An article in this week's Monroe Street Journal by Jessica Shatzman entitled "The Power of the Student" was simply tremendous. The pull quote summarizes it fairly well:
It makes sense that a teacher would be more engaged teaching classes where the students show excitement about the subject matter they are learning and about learning itself.
I've told this to students for umpteen-many years. Certainly, as a professor I understand my responsibility in setting the tone in the class. No doubt, it's a big deal. But I have had the hardest time getting students, especially those who are having a difficult time with some particular professor, to understand that, unless they pick up the ball and run with it, they're never going to have a good class. It is the students who carry the day, who get other students involved, who pick up the professor's energy. Professors can try to invigorate a class but it's the students who actually make it happen.
One of my (or, possible, my only) strengths as a professor is the energy I bring into a class. In a perfect world this shouldn't matter, but it does. It seems that students pick up on this energy and feed it back to me, the other students, and the material. However, students should realize that it works the other way, too. There's nothing more exciting to a professor than realizing a group of students in a classroom are excited about and interested in the class's material. Nothing. The excitement that he or she feels will help invigorate the professor and almost definitely increase both the quality of and the energy delivered in that day's (and future days') classroom activities.
Try it out, sometime.
Thanks, Jessica, for raising this issue.
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