never be. My school routinely uses put-upon
 ML> graduate students for the purpose (that's one of the reasons
 ML> it is somewhat downrated in both more and less thoughtful
 ML> educational evaluations). 

It appears that that is a failing of much if not all of the Ivy League
schools... I suppose that once in a while, they'd luck out and get some
graduate student with a real aptitude for teaching, and the students
would get as good or better an education than if they'd had the full
professors teaching them...  But put-upon often comes out in the
teaching... ;)

 NB>> ... probably requires more skill (if
 NB>> not more knowledge) than teaching the higher classes...
 ML> That's the whole thing. So there has to be mutual respect
 ML> between the practitioners of both.

Exactly.  :)   And if more "premium" teachers took it on, perhaps it
would garner more respect as well...  :)

 ML>> People used to ask why I'm not a teacher. I recognized my
 ML>> lack of vocation early on, when the decision could be made
 ML>> easily. I never wanted to be that kind of professor that
 ML>> we were discussing with Jim, but if I'd gone into the
 ML>> field, I figure most likely I would have become one.
 
You might have been pleasantly surprised to find more aptitude than you
thought, but the lack of appropriate credentials might have been a
stumbler... kinda why I never went into the field professionally..  but
discovered that I was capable of teaching in more than just one-to-one
situations, to my surprise.  Never tried to make a living from it,
though... ;)

 NB>> One needs a few people like my father, who were easily both, to
 NB>> bridge the gap, perhaps...  I suspect that it was more common a
 NB>> few generations or so ago... specialization hasn't helped a lot
 NB>> of fields...
 ML> That's true. John Lilly pointed that out a bunch of years
 ML> ago and called for the development of a class of bridge
 ML> people he called "inperts" - not experts, but not inexpert
 ML> either. 

An interesting proposition... one might want to come up with a
better-sounding name for them, though... :)

 ML> So, I'm told, did C. P. Snow, but that's second-hand
 ML> information, from where, can you guess?

Your favorite hated Wiki...?

ttyl         neb

... Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education. - Mark Twain
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