I had a student this past semester who genuinely, viscerally wanted to become wise and learned. The first time she came to office hours she flatly, openly asked how to do it. It was deeply personal, as all teaching and learning ultimately has to be.

The fact that she's such an outlier in her candor reminds me of how much we've turned education into a commodity that is passed from producer to consumer. I assume that some number of her classmates harbors similar longings, but the vast majority would be mortified to admit it.

They may FEEL electrified by a text or a discussion (as I think all of us educators have been, or else we wouldn't be doing this) but they stay professional on the outside. They're here to purchase a service, and you don't gush all over your service provider.

Maybe this is a luxury that I have as a white man (I'm told it is) but I ask them to call me Ian, and do my best to approach the subject matter in a very personal manner. If I feel angry about some injustice that comes up, I let myself manifest that anger.

If an insight is exhilarating, I let that show too. If a student is phoning it in / bullshitting / pretending they did the reading, I don't try to hide my exasperation. If they get it I'm manifestly delighted.

I don't know how many of their teachers are in the habit of literally saying, "yeah - you know that's bullshit" in response to a particularly bullshit student comment, but I think they actually love being addressed with that kind of respect.

Actually, I think the thing I'm proudest of in my evals every term is how consistently high my scores are for the question of whether the instructor treated students with respect. If you just read the transcript you might not be inclined to think I had.

Anyway, it's a bloody, messy, seductive thing we do when we teach - Plato got that right, in his weird way - and we should resist the tendency to sanitize it into a "professional" activity.