So yes, an instructor could have answered the question the student asked well enough but I was able to see from the question that the asker was potential graduate or professional school material and to say so, and that is the difference.
I am teaching all these extra lower division courses and I am very much put upon, and I also resist the idea that “the best people” should be teaching such courses but I see the point. I nabbed a major and identified a person with potential; others might just have gotten the student through the course, so I functioned, I suppose, as one of the “best people.”
Random Student: So the helping verb must always be “haber” in this sort of case, and never “tener”?
Professor Zero: In Spanish as we are learning it, yes. In other forms of Spanish such as Ladino, which is Jewish Spanish if you will, it would be “tener” and it is “tener” or the equivalent in other Romance languages so your instinct is good, but for purposes of this class the helping verb is always “haber”.
Student: So there are other forms of Spanish, and of Romance that actually do what I want to do? There is Jewish Spanish?
Professor Zero: Yes.
Student: So I am not entirely “off”?
Professor Zero: Not at all, you’re just jumping ahead a little.
Student: I am ahead?
Professor Zero: Well, you grasp the structure, you have good intuition and a logical question; that is what it is to be ahead in any field, yes.
Student: I am ahead! And there is Jewish Spanish, and there are other forms of Romance!
Professor Zero: Yes. And you are very possibly ahead; you are certainly not behind.
Student: I am doing fine?
Professor Zero: If this is the kind of question you ask in all your classes, definitely.
Do you see? I will have horrible evaluations since I am so exhausted, but this person I have reason to believe few notice is now more likely to finish college than before. The things you learn while doing a PhD do serve.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
But this is not necessarily stuff you’d learn during your doctoral coursework. For example, after I finished my absolutely exemplary undergraduate education, I knew a great deal of connections and branches of things, like you demonstrate here. After my MA, I didn’t know much more. After finishing my doctoral coursework — before I quit the programme — I only new things I knew were terms specific to this new discipline, mostly for concepts already familiar to me under different labels.
So, I suppose it’s relative to the scope of one’s education, and not level so much.
You’re an intellectual who is or could be PhD bound, which is my point although I was too tired to write it and also thought it would make the post too long. The particular things I said to that student, I knew from high school probably or college at most, not from graduate school. On the other hand, I had momentarily forgotten the a simple pluperfect form in French, a tense which dropped away in the Middle Ages but which one knows; asked the French linguist standing next to me; she has a PhD and looked down her nose saying, “That information is not part of my subfield.” So, she’s a mere technician, I thought.
But what our MA instructors would have done if asked this question by this student would be to take it as a sign of lostness and not as a sign of thinking. I also see their lack of curiosity of a certain kind in the courses they take from me — they want functional and not research knowledge, and so on, are still worried about being right for purposes of authority / power not just precision, etc. — it’s a whole different mentality from the research one. That’s why I think that if you don’t have fancy graduate students or the old fashioned interesting kind of MA who hardly exist any more, then you should staff 100% with people who have real research degrees … if not you’re much more likely to be producing students like technical institute students, not like university students.
“But what our MA instructors would have done if asked this question by this student would be to take it as a sign of lostness and not as a sign of thinking”
Quite. I remember by utterly futile fury I felt in my first two sems of US postgrad, when I was marked down for writing actual research papers. I was required, I was told, to consolidate the ideas we had discussed in class (cf. ‘copy-paste’ and ‘zero brainwork’). One professor even asked me — and I concede now that by her standards of imparting education she may have been justified — whether I was even doing my readings, because my papers were not scattered with quotes from the texts to prove I was. I was so livid at this utter, sheer, complete waste of my time that I nearly started crying. When I spoke to my parents later that evening I spoke like a vile racist, shredding ‘stupid American systems’ and their maddeningly repressive requirements.
Then I got over it, and felt quite ashamed. But my grades didn’t go to my usual A+ range till I started taking classes with an Argentinian professor in the policy school.
*my, not by
So this was at Brandeis? I thought that was a good university. It’s funny, here it’s the opposite: foreign students are the ones who insist on copying and pasting, quoting from encyclopedias and so on. And I think there are more US faculty of the type you describe than I realize … and that this is part of why I don’t like teaching …
It *is* a good university. Just… complying to norms I was not familiar with. My friend, a much older person, told me my professor was absolutely right in asking me to limit my ‘research paper’ to the solo primary text (which was usually two chapter at the most) because pre-PhD scholarship is all about “accuracy and completeness”. I was not, he said, “really required to think”. That was post-doctoral stuff. A PhD is for proving I can run along the grooves.
That’s interesting! I’d never heard it before. Hm… I wonder how many disciplines that’s true in?
“are still worried about being right for purposes of authority,”
Unfortunately and exceptionally true. And they are not only “technicians” but they are “technicians of received ideas.”