Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.

It is very difficult to give a general answer to this question, for teaching, like love, is an intuitive business that cannot properly be articulate in rules and procedures. (That is why one should never go to a ‘teaching-improvement workshop’.) One thing to do is to stop complaining about students. … Students tend to respond well to someone they sense wishes them well. Never let students think that your real life is research-work that happens out of the classroom – try to make it the case, so far as possible, that (as in the nineteenth-century) your research and teaching are one and the same. Do not pander too much to the demand for ‘visual aids’. Do not teach in a darkened classroom and, especially, do not structure your lecture around a set of ‘bullet points’ projected onto a screen. Remember that bullet points are discrete while thought is continuous so that what bullet points represent is, in fact, the death of thought. Address what interests students – sex, death, boredom, technology and the meaning of life.

Neither monumental buildings, nor winning football teams, nor spacious dormitories, nor expansive campuses, nor anxious administrators, nor ambitious plans ever taught a college student. Faculties teach. Books on the shelves and elaborate research projects concerned with esoteric subjects enrich the student mind only indirectly. Teachers teach.

I think most really good teachers, or professors, prepare for their classes as any writer/performer does. You write and then learn your lines, you draw your students into the performance or lecture just as any performer does, and you write a conclusion to the day’s performance or lesson just as any performer does.

On the whiteboard in Dan’s office, he has written in bold black marker the phrase ‘TEACHING ≠ LEARNING’. He believes that most lecturers pay too much attention to what they are doing in a class. Planning is important, and professors are right to spend time in advance thinking about how the class will be structured. One downside, though, is that professors will often evaluate themselves against what they said they would do in the plan. If they covered the material without tripping up, and gave the right explanations at the right time, they will be happy about how the class went.

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don't attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity or get another job.

The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.

Are Italian professors in better shape than others? What is the secret to their longevity? After all, being a professor cannot be easy: continuous lectures, updating, theses to supervise, research to coordinate and articles to publish, all without stopping, otherwise the international community will cut you off. It cannot be easy to be a professor, unless you find someone to do all these things for you. (p. 90)

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

Many professors forget that their professional responsibility is not only to generate new knowledge but also to seek to maximally disseminate it.

Teachers should prioritize the well-being of their students, as it is the pupils who suffer most when teachers neglect their teaching duties.

Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them. But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them.

Instructors must always be positive. Even if someone fails at something, you must have the energy to help them turn it into success. When teaching, always compare the correct way with the incorrect way, side by side. Then the reasons for the correct way become obvious. You must know both.