My playing became an engaging intellectual exercise in which I understood every note and why I played it the way I did, because I had thought about it myself. To this point, Booth adds three more principles that will help teachers and students avoid the Polonius role. Addressing instructors, he writes, You gotta get them talking to each other, not just to you or to the air. You gotta get them talking about the subject, not just having a bull session in which nobody really listens to anybody else. You gotta find ways to prevent yourself from relapsing into a badly prepared lecturette, disguised as a discussion.
Informal lectures are usually worse than prepared ones.
Footnotes 9 .