I spend quite a bit of time thinking about my students. I look at them, at their work, I listen to what they tell me, and try to figure out who they might become in the best of all possible worlds. This is not easy. Students try to give you clues; sometimes they look at you as if imploring you to understand something about them that they don't yet have the means to articulate. How can one succeed at this? And how can one do it 20 times over for all the students in a class? It's impossible, of course. I know this, but I try anyway. It's tiring.
My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.
An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing.
When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.
Andrew Hacker argues that algebra and trigonometry and calculus are subjects that almost nobody used after they graduate, and so why should we continue to compel students to try to pass them?
If you try to serve people, it impresses them. If you try to impress people it irritates them.
Naturally, along the way, there are beings and forces that will challenge you. They want to try and get some of your power, take it away from you, all this nonsense, and of course, you just defeat them.
I try to teach my students that books are a mirror, reflecting their own lives, and a window, giving them a peek into someone else's.
Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them
I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule? I tell them, Try to feel like a molecule; and if you work hard, who knows? Some day you may get to feel like a big molecule!
I try to get people thinking, to consider their pasts and presents, ultimately encouraging them and giving them the tools to embrace the work of reshaping their lives.
If the students don't want to learn about evolution, they shouldn't be in the course. A biology course that teaches creationism is not a science course, it's a religion course. So the students demanding that creationism be given credence in that course are out of line and are denying the academic freedom of the professor. They are calling into question the scientific basis of the material that's being presented. And students are not in a position to do that.
Images work on so many different levels. As a writer you feel them, try not to get in their way or narrow them down to anything other or less complex. A writer is a curator of sorts - once you've brought the images together you try to stand at a respectful distance and let them speak for themselves. Try not to mess with their ambiguities and contradictions. They are what they are, irreducible. This is their integrity.
When you try to portray people's lives, you try to make sure you don't portray them as clowns and that you give them a level of dignity. You don't try to change their persona, but you try to understand that they had unique problems, set in a century that you don't live.
When people are dying, they call their old enemies and try to forgive them and try to be forgiven by them. They call their old friends and affirm their love for them, as well as detach themselves from them, and they try to get into as free a space as they can so they're really ready to go. They give away all their possessions and are as generous as possible. They give up old hatreds and grudges, and that's a wise intuitive thing, because it's much freer to live like that.
For me it's the challenge -- the challenge to try to beat myself or do better than I did in the past. I try to keep in mind not what I have accomplished but what I have to try to accomplish in the future.