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

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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

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DR, ARTHUR H. WHITE

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retrogressing to the stage of the simian anthropoid? I repeat, have you seen this man, the man who never received a satisfactory answer in quiz, who never demeaned himself to praise a diligent student or lend a helping hand to a backward one? I-low many men are there today, registered in the great book of life as failures, who would have been useful men in their profession had it not been for the hopeless discour- agement dealt out to them by professors of this crabbing, overbearing variety? Truly can they cry out from their positions by the wayside, where they have fallen aside, and say that their ambition was destroyed by him who should have cherished it most. These types, purposely a little overdrawn, show some of the chief causes of failure on the part of the professor to make good his relationship with the student. On the part of the student, the reasons for failure to fulfill his part of the contract are unlimited. Many men cannot be taught, having been born Minerva- like, with all the wisdom of the ages carefully stored away in the convolutions of their cerebri, usually remaining there, refusing to come out under any and all circumstances. This type of student is familiar to all of us. Another type, equally self-important, is the chap who, although his head contains almost nothing, is continually producing something there- from in the shape of semi-lurid ideas, and fondly parading them for the edification of an unenlightened world. This is the young man who spends half the night studying up catch questions to ask his pro- fessor the following morning. He is usually an encyclopedia of misinformation, a thorn in the side of his teacher, a waste of time in his class hours, and a source of delight to the more easily amused of his classmates. Many other things go to make up the whole in this lack of eo-operation which may exist between pro- fessor and student, teacher and taught. It is admit- 26