Teachers and students rarely become good friends. They don’t divulge secret hopes, they don’t send text-messages to meet for coffee, and they don’t disclose personal struggles with each other. They keep to professional distance and communicate in patterns focusing on topics related to course material. Beneath this seemingly mutually agreed upon social arrangement, both novice learners and skilled instructors recognize an understated need for somehow becoming better acquainted on a more interpersonal level:

• Students need teachers to offer suitable career advice, craft personal letters of recommendation, and be willing to serve as a reference on a student’s evolving resume.
• Teachers need their students to work as trustworthy research assistants, write letters of support during tenure review, and provide an evaluation of a professor’s teaching ability that is open and honest.
• Both students and teachers learn more deeply when they become more aware of personal contexts that influence another’s thinking.

All of these tasks inherently require knowing a person socially to some degree.

To serve these critical functions in any useful capacity, teachers and students must undeniably form deeper social relationships beyond the scope of a limited classroom interaction. Yet, multiple barriers inhibit the social development of teacher-student friendships...

See the rest of this post in my guest contribution at the Techniques in Learning & Teaching (TILT) blog.

I recently had a student send me an email to set up an appointment.  There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the message, except it was mistakenly signed at the bottom with the phrase “all my love” as the signature.  Before I even saw this message, the same student emailed me back one minute later in a panic.  His note in the second email read:

His embarrassment was palpable; enough to make anyone cringe.  Remarkably, moments like this happen often within the academic environment.  I also once had a student in my class whose laptop was inside his backpack when it started to make noise.  Rather than calmly removing the laptop to turn off the noise, the student instead proceeded to stand up, grab his backpack, feverishly open the classroom door, and toss the backpack outside as if he never wanted to see the wretched thing again.  He coolly sat back down in his seat as if nothing had happened.  Awkward….

See the rest of this post in my guest contribution at the Techniques in Learning & Teaching (TILT) blog.