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Greil Marcus, asked what's the best piece of advice he's actually followed, gives some teaching advice.

It's really good:

When teaching a seminar, and there's a point that rises out of the discussion that you think absolutely has to be made, wait. In five minutes someone in the class will say what, if you, the teacher, had said it, would have killed the discussion - but coming from a student, it will push the discussion forward, into richer territory than your own sterile interruption could ever have found. That was my own advice to myself, and every time I teach a seminar, I have to remind myself of it about every 15 minutes.

Ah! The temptation to just say it (which I yield to all the time).

I found that because of my Google alert on "Bob Dylan." Here's what he said about Dylan:

The greatest album, ever?

Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" (1965) No matter how many times you might have heard it, a different song will appear as primary, the star around which everything else revolves - it could be "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," one day, "Ballad of a Thin Man" the next, the title song for the next year, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" a year later, each different song casting all the others into a different relief. Then "Desolation Row" might make you forget that there's anything else on the album at all. But if the album were simply "Like a Rolling Stone" and 30 or 40 minutes of silence, I still might pick it.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 31, 2010 (boomark / email).