Teaching: To Profess with a Passion

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A teacher, says Wald, must be "the most committed student in the room." In lectures, "I am just trying to make things clear to myself—I find I am learning things all the time." And even when he is the only one talking, he considers it "a kind of dialogue. I am acutely aware of the expressions on the students' faces. A puzzled look stops me short." Facts, he argues, are "just raw material for understanding basic relationships, and the whole job of teaching is to weave a fabric of relationships and to attach this at so many points to the student's life that it becomes a part of him."

Classroom Dialogist. Claremont Men's College, near Los Angeles, has only 626 students, but it also has Bronx-born Political Scientist Martin Dia mond, 46, who has turned an offbeat set of experiences into a classroom asset. He learned how to intrigue a crowd and squelch hecklers while plugging socialist causes on New York street corners when he was the age of his students.