28 Teaching Minds Here is the same woman, this time writing about how she learned music. My mentor, Otto-Werner Mueller, was conducting the Yale Philharmonia in the 1970s—I met him as an undergrad in Madison, WI. I attended his graduate seminars in Madison and spent a lot of time with him while he was in New Haven. He guest-conducted the Hartford Symphony (where I now work) twice in the past few years. (He is 83 now.) I spent hours and hours in “lab orchestra” watching him teach his conducting students, both in Madison and at Yale. What always struck me was how students were either so self-conscious they were wooden, or how they’d try to imitate Otto (who at 6 feet, 7 inches had amazing stature) physically and couldn’t pull it off. Very few were able to incorporate what he was teaching and then make it their own. | believe that effective teaching makes .. . students look at what the teacher does and see how they can imitate it in a way that is consonant with who they are The next writer was a Ph.D. student of mine and is now a professor at a major university. Trust your intuitions. This was something you told many of us over and over. It has had three meanings for me—first, that the only right things to work on are those that I can imagine a solution to; second, that whether a way of attacking something is the right way or not, it will lead me to the right way; and third, go out on a limb. I can’t say how I learned this except, perhaps, through trusting your advice and then noticing that it got me to success over and over again. It began to really sink in when I had my own students. Often, the most interesting things they brought to me were more intuitive than they were based on what everyone else was saying. And I have had to reassure people that their ideas are good and they should follow up on them. Of course, there are also intuitions that my students have that I don’t think are good, and I don’t advise them to follow HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023774