I’m putting on my “game face,” getting into the groove, going deep inside myself, pondering, reflecting, feeling, thinking, rethinking, picturing, rehearsing. I feel the gates of my adrenal glands are slowly opening. I always get this way before I present at a conference or do an on-campus workshop. In this case, I’m am getting mentally and emotionally ready for an all day pre-conference workshop on forging classroom community and a conference session with my good friend, Todd Zakrajsek, on “How Who We Are Impacts On How We Teach” at the Lilly Conference on collegiate teaching in very “brrrrrrrr” Oxford, Ohio, for which I leave tomorrow.

       One of “props” I’ll have at my fingertips for these presentations, if the occasion arises, is the result of an informal survey I had made over the past couple of weeks. After talking with my good friend, Don Fraser, I had walked the halls and randomly asked 89 students one question, “How can we professors do a better job of teaching?” In one way or another, all their answers fell into one of five revealing categories. The first, as one student put it, “Stop boring us. The second, as another student said, “Care about us as people.” The third, as still another student answered, “Tell us why we have to take a course; give it some importance to our lives.” The fourth, as even still another student put it, “Stop threatening us so that we’re afraid to do anything.” And finally, a student pleaded, “Stop controlling us like some dictator.”

      Interesting isn’t it. It should give us pause. If education is enveloped in an aura of excitement, caring, support, encouragement, fearlessness, relevance, and ownership, it is a dynamic process. It is newness. It is nurturing new attitudes, information, performance, and achievement. It’s an invitation to a new life. It’s the appearance of new possibility. It is a hint of a new self. It is growth. It is change. It is personal development. It is transformation. It is loss and acquisition. It is demolition and construction. It’s letting go of the familiar and venturing out into the unknown. It’s self-confrontation. It is unlearning. It’s “creative destruction.” All this makes getting an education challenging enough. But, students will have far more trouble and hesitation of picking up that gauntlet, of converting that challenge from barrier into opportunity, if education is pitted by the corrosive acids of deadening boredom, uninviting disconnection, uninteresting irrelevance, and arresting fear.

Louis