In short, you really can’t predict when and how your words and actions will influence others.
For four decades I attempted to teach well, failing, no doubt, many times. I think I might have been one of those professors whose students had little ambivalence: They seemed either to dislike (hate, maybe) or to like (love, maybe) my rather odd teaching styles. Over the decades I discovered that I never knew ahead of time whether or not a lesson, a lecture, or a lab exercise would spark some interest in my students. I assumed that if the information was part of a logical, coherent and unified lesson or set of lessons, the students would see their value.
Although I entered each class with internal enthusiasm and a drive to do well by my charges, I found that sometimes the words just didn’t “come out right” and that I “seemed to lose my audience.” Now, losing an audience makes any performer question his or her ability. Of course, all members of all audiences carry into the arenas of entertainment and learning their own life’s and moment’s baggage. Some audiences, as many standup comedians have discovered, are hostile, and some classes are the same. Seemingly naturally, human emotional chemistry keeps us from interacting with some people in a mutually beneficial or, at the very least, cordial way. Also, as I aged, I found myself becoming more easily judged negatively by younger students, possibly solely on the basis of my appearance and their associating me with other “older people.”
But I was often wrong in my assessment of the relationship between student and professor, and I discovered that by being pleasantly surprised after class one day. After a class that I thought went poorly because my presentation in my own opinion, to put it in the vernacular, “sucked,” a student approached me to say, “That was really interesting, Professor Conte. Where can I learn more about it?” Understand this: I had no idea that such a poor lecture had done anything other than bore the students.
So, in your own life, recognize that you never completely know when and how you might influence others.
For four decades I attempted to teach well, failing, no doubt, many times. I think I might have been one of those professors whose students had little ambivalence: They seemed either to dislike (hate, maybe) or to like (love, maybe) my rather odd teaching styles. Over the decades I discovered that I never knew ahead of time whether or not a lesson, a lecture, or a lab exercise would spark some interest in my students. I assumed that if the information was part of a logical, coherent and unified lesson or set of lessons, the students would see their value.
Although I entered each class with internal enthusiasm and a drive to do well by my charges, I found that sometimes the words just didn’t “come out right” and that I “seemed to lose my audience.” Now, losing an audience makes any performer question his or her ability. Of course, all members of all audiences carry into the arenas of entertainment and learning their own life’s and moment’s baggage. Some audiences, as many standup comedians have discovered, are hostile, and some classes are the same. Seemingly naturally, human emotional chemistry keeps us from interacting with some people in a mutually beneficial or, at the very least, cordial way. Also, as I aged, I found myself becoming more easily judged negatively by younger students, possibly solely on the basis of my appearance and their associating me with other “older people.”
But I was often wrong in my assessment of the relationship between student and professor, and I discovered that by being pleasantly surprised after class one day. After a class that I thought went poorly because my presentation in my own opinion, to put it in the vernacular, “sucked,” a student approached me to say, “That was really interesting, Professor Conte. Where can I learn more about it?” Understand this: I had no idea that such a poor lecture had done anything other than bore the students.
So, in your own life, recognize that you never completely know when and how you might influence others.
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