Word: trivia
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When I was in the ninth grade, I took a music history class especially designed for those of us who liked to listen to music but had no business playing it. Our teacher was a smart, enthusiastic 20-something with an unholy knowledge of pop music trivia and lyrics from musicals. Needless to say, we loved her. The highlight of the class was the week we watched "West Side Story" on videotape and discussed the musical's roots in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," the socially conscious message of the show and the Boston background of composer Leonard Bernstein...
...everything--in time. Whether a practice or an object, I like to pick it up and see its history, its predecessors, its equivalents, and to question obsolescence as often as possible. It's not retro or "classic," it's not Luddite, it's not fetishization or nostalgia, nor noodling trivia-mongering, nor slavish creative anachronism...
...spent most school-day afternoons with Max and Erich, along with Kenny Williams, who as a bespectacled eighth-grader possessed an uncanny memory for sports trivia. He's now the business-affairs manager. There was Grant Wilson, whom we used to pick on cruelly when he was a freckly, stuttering weed of a 12-year-old, and Chris Root, who spent a year living with the Schaefers after transferring to our high school. They're game designers now. I can remember us all huddled in Erich's darkened bedroom, a Rush album blaring as we rolled 20-sided dice, hunched...
Entertainment is not the answer. The effects of StudentU.com do not call for any fanfare by means of trivia games, celebrity appearances or gorgeous blondes handing out the day's lecture guidelines at the lecture hall's back doors. But professors need to provide for their students something more than what can be condensed into a few pages of notes. Inspiration, awe, frustration, outrage--whatever the reaction, there must be an emotional relationship between the professor and the student created by the experience in the lecture hall...
...that style of leadership, obsessing overdetails that are beneath the concerns of hisoffice, may not simply be charming. It may also beharmful to the presidency, as Rudenstine avoidslarger, more important questions in favor ofrelative trivia...