Stupidity as a critical virtue.

if i ever really stick my foot in it i have now given everybody the best screencap ever

When I was in college I had a tutor¹ for a semester who was, famously, a weird little guy. To pick one example of how he was a weird little guy, in a different class, he’d (allegedly) asked the college administration for permission to film his class secretly, so he could play students back their facial expressions later. They said no and then (the legend goes) he did it anyway. At the end of my class he solicited student feedback, most of which was variations on “you are so weird and I hate you” and which he seemed to take as confirmation he’d accomplished his mission. He also shared with us feedback from time past, which also mostly said—you guessed it—“you are so weird and I hate you.” He would give us assignments that read like this:

pretend that this is a musical score taken from a musical work of which you are totally ignorant, that is, forget the impression you have formed from what we’ve read so far.  The task is simply to ‘play’ this ‘melody.’  Your imagination is both the perfo…