“The teacher who tries to set things right by desperately doing more—more assignments, more readings, more demonstrations of expertise—may, oddly enough, make a bad situation worse. Students do not in fact want the teacher’s knowledge; they want the teacher to want theirs.”
Are You My Mother? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/are-you-my-mother
“Conversely, anyone who has experienced a “good class,” as either a student or a teacher, will recognize that dynamic of mutual satisfaction in Lay’s description. Good classes are not recalled in the same obsessive detail as bad ones because good classes are not eventful in the same way. Their drama is intellectual, not interpersonal; their stakes are shared thought and argument; the feelings they give rise to are pleasantly hazy. Neither their content nor their tone needs to be litigated in retrospect. There is a wonderful synchronicity between the knowledge of the teacher and what Lay and his contemporaries called the wish-energy of the student, such that the external world of the classroom appears to be changed into a dream world, a respite from the school that, paradoxically, exists within it.” ~Merve Emre
