You're gonna see a smilin' face, fireplace, cozy room

[austin_dern]

I'd gone to Arby's to finish reading 1927, an obsessively detailed catalogue of most everything interesting that was going on in that year, which is just the sort of history book to appeal to me since I like lots of little gritty facts clogging up my nonfiction. The big picture is nice too, but I'm the kind of guy who on hearing that, say, ``the truce talks quickly agreed on some minor points'' wants to know what those minor points were. In line ahead of me were two elderly ladies having trouble deciding what they wanted, so after a few rounds of asking each other and the cashier they said that he'd better take me first, and I thanked them if they were sure they didn't want to go first.

At the end of lunch, when I was in the chapter about entertainment, one of them came to me and asked what I was reading. I gave the title and described quickly what it was, and she said, ``Oh, 1927, that was eighty years ago,'' which being reasonable I agreed with. ``I was born in 1927,'' she said, and I said she'd picked a good year to be born. (It was an interesting year, although I wonder how many years aren't interesting when read about in careful detail. 1955, maybe.) She wondered if I was a student, and no, I was just reading for the fun of it, which prompted her to say I must be very smart, for which I thanked her. Then it got odd.

She began to talk about one of her children, who was back in school after having been too convinced of his own smartness for it earlier in life. He was a few credits short of a degree and having trouble with an instructor who returned every paper dripping with angry and sarcastic comments. According to online reviews, this teacher is particularly vicious to some students every class, but is not on record as being nice to anyone. (There is of course selection bias here.) She's recommended he just keep all these papers and turn them over to the dean at the end of the term, which seems appropriate. And then she said that I would make a good teacher, and she hoped that I'd find a spot where I could. Her friend came along, and they had to leave, and I thanked her for the conversation.

I hadn't said a word about what I do, or what I had done, and really all I had done was a couple rounds of ordinary courtesy. But in the view of life-as-a-story, that was almost certainly the big Rallying Point moment where Our Hero starts to turn things around. I just didn't expect such a moment for me to have so much Horsey Sauce.

Trivia: Gilbert Romme, concerned about uncertainties in the Moon's motion which made it impossible to project infinitely far into the future of 1795 whether the New Moon would be before or after midnight 22 September convinced the committee on the French Revolutionary Calendar -- the calendar depends for its leap days on this event -- to re-assemble and re-consider the issue when the problem became acute, in 36,000 years. Source: The Measure of All Things, Ken Alder.

Currently Reading: Nightside City, Lawrence Watt-Evans.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

According to online reviews, this teacher is particularly vicious to some students every class, but is not on record as being nice to anyone. (There is of course selection bias here.)

Uh, yeah. Those stupid online review sites are frequented by people with axes to grind. And "the professor was so mean to me" often just means "the professor gave me a lower grade than I think I deserved," and if students could reliably determine what grades they deserve, we wouldn't need professors.

I occasionally encounter people in my non-academic travels who, upon hearing I am a philosophy professor, want to tell me all about some philosophy professor somewhere who was mean to their kid. I nod politely but take it with a massive grain of salt. I have observed that people's parents are frequently convinced of their kids' greatness and take criticism of anything they do quite badly. I guess that's normal.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, there's the teachers who are regarded as mean because they grade sharply, and there's the ones who are regarded as mean because they call students who show normal curiosity idiots. Without specific examples there's no way to say which this was, so, it seemed like going along with her assessment was the polite thing to do. (At least she had pointed out various dumb things her son had done, so I imagine she was open to the possibility that her son was not a great student.)

With mathematics what I get is how people didn't understand mathematics at all. Perhaps they don't, but I would like to meet the student who thought their mathematics classes were the most fun they had in school.