andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> Generally speaking I'd say, what do you really expect
> of students? For the most part very little in their
> lives or background, or future prospects, exists to
> have stimulated intellectual curiosity, love of
> learning, or doing hard work that doesn't produce
> extrinsic rewards.
The growing weight of clinical depression during about my last 15 years of teaching makes my experience not too relevant to the general situation, but there may be something in it for others. A general and somewhat sloppy principle: the _easier_ one's grading is, the _more_ freedom one has to teach 'above the heads' of part of one's class. And a qualification there: what is above the head of student A on one occasion is _not_ necessarily above his/her head on another occasion. And you can then back this up with plenty of occasions for students to talk with you in your office.
A relaxed grading practice also allows for assigning busy-work-that-is-not-necessarily-busy-work, e.g. writing assignments in which they need only more or less go thru the motions, but which _some_ students will really use to learn, and some other students will _occasionally_ so use, and which can provide a take-off point for class discussion. I don't think I was a very good teacher during those last 10+ years -- but even in my worst semesters I was, for a _few_ students, an extremely good teacher: I left them with things to think about that they hadn't gotten in other classes. And for some students I gave a small experience in thinking because they could write without fear of penalty for writing badly. Most people on this list were able to write from the time they were 10 or so without that fear because they wrote fairly decently. Hence they could think about things while they wrote. Students that write abominably don't dare think of anything except not doing something horribly wrong.
Some professorial rage comes from an almost metaphysical belief that university teaching should be in some profound way _different_ from any other job. It is, some, some of the time. But it is still essentially just a job. It's a more fun and less laborious job if one does find ways to like students, or most of them, and even the most recalcitrant student is more fun sitting in a chair in your office than staring resentfully from the back row in a class of 75. And the professor in such a situation may be a bit less resentful if (s)he doesn't feel obliged to be the angel with a flaming sword guarding the gates of civilization from the barbarian hordes without.
Carrol