This is for Stormfront, but I want to check it with you first.

Coach or Teacher, Not Leader

In my signature I say that MY AIM IS TO BE a coach.  One person said I am not his coach because GOD is his coach.  I would gladly step down for God.  But what I said was that my AIM is to be coach.

Others aim to be leaders.

The name of my blog, “Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar,” shows that I think of myself as an advanced teacher rather than as a “leader.”

http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/

We have some excellent leaders.  In BUGS I am trying to train some more coach-professors.   BUGS is steadily evolving.  I used to do a blog where I set out my ideas, but I* kept demanding comments.

BUGS is a SEMINAR.  I praise comments, I criticize comments.  I have had at least a dozen articles entitled, “READ THE COMMENTS!”   It is paying off.

A lot of our participants used Comments to go off on their own subjects.  So I started a new segment called “General Comments,” maybe not the best title, but it is a place where Seminar Members can bring up subjects without trying to fit them in as comments on whatever I was talking about.    We have now filled up General Comments I and are on General Comments II.

But a funny thing happened on the way to General Comments II.

I felt guilty about not having looked at GC I for a while.  I thought my Seminar participants would be offended.   But when I read it over, I discovered that they did not even MISS me.   BUGSers wrote general comments, and other BUGSers commented on them.

For an Indispensable Leader, this would be a defeat.  For me, it was an enormous victory.

The statements and comments in General Comments are what one would expect of real graduate students.  Unfortunately there are no real graduate students in today’s universities.  There are no REAL seminars in today’s universities.

Which is why my definition of graduate is a bit different from the one used by the education bureaucracy:

“Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar is for people who have outgrown their college education, whether they have had one or not.”

As a former professor I make it very clear in my last book, “Why Johnny Can’t Think” what I think of what passes for education today.

My triumph in reading General Comments was not that seminar members just talked to each other.  Thank God we have Stormfront for that.   Their discussion, without my input, was DISCIPLINED.

They did not use General Comments to wander odd into whatever they wanted to write down somewhere.  We have SF for that.

Like any real seminar we have a specific program to develop in BUGS.  It is not easy to explain or one would not need a seminar format to deal with it.   If you reused to someone giving a lecture course you need to be part of the seminar for a while to understand what our DISCIPLINE is.

As I say in today’s universities real seminars no longer exist.  In today’s universities you just listen to what the professor says and regurgitate it in the exam, exactly as you did in the first grade.   To today’s professor my feeling of triumph would be hard to explain.

To me, the whole point of Seminar is PARTICIPATION, not cramming for the final.

Cramming is for high school.

In a real seminar, a long-dead art,    If a professor spends many hours in a seminar with future professors and he cannot tell who is getting it and who is not, he should go back to teaching high school where he belongs.

I feel justified in my claim to be coach, teacher, professor, whatever.  After all my work, BUGS participants are able to bring up new topics and STICK TO THE SUBJECT.

Leaders are har to replace.  But my goal is that, when I step down, due to my efforts, there will people ready to take my Chair in the numerous Seminars that will develop from BUGS.