Martha Olney's Reflections on Teaching

Here’s an older but timeless piece on teaching from Martha Olney:

All of which boils down to one word: respect. In my teaching, respect is my number one rule. I respect the students. Not because they are bright or rich or well-dressed or white or male or Asian or gay or Muslim or an economics major or the star quarterback or daughter of the President. I respect them because “students are people, too,” people deserve respect, and because I treat them as I would want to be treated.

I recognize the many demands on their time, and don’t change exam times or deadlines at the last minute. I give a complete course outline in the syllabus so they can plan their semester. I realize they truly may have commitments barring them from coming to my office hours, and so I readily schedule appointments for mutually convenient times.

I assume their goal is to learn the material. When they come to me with graded exams, I respect their desire to learn what they did wrong so that they might improve the next time. I recognize that I am sometimes unclear, so when they ask for a second explanation I provide one without offense.

I want them to gain confidence in their intellectual abilities. At UMass, this was my over-arching goal. Too many students at UMass assumed their instincts were wrong. They did not trust their ability to reason, to think. I praised them when their logic served them well, and helped them see the flaws in their thinking when they got off-track. I cheered (literally!) when they got something right after struggling with it. I believe that acquiring an ability to think through problems – be they economic or political or social or personal problems – is critical to gaining self-confidence, and so I explicitly teach a method for criticizing arguments.

Side note: I like that it’s a piece from the early days of the web, back when the focus was on content rather than styling, when you had to focus on the content because that was the only reason someone came to your site. The first CSS release was made less than a year before her post.