Twenty in NoJoMo 2015

Kind of at a low-ebb today. Tysabri in a few hours, and I’m beyond ready for it. This has been an incredibly trying week, and I will never understand how being overbearingly officious makes you right.

Talk about your professors/teachers. What things they taught you have stuck with you?

It’s interesting to reminisce about them now. Yesterday, as my mother was giving me a ride home, I was thinking about one of them who’d been a counterpart of my dad’s in the Army. We were talking about writing. This professor said something about how he’d see other officers who were not inspiring leaders, and wondering why or how they got promoted....until stumbling across things they’d written. I don’t know what happened to this professor; he was married to a professor at a nearby school, but I haven’t been able to find him. Even the totes-not-worried-about-being-evil company doesn’t give good info as a result of his common names.

So, who else.....

The History professor who helped me become a more-effective writer. There were a few things he’d focus on that have stuck with me. An impact is a collision. “In-depth” is for people who don’t know how to spell “thorough.” Still, he was big on college being about teaching you how to think, not what to think. In the world of multiple choice tests for everything, this has been lost. (And that reminds me I need to needle on something I’ve been considering as a joke that I can put up, string initials after my name on LinkedIn.....)

One who lived through “massive resistance” in Norfolk. This white protestant kid ended up at a Catholic school because the local Democrats closed all the public schools rather than integrate.

The business law professor who obliterated what I thought was a great analysis on a case. I’d treated the case as a tort, and she thought I wrote it well as a tort. “You should have used the UCC. C.” Ouch. So much for the grade on the final pulling me up to an A for the course..... At the same time, she spoke to a campus group I helped run a couple of years later, and was very gracious to me.

I’m wandering here, though, and could write little vignettes about several others. Instead, I’m going to cut it off, think about how I’d never fit in on a modern campus, and tell those kids to get off my lawn.

Last updated November 20, 2015