a Donald Kennedy story from 1974 (long, boring, recommend you skip):
When I was a high school senior, there were no such things as college admissions info sessions, tours, etc. So a few friends and I decided to skip a few days of class and go visit local colleges (Stanford, Berkeley, Davis) on our own. First up was Stanford (closest), where the admissions office gave us a course schedule and we picked a few classes at random to sit in on. We went to a philosophy class which was so boring that I never took it in college, even though I should have. Then we went to a Human Bio core class in Dinkelspiel, which was being taught by one of the founders of human bio, Prof. Kennedy. I remember that class session like it was yesterday--it was that good. He was explaining anatomy and functioning of various parts of the nervous system, using overheads of diagrams that he would then add to in colors as he spoke. The students had a copy of the overheads, and they drew on them using these large pens that housed 4 different color points, and whenever Kennedy changed color you could hear this chorus of clicks as the students changed colors. Anyway, he was tracing the path of an image as it went through the eye and the retina and then through the optic nerve, splitting and crossing over at the optic chasm to permit 3-D vision, finally back to the occipital lobe. When he finished, he looked at it a few moments and told the students he realized he had messed it up and he was going to do it over again. Loud groaning (the students had already copied everything in ink on their paper diagrams). But he said, no, this is good I made this mistake. I don't want you to memorize this stuff; you need to understand it well enough to figure it out on your own. And he went through it again, explaining how he knew he had gotten it wrong and figuring it out along the way again. I'll always remember his response to making a mistake: embracing it and turning it into a much more important learning lesson. I was excited about going to college and learning from professors like him.
After he had retired, I happened to run into him hiking alone on a trail in the Desolation Wilderness. He was as friendly and hardy and sharp as ever.
Very unfortunate that his tenure as president was ended by the indirect cost brouhaha.
When I was a high school senior, there were no such things as college admissions info sessions, tours, etc. So a few friends and I decided to skip a few days of class and go visit local colleges (Stanford, Berkeley, Davis) on our own. First up was Stanford (closest), where the admissions office gave us a course schedule and we picked a few classes at random to sit in on. We went to a philosophy class which was so boring that I never took it in college, even though I should have. Then we went to a Human Bio core class in Dinkelspiel, which was being taught by one of the founders of human bio, Prof. Kennedy. I remember that class session like it was yesterday--it was that good. He was explaining anatomy and functioning of various parts of the nervous system, using overheads of diagrams that he would then add to in colors as he spoke. The students had a copy of the overheads, and they drew on them using these large pens that housed 4 different color points, and whenever Kennedy changed color you could hear this chorus of clicks as the students changed colors. Anyway, he was tracing the path of an image as it went through the eye and the retina and then through the optic nerve, splitting and crossing over at the optic chasm to permit 3-D vision, finally back to the occipital lobe. When he finished, he looked at it a few moments and told the students he realized he had messed it up and he was going to do it over again. Loud groaning (the students had already copied everything in ink on their paper diagrams). But he said, no, this is good I made this mistake. I don't want you to memorize this stuff; you need to understand it well enough to figure it out on your own. And he went through it again, explaining how he knew he had gotten it wrong and figuring it out along the way again. I'll always remember his response to making a mistake: embracing it and turning it into a much more important learning lesson. I was excited about going to college and learning from professors like him.
After he had retired, I happened to run into him hiking alone on a trail in the Desolation Wilderness. He was as friendly and hardy and sharp as ever.
Very unfortunate that his tenure as president was ended by the indirect cost brouhaha.