With all due respect to my students, I am bemused whenever I receive signs that my teaching was effective...long after the fact (of a particular course/semester). Teachers are not celebrities--we don't crave constant attention and affirmation. It bugs me that South Korean film stars/popular musicians are always thanking their fans for showering them with love and support. As always, I can't speak for my peers in the primary/secondary education sectors, but I am hard pressed to imagine that university faculty seek such adoration (well, some do--they say they feel like rock stars when they are lecturing--will comment on this phenomenon another time).
As mentioned in my previous post on dehumanizing faculty, professors mean well and try very hard to inspire, nurture, and facilitate knowledge transfer into all sorts of student brains. If we share any purpose across the spectrum of disciplines and sub-fields, it is to show our students that accurate, diverse information (AND proper analysis thereof) matters, for the "life of the mind" and for daily life. Of course, not every student likes every faculty member or every course, so a bit of hit-and-miss action is to be expected.
But touchingly, I received a postcard from a student who finished his undergraduate studies this month (one of the last to complete the three-year curriculum, hurray) and is now enjoying a well-deserved vacation abroad. He described his sight-seeing adventures, with a lengthy discourse about antiquarian bookstores, and then...in the last two sentences, expressed his sincere wishes that I would understand his initial distaste for my course (and me) because he didn't like my pedagogical style at all, but upon reflecting on that first-year experience, finally comprehended its "grand design" (more my words than his, but I have tried to capture his tone).
I knew that he was not that motivated while taking the course two years, but upon reading that postcard (at 8am, sitting in my sunny office), I felt enlivened and vindicated. I was happier, more than anything, that our relationship had changed over time, and that he accepted my good intentions.
I presume that parents feel similarly relieved when their children hint that "things were not so bad" (especially when uttered by adolescents who are remorseful about acting irrationally or spitefully).
As mentioned in my previous post on dehumanizing faculty, professors mean well and try very hard to inspire, nurture, and facilitate knowledge transfer into all sorts of student brains. If we share any purpose across the spectrum of disciplines and sub-fields, it is to show our students that accurate, diverse information (AND proper analysis thereof) matters, for the "life of the mind" and for daily life. Of course, not every student likes every faculty member or every course, so a bit of hit-and-miss action is to be expected.
But touchingly, I received a postcard from a student who finished his undergraduate studies this month (one of the last to complete the three-year curriculum, hurray) and is now enjoying a well-deserved vacation abroad. He described his sight-seeing adventures, with a lengthy discourse about antiquarian bookstores, and then...in the last two sentences, expressed his sincere wishes that I would understand his initial distaste for my course (and me) because he didn't like my pedagogical style at all, but upon reflecting on that first-year experience, finally comprehended its "grand design" (more my words than his, but I have tried to capture his tone).
I knew that he was not that motivated while taking the course two years, but upon reading that postcard (at 8am, sitting in my sunny office), I felt enlivened and vindicated. I was happier, more than anything, that our relationship had changed over time, and that he accepted my good intentions.
I presume that parents feel similarly relieved when their children hint that "things were not so bad" (especially when uttered by adolescents who are remorseful about acting irrationally or spitefully).
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