[lbo-talk] to my teachers

[123hop at comcast.net]

.... 
How to teach a language through its modes of sensibility? Later at Berkeley, 
I got lucky again with a German Literature professor, Bluma Goldstein, who 
worked similar miracles with Goethe, Lessing, Mann, Kafka, Hesse ... She 
embodied the German world she taught, deeply poetic, but with an iron heart. 

You simply can not get that kind of experience and its depth of 
understanding out of a computer. You've got to be in the moment and the 
intense struggle of a great lecture that hovers in the air as a palbable 
battle between your own ignorance and the consumate skill of the masterpiece 
that has engaged you down to your soul---even if you have no such thing. 
It's a great art of its own. 

To my teachers, 

----------- 

You're damn right Chuck. Teaching is deeply erotic, and what you want is to make your students fall in love or at least see why something is worth loving, worth paying attention to.

Joanna