B. U. G. S.

When I bitched about “Comments (0)” here were are the responses:

Peter Paine:***

“We need Mark.”

Mark:

“Thanks for the vote of confidence!”

“It’s just that sometimes I don’t have anything unique or insightful or all that intelligent to say on a subject so instead of sounding dumb (which I do enough of anyway) I wait for greater minds than mine to respond. ”

This is exactly how a real seminar, not the dished-out crap that passes for them today, worked.

A seminar is where an old professor who has spent decades trying to pound half a gallon of information into pint-seized minds.

If it’s economics, there won’t be two sudens in a large lecture room who are there voluntarily.

So when he got his seminar, he had something he lovewd, but which a modern professor-bureaucrat cannot deal with: a roomful of students who were familar with his subject and were there on purpose.

Many, many times he would say, “I’ve been working on this” and go up to board and scracth out a diagram or an equation or something to mkae common sense look academic.

You gotta do SOMETHING with your hands.

He would end up saying, “I want you to give this some thought.”

Can you imagine a modern professor-bureucrat asking his students to do some THINKING?

But many times the students would spend the period between seminar sessions partying.

Naturallly this did not include Robert the Virtuous. But I must admit that, while I sat in my bare cell lost in Transcendental Thoughts, my mind did wander away from the subject the Prof had talked about.

The pre-class talk would begin calmly and then get a little feverish.

“Did something come up with anything?”

“I didn’t, I had a big macro test and a hundred test papers to correct.”

“Me, neither. I had two basic economics classes to teach and tach-up work on my thesis and…”

Finally some honest man would respond, “You gotta be kidding! I just woke up inthe drunk tank two hours ago.”

He was in no shape to think up excuses.

So a Peter would pipe up and say, “Where’s Mark? He can always come up with SOMETHING.”

He did.

But the point here one I doubt any of you who have been in college or grad school can even imagine.

Ole Prof demanded that you THINK about something. Can you IMAGINE a modern professor getting grumpy if you didn’ try to THINK of somethine HE hadn’t spoon-fed you?

*** Since I called Peter a Pain and he took me on by changing his name here to Pain, it occurred to me that Peter Paine would make a great name for a character in a stoty.