… for the length of our drive to our house in Upstate New York, Mr UD played a set of Teaching Company lectures he’d ordered on How to Listen to and Understand Good Music. There were many, many disks, but I didn’t mind listening along. The professor was engaging — a regular guy who cracked bad jokes and all.
“I could do this sort of thing,” UD thought, as she listened to the guy. “I’m just like him. Salt of the earth. Do anything to make people laugh. Know a thing or two about a thing or two.”
She didn’t share this thought with Mr UD, because it seemed a touch grandiose. A touch pathetic.
A few months later, while UD was in Key West, she got an email from the Teaching Company asking if she’d audition for a series of lectures on how to write well. She was thrilled.
She’s become phone pals with Lyndon Johnson’s granddaughter, Lucinda Robb, who works for TC and has helped UD through the stages of preparation for the audition lecture.
Tomorrow a car comes to Rokeby Avenue to take UD to Chantilly, Virginia — TC headquarters. The lecture UD records there will be sent to sample audiences around the country. Good reviews – she gets the gig. Bad – back to non-corporate life.
She tells you all of this because she won’t be posting as heavily as usual today and tomorrow. She’s putting finishing touches on her talk even as we blog, and pretty much all day tomorrow she’ll be recording the lecture.
As she’s written the lecture, UD has come to realize that she harbors a certain, er, fervency about the subject of what writing is, why it’s so wonderful, and why you should do it well. It’s one thing to leap from scathe to scathe, as she does in a daily way; it’s another to pause and think in Big Terms about why a person might make herself into something called Scathing Online Schoolmarm in the first place…
Whatever the outcome of the TC process, UD‘s grateful to the place for prompting her to think in this way.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:19PM
Good luck on your audition. If you lecture half as well as you scathe, you’re in. My wife and I have many Teaching Company courses and believe the guy you heard, Robert Greenberg is the best.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:20PM
Good luck! My local library has a few of these courses. I like ’em.
TC also has a great return policy.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:26PM
Congrats on the audition UD. And good luck with it too. Like the other commenters, I have a number of the TC courses, including the one you were listening to in the car. I’ve picked up a number of great tips and insights from SOS, so I’m sure your course on writing well would be outstanding and would be well worth the bucks.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:35PM
Hey. If you do get the job maybe MU will sling the final product to the Adzillatron. Cancel the cheerleaders it’s Soltan time. How sick would that be?
May 26th, 2009 at 6:09PM
Thank you all for those kind words.