[Avodah] Embarassing One's Rebbe (was Torah Study vs. other contributions to society)

[Moshe Yehuda Gluck]

R' MB:
*The same Pachad Yitzchaq discusses the problem with asking an
*off-sugyah question of one's rebbe. Usually it is explained in terms
*of avoiding the possibility of embarassing one's rebbe in public.
*(Lema'aseh this is impluasible. Even with our current round of
*gedolim, who do not pretend to be on the level of tannaim or amora'im,
*it would be difficult to catch them off guard about a sugyah, and rare
*for one of them to be embarassed over it.)

(I find this hard to believe - see Horios 13b, which recounts how they
attempted to embarrass Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel by asking him to teach
Uktzin, which he did not know.) 
I suspect that the model of learning of that time, which required enormous
amounts of memorization, led to a different model of recall than what we are
used to. For example, if someone quotes a Gemara to me that I learned
already, I have a pretty decent chance of remembering where on  the Daf it
is, and whether it was Amud Aleph or Beis. (I'm horrible at remembering the
actual Daf number, though.) Way back when, there was no spatial (or just
about any other) frame of reference, and conceivably, if someone remembered
that something was a Gemara in Kesuvos, (unless he was holding in Kesuvos
and he remembered it in his short-term memory) he would start from the
beginning of the Mesechta and mentally "scroll" through the Gemara until he
reached what he was looking for. Should that Gemara have been toward the end
of the Mesechta, he might well be embarrassed at taking so long to locate
and remember the Gemara.

KT,
MYG