University of the Pacific School of Dentistry - Chips Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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DR, ARTHUR H. WHITE

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The Relationship Between Professor and Student By Arthur H. White, M. D. N common with most other things in or on this earth, the relationship between professor and student may be looked upon from a varying' number of stand- points. It is, however, only necessary or pertinent for us to consider two objectives-that of the pro- fessor in his dizzy elevation of learning' and great- ness, and that of the student, occupying- his forlorn position at the bottom of the pit of unenlightenment. From the point of view of the professor, the relation- ship to his class is usually of a most pleasant char- acter, assuming' always, however, a certain amount of ability and willingness to learn on the part of his students, and on his part a knowledge of how best to impart to his hearers a modicum of that combi- nation of the ologies with which his head is so well filled. Hy far the most important consideration in the bond between professor and student is mutual con- fidence and co-operation. This is a sine qua non of all academic and scientific learning', and in its absence results are nil and scholars are an absent quantity. Many of the ablest men of our profession have made most abject and miserable failures as teachers, not from any lack of knowledge of the subject which they undertook to teach, but entirely on account of their inability to acquire the faculty of co-operating with those whom they were attempting' to teach. The cause of this fault is, in diPferent men, due to many different traits, the commonest, perhaps, being an overweening assumption of dignity on the part of the lecturer. The type was more common in the past than in the present-a concentrated essence of standoffishness and dignity encased in a frock coat and more or less completely hidden behind a large output of most learned and high-sounding medical phraseology, punctuated at discreet intervals by a 22

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most pompous clearing of the throat and accentuated now and then by sonorous haws and ahems, most comforting to the self-esteem of the speaker. This type is, perhaps fortunately, becoming a rara avis, it having been generally noted in the keen struggle ofthe survival of the fittest that the hypertrophied dignity was more than counterbalanced by an atrophied teaching ability. Another common cause of incompatibility, and one that is absolutely inimical to the maintenance of a proper relationship between teacher and taught, and to the development of the mind of the student along the lines of the subject under study, is a desire on the part of the professor to be easy on the class. The class, as a rule, and I say it with all due acknowl- edged respect, but, nevertheless, with a knowledge gained of many profs and many students-the class, I say, will, as a rule, be easy enough on itself. Occa- sionally we read of a student dying of overstudy. I say we read of it. VVhen a professor tells you that he wants to make things easy for you, watch him and see if he does not make things easy for himself and slight a corresponding amount of work. Had things been made easy for every one in his college days, there would now be a most woeful dearth of good medical men on this green footstool. Yet again, a fruitful cause of discord is the practice, seemingly inherent in some men, which is most pic- turesquely, if not best, described as crabbing. The verb to crab, I am told by the best authorities on slang and colloquialisms Cnow attending one of 1ny classesj, means to bite, to pinch, to irritate, to crawl, having the characteristics of a crab. I-Iow many of you have seen this man-querulous, fault-finding, inadequate in his teaching and insin- cere in his quizzing, whose chief purpose in life seems to be todemonstrate to his discouraged students that they are a hopeless and impossible aggregation of undesirables, still possessing some of the attributes of human intelligence, but surely and irrevocably 25