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If I have learned one thing in my experience as a graduate teaching assistant in four different classes at two different universities it is this: the majority of undergraduates will remain disengaged or will simply "go through the motions" (without much real intellectual investment in the course) unless the instructor engages them in ways on the margins of or wholly outside the standard teacher/student relationship.

To risk an over-generalization, it seems that all too often professors approach their students with a "take it or leave it" mentality. That is, their attitude seems to be "I am going to teach you this material, I am going to teach it to you by this method (many times a soporific one), and it is your job to adjust to me." Justifiable as this attitude may be, it is often counterproductive. The university, which may be concerned with research and an expanding list of publications, tends to place little to no pressure on the tenured or tenure-track professor to put in the extra effort to try to reach students. However, I've never known an undergraduate to learn more from professors' lists of publications than from the professors themselves.

What, then, does meeting the undergraduate "halfway" in a shared space entail? It involves building a firm academic foundation, and taking into account as much of the iceberg below the water line as we possibly can. A daunting challenge, indeed: each student's iceberg will be different, each student's foundation will need construction in a slightly different way. However, I believe there are some general guidelines to follow in order to achieve the best progress.

One of the most important factors is to identify the most likely emotional experiences students are liable to bring into the classroom with them. For the undergraduate, to name just a few, these may consist of pressures to succeed, anxiety over finances and career paths, romantic relationships, and (especially for the freshmen) homesickness. I have come to think of this set of experiences as a big balloon that we walk around outside of and, thus, precedes us wherever we go. If I try to engage a student directly, as if this balloon didn't exist, the vast majority of the time I will simply "bounce off" this balloon, and fail truly to reach the student. Early in the semester, then, I try to talk about some of my own experiences as an undergraduate such as disagreements with parents over studies, the deaths of beloved family members, problems with motivation in school and apathy in general.

What if your experience as an undergraduate was mostly unproblematic? Please then consider sharing the types of such problems that a friend of yours may have had. (After all, teaching includes performance and what would a performance be without a little poetic license?) Assisting undergraduates to see you had gone through similar experiences is the most important advice I could give anyone teaching them. Then, if they see you in ways to which they may relate, they will be much more likely to listen to what it is you have to say, and, perhaps more importantly, much more likely to think themselves capable of knowing what you know and of growing intellectually.

I should mention, however, that I believe it is vitally important to make clear in the first week what I expect of the student from an intellectual, logistical, and behavioral standpoint. I have high expectations and, at least in the first half of the semester, I am somewhat demanding of students in terms of their grades. (As someone has typically paid a decent sum of money for this student to be in my class, I feel it would be unfair to teach any other way.)

However, once stipulated, I simultaneously try to create as trusting an environment as possible. While sharing some of your most vulnerable moments gets you most of the way there, more is required. To push yourself further into that shared space of learning (despite no doubt being short of time), I suggest you encourage students to see you during office hours simply to chat about anything. If we spend twenty or thirty minutes talking to a student about music, politics, or even television shows, how much more likely do you think they would be to pay attention in class, to read a little more carefully (or simply a little more), to work on their assignments a little harder? Two, five, or ten times more likely? In my experience, even more than that. Plus, we may wish someone would have told us certain things about school and life in general that we had to find out the hard way. What a great opportunity to spare someone of our misery, some of our wasted effort, some of our embarrassment, even.

As I've progressed through different stages of education and advanced to studying and teaching at more prestigious institutions, I've spent some of my time needlessly worrying that I wasn't on the same level of ability as my peers, that I wasn't as intelligent as the people around me, and that there was simply "something" (who knew what) about them that made them better thinkers than I. How much time I spent worrying about that! I know now that there's nothing "magical" about anyone that makes them a better scholar than I. I've been able to find my own style of teaching, learning, and thinking, and am able to be comfortable with that because, through lots of hard work, the process of education has been "demystified". Sharing with students is a wonderful way to allow them the security and safety to "spread their wings" a little and grow into the persons they can be and, more importantly, really want to be.

It's always worth a little extra time and energy.

Christopher Kolb has a B.A. (University of Kentucky) and M.A. (George Washington University) in Anthropology and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He is researching the ways in which public education has been racialized through history and the intersection of public policy and community politics, especially as related to the urban rebellions of the 1960's and early 1970's. He is interested in the ways in which imaginings of "education," "learning," and "studenthood" influence notions of subjectivity among African-American adolescents and their elders. His dream is to facilitate exchange programs between urban (predominantly African-American) populations, poor white rural populations of the Appalachian region, and Latin American campesinos and urban laborers.