A higher education teacher asks herself: "Who are my students?"

Or: "What is a class of students to a teacher?"

A class is a heterogeneous mass of essentially amiable faces.

Heterogeneous but incredibly balanced, actually. In each class, there always seems to be at least one excellent student, a few good students, many average students, a few weak students and some hopeless cases. Plus, there are always shy students, voluble students, sucking-up students, indifferent students, bookish students, slack students, polite students and rude students. It seems as though somebody at the registry office goes though their biographical details with care, sifting through all the information, scrutinizing their appearance and personality, so that in every single class there is an adequate number of specimens of each kind.

However, each student is one of its kind. He or she is not there to represent a particular type. Each student sort of lands in a class somehow, whilst following their own path. Surely, throughout most of each day, for a few years, they belong to a class, the class is their here and now, and it is within the class that they feel alive, vulnerable first, then safe, then loved maybe, or maybe not. Nevertheless, the class is exterior to each student, he or she has an existence outside and away from the class, of course. How can teachers forget that?

Each pair of eyes gazing at us, sitting there in front of us has its own dreams, its own wisdom, its own experience. And we, the teachers, look at them and see nothing, because we are facing the whole class, even though we see one pair of eyes at a time. For us, each pair of eyes is really just a big question mark, each head is just like an empty space for us to fill, and each set of ears hides a little bag of doubts in between. And what we worry about is that, in some of those heads, there are little "land mine" questions waiting to explode, which is why we tend to act carefully during the classes, to leave them undisturbed, to keep them quiet, until the end of each session.

óscar Lopes, a Portuguese professor (1917-2013), wrote somewhere that the best teachers are those who are willing to learn with their students. Clever man. I am sure he learned a lot. But how many students have had teachers like that? And who, among the teachers, can honestly and regularly say: "I learned this from a student today"?

Being a good teacher, in that sense, is a question of mental availability, of humbleness, of trust, and of cunning too (If they take home what I give them, why not see what they have to offer me?). It is a question of looking for the good side of things, more than the positive side of things. Because learning does feelreally good. And sharing feels even better.

Some academic years of my life have been especially productive in that sense. And I'm not writing this to boast about my ability to learn with students. I am writing this to let my students know how proud I am of them - in particular the ones who taught me the most. And also to thank them for teaching me such important and valuable things, in such an intense way - sometimes in a hard way, painful even. Some of your lessons were like a slap in the face, or an needle shot, or even like cold-blooded surgeries at times. But I was there for that purpose, really. And sometimes I was really asking for it as well... especially when I forgot that each head in front of me, with its free memory space, had a disc inside which was already full of information that I did not know! So, tough luck, I deserved it.

Every teacher should learn an automatic lesson: each time they underestimated a student, that student should teach them something they did not know. Yes, that would be an effective land mine to blow their egos. Now how's that?!

Yes, because every student, even the lost cases, the timid ones, the sucking-up ones, the voluble ones, the indifferent ones, the slack ones and the rude ones know things (many things!) that teachers would benefit from knowing too.

This is the English version of a text I published in 2005 on my blog.