An old guilt surfaced again today when I remembered an impoliteness committed by me three decades ago. On an end-of-semester feedback form at Rice University, in a moment of juvenile foolishness I quoted the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right") and wrote "You just kinda wasted my precious time" along with some other negative remarks about the just-finished class.

Those words were uncalled for, untrue, and unhelpful. Belatedly, I'd like to say I'm sorry to whoever read that message of mine. And let me extend the apology to countless other people with whom I've been snippy over the years. I'll try to do better in the future.

(For a contrasting message that I am happy to remember writing above my name in the Rice 1974 yearbook, see WhatIsMyLife (30 Apr 1999).)

TopicPersonalHistory - 2002-08-24

Tradition education – the kind most of us have experience, with its emphasis on classroom and lecture, is hugely inefficient. It's a testament to the sheer stubbornness and adaptivity of the human spirit that we, in spite of it, actually learn anything at all. perhaps the most important thing we can learn from that setting is to attain an independence to ferret out information on our own and diregard the dissing influence of the setting. – Bo Leuf

(correlates: Comments on BodyMnemonic, AgesOfWork, SecretOrigins, ...)