We are social beings and we exist in a historical context, even down to being carried away in contemporary movements of memes [2] and shifting emphasis. To achieve excellence, we must gather much. On the other hand, if you spend all your time with other art, even if it's just art better than what you can do, you don't have time to create your own. And the benefit to feeling alive through experiencing the edge of creation is of profound importance. If I can be happy and still create (or vice versa) then I have won . . . existence.
Back to the handwritten sign: These types of decorations as non-decoration are common enough for male teachers, especially at the high school level. His entire instructional method was lecture. You may think that is my criticism of him; it is not. Rather, it is that he lectured poorly. Not only that, but that he lectured poorly on purpose.
My proof is that he had two stories from his life that he shared with the class, but the only way he'd tell them was if someone said "tell us the ____ story" by name. This meant that someone who had heard the story before had told someone in the class to ask him about it. See, it was an ego-trip, you dig?
In the telling of these two stories, he showed the fundamentals of a good communicator: facial expressions, set ups, punchlines, expressing the doings and states of mind of interesting people. The stories were excellent. But none of these abilities were used in teaching literature. For that, his job, he read in a monotone off notes that were turning yellow with age, showing no desire to breath life into any text, or make any of it human. I mean he had great things to work with -- Hamlet, Hesse's Damien, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gardener's Grendel, the Death of a Salesman, and Waiting for Godot.
So why did he do this? In part it was to keep his class sizes small, which I got on good information from another teacher who I worked with later on. Also, it enabled his two stories to stand out so much that they achieved legendary status. But really, I think the biggest factor is that he got off on the notion that he was smarter than everyone else. If eyes were glazed over or students fell asleep, it just went to show how much greater his ability to take on the higher realm of abstractions was. Holy shit, I just remember I took his philosophy course as well, and that in that course he stated that was a Platonist [3]. Now that I remember I took more than one course with him, I think that I might have heard at least one of his two good stories more than once.
. . . I'm now going to undermine my own humor a bit. I've taught, and I would hate to read an essay like this from a former student of mine. So I want to give the man his due. He had once expressed the idea that he thought people learned best from their own reading, and that what was particularly beneficial about going to college was access to a good library. The pacing of his reading assignments stacks up favorably in light of the watered-down education students are now receiving. He taught in a way that was emotionally sustainable for him and was professional in all his interactions with students. In conclusion, I received no harm from taking his classes and would gladly have a conversation with him if we ever happened to cross paths again.
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[1] This lead to me reading up about Mr. Steinberg. Doing so lead to this gem:
Steinberg took an informal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. This was in juxtaposition to many formalist critics at the time, such as Clement Greenberg, who were known to be resolute in their writing.This goes to show that the "objectivity" pose in criticism was something constructed out of a historical moment, and one that was not really all that long ago. As a quick summary, the arts developed physics envy as modernity was ramping up. Then the sentiment was hardened into rules and procedures during academia's metastatic growth, which in turn was a subset of the Great Cultural Suicide after the Great Oil War, aka World War II. No "I" meant no ethos, which fit in just fine with the systems that were growing in power and seeking to defend themselves. Mistakes were made, indeed.
[2] Be aware that meme was well-defined when it was coined in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
This article summarizes it as "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" and furthermore includes this explanation:
Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity. Unlike with genes (and Dawkins' original meaning of "meme"), there is no attempt at accuracy of copying; internet memes are deliberately altered.This brings up an interesting question. Do we make efforts to defend that meaning or do we let the word semantically drift along it's merry way as over-repetition of images, mostly from -- but sometimes creating -- pop-culture? I am left fascinated with these kinds of fights. And if you never fight for anything, you cede all of natural language to fools. (Note to self: keep working at math. Even if you remain laughably inadequate, at least you can operate inside of truth).
[3] I think that "holy shit" actually works on a pretty significant level here. We defecate because we are embodied. Human bodies experiencing the world are what took the time to pen literature and even philosophy. I don't think there's supposed to be pooping in the Platonic realm, at least not in the reading presented in that survey class.
