Why we teach

A brief exchange on Facebook a while back (5/27/26) that I think is worth bringing to a wider audience. From Lynne Murphy (University of Brighton, in the UK), testily: Hey, students who thought they could skip seminars after they “knew” what they were going to write their essay about. You were wrong, and I’m taking some pleasure in pointing out all the connections you missed between different aspects of our module. A pleasure I would have been happy to forego if you’d only come to class … My follow-up (from teaching at UIUC, Ohio State, and Stanford): It’s truly maddening. Aside from the students who smugly feel entitled, there’s the great population of them who’ve been brought to think — and this is mostly not their fault — that schooling is merely a ritual of jumping through pointless hoops and showing that you can reproduce the right answers to inscrutable questions. Our students are people who’ve never been told that their teachers intend (with a certain degree of urgency, because…