To my students,

Education has traditionally been a relationally intensive enterprise. If you look at teaching and learning practices across cultures and across the centuries you’ll see that our predecessors took it for granted that learning involved real, authentic relationships between teacher and student and between fellow students. I invite you into a community of learners in our shared classroom. This is a chance for all of us to learn, for me to learn from you and for you to learn from me and your fellow classmates. Becoming a community of learners isn’t easy, but it’s good. And it requires us to all to push ourselves beyond what is comfortable because learning involves radically revising our mental models of the world, something that is decidedly difficult.

The classroom is a place for learning, exploration, and discovery. It is not primarily a place to feed the ego, make a name for yourself, or construct an identity. You are more than the grades on your transcript. Your identity is not on the line in this class. That means you have the freedom to forget yourself and engage the material.  You have the freedom to try hard, to discover, to struggle, to be wrong, and to be frustrated. I’m here to support you during this journey we’re taking together (for a semester, several semesters, or perhaps for a grad career).

Adam

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is . . . they are unconscious. They are default-settings.

-David Foster Wallace