I'm in the middle of grading end-of-term exams for my PHL 210 class. There are some very solid responses here; but there's also a bit of what must exasperate anyone who has ever taught. I won't go too much into it, but here's a good example:
One of the exam questions is a short answer question, fairly easy, on Kant. Because this is a summer course, the class periods are very long (3 hours), so I divided the period up into a guest lecture (by Julie, who taught the first term) and the test. The guest lecture was on Kant. Julie, with whom I had consulted on the question beforehand, emphasized the answer three or four times in the course of her lecture, which was about an hour long; and her formulation of it was very similar to the formulation of the question. Since Julie is a fairly good lecturer, the lecture was clear (better than mine usually are, since she is less likely to be carried away by the line of thought in front of her at a given moment), and the importance of the answer was easy to recognize. There were still people whose answers to the question weren't even in the ballpark. Several of them, in fact; it can't be that all of them just blanked on the question whose answer they had been given several times in the previous hour.
My philosophy of teaching is essentially Thomistic in character. The greater part of the intellectual work is and must be done by the pupil; all learning is an exercise of the pupil's own understanding on occasion of assistance by another. The purpose of an external instructor is:
1) To provide external aids and means of understanding, e.g., by relating it to the experience of the students or by giving examples and analogies, which the pupils can use to help themselves understand the truths and opinions being studied;
2) To give order to the truths and opinions being studied so the pupils can more easily see how they all fit together.
This is all (I'm leaving aside things that may conduce to these ends but are not essential to instruction, e.g., the things that make classes not just informative but enjoyable and entertaining). These things are very difficult to do; but they don't get anyone very far if the students are not willing to put forward a bit of their own intellectual work. Fortunately, there are lots of students who are willing to do this. Nonetheless it's frustrating to find that there are those who aren't. Even one is exasperating; that there are several almost makes me angry.
