The other day I was making one of my (half-) joking “kids today” mini-speeches to one of my (very patient) graduate students, Tameem, as part of an IM chat we were having about graduate teaching matters. He then said that he remembered something he wanted to share with me, and IM-ed me this*:
…which I’ll readily admit is both funny and very familiar!
-cvj
(*You can click to make it a bit larger)
But… but… but… us young people know everything!
😉
LOL! Thats funny spyder. A shirt maybe, inside out?
Irrelevant detritus? I had to look up the word and then it hit me.
Whose to say Clifford is not a chip of the old block of the “Grand dad of science?”
Student….teacher…..student…..teacher? We are never to old, I think. 🙂
I always found myself smirking a bit when others would act like the Grand-dad. That was until last summer when i had my first experience spending a good portion of a half an hour looking for my sunglasses around our festival campsite. For some reason no one bothered to tell me what became all to clear to me when i stepped into a friend’s big RV and had to take my sunglasses off to look for them. Age may have its perks, but it also has its moments of terror and humiliation.
Oh, Geez….. lighten up, will you? It’s just a simple joke. Why drag the irrelevant detritus from the other post into it?
-cvj
It’s always nice when the people in power can laugh together with the little people that report to them. This is easier than one might think. My observation is that no matter how lame the boss’s joke, the people who are underneath laugh heartily.
An appropriate comment for the Ides of March is to note that no human understands very well how others see them or the nature of their relationship. This goes double for people in positions of power who receive little feedback when they step on junior peoples toes. Tyrants believes that the people love them, and that they do things for the people’s good, not their own. This applies in academia as much as it applies in all other human activity such as business, politics, or medicine.
The human species is designed to kowtow to authority. We naturally form organizations that give authority to older (mostly male) figures whether they understand things better than younger candidates or not. That sort of organization are preferred not because they push science farther and faster, but because they minimize conflict.
The people in authority in academia determine the research interests of the students that they control. This is exactly the thing that Smolin warns about in the last section of his book.