Professionally, no prospect terrifies me more than becoming one of those professors who keep offering the same tired collection of lectures for decades. Of course, the inertia is always there and I have to struggle against it in order to continue growing intellectually. This is why, as I shared earlier, I selected a variety of topics from recent Latin American history that I know nothing about and scheduled lectures on these subjects for this semester.
The very first topic was Peru’s El Sendero Luminoso. I’m ashamed to confess that my knowledge of it was so non-existent that I even had to do an online search to figure out what country it originated in. (Please remember that I’m not a Latin Americanist, which excuses this ignorance to an extent.)
Since these topics were included in the syllabus and announced to the students, I had no option but to start learning. I buried myself in sources on El Sendero Luminoso and finally delivered my lecture today.
The lecture was a smashing success. At the beginning of the class, many students looked bored and exhausted. The moment I walked into the classroom, many of them whipped out their cell phones and started texting with abandon. (I’m noticing that this is a very common reaction to a professor’s appearance. I attribute it to teenage shyness.)
However, after I started speaking, their interest awakened. Eyes opened, backs straightened, cell phones were put aside. The students looked riveted. At the end of the class, there were so many questions and comments that I couldn’t even finish the lecture on time. The prof who is teaching the next class in this classroom started making frustrated huffing noises that I could hear from behind the closed door.
We talked about the issues faced by progressive movements worldwide, the cocaleros, the War on Drugs. The level of enthusiasm the students exhibited was outstanding. Since the subject is new to me, I was very eager to share this new knowledge and I guess the students felt that.
I can’t tell you how happy I feel right now. This is what an educator lives for.
The moral of the story: intellectual self-improvement bears immediate and stunning fruit.
And now I’m off to my lecture on the Spanish Civil War.
Clarissa's Blog 
Your posts make me want to go and get a PhD so I can be a professor too… (just not in accounting. I doubt I would have much flexibility on subject matter when teaching account courses.)
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Oh, thank you! This is the greatest compliment I could get! 🙂
I’m competing with a crowd of miserable academics who whine how horrible our profession is (the College Misery blog). 🙂
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Accounting relates to history, economics, politics, culture. It must be fascinating to learn more about it.
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Your first paragraph worries me. If this lecture was so great, why would you want to quit doing it and deprive future students of it?
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I know this must mean I used a grammatical tense incorrectly. Could you point out the mistake because I can’t catch in spite of staring at the paragraph for 5 minutes. I keep moving between 3 languages all day long and I end up losing my grammar in all of them.
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I do not see any grammar that could change to change the meaning. I just think that when you are a professor who makes something work well in a class, it is reasonable to continue to do it. In time, you may appear to others to be set in your ways and do the same thing over and over. But the alternative is to keep throwing out things that work really well to replace them with other things just because they are different.
I suspect that the only remedy for this is to teach a variety of courses so that there are always new challenges.
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Try a lecture on la teología de la liberación next time!
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My students have this annoying tendency to lose all interest when I mention Catholicism. It seems like, for them, drawling “Oh, so these are Catholics. . .” is a sort of an excuse to avoid criticizing the actions of Christians at any level. Catholics, those bad, evil Christians are not the same, of course, as the good, well-doing and well-meaning American fundies.
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