The Conversation Thread That Started This Blog

This Blog started from a newsy email from Sara and Jim Feldman to Dusty (Arnold Wasserman.) That got several other CIT56ers to weight in and it seemed as if we wanted to have a pre-reunion conversation about days at Tech and other thoughts.

So below is Sara's email followed by the ensuing conversation thread as best as I can reconstruct it with assistance from Sara.
I don't have all the dates, so I have numbered them in order: #1, #2, etc.

Let's continue the conversation. I suggest that anybody who wants to enlist other contributors do so.

The settings permit anybody to post to this blog or add comments to any post.

dusty

Sara Feldman '56 said...
Good morning classmates, it is 5:00 am –who is awake? June 13, 2006

I don’t know about you, but I wake up very early. It does allow me to take my medications on the four times a day schedule. as well as starting on all the plans for the day. This is not a complaint, my Parkinsons is well under control, my schedule is full of wonderful things and people, including working on the CIT/CMU ’56 committee, and I expect to have a great time at our reunion.
Looking through my Tech memorabilia I came across a grade sheet It started me thinking about the relationship of private, public,, professional and protected information in 1956 and now. At least in the Painting and Design department they posted every student’s grades on the office door. They also sent a copy to your parents. So much for privacy.
On the other hand the living quarters for the women was protected. All of us lived in one building – Morewood Gardens – and except for a very occasional workman, men were allowed on the floors to help carry luggage up, and down, at the start, and end of each year. If that sounds odd now, it allowed a relaxing environment , and we found no problem getting to know the men on campus.
Professional privacy is an interesting idea in a teaching situation. Where does the line between open discussion of your work and the “Carnegie Plan” fall? We , the P & Ds, would have an assignment, and then put our solutions up on the picture rail and the conversation would begin. The whole class participated .The idea was to crit the work, with the professor leading us in the direction that would produce the solutions he meant us to find –or as we used to say about the Plan –“never tell them anything”. I suppose in courses where there was an actual correct answer one would say “ never tell them anything, make them discover it themselves” Let’s talk about “The Plan” at our 50th Reunion ! Let’s talk about our lives in those 50 years.
Now , I have been told, the grade slips are more private. The living , however is much more free-flow. In 1952 my roommate, Joan Newman, and I came to school with one alarm clock, and one AM radio for the room. There was only one outside line telephone in each tower in each floor. Think of all the electronic objects that each student has now – it is an amazing change in style.
The technical equipment needed as a part of a CMU education, as well as the general amount needed to run a first rate educational institution is very costly. Let’s consider having our class gift be a scholarship “The Class of 1956 Scholarship”. How does that sound?
Sara

5:30 AM


#1

hi, Sara: thank you for your newsy letter.

Can you tell me the exact dates of the 56 reunion event? I can't be in Pgh. for all of Homecoming.

Concerning your note about a class of 56 scholarship fund. Do you have any funding target in mind? These days, everything in college costs so much that it seems like it would have to be a significant amount to mean anything.

As for a discussion of the Carnegie Plan: you say that ". I suppose in courses where there was an actual correct answer one would say " never tell them anything, make them discover it themselves." I can't recall any P & D courses where there was an actual correct answer. But guiding students to discover answers themselves definitely was part of the plan. Bob Lepper articulated his pedagogical method when he talked about "heuristics," his favorite term. His aim was not "never tell them anything," but rather "tell them just enough to encourage them to explore further and discover on their own."

Heuristic comes from the Greek, heuriskein, which means "to discover."

Heuristic means:
- Serving to discover or to stimulate investigation.
- Of an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student.

At the time Lepper was introducing us to heuristic learning, on the other side of campus Herb Simon, Nobel laureate and professor of computer science, was inventing the field of artificial intelligence ( AI) with some assistance from our classmate, Ed Feigenbaum. In connection with AI, Simon employed the third meaning of heuristic; i.e.:
- Relating to a general formulation that serves as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem.

In order to build expert computer systems, an AI scientist studies the way human experts do what they do -- for example, how an oil geologist figures out where an oil reservoir might lie or how a biologist comes up with an advance in genetic medicine. The AI analyst unpacks the thought process of the expert -- not only his explicit formal procedures, but also the tacit "rules of thumb" that constitute his method of discovery -- in other words, the heuristics of his expertise. Then the AI scientist translates these heuristics into the if-then propositions of the inference engine of an AI system.

Lepper used to have debates with Simon, heatedly objecting to the scientist's desire to computerize the creative process.

Ed Feigenbaum and I meet often. Unlike Lepper and Simon, when Ed and I talk about heuristics, we wind up on the same side of the matter because in recent years, heuristic analysis similar to that employed by AI scientists has become part of the tool kit of design innovation.

Warmest regards, dusty wasserman

# 2

You now have my original letter & , Ah yes, that was the point --we had no concrete solution---but we had a solution that Worner. Libby. Anliker, Lepper et al wanted us to reach, and they worked us around until we "got it".

more tomorrow--Sara

# 3

On Jun 13, 2006, at 11:32 AM, Jim & Sara Feldman wrote:

How about UNARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Somehow I turned on the "speech" mode, and "she" keeps reading our correspondence out loud. Aggggh.

Except for a pleasant smile, and the conversation that went along with our class work I did not have much interchange with Lepper. It is not a question of respect, I appreciate his work, I think looking back he must have had the feeling that it was the men who were serious , and the women, while even talented in some cases , were not in a position to spend the time involved to become what he expected of his best people.

Is that a faulty memory?

Sara

# 4

I have no ideas about Lepper's views on women. But in those days, all us guys were male chauvinist sexist pigs, so its a fair bet you are correct.

I did love Lepper, in all his hunch-shouldered, cackling laughter, tobacco-stained idiosyncrasy. I suppose he was my first true mentor. After graduation, I made it a point to visit him and his wife at least once a year until he died. Shortly before which, a number of his graduates got together to give him a life-time acknowledgement party. When asked whom he would like to give the celebratory speech, he chose me. I was deeply touched. By that time he was in a wheelchair and hooked up to oxygen. But he still cackled at my imitation of him giving a class crit.

dusty

# 5

From Rachel Katzin Chodorov

Dear friends,

More comments. At the Yale Art School where I went for my MFA, there were never any "answers" nor questions that would demand "answers." After all we were studying art, not arithmetic, and isn't learning always exploration? We also never had group crits, only one on one. Instructors treated us more like colleagues than students, except for Josef Albers. He was leading us down a path that was different from any other I've encountered for teaching painting, drawing, sculpture, design etc. Albers was teaching us to SEE. Then training our eyes to connect to our brains and our brains to our hands. A little like the way Tai Chi is taught. You don't remember what you've learned intellectually, rather it becomes embedded in your physical self. For the first 6 weeks in drawing class we only drew free-hand parallel lines , about 15" long in a newsprint pad. It got harder and harder. At the end of the 6 weeks when he announced we were moving to the next problem, I and a few others said, "No, I can't. I haven't finished the parallel lines yet." Architects loved this course. By the end of the year we could draw almost anything in the physical world. We had a kind of X-ray vision.

Arnold/Dusty, found your comments so interesting I sent them on to my son who lives in Paris. Sam, AKA Pip, studied cognitive science in college and was considering going into AI. Actually he went to CA after graduation to explore grad. schools and I think he met with Ed or Bob Engelmore (?). Instead he became a filmmaker/publisher and now has a company and a gallery in Paris dedicated to the work of experimental, or avant garde, film artists., His company (see www.re-voir.com) publishes and distributes the works of both archival and contemporary filmmakers, i.e. Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Hans Richter, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, etc. on video cassette. Most tapes are packaged with books about the artist and are distributed world wide. (His library will come out in Sony Blu-Ray next fall.) I got a little off the track.....but I thought you'd find his reply to your notes amusing:


The opening quote reminds me: I recently read Teacher Man, Frank McCourt's new book about working at Stuyvesant. There is a very funny section where he imagines how frustrated his students are by never getting any direct answers in his course. He describes Math and Physics teachers who I remember, and how they pose problems at the beginning of their course periods, and draw up elegant solutions during the class, so when the bell rings and they drift out into the halls, they are satisfied with what they have learned. Whereas in McCourt's class they complain that McCourt asks them why Hamlet was mean to his mother and 45 minutes later when the bell rings they still have no idea.
-Pip

(Stuyvesant, where Pip was a student, is a public high school for gifted kids in New York City.)

As for the CFA scholarship, this requires a bit of research to find out how much $ would be useful, and what criteria should be established.

Let's continue the discussion.... Rachel

# 6

Pip's reply made me think of Wikipedia, where users, not pointy-headed scholars, create the content -- a premier example of the social structure of Web 2.0. A standard encyclopedia gives you a tidy, unitary," authoritative" definition -- or at best, a range of such definitions. What is most interesting in Wikipedia is not the top level definition -- which often is problematic -- but rather the conversation thread behind it, where you see an idea refracted through myriad points of view. Like Pip's example, the rich learning -- and perhaps something closer to truth -- resides not in the right answer but in the social argumentation around an idea.

I also find your mention of Tai Chi interesting. I have practiced Tai Chi for many years, and more recently Chi Gong and Yoga (I do live in California after all.) Physically, all Eastern practices entail repetition of a standard repertoire of movements. Mentally, they require "just doing", with no connection to end-gaining -- a very non-Western/Aristotelian/Cartesian notion. Mastery comes in the form of detachment from control, the ego-self and the physically material. Albers' pedagogy comes out of German artisanal heritage. While his stance might have been that of master-to-apprentice, and his pedagogy might have looked like a Zen practice, I wonder whether the purpose was not just the opposite of Zen ego-lessness.

This could be a long conversation. Maybe we need to set up a wiki.

Best always, Dusty

# 7

Joan & Kal left today with a bunch of kids and grand-kids for a few weeks in Italy, She also suggested we put the conversation we have had on the Reunion web site for all to join.

Our oldest grandson, Rafi, is now a few weeks shy of 13. We leave for Israel on July 4- . The Bar Mitzvah will be there since his other grandparents live in Jerusalem. Rafi was the one who showed me the modern age--I walked to find this tiny child sitting at his father's desk holding a bottle in his mouth with one hand and playing a kid's computer game with the other hand.

Back to the idea of a whole class conversation.. If all agree who are in the conversation so far I think it is a good idea. I will ask Oz & Rachel and her son, and get back to you.

Sara

# 8

On Jun 14, 2006, at 3:20 AM, Jim & Sara Feldman wrote:

First facts. I have asked the Alumni Office for another copy of the amount of money needed for a scholarship, and the amount of possible givers we have. I will send it on when I get it. ( My memory -not confirmed fact - is that we had approximately 600 potential givers, and the minimum for a scholarship was $ 60.000.)

Reading your answer Dusty I immediately decided I had gone too far.The fact that I had no long philosophical discussions outside of class with Lepper, is probably because I was bouncing around having so much fun that I never took the time. Hardly his fault.

Fiction. That you all were male chauvinist etc. In truth , the general world did not take women artists as seriously, but we were taught with the same vigor as the men., and you guys were great.

There was one exception, and even then it was not a failure in class , but a stalking and sexual harassment of a classmate that took place outside of class hours. If we had known at the time I would have expected that he would have been faced with a wall of young muscle, and a clear statement that it was not to happen again.

( If it had been me ,I would have told both my classmates and I would have told my parents,I can promise there would have been a very angry father, who was also a lawyer-- it would have been good- bye instructor)

Fact. The attitude of society at the time was that she must have done something to deserve it, a pure fiction. When she told us 40 years later , and we realized how much it ruined her Tech experience, I pondered what to do to help erase those memories.

Fact. What I did was look through my Tech scrapbook find a clear photograph the man I had taken one day that we were all hanging out taking pictures.. He was standing alone. I took the photo to Staples --blew up full size, and sent it with a covering letter that said " This photograph comes with instructions. You are to tear it up in little pieces and throw them in the toilet. It is optional wether you use the toilet before flushing it." I got an immediate reply. She was so full of laughter--she said it was one of the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her. It wiped out so many lingering feelings. ( so to speak) Her only regret was she had not told us earlier.

I don't want suggest that professionally she stood still, she got a masters degree, a Fullbright grant, had a loving and talented marriage and family ---but she says that after that incident she was always looking over her shoulder with a feeling that there was some unseen danger.

So , it is 50 years later --let's continue

Fact.The schedule for today is busy--talk to you soon.

Sara


# 9

From: Arthur Ostroff

My two cents:

Bob Lepper: Information was dispensed, however obliquely. When my "Oakland Problem" was placed, I was delighted and bewildered. So I asked him what practical use this project had, He pointed to a catalog of the "Family of Man," then a blockbuster show in New York. Ah, enlightenment! Over time, the arrangement of text and visuals on a page has been one of my strong skills. On my sporadic visits to Pittsburgh, I always made it a point to drop in and chat.

Bill Libby: We had a close relationship, with visits in Pittsburgh and Brussels. He actually suggested that I consider coming back to Tech to teach. When I considered the minuscule salaries on offer,I demurred. Another road not taken...

Howard Worner: We paid regular visits to his Barnegat Light home . After Marian passed away, he dropped out of sight. Andy Warhol's nephew, Jamie, had a book signing and expo in Philadelphia . I went, bought his book, "A visit to Uncle Andy's", learned his was a Tech alum, and Howard was not only a close friend, he had his phone number in Virginia Beach! When I reached him (he'd lost our address), his first words were "When are you coming down?" For the next three years we did. Learned a lot about his life, how he got to Tech, etc. For all his accomplishments, Howard never got over the patronizing sneers from some of the "Fine Arts" crowd at Tech.

And what was Andy Warhol, class of '49, doing at Tech in 1952? Probably making up his gym credit, since he never went...

As to the Arts, a quote from an old Esquire issue: "Talent is something you do easily and well. Because it comes so easily, most young people tend to reject it until time starts to run out." And from the New Yorker's Adam Gopnck: "Art doesn't need someone to explain it after you look at it; Art explains itself by being there to look at." (So there, Arthur Danto)


See ya, Oz

#10

Seems like we want to talk to each other before showing up in Pittsburgh. Which seems like a nice idea. So what I am wondering is whether we should set up a 56 chat room to continue this conversation and pull in a lot of other 56ers. Anybody out there own a 9 year old grandchild? They can set up web sites, chat rooms and blogs in about ten minutes. Actually, a blog would probably be simplest -- and you can post pictures to it.
Whaddya think?

dusty

#11

Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 09:15:03 -0500
From: Judith Obermayer


The other thing to consider is a class web site with a password protected section for those who wish to put in personal information, pictures, etc. This would be done in advance of the reunion and could include links to individual web sites as well. This allows people not attending to participate and encourages people to attend. I would guess that the vast majority of our classmates have internet access and would use this resource. It certainly worked well for a Swarthmore reunion. See: http://www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/reunion/1952/yearbook.htm for the class site they used. My assistant, Betty, did the technical work and made some conditions on the form of electronic material that was acceptable so it could be added easily. Since our class is so large we would probably need several people able to add things to the web site. I will find out more on Monday about how she handled it.
Whatever it is -- let's share it.

# 12

On Jun 17, 2006, at 3:15 PM, Arthur Ostroff wrote:

Sounds like a good idea. Now, for that 9 year old randchild to set it up...

Oz


# 13

I set up a web site.

I'm having my second grandchildhood.

Go to www.carnegietech56.blogspot.com

dusty


# 14

very nice1

I will post our conversation after I call Rachel , and out stalkee to see if she wants her story it on.

Sara

# 15

I talked to everyone--it is a go. I will put my 1st note in, then you put your erply, I think Rachel was next, then me again--or you then me, and Oz. I do want to change just a word or two after speaking to Joan Veleff Schaler--she thought her experience should go in, but wanted something added.

So , I will try putting mine in.

ASara


# 16

Bien fait!

Artur


# 17

I came across more CIT things in the past week.

In this case it was a portfolio of 28 prints-( commercial lithographs) of painting of Howard Worner that he had sent me in 1986, along with a long letter telling me about the many travels to far-flung places that he turned into painting essays. He added a comment at the end about the direction he thought the department was going since the Radio days.

Dusty I see only one comment is still the number on the blog---did you get my string of earlier conversations?

Back to Howard's work. I really enjoy it-- I suppose the Wean Collection has the originals. in the portfolio he included a large variety of places.

I have sent it on to Oz. We can talk about what to do with it after he sees it.

Sara