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Those who are about to make the transition from being students to being teachers often have many questions and anxieties about the duties they are about to perform. The first reading in this section is a lecture given by Robert Ferguson, who was asked for the Chicago Teaching Program's spring 1987 workshop to provide some practical suggestions for those beginning their careers as teachers. In response to this assignment, he offers a series of commandments for beginning teachers, which he illustrates with anecdotes about the kinds of problems that can arise when teachers forget that their students do not simply absorb information passively. Rather, as he so nicely illustrates, students actively interpret what they hear and thus will, with surprising frequency, alternately puzzle and amuse you with their reconstructions of what you have said.
Although Ferguson's advice is primarily addressed to those who plan to use the discussion method, his commandments do, as he notes, deal with issues that will be of concern to all beginning teachers. Moreover, his recommendation about effort is one that underlies a sizable proportion of the questions beginning teachers ask as they prepare to enter the classroom, irrespective of the teaching method they plan to employ. Accordingly, the next section amplifies the topic of preparing for class by responding in general terms to two questions commonly asked by beginning teachers. The sections dealing with lecture and discussion teaching offer additional suggestions for preparation.
Our topic today is the nature of teaching practice, and I address you as a teacher and not as a theorist of pedagogical methodologies. The following observations come from a reasonable wealth of practical experience and from the comments of a few colleagues who have been kind enough to share their own thoughts in the two weeks that I have had to ruminate on the subject.
My assumptions in addressing you are twofold: first, that you are essentially new or beginning teachers; and second, that the subject of greatest mutual concern is the discussion class. If you are personally more worried about formal lecture techniques, some of my comments should still be useful—especially if you pay some attention to the plan of what you are about to hear. In any case, the whole purpose of the lecture is to reach toward effective discussion. Education is always a matter of exchange.
Let me begin with an example from my first important teaching experience as an instructor in an expository writing class with twenty freshmen. At the time, I was a graduate student—one of perhaps thirty new instructors in this very large course—and we were all given a small teaching manual to help us get started. I don't remember the manual, but I have a very vivid memory of one of my colleagues, a tall ex-Marine who, accustomed to orders, followed the manual all too carefully in his first class. That class had reduced a strong, self-confident, outgoing person to a mass of trembling fears.
This is what happened. Apparently, the manual called for an instructor to enter the first class with a common object from daily life and to dare the class to define it. The exercise was supposed to lead into a spirited discussion about the vagaries of language and the need for precision in its use. Our ex-Marine was an athlete. He brought a tennis ball with him, bounced it on the desk, and, following orders, dared his class to define it. And from the back of the room had come, "It's a tennis ball. Now what's next?" The timing, the poise, and, yes, the casual hostility of the remark destroyed this new instructor's entire class plan. Later in the day, when our conversation took place, he literally could not remember how he had survived the rest of the hour.
I give you the story for two reasons. First, it is an excellent example of every beginning teacher's nightmare. Your class plan has collapsed, and you experience the derision of your charges in direct consequence. You have been left with nothing to say and a great deal of time in which to say it! You have lost the upper hand and fear that you can never retrieve it. Most terrible of all, your knowledge has been dreadfully inadequate to your needs. The incident literally embodies the question that you will ask a hundred times a class in your first year of teaching, Am I running out of material?
My second reason for giving you this example has to do with my innate suspicion of teaching manuals, every one of which should be taken with many grains of salt. A rigid application of rules in the volatile forum of the classroom will inevitably fail. Another person's decent insight quickly becomes an artificial constraint when applied too mechanically. It should be clear to you then that my title, "The Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching," has its facetious side. The open-endedness of that final half has other important meanings that we will get to later, but it stands most immediately for incompleteness, lack of system, and the knowledge that you must make your own rules based upon your own experience instead of relying upon mine. On the other hand, I have seen—and lived—your problem, so bear with me. Here is the first commandment.
1. Make the classroom your own.—In part this means the Shakespearean homily, "To thine ownself be true." If you try to present yourself as something that you are not, even your dullest student will eventually see through the artifice and decide that you are a phony. Of course, knowing oneself is a difficult business, but you can learn a great deal while teaching if you give yourself the chance. Think rather deliberately about your own character. Know your strengths and weaknesses. Work on your weaknesses, but play to your strengths. If, for example, you are a straightforward, earnest individual, don't try to be overly witty in the classroom. At the same time, please don't forget humor; it is one of your most creative teaching devices.
Not the least part of being true to yourself lies in admitting ignorance. When a student asks you a question, and you do not know the answer—it will happen occasionally—there is only one correct answer: "I don't know." These are hard words to get out for a beginning teacher, but don't underestimate the pedagogical usefulness of your own ignorance. Let me suggest just two strategies among many: (1) outline the way in which one might think about constructing an answer to the question, or (2) make a mutual assignment (for yourself and the student who has asked the question) out of finding the correct answer for the next class.
Of course, making the classroom one's own means much more than I have just suggested. It does not mean imposing your own personality on your students. The logical extreme of such obnoxiousness can be seen in Ionesco's play, The Lesson, where the teacher ends up killing his student because she fails to conform to his understanding of her. I do mean, however, that you have to guide and, at times, control your class through the nature of your own personality. There are a hundred different ways to do this, and experimentation is the key. Making the classroom your own means creating an atmosphere in which everyone, including yourself, is comfortably effective—an atmosphere in which everyone is engaged and engaging. This goal is more easily stated than accomplished, but you never want to lose sight of the ideal.
2. Effort!—The second commandment can be given in one word: effort, yours and theirs. If you are industrious, your students will respect you. It is almost as simple as that, though I refer you back to rule one above as a sometime qualification. So be industrious. This characteristic is rarely a problem with beginning teachers. I raise it now because the halls of academia are filled with lazy teachers and even lazier students. Mark Twain is quite correct when he says that "the natural inclination of the human being is toward rest." There is, I believe, no substitute for continuous effort, even if you know your material well. Teaching is work. Don't ever forget that. You are the source of energy in your classroom. Now this may seem like an obvious comment, but the point is more complicated than most people realize.
Your effort in preparation must be matched by a similar effort in preparation from the other side of the desk. It is your responsibility, in other words, to insure that your students prepare. They will sit back and expect you to entertain them if you allow them to. But if you let this happen, there will be long stretches of boredom for all concerned, and this will be true even if you are an accomplished performer because that is all you will be, a performer. Your mission is to make your students think. That does not happen if they are simply relaxing. There should be no freeloaders in your classroom. Students should be in class, they should be prepared, and they should be expected to participate on a regular basis.
I sometimes think that the single greatest characteristic that we have lost sight of in contemporary education is the value of the spoken word in intellectual exchange. One of the reasons why some of you will have difficulty as beginning teachers lies in the unfortunate fact that you have never been expected to hold forth in a formal way in a classroom. My rule of thumb in presenting this need to my students is as follows: students should speak often enough in class that the act does not interrupt their own flow of thought. Thus, if a relatively passive student spends five minutes thinking about the form of a comment and then ten more worrying about what has been said, that student has just missed one-third of your class. Stress the formal skill of public address; it is one of the vital skills a college student is supposed to master. To accomplish this goal in a balanced way, I call on students in class. If you adopt this practice in a regular and fair-minded way, your students will accept it as part of the natural process of instruction and will not see it as a problem.
3. Remember the formal process of instruction.—The third rule of good teaching is almost as obvious as the first two: remember the formal process of instruction. The artificiality of the classroom in the formal process of instruction leads you to do things that you would not do in ordinary discourse. Prepare for this formality. It includes, among other things, the careful, even labored attempt to achieve precision in the formulation of questions. It also involves an unusual amount of repetition of your points and of your students' points. (It is always helpful here to remember the old adage of the BBC: tell them what you are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you have said.) These qualities would be tedious in regular social exchange, but they are vital in the classroom. This formality extends, of course, to your class agenda. Know what you mean to accomplish in every class. Your students should know what you are doing and why you are doing it. They will be especially interested in the details. They should know what is expected of them and when—from day one in your class. They should know how you grade and what the grade means to you.
The elements just listed are ones that beginning teachers usually remember (with the possible exception of repetition). If anything, a new teacher will overemphasize the formality of instruction at the expense of substance—sticking too closely to an agenda, for example, at the expense of a more interesting point in class. But there is one element of formality that new teachers often fail to comprehend. I refer to the hierarchical nature of the relation between teacher and student. That relation is unavoidably hierarchical with all of the implications that this implies. Beginning teachers are often still students themselves in another context, and the dimensions of hierarchy often make them uncomfortable. Learn to work within it. Because you have an institutional advantage—one that will at times fascinate your charges—you also have a hundred ways for taking personal advantage of your students. All are questionable, and at least a score of them are completely unethical. This is not a lecture on teaching ethics, but you should never forget that to take advantage of a student for your own physical or intellectual pleasure is to be a traitor to your profession. Hierarchy as such is neither a positive nor a negative ingredient, but I guarantee you that it will operate in a negative fashion if you have not thought of its implications. I remind you of Cicero's famous injunction: "The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn."
4. Be aware of your students.—My fourth rule, be aware of your students, sounds simple enough. The issue, however, has many dimensions. We can start with the literal and work up. You cannot hope for a substantive exchange with your students if you do not know their names. This amounts to a near law of human nature: your knowledge of the name is a primal signification of your interest; failure to know is just the opposite. I actually take role before every class. I do it not just to learn the names in a large class but to inform everyone of that name. It is also an act of preparation. When you call role, you can actually see your students sit up a little more carefully as they get ready for the public participation that true membership entails.
A second level of awareness of your students has to do with the corporate identity of your class. Here I refer to their own interaction and apparent sense of place, to their likes and dislikes within the group. A hatred between students in a class—this will happen—can be a peculiarly corrosive phenomenon for the whole group. You have to diffuse these situations as they arise. What you hope for as a teacher is a certain organic wholeness, a sense of enterprise within the class as a collectivity. You work on this by bringing everyone into the business of each class. Remember, no freeloaders. You do it by controlling the monopolists and by drawing out the silent ones. You do it by making sure that the self-worth in a student's comment builds within the immediate intellectual challenge that the group is facing. My own gauge for success in thinking about the corporate identity of the class takes the form of an aspiration. I hope that if I were suddenly called from the room my class would continue the discussion at hand without a break.
A third and related element of awareness might be called the musketeer syndrome: all for one and one for all. You face a dozen quick decisions in every class as to whether you favor an individual student or the group. Most of the time, the individual and the group work in tandem. Most of the time, you will give the group priority if there is an implied conflict. Even so, you owe every individual student time in your class, and there will be moments when you will want to sacrifice the group for that individual. Let me offer a quick example from recent experience. This year I was teaching The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The novel is about a young, beautiful, and socially prominent woman who turns her back on place and preference and who, as an increasing outsider, eventually commits suicide. The book, naturally, is more complicated, but this quick summary is all you need to know to appreciate the dilemma of my student, a Korean American, who was striving very, very hard to fit within her adopted culture. She was supremely threatened by The Awakening. She saw that Chopin's character was throwing away everything that she was working for, and she needed to talk about it. Why, she wanted to know, should this perfectly adapted character fail to participate in society and then take her own life? It made no sense to her. My student, you will gather, was operating on an entirely different level than her peers in the class. Nevertheless, I gave her five minutes of our class to explain her point of view. She needed every one of them. For that time in that situation, the others had to wait.
There is another and perhaps more controversial aspect of one's awareness of students. Simply put, I teach most of the time to my best students. There is, in fact, little choice in the matter if you want to hold your class. One of the talents that you need to develop in the classroom is the ability to watch and gauge your students even as you are thinking or talking with them. Your better students are your weather vanes. If they do not understand what you are saying, then no one does. If they are manifestly bored, it is time to move on. You compensate by being available to all of your students outside of class. Office hours, you know, don't sound like much. You can find a way to spend an hour and a half in your office before going home. The easiest thing in the world is to turn a student away from your door. But because you are moving quickly in a class—particularly here at the University of Chicago—you must be ready to spend a lot of time outside of that class with your slower students. You have to give your people the time that they need, and you are not going to do it in an hour and a half a week.
There is one last level of awareness of your students that is worth stressing to new teachers. You want to think carefully, even clinically about your students' actual situations as they present them to you. Who seems to be in trouble? Who is pressing? Who is nervous? Who is riding for a fall? Whether you consider a display of intellectual arrogance to be merely that or a mask for painful insecurities will determine a great deal about how you respond to it. You are, in short, a counselor as well as a teacher, and you can help your students more than you might think by understanding the direction behind their performances.
A concrete example might help here. In that first expository writing class that I alluded to earlier, I managed to bring an alienated female student from the periphery into the center of intellectual activity of the class. Her work improved mightily during the semester, and I was proud of our mutual success right up until the moment when she broke into tears in public over the discovery that her instructor was a married man. I failed that student in the sense that I was the cause of unnecessary embarrassment and pain to her. I failed to see what was happening. I was so absorbed in my success that I did not think about the additional dimension and guard against it. Remember, the goal is not just to get your students' attention or to win their applause or even to teach them. The goal is to contribute to their ideal growth and development. You should realize that you are dealing with a population that is going through a very difficult maturation period. Make sure that you contribute to that growth instead of hindering it.
5. An idea is not an idea until you hear it from your students.—My fifth commandment is a little different, and I hope that we are getting into less familiar territory as we move along. It is this: an idea is not an idea until you hear it from your students. I believe this one more with each passing day. You can be brilliant on the subject of realism in American fiction or on Weber's theory of charisma in a sociology class, but, if your students do not come up with an understanding of realism or charisma, you have been plowing in the sea. Several years ago, I listened to a colleague deliver an excellent lecture on eighteenth-century prose to a class of juniors and seniors. This professor was a former actor, a man with a fine voice and sense of audience, and he had never been more brilliant than on that day. But the young woman on my left, an industrious note taker for the first few moments, seemed at first confused and then disinterested. Her mind wandered, and then, forty minutes into the class, she wrote at the top of her page, "Who is Dr. Johnson, anyway?" I hope the lesson is clear. Who is Dr. Johnson, anyway? The goal of the class, no matter what the class, is to get your students to use the ideas that you have suggested to them. They must understand first. Then perhaps they might go beyond even your own understanding of those ideas. When the latter happens, when you see something for the first time because a student tells you about it, you have received perhaps the greatest reward that the classroom has to offer.
There are many ways to test your students, but the best way, certainly the most immediate, is to listen to them. Listening is an art. As a teacher, you have to be listening and thinking at the same time. This procedure will require all of your concentration. I can summarize its importance through a subordinate premise: it is extremely hard to figure out what your class knows. Indeed, I'll add a subsidiary to the subordinate premise: it gets harder to figure out what your class knows as you get older. One of the incipient signs of old fogyness in the teaching profession is that frequent complaint that students know less than they once did. In all likelihood, it is not a matter of knowing less but of knowing something different from what you expect them to know. Get beyond your feelings of depression about your students' presumed ignorance as fast as you can. Find out what they do know and learn to work with it. This is the foundation on which you build.
As a young, beginning teacher, your sense of what your students know is the one area where you have a tremendous advantage. You have a shared experiential context with students who are only somewhat younger than yourselves in music, history, film, style, and general culture. Use that experience. As an older teacher, you must learn to compensate. The seminal event of my student days was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For the student of today, that event might as well be the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The longer you teach, the harder you have to work at reaching your students across the history that increasingly separates where it once united.
Let me explain what I mean from an incident in class just this week. I have a student, a good one, who is writing on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We were discussing the second section, "A Game of Chess," in which two young women in a pub discuss a third as part of a whole series of images of debased sexuality:
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
My student, a child of the eighties, automatically assumed that the pills in question were birth-control pills. The Waste Land, of course, was written in 1922, and there were no birth-control pills in 1922. The section is about pills that force a miscarriage or an abortion. My point is that I will never teach the passage in quite the same way again because of my conversation with this student. I have learned from his ignorance. Don't underestimate that resource. The truth in teaching is always a complex thing. I remind you of Henry Thoreau's comment on the importance of dialogue. "It takes two to speak the truth," writes Thoreau, "one to speak and another to hear."
6. Never answer your own questions.—Rule number six follows from number five. Never answer your own questions. It took me quite awhile to learn this one, but I now try to abide by it faithfully. If you answer your own questions, your students will quickly appreciate the pattern, and they will wait for your answers instead of thinking about the problem at hand. The great difficulty with the sixth commandment is that you must be prepared to wait for answers. You must not be afraid of silence, or, as a colleague has expressed the idea, learn to make silence work for you instead of against you.
Accepting silence, enduring silence upon occasion, has been my hardest lesson as a teacher. The natural impulse is to leap right in or to move on. But I would remind you that a good question—one worth asking—is not easily answered. Moreover, you are not usually interested in the first thing that comes tripping off of the tongue. Take some comfort, when these silences arise, from Eliot's lines in "Ash Wednesday":
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
But if you are not poetically inspired or are still faint of heart, let me suggest a few strategies. I will sometimes reformulate the question in a more leading way. Sometimes, if I think the question is crucial, I will turn around and write it on the the board and just leave it there for the class to think about. Sometimes, I will simply say, "This is a difficult question. Take your time in thinking about it." Very occasionally, I will even say, "This is perhaps too difficult a question for us to consider at this moment," and we will move on without further comment. Invariably, you find that your students return to the question on their own at the proper time.
There are important compensations for this technique. Some of the most rewarding moments that I have experienced as a teacher have come when a group of students have come to me about a raised query. "All right," they will say," we have thought about it, and this is what we think. Now, what do you think about it?" The goal, as always, is intelligent thought. Emerson puts the matter best for me: "One must be an inventor to read well. There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion."
7. Take a few calculated risks in your class and, now and then, even some uncalculated ones.—Number seven must be understood with special care: take a few calculated risks in your class and, now and then, even some uncalculated ones. Education is a speculative venture. You must allow for spontaneity for your own sake and everyone else's. As a beginning teacher, you are likely to feel the greatest sense of conflict between your agenda and classroom discussion. You will have that agenda in front of you, and you will be tempted to follow it too mechanically. Obviously, there are things that you must accomplish in a given class—that is your agenda—but don't be too slavish about it. Experienced teachers probably try to accomplish less in an agenda, but they work much harder to have that agenda emerge in a seemingly spontaneous and integral fashion. Don't be in such a hurry to tell the truth. Benjamin Franklin was right when he says that people learn best when they think that they have thought of it themselves. Taking risks is also an important mechanism for sustaining your own interest in the teaching process. That class is best where you also learn something. You want to be receptive to the good, unexpected response, the point that takes a lesson in a different though still valuable direction. Oh yes, there is one last thing about taking risks. Sometimes you are going to fail. That is in the nature of taking risks. But you will be astonished by the generosity of your students on this score. More times than not, they will emphasize their own excitement in the chance that has been taken.
8. Welcome change.—My eighth suggestion is a real commandment. I am prepared to have it written in stone for Charlton Heston to carry off of the mountain. I can give it in just two words: welcome change. Try different things as a teacher over time. Embrace new possibilities. You don't really need to hear this commandment right away as a new teacher, but I want to warn you that universities and colleges and high schools are filled with once vital teachers who have turned into hollow men and women by delivering the same canned classes year after year. The canned lecture is to learning what rust is to metal. It disturbs and undermines the integrity of the vital substance. No one expects an entirely new preparation every year for every class session, but the line of demarcation here is sharper than most realize. There is a world of difference between knowing your class notes and knowing your subject. If you know your class notes, you are prepared to say what you said before. If you know the substance, you are ready to engage in a fresh understanding. Your students always deserve the latter. The first is always possible, but it is also a cheat. My personal rule of thumb for insuring change is to teach at least one new course every year. Collaborations with other teachers in group courses is another insurance policy. At the very least, make sure that you have changed your texts in existing courses. It will be easier not to change the texts, but no one ever said that good teaching was going to be an easy matter.
9. Make sure that they enjoy it.—My ninth commandment did not come from direct experience, but it struck me so forcefully when I first heard of it that I do not conduct a single class without thinking of it. A friend of mine, as a young beginning teacher, had the experience of getting to know I. A. Richards, the father of practical criticism and a major figure in literary circles generally throughout the first half of the century. Richards was then in his late seventies, and my friend was busily engaged in working up a lecture on Oliver Goldsmith. Richards asked my friend what he was going to do and received a rather lengthy analysis of the ins and outs of the situation, the organization of the lecture, the goals of the class, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When my friend was finally finished, Richards responded that he had forgotten one thing. "You have forgotten the most important thing," Richards said, "make sure that they enjoy it."
So the ninth commandment is just that: make sure that they enjoy it. The greatest compliment that students can pay you is to tell you that they are sorry when the course is over. When a C student tells you that, you can have some hope that you may have been doing your job. Your students should look forward to your class. They should want to be there. Learning is an innately enjoyable process. If it is not in your classroom, then something is wrong. Indeed, the institutionalization of learning threatens the primal truth that learning is enjoyable. Institutions—habit, schedule, convention—turn the classroom into a requirement instead of a privilege.
I am a teacher of literature, and this status gives me an inestimable advantage in trying to create interest, excitement, and pleasure in the classroom. As Samuel Johnson has put the matter, "A book should teach us to enjoy life or to endure it." The problem, alas, is that too many teachers assume that great literature will necessarily do that all by itself. It might, in fact, but you cannot afford to trust to that hope. You will hear professors tell each other and their students that "on the college level we assume interest." Nothing could be more benighted. Never assume interest! Part of your task, always, is to engender interest and to keep it alive. Professors have a bad habit of assuming the importance of their subject. You may assume it, but don't forget to demonstrate it along the way. I try to keep in mind Montaigne's aspiration that "the gain from our study is to become better and wiser by it." The aspiration will mean different things on different levels—a different thing for a high school student than for a professor of graduate students. Still, as you prepare a class, it is not a bad idea to think about what "better and wiser" might mean in the particular context of your classroom. This may sound like a heavy burden, maybe even a pretentious one, but I find it to be an indispensable concern. Students will have their own reasons for taking your class, but, if and when you are asked for a reason—in a moment of uncertainty or perhaps of challenge—you want to have not just an answer but the best answer of which you are capable.
9 1/2. It is what your students take outside of the classroom, not what they do within it, that counts.—We've come to the final half commandment that I promised, and I hope that you will view my fraction as more than a conjurer's trick to hold your interest. As I said at the beginning, the half indicates, in part, an open-endedness, a lack of closure, a need for you to set up your own rules in keeping with your own personality and experience. But I also call it the ninth-and-half commandment because it extends wildly outside of the frame of reference that we have been discussing: namely, your performance in the classroom. Not to make a mystery of it, the last commandment states that "it is what your students take outside of the classroom, not what they do within it, that counts."
I mean for this knowledge to be rather humbling. Your brilliance in the classroom counts for nothing if your students don't remember something after the experience. You want to think very hard about what they are to remember. What they do remember can be quite bizarre. A quick example should suffice here. Last year, in teaching The Iliad, I happened to mention that marvelous moment of closure near the end of Homer's epic where Achilleus' divine mother, Thetis, comforts his grief and tries to return him to everyday life. "Go back to your women," says Thetis, "and sleep with them as you did before." On the examination, about two-thirds of my freshmen observed that "Achilleus' mother said it is all right for him to sleep with anyone he wishes to . . . and this makes his life happy again." This response was my failure. There will always be some throwaway comment in one of your classes that your students will cling to and that will come back to haunt you. What they remember can be frighteningly insufficient by your standards.
What I would emphasize, however, is that to instruct and to educate are not synonyms. "To instruct" means to put in, it means to inform, it means to furnish with knowledge and information. "To educate," from the Latin educare, ex-ducare, means to bring out of, or to lead forth. Instruction, in other words, leads on to education, but they are not the same. You instruct your students, but you hope that they educate themselves through that instruction. I think that it is Pascal who says that the definition of an educated person involves one who can happily spend time alone in a room—someone, that is, who has the resources to entertain the self through thought and reflection.
It is my own personal belief that students learn more from each other than from their teachers. If you are lucky, they will listen to what you have to say, and they will, in some instances, even seek you out for confirmation or even an extension of the thought in question. But they will truly test what they know by arguing about it amongst their peers. Whether it is a math problem set, an essay assignment, or the interpretation of a book, the refining process of what they know takes place in those debates within their own generation. You can see that process at work in just about every conference room of Regenstein library on a given night.
One way of thinking about your task as a teacher is to ask yourself exactly what they should remember from a class. What can you say to keep them thinking about the subject? Or better yet, what can you say or what can you do that will keep an idea or work alive for when they will actually need it? When the Pequod finally sinks beneath the waves at the end of Moby-Dick on some Thursday afternoon late in the winter quarter, it has indeed sunk in vain unless your student, sometime later, argues with someone about the nature of "the predestinating head" that put it there.
Of one thing you can be certain. If your students leave your class with nothing else, they will leave it with some image of you, their teacher. The word "professor" is often a term of respect and sometimes one of derision, but the image that you want to leave your students with is the original meaning that we have lost sight of. Originally, to profess meant to make a public statement of what one believed, it meant to declare one's faith openly, to make a religious statement of one's convictions in a way that conveyed one's knowledge and integrity. I would submit that this is still true if properly understood. You want to convey your passion for what you are doing but not with the object of appearing as some idealized individual or saint.
If you have demonstrated the integrity of your subject matter with all of your involvement behind it, you can hope that your student will identify with the thinking process and not with the thinker. You will have taught three things because each is useless without the other two. You will have conveyed, first, the true complexity of your subject, second, the high worthiness and pleasure of thinking about that subject, and third, the ability, despite every complexity, for actually thinking about it. You will have led your student into that proverbial empty room with enough capacity for thought to remain there—at least occasionally. You can even hope that, if another enters this room, that something interesting might be said there.