[9fans] passionate about research or about teaching

[Laura Creighton <lac@cd.chalmers.se>]

Some people manage to be both.  I am solidly more a researcher, indeed
I worry if I should be let around students at all.  On the other hand,
the truly odd ducks were the ones that taught me the most in my life,
so perhaps a bit of me is a fine idea.

My mother, on the other hand, is in my admittedly biased opinion, the
single best teacher of 10-18 year olds on the planet.  And the students
agree.  One year, a school she was at which had 9 second form classes
allowed, for some reason, the students to select which teacher to have.
and of roughly 270 students, 245 or so wanted my mother.  This was
a complete revelation to her, and so they had a special meeting where
they put her int he auditorium with all the students and she asked them
``why?'' ``why did they want _her_''.  And aside from the people who
said, `my brother had you as a teacher and he said you were the best
teacher he ever had' and the like, there were 2 answers.  The first is
that my mother is resoundingly authentic.  There is absolutely no
pretense and phoniness with her, and the students have an unfailing
ear for the phoney.  So they said things like `you might be wrong, but
we know that you won't be lying.' and `you said that you were wrong
yesterday once.' and things like that which I gather are novel things
in their experience.

The other thing that she does is treat students with respect.  I think the
expression `you have to earn respect around here' is one of the all time
evil sentences on the planet.  My mother's students were willing to move
heaven and earth for her, and even do the more difficult task of 
thinking about their homeworks, because of little things like `saying excuse
me when she bumped into them in the hall' and `you held the door open for
me when I was carrying a lot of books once' and `you never once cut in front
of me in the cafeteria line.'  My experience, like hers, is that if you
consistently treat people with respect, NOT toadying, but genuine respect,
they immediately try to shape up into the sort of people that are worthy
of respect.

At any rate, having founders of a start up company who start meetings with
things like `I apologize that my disgraceful preoccupation with private
matters has caused all of you to lose 15 minutes of valuable time this
morning' has helped make people who really think that their time should 
be spend doing something valuable.  

This trick may only work in Sweden, and Japan, and other places where
individualism is not the order of the day.  When I was last in the USA
I took a good look at the youth, and while they appeared to have many
problems, inappropriate humility, and over-concern for the face and the
feelings of their fool elders did not appear to be prominent among them.

I must go to a meeting or I will have to say that AGAIN

Laura