Reclaiming Purpose

CHAPTER 7The Role of the Faculty in the University of the Future

My first experience teaching was when just a week before the start of a new semester I was given a teaching assistantship at Boston College, where I was a newly enrolled graduate student in the master's in English program. I was handed the pile of books that all teaching assistants (TAs) were supposed to use when teaching the first-year writing course required of all undergraduates. They included James Boswell's Life of Johnson, a collection of William Butler Yeats's poetry, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Virgina Wolfe's A Room of One's Own—all wonderful works, but maybe not the best choices for engaging students fresh out of high school. As immodest as it sounds, students loved my class, telling me so in person, echoing the sentiment in course evaluations, reminding me of it when I would run into them years later.

Why? It was not the material, as much as how I worked to make it come alive and seem relevant. It may have helped that I was not much older than my students, sported long hair and an earring, and shared many of the same pop culture reference points. But I think the real reason was how I responded to them: I loved my students. I got to know them, gave them lots of my time, listened seriously to concerns wholly unrelated to class. I brought them to a live performance of The Tempest, the $4.99 (hey, it was a lot of money back then) all-you-can-eat pasta night at a local restaurant, and the occasional ...