This post focuses on two professors who teach at law schools almost 1,700 miles apart. For many years, on the very first day of one of the two professor’s first semester course, he would tell students to clear their desks, inform them that they have an examination that counts that day, and distribute bluebooks and a traditional law school essay question. He then would say, “You may begin.” After about 20 minutes of student floundering and, let’s be honest, stress and sweating, he would smile and say, “Psych!” In the other professor’s classes, when students say something that is incorrect as a matter of law, fact, policy, or analysis, he responds, “You could not be more wrong!”  

It may surprise you to know that both professors have always received uniformly high student evaluation scores, among the highest, if not the highest, at their law schools, and they are beloved and gratefully remembered by their former students years later. Does that mean the secret sauce of being a beloved professor is being mean? Of course not.

What these two professors have in common is that, in every way, even in the two instances described above, they communicate their caring for their students, their passion for having students learn, and their willingness to do everything they can to help. The secret sauce lies not in their particular words or actions but in their hearts, their genuine caring for their students as humans and for their students’ learning and their authenticity.

That genuine caring is manifested in dozens of ways. They prepare for each class as if they were teaching the topic for the first time. They make time for students, even when it is inconvenient for the professor. They take delight in students’ successes. They check in on students when the students seem to be struggling or down. And they manifest their pleasure in seeing their students in class, in the hallway, around town.

And they are among the most genuine humans I have ever met. There is no bull with these two professors, and everyone knows it.

It helps that these two professors have passionately-held rationales for their choices, even their choices to administer a fake exam and harshly critique a student classroom comment. It also helps that they explain those beliefs to their students. As to the fake exam, the professor would explain to the students that they need to understand, from the first day of class, what they need to learn to be able to do. The professor does not believe there is any way that the professor can explain what the students will need to do on exams that will be as effective and as preparatory as the students, with the professor leading the discussion, discovering for themselves what they need to do. As to the harsh critique of wrong classroom statements, the professor, after teaching for a few years, discovered that his failure to clearly identify incorrect statements of law, facts, policy, and analysis as incorrect caused some students to believe those inaccurate statements were correct. 

My point is not that these are optimal teaching practices. My point is that, because both professors so effectively communicate their caring for students and are so genuine, their students understand everything they do as pro-student. And the students are grateful for the effort. 

Consequently, the professors’ hearts speak louder than their words.