I have a confession to make. Well, several, actually, but let’s do one and declare victory for now, shall we? If I get going, the line at the confessional’s going to get really long, and the poor priest in the box could starve to death.

Today’s admission is about compliments. I don’t accept them well. I play something on one of my horns, someone gushes “That’s wonderful“, and I’m wondering how they could possibly have missed the seventeen gaffes I made in that piece of music. Someone tells me “You da Man“, and I’m wondering how come they can’t see my pink slip.

I’ve felt this about compliments for as long as I can remember. And I can remember for almost as long being told “Don’t tell them about your mistakes! That’s rejecting both the compliment and the person giving the compliment. Would you like being told ‘you’re too stupid to know what’s good’? Stuff your feelings down a hole, smile, say ‘thank you’, and move on.”

So I do. Sometimes. And feel uncomfortable about it. My feelings don’t like being stuffed down that hole. I’d make a terrible politician. Or used car seller.

It was a great relief, I confess (oops, that’s two), to read that C. S. Forester, author of the Horatio Hornblower tales, was no better at the compliment game than I am. In his book The Hornblower Companion (which, by the way, is one of the best narratives that I’ve read about the intersection between the person and the art of the writer), Forester relates that none of his finished works lived up to the expectations he had for them, that he hated having to reread anything he’d written, and, by the time he’d forced himself to read through the fifth proof of a completed novel, he was certain that no one with any semblance of wit would spend fifteen seconds with this drivel.

And his books were - still are - bestsellers. Where does that leave me…?

I’ll tell you where. In a quandary. No, that’s not the place where you break rocks, though sometimes I wonder if that’s all I’m really good for. No, not even that, given the state of my back at present.

It’s the place you’re at when you’re about to start teaching a class full of young people aspiring to win a place in your business, and you know what it takes to “make it”, you know that they don’t, yet.

And you can’t tell them without hurting their feelings.

Worse yet, you can’t tell them without hurting the bottom line of the institution that sold them the course!

Yes, this actually happened to me. Once upon a time, I gave a class grades (many of them failing grades) on the basis of their actual work. Work that I knew would never get them the phantom of a ghost of a chance of getting, or holding, a job in my field. And I was told, in so many words, never to do that again. To keep those grades, at all costs, high enough for all to pass. Or else the department would lose staff. There was a direct link between the numbers of bums in seats and the numbers of people hired to look after those bums.

It didn’t matter whether the bums had any business being in those seats.

It didn’t matter that they were being passed along, secure in their belief that they were winning a pass into a good job in the working world. Right up to the moment when they actually ran into the working world, and got told, in so many words, that they got nuthin’.

It didn’t matter that the university was being turned into a playground basketball court. Where the crowd shouts out to the players, “You da man! You da man! You da man!” Right up to the moment when they actually run up against real players in the pro leagues (this means you, Duke University): “You da chump!“

The bread lines are full of “men” who were told how good they were until after it was too late. When they ran up against the real players and found out they got nuthin’.

Shortly after I had that discussion about bums in seats, I left the university (where I had already gotten tenure), vowing never again to take a full-time teaching job.

I confess (sorry, that’s three) to being much too aware of the gap between where I am and where I need to be to “make it” in music. Of being much too aware of the gap between where most students are, in terms of professional skills and personal habits, and where they need to be in order to achieve their stated aspirations. And I don’t see how I’m doing anybody any favors by concealing that difference.

Especially when that concealment is done in the name, not of the personal and professional development of students, but in the name of some institutional accountant’s stock options.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

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