Teaching a Golem good manners

An anonymous Mishnah at Avot 5:9 tells us how to tell a chacham—a wise and almost by definition well-behaved person—from a golem, a somewhat uncouth and unmannered soul, someone who is not yet the finished product:

שִׁבְעָה דְבָרִים בְּגוֹלָם וְשִׁבְעָה בְּחָכָם, חָכָם: אֵינוֹ מְדַבֵּר לִפְנֵי מִי שֶׁגָּדוֹל מִמֶּֽנּוּ בְּחָכְמָה וּבְמִנְיָן, וְאֵינוֹ נִכְנָס לְתוֹךְ דִּבְרֵי חֲבֵרוֹ, וְאֵינוֹ נִבְהָל לְהָשִׁיב, שׁוֹאֵל כְּעִנְיָן וּמֵשִׁיב כַּהֲלָכָה, וְאוֹמֵר עַל רִאשׁוֹן רִאשׁוֹן וְעַל אַחֲרוֹן אַחֲרוֹן, וְעַל מַה שֶּׁלֹּא שָׁמַע אוֹמֵר לֹא שָׁמַֽעְתִּי, וּמוֹדֶה עַל הָאֱמֶת, וְחִלּוּפֵיהֶן בְּגוֹלָם

Seven things characterize a golem, and seven characterize a chacham. A chacham does not speak before one who is greater than him in wisdom or age. He does not interrupt his fellow's words. He does not answer precipitately. His questions are on the subject and his answers to the point. He responds to first things first and to latter things later. As to what he did not learn, he says "I did not learn that." He concedes the truth. The golem is the opposite.

What is this all about? The Maharam Shik explains that it is all about derech eretz, good behaviour, the way a person should handle him- or herself when dealing with others. Startlingly he tells us that this mishnah is placed here in Avot for the specific benefit of the chacham who spends his days in the Bet Midrash, the house of study, because that is a place where he will find no-one to teach him good manners.  From this comment one can infer Maharam Shik’s attitude towards the hurly-burly of the Bet Midrash, where it often seems to the interested outsider that there are more people speaking than listening and that interrupting one’s learning partner in the middle of a sentence is compulsory.

Avot provides another clue as to how one should behave towards others with whom one learns. At Avot 2:15 R’ Eliezer teaches that one should treat one’s chaver, one’s learning partner, with the same degree of respect that one expects to receive oneself. No-one enjoys being interrupted, by being asked off-the-point questions or by having to listen to one’s partner making apparently authoritative pronouncements on matters that les beyond his or her knowledge. Worst of all is the situation in which one’s learning partners positively know that they are wrong but they refuse to accept the truth and cling stubbornly to the fiction that they are somehow right really, or that they don’t deserve to be wrong. This being so, the principle of reciprocity calls for us not to conduct ourselves in any way that we would find annoying or offensive if others do the same to us.