Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
Preface xi
think) and had skipped a few grades on the way. Suddenly he found
himself at New York University, which in those days was located in
the Bronx.
This is what he remembered most about college in 1923: Apart
from the poverty stories, the “how hard he had to work to support
himself” stories, the stories about watching the Yankees from the el-
evated train and wishing he could go to a game, he remembered that
teachers lectured, that you had to memorize what they told you and
then tell it back to them on a test. He thought college was stupid, but
he assured me (in 1960) that college surely had changed by now and
that teachers wouldn't still be doing this. Oh yeah? In 1962, when I
entered college, they were doing exactly that. And, in 2000, when I
retired from 32 years of professoring, not that much had changed.
So I was thinking about teaching before I got to college and I was
thinking about it while I was a professor and I am thinking about it
now that I have, for the most part, finished teaching. To make sure I
have been thinking about it correctly, I asked former Ph.D. students of
mine, (now tenured professors mostly and some industry executives)
what they had learned from me while they were spending 4—7 years
studying with me. I thought their answers might help me think about
teaching in a new way. I sent an e-mail to maybe 20 former students
whose e-mail addresses I happened to have, and most responded. Here
are some excerpts.
1. [remember quite specifically a homework presentation I
made in your class. When I presented it in class, I was a junior
in college, and all the other students in that class were grad
students. When I was done you smiled at everyone (a rare
event) and said, “Anyone care to follow that act?” Your clearly
heartfelt endorsement of my little research product was a key
moment in my coming to trust my own ideas. I just submitted
a $16.7 million proposal to NIH that would create the first all-
computational genome center. The kind of chutzpah embodied
in that proposal is one consequence of my experience with you.
2. The way you assigned me to a project—you sent me to each
existing project for 2 weeks until I hit on a project with a good
fit (I was enthusiastic and coherent talking about it). I used this
technique when I was assigning people at Accenture.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023741