Transformational Education > A new way of teaching
Audio Clip – Levitt on the teaching group
Transcript
And so afterwards I heard that he, Ed Bursk, and George Lombard had a meeting, and they decided that I would get a job offer to teach Marketing, and I was a pretty safe risk, because I would be teaching the first year course that was run by Milt Brown, and John Chapman was teaching in it. And I forget the other guy. It was run by Milt Brown, anyhow. Which was terrific good luck for me, because—oh, Walt Salmon was teaching it.…
So it was terrific luck for me, because the way Milt Brown ran the course is we'd have a staff meeting once or twice a week to go over each case. Not only what the subject was, and what was in the case, but how to handle it, how to manage it in class, and what to do, and what not to do, and things like that. And Milt was very enthusiastic about teaching. Boy, he's always enthusiastic. Sort of hyper.
And the four of us would sit in this meeting in Milt's office to go over the cases. And I couldn't make any contribution in that meeting, but I had learned a lot from Milt. And John Matthews taught in that group too, so it's Walt, John Matthews, me. That's the first time that Walt had taught. He had been working for McNair, and doing some other teaching now and then. But this is his first fulltime teaching job there.…
And so we had discussions about what our analysis was, and how you think about this thing. And the distinctive thing about that was in just the discussing of it, Milt got so emotional, and ripped up, and everything was exciting that he talked about all these dumb numbers, and he was flying very, very high, at a high rate of speed.
And Walter, in that meeting, used to say things like, "Well, that couldn't be true, because if you take a look at the numbers on page 32, and then you compare them to the numbers on exhibit 7, that doesn't make sense together. There must be something else going on there. And he was always jumping on Milt, and saying, "It doesn't make any sense. If you look at the numbers, it doesn't make sense. Walt was very persuasive. So they had to find another way of making sense, which is really wonderful to learn. A wonderful way for you to learn.
And one of the marvelous things about Walt was, you could depend upon him -- he always had something with numbers, and he had worked them out. So in preparing for the class, I was working on the numbers, too. And after a while, it was a little joke, because Walt had a lot of numbers, he knew what was going on, except he had the numbers wrong. That was a big joke. It wasn't wrong, exactly, but it was not precise. But he had the right way of thinking about things. It was very helpful. So I got a terrific education in those staff meetings.
Theodore Levitt