2021-OCT-29-1141Hrs
I was thinking the other day about the art lecturers I encountered at Mausica. Of course Boodoo, but also Thomasos, whom I never quite understood.Two of Thomasos' assignments caused a stir among us on the campus, one was "Stop Thief". The other, was "A mendicant".
"Stop thief" made the rounds outside of class as a kind of Mausica special.
But when Thomasos gave us the assignment of drawing a "mendicant", many of us, including me, did not know, or had never heard about, a mendicant. I had never heard the word, and in Marabella where I grew up I dont think we had mendicants. So many of us did not know what to draw.
Mendicant was a first year assignment, but second years in Mayfair and Haven got on to it, and soon it got into the hostel lexicon, with phonetic adjustments. Mendicant became a label you could affix to a man. You could say to a man, "you is a mendicant or what?" Men like Beck, Bullock, Sto, Geezmo, Braf, revelled in this.
I had Thomasos as supervisor for student practice. On the Friday of student teaching, as all may remember, we were back at lunch, and the supervisors were supposed to spend the afternoon going over the week's experiences with their charges. This of course is where people like Cuffie excelled. But Thomasos was candid about this, and told our group he did not know what he was supposed to do. He walked down the corridor and saw Cuffie and others in front of their groups, in animated posture.
When he came to our group he said, memorably, "all these lecturers, talking, talking, teaching teaching, what are they talking about?"
I remember him vividly. There was an honesty about this that was striking. Maybe specialist lecturers like him should not have been given that role.....maybe it should have been left to those more steeped in teaching methods and classroom management. People like the Cuff, Hordatt, and one or two others.
Scratchie.
Theodore Lewis 69
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