It is very difficult to give a general answer to this question, for teaching, like love, is an intuitive business that cannot properly be articulate in rules and procedures. (That is why one should never go to a ‘teaching-improvement workshop’.) One thing to do is to stop complaining about students. … Students tend to respond well to someone they sense wishes them well. Never let students think that your real life is research-work that happens out of the classroom – try to make it the case, so far as possible, that (as in the nineteenth-century) your research and teaching are one and the same. Do not pander too much to the demand for ‘visual aids’. Do not teach in a darkened classroom and, especially, do not structure your lecture around a set of ‘bullet points’ projected onto a screen. Remember that bullet points are discrete while thought is continuous so that what bullet points represent is, in fact, the death of thought. Address what interests students – sex, death, boredom, technology and the meaning of life.

Julian Young Carolinian

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