NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/bit/listserv/mbul/6226

Text File | 1992-12-28 | 1.8 KB | 36 lines

Comments: Gated by [e-mail]
Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!auvm!UTXVM.BITNET!SLATIN
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Mon, 28 Dec 1992 10:48:00 CST
Sender:       "Megabyte University (Computers & Writing)" <[e-mail]>
From:         [e-mail]
Subject:      Re: Standard English
Lines: 25

To Dave Schwalm, on the difference/distance between professor-types and
graduate assistants, and who knows more than whom about what, when, wherefore,
and so on:

Just a reminder: what became the Daedalus software we've spent so much time
discussing on this list was created by graduate students, not by faculty with
PhDs in hand.  It's precisely because the graduate students know so much and
are so damn creative that I find it worth spending so much time and trouble
and energy running the Computer Research Lab and scrounging for money.  I
learn from the graduat students all the time, perhaps more than they learn
from me-- I have no way of telling, and it doesn't really matter anyway, does
it? They know how to do some things I would have thought "undoable," and vice
versa; and so I try to work with them as collaboratively as possible,
developing relationships roughly analogous, I think, to those described by
John B. Much of what I can contribute has to do with (sigh) institutional
perspective: that is, theone thing I *know* I know more about than my students
do is the University and the way it's organized (or disorganized).  In most
cases, I know more about computers and how they work, too.  I've read things
they haven't read-- but they've also read things I haven't read.

I ramble.  I should have quit with the line about what became the Daedalus
software-- that's all the evidence I need to keep me humble.

John Slatin
UT Austin