The "I promise you" is an interesting moment in the life of any faculty member. Sometimes we are absolutely certain we're right and we are right: "I promise you that this thing we're learning doesn't seem of immediate use but it will be three steps further down the road". Sometimes we're certain we're right and we're not because something's about to change in the basic set of tools and procedures that we use right now and we don't know that any more than they do. ("I promise you that you will need to know how to operate your computer from the MS-DOS command line.") Sometimes we're trying to make an inspired guess--I keep telling my daughter that if she wants to be involved in film and media production maybe she should understand how to work in algorithmic environments since some of the actors and visuals and sound will be mediated through AIs or sophisticated programming ensembles. I may actually be wrong, plus of course I'm telling her to do something that I can't do and don't know all that much about. Sensibly she is rolling her eyes in response each time.
But I think sometimes I'm just like Geoffrey Rush's character in Shakespeare in Love, who keeps saying that somehow the production of Romeo and Juliet is going to come off and it's going to be great and when asked how he knows he just says, "I don't know. It's a mystery!" I can't even tell students why I think what we're doing is worth doing in the way we're doing it but I'm sure that it is. And I feel as if so far in my career, my percentage on this is pretty solid. It seems like this is another part of "you have to do it before you find out why you should do it"--it's about trusting someone when they say "this will be worth doing". Which is why we have to be so careful about being wrong about that in a way that could have been avoided--take a student through their paces that way to no useful or productive end one too many times and you have a person who hates education altogether.
The "I promise you" is an interesting moment in the life of any faculty member. Sometimes we are absolutely certain we're right and we are right: "I promise you that this thing we're learning doesn't seem of immediate use but it will be three steps further down the road". Sometimes we're certain we're right and we're not because something's about to change in the basic set of tools and procedures that we use right now and we don't know that any more than they do. ("I promise you that you will need to know how to operate your computer from the MS-DOS command line.") Sometimes we're trying to make an inspired guess--I keep telling my daughter that if she wants to be involved in film and media production maybe she should understand how to work in algorithmic environments since some of the actors and visuals and sound will be mediated through AIs or sophisticated programming ensembles. I may actually be wrong, plus of course I'm telling her to do something that I can't do and don't know all that much about. Sensibly she is rolling her eyes in response each time.
But I think sometimes I'm just like Geoffrey Rush's character in Shakespeare in Love, who keeps saying that somehow the production of Romeo and Juliet is going to come off and it's going to be great and when asked how he knows he just says, "I don't know. It's a mystery!" I can't even tell students why I think what we're doing is worth doing in the way we're doing it but I'm sure that it is. And I feel as if so far in my career, my percentage on this is pretty solid. It seems like this is another part of "you have to do it before you find out why you should do it"--it's about trusting someone when they say "this will be worth doing". Which is why we have to be so careful about being wrong about that in a way that could have been avoided--take a student through their paces that way to no useful or productive end one too many times and you have a person who hates education altogether.