Good Enough (2015-02-09)
Watched the film Whiplash the other night, and it raises some interesting questions about motivating would-be artists. The story is about the interaction of a verbally abusive music teacher and one of his extremely promising students. The teacher justifies his abuse as necessary to push anyone with the potential to be great on to actually achieve greatness. The sadistic extent of the teacher’s abusiveness makes that assumption morally repugnant, but at one point in the film this teacher says something that does ring true. He says that to tell a student who fails to push himself that he did “good enough” is one of the worst things a teacher can say.
