I get Paul Trout's irony in "How to Improve Your Teaching..." (Fall 1997). But his defensiveness about teddy-bear and grunge professors and overly functionalist approach to higher education is insulting to those of us who feel a responsibility to ourselves and students not limited by evaluations or letter grades. As a teddy-bear, sometimes grungy, and hip-hoppy professor, my "warmth" is not a "manipulation" fabricated to help myself "get ahead" (p. 19).

A newer generation of students likes professors who are responsive to their needs as human beings, not just as students. Students these days respond to professors who aren't dull and boring. They correlate how much they have learned with how much "fun" the course is and how nicely the professor treats them. They can relate better to course material if they know something about the professor--maybe that the professor is or has been a victim in his or her life. Wow, these are a threat: friendly, responsive, interesting human beings as professors, professors who are complex, imperfect human beings, with personal lives, professors who maybe listen to the same music they do, watch the same films and television shows, have the same problems and dreams as do their students.

Assessing learning strictly by exam scores is just as flawed as assessing it by SNEFs. People manifest what they have learned in myriad ways--not just in exams. In fact, exams, term papers, and oral reports are pretty cramped and narrow reflections of knowledge. It may take some students months or years to fully process and actualize what they can learn in my classrooms. In fact, the most valuable knowledge I can impart to my students is probably not knowledge they can articulate in a 50-minute exam. I just understand education to be more than that capable of summary by any kind of institutional mechanism.

If my students don't feel respected as a fellow human-being in my course, if they don't enjoy my course, then I have not taught them something very vital. And I teach some pretty difficult subjects--I spend over five hours on the massacre of Lakota women, children, and men at Wounded Knee in 1890. I teach about Euro-American genocide, the theft of land, and culture. I teach about Euro-American guilt and remorse, and ways we can bridge through healing the abyss between Native and non-Native peoples. My courses are intense, they are personal, and oftentimes very uncomfortable. But, my students "enjoy" them because I am teaching about issues we deem relevant (but often repressed) in culture. These are also issues that the younger generations understand to be critical--racism, oppression, equality, alienation. Maybe our values are different because we were born into a world configured around Mutually Assured Destruction, incomprehensible environmental degradation, and unimaginable contemporary suffering in the most prosperous and advanced country in the world. Maybe we shouldn't be labeled manipulative or vacuous because we value classes, professors, and identities that are sensitive and empathetic and that we desire a culture that reflects these values, and that we understand that higher education is not above culture.