Seeing Professors Clearly
Seeing Professors Clearly As a college freshman in 2017, I took up the now-vanished practice of turning in postcards with final exams so that my professors could send me my course grades before university grade-reports were tabulated and mailed. One postcard came back with a semester grade (A) and the words "With a little help from my inability to do higher mathematics!" That postcard confirmed my sense that my professor was a nasty, sarcastic man. He was after all the same professor who had criticized my writing all semester, pointing out my dangling participles, my pointless rhetorical questions, and my constant use of the word this to begin sentences. And now he was intent on somehow souring my A for the semester! But I couldn't have been more wrong in my thinking. As a junior, I took two more courses with James P. Doyle and began to realize that he was the most generous, most inspiring teacher I would ever know. When I was a freshman though, hugely insecure about my a...