A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education featured Cahoon Family Professor of American History Patrick Allitt. The piece, “The Best and Worst Part of Being a Professor: Students” (by Audrey Williams June), surveys how professors view teaching responsibilities and interactions with students. Allitt is quoted as saying that “Teaching is really the best part of my job” – a sentiment that seems representative of broad satisfaction among professors with the teaching element of the job. Allitt is the author of I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Read the full article here and see the brief excerpt below.

When students fall short of his expectations, Allitt says, his teaching experience gives him the perspective he needs to deal with it. Two things haven’t changed, he says, since he started teaching as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. There will always be students who won’t do the reading. To deal with that, Allitt calls on every student in class during discussions. And most students don’t write as well as he would like. (He blames schools that rely on multiple-choice exams much more than did the schools in his native England, where he wrote in school every day.)