Mon, 30 Jan 1995
REACHING STUDENTS

How do you "reach to teach" students? I don't know. I'm not sure that e-mail, journals, discussions, varying styles, or whatever methods and techniques anyone may use to reach students is the seminal issue. And, I don't know if there is any one formula, one set of methods and techniques for successfully reaching students, that fits all sizes. I do know, however, the formula for failure:

1. treat every student in every class as the same
2. keep doing the same thing over and over again until you're comfortable and its routine
3. be satisfied with and judge successful only those things that go the way you want them to
4. take the easy and comfortable road instead of the risky and right one
5. don't be concerned with the kind of people the students will be after they leave the classroom and the kind of society they will live in
6. act removed and superhuman, be taken with yourself, and hide your foibles so that the students cannot say, "you're just like us"
7. do not truly believe in and trust yourself
8. concentrate so much on information transmission, be so intellectual, that the heart is besides the point
9. when the heart of the educational matter, the humanity of both you and the student, is wrapped in reams of lecture notes and administrative memos and test booklets, and is obscured.