While in grad school at Indiana University, I was involved in teaching two different classes1. There was “Introduction to Computing Applications” (A110) and “Introduction to Computer Science” (C211). Both were grounded in “skills”, by which I mean “the ability to do specific things that you will be expected to do on-your-own to pass the class”. BUT in C211, I also got to talk about “what a computer scientist thinks about X”. I got to be the computer scientist and share what I though about a solution to a problem…the hope being that students would pick up an aesthetic for what makes me happy/sad in a professional way.

Similarly, when I teach dance classes there are two parts to it. There is “doing the move” which matters…but usually only because its something to hang a different lesson on. That lesson is usually aesthetic in some way. I pick the move because it will make the clarity/quality/connection of some motion clear, so it can be worked on.2

Also similarly, I was well into my 20s before I figured out that etudes in music are really just sneaky ways to teach a common way to move around a scale that you can use in other songs3! Again, the proximate goal of “I can play this etude” is not the real go, but a vehicle for something deeper.

The process of sharing-and-possibly-imparting some aesthetic qualities to things that are often taken as more mechanical is discussed in detail while discussing the challenges of analog computation in this article.

  1. I taught each for several years, but never concurrently. ↩

  2. Sometimes moves are just picked because they are part of the vernacular. Sometimes moves are picked so people can just do something (anything) on their own and feel good about it. These are important things too, but they are usually only the focus in early classes. I’ve been to many tuck-turn-based classes (rooted in vernacular) that were tweaked to focus on a specific movement quality…sometimes in contradictory ways! ↩

  3. I have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees sometimes. I’m sure more than one person shared this with me through the years. Please be patient with me….I swear I’m not deliberately obtuse. ↩