August 9, 2002

The Naked Professor

By PETER S. TEMES

The college classroom is a risky place. Professors often enter it defended by crisp syllabuses, lesson plans, class notes, and, most powerful of all, a great deal of knowledge that their students don't have.

"My worst nightmare," a friend of mine told me in graduate school when we were both TA's, "is the class where the students have good questions and I have no answers. They ask and ask and ask, and I keep coming up blank." The most common metaphor I hear from other teachers for this

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