Draw Breath

It's the time of year again when we academics are welcoming a new crop of students into our classes.

I always have mixed feelings about this time of year. Apart from the obvious that Winter is coming and that the students stay the same age but I get older, the new academic year serves as a reminder of the fundamental questions any teacher worth their salt ought to ask.

It's easy to wonder about the formal aspects of running courses. And you simply have to wonder how you're going to convey all that information between now and the end of semester. The fundamental questions, though, are pretty much contradictory: 'why should the students be interested in what I've got to say?' and 'how much ought I to cater to them?'

One change in my years of teaching, at least at undergraduate level, is that you can't simply assume that students are interested because they have taken the course. Nor can you assume that they'll participate in a way that you can reasonably expect. So part of the teaching-in-higher-education job comes down to explaining to students why they should be more bothered by some issue than they need to be to pass. You also spend your time trying to cajole them into some involvement in their own classes.

Tactics towards the final element in all this are dealt with in the thread started by Chris Bertram over on Crooked Timber. Let the terror of silence begin!