I know a professor who constantly complains that her students cheat. It’s a big obsession with her. Curiously, she’s one of the most dishonest people I’ve ever met.
Another professor complains that students are bored, unenthusiastic and have zero interest in learning. He’s ready to retire and says he struggles to find anything that would interest him.
My students are all very enthusiastic and happy but I wonder if that, too, is simply my reflection that I’m seeing in them like in a mirror.
It’s both of course. Ever had to spend a lot of time with a terminally depressed person? Sucks the life out of you.
Meanwhile, I could listen to my agronomist relative talk all day about dirt. Not because I’m all that interested, but because *he’s* really interested, and that makes him interesting. When we visit, he gets out his auger and goes and does soil samples with my kids, they talk about A horizons and B horizons and they shake soil up in a jar with water to see what settles out, and they test it for clay content, and sift it through sifters and talk about particle size and organic matter and he tells them crazy stories about his student soil-surveying days… and even though they were just little kids when he first showed them all this, they were *mesmerized*. Because the guy has so much love and enthusiasm for both the subject, and for other people. It’s amazing.
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I have a colleague who always has an unusually high number of cheating students and I’m pretty sure this person lies about small things on a regular basis. Interestingly, their evidence of student cheating is almost always that the student’s work is too good, their thoughts are too complex and the writing is too sophisticated to have been produced by an undergraduate. I teach very different sorts of courses, but I usually have a couple of unusually good writers in each group and our student body can be all over the map in terms of academic preparation, so it isn’t that odd for a handful of papers in each class at our university to be extremely good. So I wonder if this isn’t at some level a reflection of inadequacy related to the colleagues own (fairly modest) scholarly production.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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